September 4, 2019
From a piece I just published in the SSRC's Items: The article processing charge (APC) is the specter haunting the open access movement. Advocates for open access (OA) face plenty of other obstacles, including tolled journal prestige, researcher inertia, and the...
August 30, 2019
Jon Tennant and Tony Ross-Hellauer, in a new preprint on SocArXiv: As a core component of our immense scholarship system, it is routinely and widely criticised. Much ink has been spilled on highly-cited and widely-circulated editorials criticising or championing peer...
August 27, 2019
Guy Geltner, commenting on the stealthy privatization of Amsterdam University Press: The corporate, market-blindness leading this process on the UvA’s part underscores its dismissivness of the needs and concerns of the academic community, above all in the social...
August 26, 2019
If current trends hold, the communication discipline will be fully OA in 2094. In 77 years. That's the conclusion of a just-published study in SAGE Open, that also reported that just 3.3% of communication articles are OA. By that yardstick, the discipline is a...
August 22, 2019
Jon Tennant, in a reposting of his comments on a disingenuous, Elsevier-penned Times Higher Ed piece: When Elsevier uses words like ‘sustainable’, I do not think it means what it thinks they mean. The term ‘sustainable’ means maintaining Elsevier’s 37% profit margins...
August 21, 2019
Janneke Adema and Sam Moore of the Radical Open Access Collective, in an Open Library of Humanities interview: OLH: How does a radical approach to open access empower researchers in the Global South, and those outside of traditional institutional frameworks? JA &...
August 21, 2019
Bianca Kramer, on the European Commission’s second go-around on its RFP for a preprint platform: The use of proprietary technology is now allowed, with the Commission only requiring a non-exclusive license for the duration of the contract, and longer only for specific...
