The broad online availability of theses and dissertations creates difficult tensions between the individual rights of authors, the rights of educational institutions, and the responsibilities that both have to global scholarship and the collective good. How can we resolve those tensions?
Gold open access for monographs is based on the notion that provosts will pay for what librarians will not. This seems like an improbable model for scholarly publishing. Publishing that is not based on end-user demand is not likely to have strong support in lean times.
There’s no denying the growth and increased acceptance of the concepts of open access in scholarly publishing. But the repercussions of the business models and methodologies chosen for OA are just beginning to be recognized.
A key element of open access is the notion that circulating information is de facto a positive good. Audiences benefit from access, and scholars benefit from exposure. But for the latter, at least, there is a case to be made for a […]
Open access publishing has gone through a number of stages. Though different people will classify these stages in diverse ways, one way to view this is to say that since the initial period of advocacy for open access, commercial interests have entered this market and are now prepared to augment their positions by leveraging their elite brands, using them, as it were, to draw manuscripts for a family of cascading products.
Is a flip to a Gold OA world as easy as a recent paper suggests?
Predatory publishing is a big and complex problem; so is calling out and shaming deceptive publishers by means of blacklisting. Is that something we should even do, and can it be done fairly, constructively, and helpfully? Yes, and here are some suggestions how.
The administrative burden stemming from funding agency and institutional access policies is just beginning. Can we reduce the severity of this storm with careful planning and collaboration?
When thinking about open access to content, is it appropriate to equate disabling downloads with lack of support for the visually impaired?
Journals and funding agencies are focusing on data availability as a route to better experimental reproducibility. But the data is only part of the equation. A new set of NIH guidelines is a great start toward making methodologies better documented and more available.
It is often argued that open access will reduce the overall cost of scholarly communications, but this article proposes that OA will be additive to the size of the current market.
Why can’t researchers agree on whether Open Access is the cause of more citations or merely associated with better performing papers? The answer is in the methods.
There is a certain fundamentalism that pervades discussions around open access policies and business models. On the one hand there are the advocates, and through the laws of conservation of energy, the equal and opposite reaction of anti-open access advocacy. There seems little room for rational debate about open access in the midst of such an antagonistic atmosphere.This post asks us to spend our time thinking through a range of open access models, experimenting and refining, rather than forcing ourselves down the road of policy mandates that potentially discourage innovation.
A video of Rick Anderson’s recent talk at the Smithsonian, on why it’s so hard to have conversations about open access that don’t devolve into shouting matches and accusations of bad faith
When does it make sense to call an Open Access policy a “mandate” — and when does it constitute unhelpful exaggeration?