Why You Should Care about Open Access: An Open Letter to Scholarly and Scientific Authors
If you’re a scholarly and scientific author and you think the open access movement is irrelevant to your interests, think again.
Editorial Independence and Journal Ownership in the Age of Open Science
The editorial board for the Journal of Informetrics declared checkmate when they resigned over Elsevier’s open access and open citations policies. Raising both practical and moral questions of journal ownership, the editors of Learning Publishing ask: What can this power move tell us about editorial ownership in the age of open science?
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Baffling Funder Mandate
Famed detective Sherlock Holmes does his best to help his friend Dr. Watson figure out how best to comply with the requirements of Plan S.
Welcoming Back The US Public Domain
January 1, 2019 marked the emergence of new works to the US Public Domain for the first time in 20 years.
Upstreaming: The Migration of Economic Value in Scholarly Publishing
As publishers increasingly lose control of the final stage of the publishing process, they are looking elsewhere to extract economic value. They are finding it upstream, in the various linked processes that lead to the (erstwhile) final document.
Do You Have Concerns about Plan S? Then You Must be an Irresponsible, Privileged, Conspiratorial Hypocrite
Over 1,400 researchers signed an open letter expressing concern about Plan S. Then Twitter came for them — and, more particularly, for the woman who organized the letter.
Open Access, Academic Freedom, and the Spectrum of Coercive Power
Who has the most power to take choice away from authors?
HathiTrust Expands Offerings to Researchers: A Conversation with Mike Furlough (and Others)
The HathiTrust Research Center has recently announced a significant expansion of its services. Rick Anderson discusses the changes with Executive Director Mike Furlough and staff.
Guest Post: Think Sci-Hub is Just Downloading PDFs? Think Again
They’re phishing, hacking, and password-cracking to steal personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions. Andrew Pitts takes a hard look at Sci-Hub as, “Corrupt cybercriminals, not Robin Hood.”
A Solution for Copyright Reform: The Clown Egg Register
Clown faces painted onto eggs as a method for registering copyright. Shudder.
The New Plugins — What Goals Are the Access Solutions Pursuing?
The apparently different approaches Kopernio, Unpaywall, and Anywhere Access are taking might have a common assumption at their hearts — the status quo.
One Author’s Novel Approach to Article Self-Publishing: An Interview with Allyson Mower
An author found that the relevant journals were unwilling to publish an article of historical research that found evidence for a surprising and somewhat controversial proposition about the founding of the University of Utah. So what did she decide to do with her article? Something rather unusual, it turns out.
Libraries Face a Future of Open Access
Libraries and legacy publishers are in an unholy embrace. They need not love each other to feel they should stick together.
Guest Post: From Supermarkets to Marketplaces — The Evolution of the Open Access Ecosystem
Sven Fund from Knowledge Unlatched talks about new approaches needed to drive open access progress.
If ResearchGate is Where Authors Connect and Collaborate …
The recently announced agreement between ResearchGate and Springer Nature, Cambridge University Press, and Thieme demonstrates that there is not a uniformity of perspective in the publishing community about article sharing on ResearchGate, or presumably on the many other scholarly collaboration networks that exist. It also signals that ResearchGate, a decade-old start-up disruptor with with venture capital investment and a rapidly grown user base, has taken its place at the negotiating table and found not just enemies but allies.