An Interview with Amy Brand on a Proposed New Contributor Taxonomy Initiative

We’ve got DOIs (digital object identifiers) to help identify research articles, images, and other digital objects, and ORCIDs (Open Researcher and Contributor IDs) to help disambiguate the authors of those objects. Now there’s a new initiative to create a contributor taxonomy that identifies who’s done what in the creation of published research – find out more in our interview with Amy Brand, one of the brains behind the concept.

Public Access: Getting More Research to More People

Despite the increase in open access publishing, public access initiatives like Research4Life, INASP, the UK’s Access2Research pilot, and more are still playing a valuable role in making research publications more widely available, both to researchers outside of the developed world, and to the general public.

How Can We Make the Publishing Process More Sound?

At a time when more research articles are more readily available to more readers globally than ever before, it’s crucial we are confident that those papers meet the highest standards and, that on those occasions where they don’t, there is a sound system in place to revise or retract them. So what can we do to make the publishing process more sound?

In (Digital) Scholarly Communications We Trust?

With all the disruption and upheaval in digital scholarly communications, how do today’s researchers decide which articles and publications they can trust to read, cite, and write for? A recent study finds that, somewhat surprisingly, peer review and other traditional tools remain as popular as ever with most groups, though social media is increasingly popular with some.

Collaborate, co-operate, communicate!

Much of the public debate about open access is polarized, but a recent study of scientific communications shows that extremism breeds more extremism. Isn’t it time we started to look at more effective ways to communicate – to listen, learn to understand each others’ views, and find ways of collaborating and cooperating, rather than competing?