Guest Post – MDPI’s Remarkable Growth
Despite controversies, MDPI has flourished and are now the 5th largest scholarly publisher in the market. Christos Petrou offers an analysis of their enormous levels of growth.
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back — The Pandemic’s Impact on Open Access Progress
The COVID pandemic may leave us stuck between a growing consensus that open science is the superior way to drive progress and an inability to invest what may be needed to make it happen.
cOAlition S’s Rights Confiscation Strategy Continues
By calling its new policy a “Rights Retention Strategy,” cOAlition S is engaging in doublespeak. This strategy actually does exactly the opposite of what it claims.
Guest Post — Is It Time to (Finally) Get Serious about Submission Charges?
Journal submission fees would reduce the continuously growing editorial and peer review burdens while allowing for better levels of rigor and oversight. Roy Kaufman makes a case for their adoption.
The UK National PID Consortium: A Pathway to Increased Adoption
Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are an essential part of the open research infrastructure, but need widespread adoption to be effective. Learn about Jisc’s plans to increase adoption through a national PID consortium in this post by Alice Meadows.
Guest Post — Streaming Live – Oral Arguments in FTC v. OMICS
The legal case against it will help determine whether OMICS is merely a “spirited player” or something worse.
Utility, Morality, Strategy, and Scholarly Communication
Should the library focus first on serving its local constituency, or on changing the scholarly communication ecosystem? No matter how we answer this question, the implications will be complex.
Taking a Big Bite Out of the Big Deal
Unsub is the game-changing data analysis service that is helping librarians forecast, explore, and optimize their alternatives to the Big Deal. Librarians breaking away from the Big Deal often credit Unsub as a critical component of their strategy.
Guest Post – The Megajournal Lifecycle
Christos Petrou looks at megajournal performance and the resulting business implications.
Copyright, Creative Commons, and Confusion
In this article, Robert Harington revisits the history of copyright, steering into Creative Commons Licensing, and weighs the value of protection and reuse in light of an inexorable push towards global openness.
Helping Researchers Communicate Their Findings to the World: An Interview with Emma Feloy of Research Outreach
Research Outreach is a young company that helps researchers make their work more easily intelligible to a lay audience. Editorial Director Emma Feloy answers some questions about how their service works.
To Bundle or Not to Bundle? That Is the Question
Some libraries are seeking transformative agreements, others are unbundling the Big Deal. Can major publishers reestablish value without a major revenue sacrifice?
Seeking Sustainability: Publishing Models for an Open Access Age
Open access, scholarly publishing, business models, and sustainability. The past is prologue. The present is complex. @lisalibrarian provides SSP a primer.
Academic Libraries at a Pivotal Moment
New findings from Ithaka S+R provide the most recent and comprehensive evidence for how academic library acquisitions and open access initiatives may proceed in light of the present disruptions
The Internet Archive Chooses Readers
How will we meet this moment of global crisis? The Internet Archive breaks glass.