September 8, 2022
I missed this important statement from cOAlition S back in June: Scientific publishing is evolving rapidly. A number of initiatives have moved away from the notion that peer-reviewed articles must be published in traditional Open Access journals or platforms. They...
September 8, 2022
From the department of creeping privatization: EdSurge’s Daniel Mollenkamp on Coursera’s move to sign university deals for industry-friendly certificates in the wake of falling enrollments: To Coursera, the online learning platform and edtech “unicorn” that went...
September 6, 2022
Patrick Dunleavy, writing for the LSE Impact blog: Other US-based promoters of open science, like the Centre for Open Science, also cover mainly the quantitative disciplines in social sciences (like psychology and health studies). Yet COS’s somewhat disturbing...
September 5, 2022
Marcio Rodrigues and his Brazilian colleagues, in a recent commentary, noting that funded researchers in Brazil have roughly $2,000 a year to conduct their studies: A median cost of APCs equal to USD 2,600 was recently estimated. However, APCs can cost more than USD...
August 30, 2022
KU Leuven's Demmy Verbeke and Laura Mesotten, writing in UKSG Insights on their APC-free Fund for Fair Open Access: We should consider why we strive for OA. If it is only to arrange broader access to the published record, then the easiest approach undoubtedly is to...
August 26, 2022
From yesterday's blockbuster White House announcement on immediate OA for federally funded research: Improving public access policies across the U.S. government to promote the rapid sharing of federally funded research data with appropriate protections and...
August 24, 2022
Audrey Smith and co-authors, in a study published in MIT's Quantitative Science Studies late last year, with still more evidence that APCs exclude authors from the Global South: We found that for the overwhelming majority of articles published in the Mirror-Parent...
August 11, 2022
The article processing charge (APC)—and its stealthy cousin, the read-and-publish deal—are finally coming under the ferocious assault that they deserve. This last year, both the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation and the Budapest Open Access Initiative came out strong...
August 9, 2022
COPIM's Judith Fathallah, in an excellent Liber Quarterly overview of funding models for OA monographs: Book Processing Charges [BPCs] may have their place in the publishing landscape, and no doubt will be used across a range of models for the foreseeable future. But...
August 5, 2022
I wrote a [short piece](https://elephantinthelab.org/the-case-for-pubpub/) for Elephant in the Lab on the virtues of [PubPub](https://www.pubpub.org): > In its early days, PubPub was proudly sui generis. The team ignored most scholarly publishing conventions by...
August 1, 2022
An interesting, rarely surfaced point, in a [reflection post](https://unlockingresearch-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/) from the University of Cambridge's working group on open research in the humanities, on the drawbacks of the "green," accepted-manuscript repository route to...
July 27, 2022
From June: A jaw-dropping paper, based on FOIA documents, that tracks the foundation-boring grip that for-profit Online Program Management (OPM) firms like 2U have on public universities. The authors combed through hundreds of private contracts, documenting widespread...
July 26, 2022
Preprint platform Research Square exists to drive business to English-language editing factory American Journal Experts (AJE), which launched the platform in 2018. Preprint authors receive a Language Quality Score, and are then shilled to spend hundreds of dollars on...
July 22, 2022
Michael Vasquez, writing for The Chronicle [paywalled] a few weeks ago: When a pair of professors stepped down from their posts at Arcadia University this year, without another job lined up, they did so to halt the creation of a physician-assistant program in...
July 21, 2022
Speaking of the Knowledge Futures Group's Gabe Stein, here's the key excerpt from his recent post outlining the KFG's plans for PubPub self-hosting: We’re planning to support both centralized and self-hosted versions within our existing nonprofit by slowly building...
July 19, 2022
The Knowledge Futures Group's Gabe Stein, in a sharp analysis of the peculiar market dynamics of scholarly publishing: Because of this complexity, the academic publishing market imposes enormous social switching costs on its customers. For an individual researcher to...
July 8, 2022
Stanford's Robert Kaplan, arguing in [*Times Higher Education*](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/lets-end-rocky-marriage-between-academia-and-commercial-publishers) for bringing academic publishing in-house [paywalled, alas], cites the author-excluding APC: >...
July 5, 2022
Iowa State's Curtis Brandy, in an [interview](https://ceup.openingthefuture.net/news/52/) on the [Opening the Future](https://www.openingthefuture.net) site: > Libraries have traditionally placed their scholarly communications and collections work in distinct...
July 4, 2022
I missed this [Ubiquity Press post from last April](https://blog.ubiquitypress.com/cc-by-a-somewcautionary-licensing-tale-127e407b3da5): > Until 2021, Ubiquity Press published all of our books under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) […] However, at the...
June 16, 2022
Colleen Flaherty, writing for Inside Higher Ed: Roland Hatzenpichler, assistant professor of environmental microbiology at Montana State University, said it’s been about a year since he started refusing to review for for-profit journals for free. In response to one...
