A summary with slides of a presentation for the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP). The argument is that professional societies are now fighting on three fronts: with the new open access mandates, with the large commercial competitors, and sometimes internally when governance is an issue.
Articles are published before they’re reviewed; doubts about a paper are viewed as a positive status; papers only need to contain “science;” review and revision can continue forever; and PubMed Central is their certifying entity. Welcome to the world of F1000 Research.
The recent sale of Mendeley exposed surprisingly naive perspectives on the company’s clear and inherent goals. Other venture capital plays are afoot in scientific publishing and academia. When will we stop being the prey?
Editorial boycotts and declarations of independence generate a lot of heat, but what do the data say about the actual success of the new journals compared to the journals that were overthrown.
A meeting between librarians, publishers, and society leaders reveals common concerns and the ways in which roles are overlapping and mingling.
An analysis of publishing costs continues the theme of accountability and transparency, but perhaps focuses too much on the containers of information rather than how and why the containers are filled in the first place.
A common marketing cliche turns out to be empty of anything but rhetorical power when examined more carefully.
A survey of multiple scientific and academic domains about open access publishing provides an interesting snapshot, but fails to provide much actionable data as it conflates too many areas into one.
OA mandates like the RCUK mandate seem to have aspects that actually put the burdens of OA on the academics, universities, taxpayers, and scientists they were meant to help.
After a great deal of public and political resistance, the RCUK revises its OA policy. Unfortunately, the revisions only highlight the same problems, sow more confusion, and reveal how central the issue of academic freedom is to this approach.
Click-through agreements are efficient for publishers and software companies to offer, but is it right for this efficiency to cloud the rights picture? Can’t we create systems that are slightly more subtle and customized?
A new financial analysis of open access and two major publishers suggests that many of the trends we’re seeing aren’t about adversarial ideas and win:lose propositions, but about relatively small market adjustments and incremental changes.
The OSTP memorandum is a reasonable step forward for everyone. However, a NYT editorial provides misleading interpretations of its scope and design.
The public access policy for the OSTP is announced, and it is even-handed, realistic, designed for rapid implementation, and a sign that the OA movement has matured into one that can work collaboratively to move forward.
A reprint of an essay from 2008, which attempts to describe the evolution of open access publishing, Written before the astounding success of PLoS ONE, it outlines the link between open access publishing and the still-persistent traditional model.