There are various ways that customers get locked in to services in scholarly communications. These methods are longed for by publishers and disliked by customers, but they naturally emerge as a part of the economy.
PubMed is found to contain predatory journals and publishers, likely reflecting a long-term and broader problem, which only adds to the confusion about what exactly PubMed represents at this point.
The hidden costs of data availability policies.
Researchers claim that PMC boosts citations by 26%. A closer look at the paper reveals serious data and analysis problems. Can we collectively design a better study?
Revisiting Kent Anderson’s post based on his FOIA request documents show that PubMed Central spends most of its money tagging author manuscripts, and that its stricter rules for NIH authors may double its costs.
The second public access plan from a US federal funding agency has been announced. Some first impressions…
The US government’s new appropriations bill contains a public access mandate for research articles funded by some agencies.
This is a research report, based on a grant from the American Society of Civil Engineers to explore the potential for adverse economic impact on journals from imposed public access embargoes
As requested, here is a summary of all the things found so far through the FOIA requests regarding PubMed Central — from eLife to BMC to JMLA to conflicts of interest to coverups. It’s quite a fetch.
The PMC NAC, facing controversies about its oversight functions and seeing the focus of its oversight embroiled in a public scandal, said nothing about these topics at its latest meeting.
Using free government infrastructure that’s not available to everyone else raises questions of fairness, which lead to questions of harm. But who is harmed may be both obvious and subtle.
Howard Ratner, Director of Development at CHORUS, brings us up to date on that project and on the ORCID system, which turns one year old today.
New documents show that the Director of the NCBI was deeply involved in getting eLife launched on PubMed Central, that NLM staff were uneasy about the shortcuts taken to make it happen, and that eLife was largely driving the bus throughout.
Why does PubMed preferentially link to PMC versions in its search result lists? Emails from 2011 suggest it’s specifically to generate more traffic to PMC and show off NLM services.
As the US government shuts down, what happens to the scholarly materials it distributes?