The Humanities as Canary: Understanding this Crisis Now
The Humanities have always been the canary in the coal mine of the full knowledge industry. What information can help us understand this crisis and its implications?
Guest Post — Challenges in Academic Publishing Amid War: ISSN Issues in Ukraine Threaten Research Integrity
Recently, a group of Ukrainian researchers uncovered serious violations in the use of ISSN identifiers by journals operating in temporarily occupied territories, revealing systematic misuse of academic infrastructure and promoting narratives hostile to Ukraine.
Declaration To #DefendResearch Against US Government Censorship
In response to US government efforts to censor research and researchers, a small group of scholarly communications professionals have launched a Declaration to defend research. Learn more in today’s post by Alice Meadows, one of the members of this group.
Indirect Costs (Facilities and Administration Cost) Explainer
The US government is looking to drastically reduce the amount paid in “indirect costs” in federal grants. Just what are “indirect costs”?
DEIA and Doing the Right Thing
Now is a time when we must continue to stand against censorship and to support the scholarly community in both our words and our actions, according to our ethics and beliefs.
Revisiting: Measuring Societal Impact or, Meet the New Metric, Same as the Old Metric
Bringing back a post from 2018, as funders increasingly demand measurements of “real world” impact from researchers. Does this steer us toward the same traps we’re already in from the ways we already do research assessment and is this short-term thinking problematic for the future of science?
Guest Post — Evaluating China’s Science and Technology Journal Excellence Action Plan: A New Era of Research Impact and Standards?
Here we examine the second phase of China’s Journal Excellence Action Plan, its implications, its funding framework, and what it means for Chinese scientific journals, researchers, and the broader international academic publishing community.
Access to Science & Scholarship: An Interview with Amy Brand of MIT Press
On September 20, 2024, MIT Press hosted a workshop, Access to Science & Scholarship: An Evidence Base to Support the Future of Open Research Policy. I interviewed Amy Brand to discuss the goals and outcomes of the workshop.
How the SDGs Are Shaping the Research Agenda, and What Publishers Need to Know and Do
Insights from a recent study looking at how the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are influencing research, including recommendations for publishers’ next steps.
Paywalls are Not the Only Barriers to Access: Accessibility is Critical to Equitable Access
Digital accessibility to the scholarly communications process is core to providing equitable access to the literature.
Revisiting: Libraries and the Contested Terrain of “Neutrality”
Revisiting Rick Anderson’s 2022 post which asks, are libraries “neutral”? That question is way too simplistic to serve as anything other than a political football.
Revisiting — What Does “Federally Funded” Actually Mean?
With a new public access memo and federal agency policies due, Angela Cochran revisits her 2013 post exploring what Federally Funded means.
Woefully Insufficient Publisher Policies on Author AI Use Put Research Integrity at Risk
Do publishers really understand what tools researchers are using and how they are using them? Can we do more to create better policies based on real use cases and not hypothetical conjecture about what AI might do in the future?
Oxford Administrators Want OA Policy Removed from REF 2029. I Have an Even Better Idea.
Three Oxford administrators want to lower the cost of mandatory open access by shifting the responsibility for enforcement to funding agencies. But that doesn’t lower costs at all; it only shifts them. To truly lower costs, stop trying to make open access mandatory.
Guest Post — DOAJ’s Role in Supporting Trust in Scholarly Journals: Current Challenges and Future Solutions
In this post we reflect on the current threats to trust in scholarly journal publishing, and the implications for organizations like Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) that seek to uphold that trust.