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When the year began, the world's largest academic publisher, Elsevier, had increased their annual profits, with an operating profit approaching US$1.2 billion in science, technology, and medicine - a profit margin of over 36%. By year's end, a hefty chunk of the world's research community was walking away from big subscription deals with Elsevier and others.
The necessity of developing a public infrastructure for open access, its benefits and the obstacles to reaching this goal.
Details of the contract between the German consortium DEAL and Wiley reveal that the transformative nature of this new big deal may come at a high cost.
Much of the debate on Plan S seems to concentrate on how to make toll access journals open access, taking for granted that existing open access journals are Plan S compliant. We suspected this was not so, and set out to explore this using DOAJ's journal metadata. We conclude that an overwhelmingly large majority of open access journals are not Plan S compliant, and that it is small HSS publishers not charging APCs that are least compliant and will face major challenges with becoming compliant. Plan S need to give special considerations to smaller publishers and/or non-APC-based journals.
Elsevier argues that they make their citation data available through their subscription database, Scopus, and that “[…] Elsevier cannot make such a large corpus of data, which it has added significant value to, available for free."
New contract gives researchers access to Wiley's journals and makes their papers open access
Though the popularity and practical benefits of preprints are driving policy changes at journals and funding organizations, there is little bibliometric data available to measure trends in their usage. This study collected and analyzed data on all preprints that were uploaded to bioRxiv.org in the past five years.
Following in the footsteps of linguistics journal Lingua, the editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics has resigned and launched a rival journal that will be free for all to read.
Today the entire editorial board of Informetrics, a major publication in the field of Scientometrics and Informetrics, has unanimously resigned their position. In the future they will dedicate their time to a new full open access journal: Quantitative Science Studies.
Robert-Jan Smits is pitching the Plan S vision to transform academic publishing to the world’s big science funding bodies.
A survey of publishers with journals indexed in Directory of Open Access Journals has revealed surprising trends in the way that content is published.
Open Acess and Plan S in particular create a conflict between editorial quality and the cost of publication.
Scientific publishers charge so much that even Harvard can't afford it anymore. A new publishing infrastructure could help.
China appears to embrace Europe-led plan, but other countries are reluctant.
The University of California is re-negotiating its systemwide licenses with some of the world's largest scholarly journal publishers, including Elsevier, to provide additional open access options for UC authors. In these negotiations, the UC is seeking a single, integrated contract with each publisher that covers both the university's subscriptions and open access publishing of UC research in their journals - what are often known as "publish and read" agreements.
The Max Planck Society is going to discontinue their Elsevier subscription. By doing so the Society joins nearly 200 universities and research institutions in Germany who have already cancelled their agreements with Elsevier.
As some editors are moving to 'flip' their journal the publishing giant offers considerable compensations to change their minds.
The funder-driven push for freely accessible scholarly literature has divided the scientific community.
I’m not the first to come up with a personal story about the importance of open access and I’m not going to tell my story right now. I want to tell two other stories from the past couple of weeks that have reinforced for me why I do what I do every day in advocating for full and immediate open access to research.
In 2018, there has been a drop in the number of fully OA journals published by Elsevier, from 416 to 328 journals. The majority of Elsevier’s fully OA journals are still non-charging.
The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) reiterates its support for the goal of Plan S to achieve “immediate Open Access to all scholarly publications from research”.
ALLEA welcomes the ambition of the coalition of European research funders to move the scientific publishing system towards open access; however, broader consultation with all parties is required during the implementation phase.
University of California System is playing hardball with Elsevier in negotiations that could transform the way it pays to read and publish research. But does the UC system have the clout to pull it off?
What are the underlying mechanisms that cause disciplines to vary in their OA publishing practices.
The University of California faces a Dec. 31 deadline to reach a renewal deal on subscriptions to 1,500 scientific journals. Here's why it might not regret letting its subscriptions lapse.
The 14th Berlin Open Access Conference, hosted by the Max Planck Society and organized by the Max Planck Digital Library on behalf of the Open Access 2020 Initiative (oa2020.org), has just come to an end after two intense days with 170 participants from 37 countries around the world discussing where the research organizations and their library consortia stand in their negotiations with scholarly publishers in transitioning scholarly publishing to open access. The participants represented research performing and research funding organizations, libraries and government, associations of researchers and other umbrella organizations, many of them holding high-level positions at their organizations. In his welcoming address, Max Planck Society President Martin Stratmann captured the spirit of the meeting when he stated: "Open Access is the responsibility of all of us."
Officials pledge support for European-led 'Plan S' to tear down journal paywalls - but it's unclear whether China will adopt its policies.
More than 1,400 researchers sign an online letter arguing that Plan S will not impinge on academic freedom, as some critics claim.
