May 7, 2021
The indisensable OA observer Richard Poynder dropped another hefty ebook (163 pages!), Information Wants To Be Free, in December. From Poynder's post introducing the book: While what I say might be slightly overweight in European developments, it may not matter if (as...
May 3, 2021
From the press release announcing the exciting merger of Open Library of Humanities and Birkbeck College: The OLH is an academic-led, gold open-access publisher (articles are freely and permanently accessible for everyone, immediately after publication) with no...
April 30, 2021
Ashley Jester, in a must-read in Commonplace: When a deal is struck that covers some or all of the APCs, that deal explicitly validates the idea that APCs are an appropriate part of the open access ecosystem. You are no longer arguing about whether or not individual...
April 22, 2021
Speaking of read-and-publish, here are my quoted thoughts at the end of Inside Higher Ed piece on the big Cambridge deal: One of the primary concerns about read-and-publish deals is that in the long term, the “barriers currently imposed on readers will be erected for...
April 22, 2021
Jennifer Frederick and the Ithaka S+R team, reporting on library budget cuts on The Scholarly Kitchen back in December: With so many US academic libraries facing cuts, some might be tempted to assume that the sector is bottoming out and will soon recover. To the...
April 9, 2021
Mahdi Khelfaoui and Yves Gingras, in a recent Journal of Scholarly Publishing article [paywalled, sadly]: In this article, we analyse a relatively recent commercial strategy used by large academic publishers to capitalize on the brand names of their most prestigious...
April 4, 2021
Peter McMahan and Daniel McFarland, in a just-published American Sociological Review article: By curating the published research in an area, [literature] reviews highlight certain connections between publications while obscuring others, dramatically simplifying a...
March 31, 2021
From the Medium post announcing that scite has struck a deal with Wiley to embed its contextual citation snippets (dubbed, inevitably, Smart Citations) into over a hundred Wiley journals: Smart Citations display the context of each citation to a publication, allowing...
March 20, 2021
From the annual report of MDPI, the Swiss-based for-profit OA bohemoth: 165.2K peer-reviewed manuscripts published online, an increase of 55.6% in comparison to the previous year; 50 new journals launched, and 13 journals transferred to MDPI; 35 days used from...
March 17, 2021
MIT Libraries' Chris Bourg, quoted in an Inside Higher Ed story on the UC-Elsevier deal: “If pay-to-publish models (whether multi- or single-payer) become the new norm, they will inevitably lead to a system where the work of scholars from less-privileged institutions...
March 10, 2021
The most exciting aspect of MIT Press's Direct to Open OA book initiative is that library-participant fees are set, in part, according to ability to pay: To determine fees that allow the offer to reach the revenue target, the Press: Assessed the total universe of...
March 9, 2021
I finally got around to reading the forensic Chronicle account of turmoil at the anthropology journal HUA. The story, by Jesse Singal, is worth a read—it is an impressively thorough and fair-minded act of journalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the APC shows up in one of...
March 8, 2021
Here's an idea, premised on a pair of observations: (1) open access is now inevitable, at least for the journal literature; but in (2) an APC/read-and-publish package. There are lots of exceptions and byways, but the momentum—thanks in part to Plan S—is with an OA...
February 16, 2021
A Salesforce exec, in an October post hawking the company's software tools : In a matter of months, higher education institutions have had to reinvent themselves from physical hubs of learning to digital enablers of the student journey. And while no one knows exactly...
February 11, 2021
From PubPub, the MIT open source platform: The community is still working on the processes, workflows, standards, and values that will support this emergent form of publishing. But that shouldn’t stop anyone who wants to explore these models from starting now. With...
February 8, 2021
MIT Technology Review, on the challenges to reproducibility in AI research: According to the 2020 State of AI report, [...] only 15% of AI studies share their code. Industry researchers are bigger offenders than those affiliated with universities. In particular, the...
February 6, 2021
The Daily Beast: The reporter at the center of the collapse of one of the New York Times’ biggest reporting projects is moving to a new beat. Rukmini Callimachi, formerly one of the paper’s highest-profile reporters on ISIS and extremism in the Middle East, has been...
February 1, 2021
From SPARC Europe's summary of a recent gathering to discuss and inform the coming Plan S for books: With almost 75 attendees, this workshop focused on business models for OA books and brought together experts from the field before ending with a document sprint. The...
January 29, 2021
From the UK-based open monograph project COPIM: Available on Github at https://github.com/BirkbeckCTP/otf-signup, features of the system include order tracking, billing management, notification of new sign ups, and access control for backlist packages of books. The...
January 28, 2021
Sam Moore, in a LSE Impact post on research and the commons: Simply put, policymakers should reorient their focus away from mere open access to the outputs of scientific research and instead nurture the commons across the research lifecycle. It would mean less of a...
