Scientific Publishing Is Rigged - at Our Expense
If 'money makes the world go round' then the world of scientific publishing has proved to be no exception to the rule.
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DEAL and Elsevier Negotiations: Elsevier Demands Unacceptable for the Academic Community
DEAL and Elsevier Negotiations: Elsevier Demands Unacceptable for the Academic Community
"Elsevier is still not willing to offer a deal in the form of a nationwide agreement in Germany that responds to the needs of the academic community in line with the principles of open access and that is financially sustainable," says Horst Hippler, the lead negotiator and spokesperson for the DEAL Project Steering Committee.
Complaint to the European Ombudsman about Elsevier and the Open Science Monitor
Complaint to the European Ombudsman about Elsevier and the Open Science Monitor
A formal complaint to the European Commission Ombudsman regarding the relationship between Elsevier and the Open Science Monitor.
What Is a Predatory Journal?
The objective of this scoping review is to summarize the literature on predatory journals, describe its epidemiological characteristics, and to extract empirical descriptions of potential characteristics of predatory journals.
Scholarly Publishing Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It
Imagine using version control to track the process of research in real time. Peer review becomes a community-governed process, where the quality of engagement becomes the hallmark of individual reputations. All research outputs can be published and credited with not an 'impact factor' in sight.
Elsevier Serves the Global Research Community to Deliver Open Science?
Elsevier Serves the Global Research Community to Deliver Open Science?
A response to an article by Elsevier which critiqued a piece by Dr. Jon Tennant about them corrupting Open Science in Europe.
Elsevier Are Corrupting Open Science in Europe
Elsevier - one of the largest and most notorious scholarly publishers - are monitoring Open Science in the EU on behalf of the European Commission. Jon Tennant argues that they cannot be trusted.
Enago Open Access Journal Finder
This free tool helps you shortlist verified open access journals from DOAJ for publishing your manuscript thereby safeguarding you from predatory journals.
Nature Editor Bids Farewell
A reflection as the seventh editor-in-chief of Nature hands over to the eighth.
The Latest in Search: Do New Discovery Solutions Improve Search as Well as Retrieval?
The Latest in Search: Do New Discovery Solutions Improve Search as Well as Retrieval?
A heuristic (exploratory) comparison of several new, free / mainstream academic search tools, concluding that their effectivness improves if an institution's library licenses them for off-campus authentication.
A New Twist on Peer Review
eLife is conducting a trial in which authors will decide how to respond to the issues raised during peer review.
Will Europe Lead a Global Flip to Open Access?
There appears to be no realistic path forward that achieves Europe's 2020 open access targets without resulting in substantial revenue reductions for existing publishers. Will Europe miss its OA target? Or will publishers miss their revenue targets?
Introducing the Free Journal Network: a Community-Controlled Open Access Publishing
Introducing the Free Journal Network: a Community-Controlled Open Access Publishing
The Free Journal Network was established earlier this year in order to nurture and promote journals that are free to both authors and readers and run according to the Fair Open Access Principles.
Some Science Journals That Claim to Peer Review Papers Do Not Do So
Some Science Journals That Claim to Peer Review Papers Do Not Do So
One estimate puts the number of papers in questionable journals at 400'000.
University of Victoria Digital Humanities Lab Expert on the Privatization of Knowledge
University of Victoria Digital Humanities Lab Expert on the Privatization of Knowledge
"Their profit margins are bigger than oil and gas. Most people don’t know this,” explains Alyssa Arbuckle, Associate Director of a digital humanities lab at the University of Victoria.
Top Universities’ Journal Subscriptions ‘Average £4 Million’
Average spending has increased by 19 per cent in four years, Freedom of Information requests reveal.
Has Google Become a Journal Publisher?
Google's journal about artificial intelligence (AI) coming from editors and authors associated with Google and Google Brain raises questions about conflicts, vanity publishing, and Google as a media company.
The Institutionalized Racism of Scholarly Publishing
Publishing exclusively in English can cause the deterioration of a culture’s local knowledge, brain drain, and hinder the emergence of important research. There are scholarly journals from the Global South who won’t flip to open access because they know they will be immediately labelled as predatory. Fixing these problems will require reconsidering how we talk about predatory publishers, no longer recommending blacklists, and using databases beyond Scopus and Web of Science.
CORE Becomes the World’s Largest Aggregator
As of May 2018, CORE has aggregated over 131 million article metadata records, 93 million abstracts, 11 million hosted and validated full texts and over 78 million direct links to research papers hosted on other websites.
Growth Rate Ten Times Higher Than Journal Articles
Preprints are one of the fastest growing types of content in Crossref. The growth may well be approximately 30% for the past 2 years (compared to article growth of 2-3% for the same period).
Who Gets Credit? Survey Digs Into the Thorny Question of Authorship
Most researchers agree that drafting papers and interpreting results deserve recognition — but opinions don’t always match authorship guidelines.
Why Thousands of AI Researchers Are Boycotting the New Nature Journal
Academics share machine-learning research freely. Taxpayers should not have to pay twice to read our findings.
All Publishers Are Predatory - Some Are Bigger Than Others
The assumption that the publication of an article in a high-impact factor, indexed journal somehow adds value to international science is a collective illusion - one that is unfortunately shared by funding agencies, institutions and researchers. This illusion - which serves as an excuse to delegate the evaluation of science to for-profit companies and anonymous reviewers for the sake of false objectivity - costs taxpayers dearly.
Effects of Copyrights on Science
A unique WWII-era programme in the US, allowed US publishers to reprint exact copies of German-owned science books, to explore how copyrights affect follow-on science. This artificial removal of copyright barriers led to a 25% decline in prices and a 67% increase in citations.
Licence Restrictions: A Fool's Errand
Objections to the Creative Commons attribution licence are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible, warns John Wilbanks.
Are Funder Open Access Platforms a Good Idea?
Ethical, organizational and economic strengths and weaknesses of funder open access platforms: opportunities and threats presented by funder open access platforms in the ongoing transition to open access.
Why Are Ai Researchers Boycotting a New Nature Journal and Shunning Others?
Why Are Ai Researchers Boycotting a New Nature Journal and Shunning Others?
The AI field is increasingly turning to conference publications and free, open-review websites while shunning traditional outlets - sentiments dramatically expressed in a growing boycott of a high-profile AI journal.
Springer Nature Is Committed to Being a Part of the Open-Access Movement
Springer Nature Is Committed to Being a Part of the Open-Access Movement
Institutions, research funding bodies and publishers must all work together to change the system in the interest of advancing research, says Steven Inchcoombe.
Scientists Are Subverting Formal Publishing. Well, Some of Them
Scientists Are Subverting Formal Publishing. Well, Some of Them
Just as the peer review system of journal publication is itself an ever-evolving construction, so too are the unspoken rules that govern which scientists share what.
Give Every Paper a Read for Reproducibility
Catherine Winchester was hired to ferret out errors and establish routines that promote rigorous research.
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