Founder and Director, Research Consulting. Rob has led more than 100 projects for clients across government, academia and the private and not-for-profit sectors. Their work encompasses strategy formulation, public policy, international development, organizational design, technology adoption, market research and more. Rob is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, a member of the leadership group for the Open Scholarship Initiative, and serves as an independent reviewer and evaluator for the European Commission.
A recent survey of 66 learned societies (primarily in the UK) revealed a revenue crisis which threatens the very existence of community-driven publishing, and by extension learned societies themselves.
Victoria Ficarra and Rob Johnson offer insights into the new UKRI open access policy.
Global initiatives in open are decentralized and disconnected, lacking researcher input and buy-in. An “opens solutions” approach can both embrace and leverage that diversity, ensuring that it all contributes to the greater whole.
Rob Johnson of Research Consulting and Vanessa Proudman of SPARC Europe look at a recent survey of of European funders to explore what’s being done to drive change in scholarly communication, and argue that funders’ open policies could be backed up more by funders’ own practices.
In this guest post, Rob Johnson and Andrea Chiarelli of Research Consulting discuss the findings of their recent research study into the recent growth of preprint servers and explore how publishers might respond.
Rob Johnson looks at the growth of hybrid open access, and questions whether it will remain a reliable revenue stream for publishers.