As we drift into a scholarly economy with centralized payment mechanisms and greater dependence on government funding, are we truly setting ourselves up for long-term independence and success?
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?
Some professional societies need to be persuaded that open access publishing may be in their interest. The best way to do this is to provide data on the publishing ecosystem, including such things as the number of articles of interest to a society that appear in other venues and the practical implications of not having an OA option for prospective authors.
When thinking about open access to content, is it appropriate to equate disabling downloads with lack of support for the visually impaired?
Revisiting a holiday classic: ‘Twas the month before Christmas, and by listening hard, you can hear Joe Esposito yearn for a library card. The reasons are simple, yet give publishers pause. No wonder Joe’s only hope is with Santa Claus.
A new report, commissioned by London Higher and SPARC Europe, tries to quantify the costs undertaken by UK higher education and public sector research institutions in complying with open access mandates. The resulting numbers are quite interesting.
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.
With increased pressure from funding bodies and others for researchers to make their data open, as well as their research articles, it’s important to understand who is already sharing what data, how, why – and why not…
A report from Simba Information tallies the total value of the open access marketplace, putting OA at 2.3% of the total market for STM journals. It documents as well, without comment, that more and more OA activity is the business of for-profit companies.
This year’s beach reading will be spent with books by public intellectuals. Unfortunately, writing for the general public is not valued within the academy, to the detriment of public education.
An interview with the President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, on the unintended and potentially damaging consequences of public and open access mandates and embargoes.
Adding to the discussion of APCs, eLife’s financials suggest that being competitive with some major journals means the journal is expensive to run.
The DOAJ is kicking out hundreds of predatory and scam publishers that found their way into the directory, and tightening standards to ensure that they don’t sneak back in. Which makes things a bit awkward for a community that, for years, has been insisting that predatory OA publishing isn’t a problem worth worrying about.
Despite the increase in open access publishing, public access initiatives like Research4Life, INASP, the UK’s Access2Research pilot, and more are still playing a valuable role in making research publications more widely available, both to researchers outside of the developed world, and to the general public.
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.