Guest Post — Climate Action: Collaboration for Progress on Earth Day
Thea Sherer discusses Springer Nature’s efforts to address climate impact and how collective action can help us all do our part.
Guest Post – An Early Look at the Impact of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Journals Warning List
At the end of 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued their first “Early Warning List of International Journals”. Christos Petrou takes a look at the early impacts this list has had on the journals and publishers named.
Publishers Care about the Version of Record, Do Researchers?
Study of researchers indicates that a preprint or accepted manuscript can substitute for the version of record in some use cases but not all.
Guest Post — Responsible Reporting of Suicide During COVID-19: The Role of Academic Publishing
The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health are widely discussed in the media, but responsible discussion is vital, and academic publishers have an important role to play. Please be aware that this article talks about suicide.
Plan S Rights Retention Strategy, Copyright and the Academic Community – Part One
Robert Harington talks to a range of expert stakeholders with differing views about the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy and Creative Commons Licensing. Part 1 of 2 interview posts.
Explaining the Rights Retention Strategy
Unpacking each word — rights, retention, and strategy — enables understanding what this policy is and how it functions within the Plan S compliance framework.
Truth and Lies
How to address lies in the political life of a democracy? Education, information literacy, gatekeeping, and dialogue are not enough. Lisa Hinchliffe and Roger Schonfeld examine the issue.
The Failure of the US Government to Fund Science Infrastructure is Causing Things to Literally Collapse
The Arecibo Observatory collapsed, laying bare the problems of funding science infrastructure.
Journalism, Preprint Servers, and the Truth: Allocating Accountability
Journalists are increasingly flagging unsupported claims and blatant falsehoods–it’s time for preprint platforms to do the same.
The Global Pandemic and Scholarly Societies
Robert Harington asks how scholarly societies are coping as the global coronavirus pandemic continues to cast a shadow, certainly well into 2021 and very likely into 2022 and beyond?
The Effect of a Strong Data Archiving Policy on Journal Submissions (Part II)
We revisit our analysis of how adopting a strict data policy affects journal submissions and find that the effects depend a lot on Impact Factor trends
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.
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.
How COVID-19 is Changing Research Culture: An interview with Daniel Hook, CEO of Digital Science
In this interview Robert Harington asks Daniel Hook (CEO of Digital Science and co-author of the new Digital Science report. How COVID-19 is Changing Research Culture) about his views on fundamental shifts in research culture as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic.
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.