Politics and Open Access
Robert Harington explores rumors circulating in recent weeks of an impending US Executive Order focusing on public access to federally funded research and open data.
Robert Harington explores rumors circulating in recent weeks of an impending US Executive Order focusing on public access to federally funded research and open data.
Libraries and individual subscribers to journals have seen the problems that can occur when a publication moved or was sold from one publisher to another. Perhaps there would be an editorial change, leading to delayed issues. Perhaps all the subscription […]
In this article, Robert Harington implores Plan S leaders and funders to take researcher needs to heart.
Robert Harington argues that academic societies need to balance mission and business more effectively. There is nothing wrong with developing a mixed publishing economy that best suits a range of communities and types of business.
Plan S proposes to take a hammer to how we fund peer review and publication. The focus is currently on APCs, but submission fees are overall cheaper for authors, particularly at highly selective journals, and thus warrant serious consideration.
A flawed article claiming that manuscripts don’t change much between being preprints and published articles somehow makes it through peer review unchanged.
Scholarly publishers are already doing much to make government funded research as free as possible as soon as it is published. Why do we need a law to enact what is already taking shape? Robert Harington suggests it comes down to politics.
Managing volunteers in a critical and yet overlooked part of running a successful journal or program. Angela Cochran explores tips for getting the most out of volunteers and where we can find training to learn these skills.
President Obama has published three articles in six months in three of the world’s most prestigious scholarly journals. Is it appropriate? With these precedents, what happens when the politics of the President conflicts with the politics of science?
In the wake of public questions about trust in science, Angela Cochran had a conversation with Dr. Jamie L. Vernon about the challenges of communicating science to the public and how the SciComm community could do better.
Fake News is making headlines as questions about how dubious stories may have influenced the US election. This post explores the damage done to reputable news organizations and what scholarly publishers could learn from the whole thing.
University presses are not well positioned to thrive in journal publishing because they have not adopted any of the (relatively few and common) business strategies that are necessary, given market dynamics, for success. I do not put forth this thesis lightly. I have great affection and admiration for university presses, their value — craftsmanship, attention to detail, “getting it right”— and their mission. This is not admiration from afar: I served, in the formative years of my career, at the University of Chicago Press (Chicago), where I learned the tools of the trade and many of the practices and protocols of scholarly publishing still in use today. But after nearly two decades of observing university presses, from within and without, this thesis seems to be inescapable.
Robert Harington discusses Joe Esposito’s Scholarly Kitchen article from June 2015, entitled “The Mixed Marriage of For-profit and Not-for-Profit Publishing”, in context of his own experiences in the world of society publishing.
We spend much time these days wondering when the academic journal as we know it will cease to exist. Robert Harington discusses the role of the journal in light of a fascinating new venture in the field of mathematics – the overlay journal Discrete Analysis.
In this episode, Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky talks with podcast host Michael Clarke about the causes, trends, and problems with retractions of scientific research papers.