Broken links, clunky formats, and outdated platforms have both authors and publishers turning to alternative solutions.

In this guest post, Gisela Fosado and Cathy Rimer-Surles of Duke UP share highlights and a video from their panel session on equity at the 2019 AUPresses Annual Meeting, plus helpful recommendations to help us achieve equity in scholarly communications.

Of the 215 active journals published by SpringerOpen, 54% charge APCs. The average APC was 1,212 EUR, an increase of 8% over the 2018 average, 6 times the EU inflation rate for June 2019 of 1.3%.

Many authors start with the figures when writing a paper, but it is easier to tell a good story if you start with the Introduction and Results, and leave the figures to later.

A fact check from UC’s negotiating team.

Virtually all top medical journals require authors to disclose potential conflicts of interest, but few - just 12% - apply that same medicine to their own editors by publicly disclosing editors’ financial ties to industry, a study has found.

Authors want their papers published quickly while also expecting high-quality reviews. Reviewers want reasonable deadlines. These two groups come from the same communities so why the disconnect? 

The research community needs to find ways to reward study design and methodology as much as the final result. A publishing format called Registered Reports offers a means of addressing this challenge.

With open access Plan S approaching, learned society journals are expected to fall in hard times.

This dataset provides a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving. It is found that these costs range from less than US$200 per article in modern, large scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review, to about US$1,000 per article in prestigious journals with rejection rates exceeding 90%. The publication costs for a representative scholarly article today come to lie at around US$400. The additional non-publication cost items that make up the difference between publication costs and final price are discussed. The dataset refers to calculations about the scenarios described in a publication about that topic.

The changing world of scholarly communication and the emerging new wave of ‘Open Science’ or ‘Open Research’ has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly debated topics.

Agreement will allow for continued explorations between Elsevier, VSNU, NFU and NWO on how to work together toward future Dutch open science infrastructure services.

Open access publishing still profits publishers, with little added value for researchers.

Funders should award competitive grants directly to journals to underwrite the costs of open access, urges Adriano Aguzzi.