June 13, 2022
Jeanne Whalen, writing for The Washington Post (paywalled) on Amazon's play for quantum computing : Amazon will base its quantum team at a new center on the campus of Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., which officially opens this week. Caltech described it as the first...
June 7, 2022
Björn Brembs and nine co-authors, in a sweeping paper posted to Zenodo last fall: There is now a very real threat of a single (or few) corporations effectively owning all scientific data, both research data and user data, on top of their share of the scholarly...
June 6, 2022
Speaking of persistent identifiers, NISO annointed the CRediT taxonomy as an official standard in February. The core bundle of roles to credit has been around since 2014: Conceptualization Data curation Formal analysis Funding acquisition Investigation Methodology...
June 3, 2022
Phill Jones and Alice Meadows, in a Scholarly Kitchen post urging publishers to go all in with persistent identifiers like ORCID: Over the last few years, there has been significant progress in developing recommendations, policies, and procedures for creating,...
May 24, 2022
From a new and important open letter signed by 17 Nobel laureates and more than 30 international organizations: The exorbitant article processing charges (APC) that come hand-in-hand with the Author-Pays OA publishing model deepens the inequality between researchers...
May 20, 2022
Tonya Riley, writing for Cyberscoop: The Federal Trade Commission voted 5-0 on Thursday to issue a policy statement warning education tech companies against using data collected from children via education services for additional commercial purposes, including...
May 19, 2022
From the Wiley press release: This agreement, which marks Wiley’s first in Latin America, positions UNAM as the leader and pioneer in the development of open access research, allowing its researchers to publish most if not all of its articles open access across...
May 11, 2022
From Springer Nature's press release announcing an OA book deal with Max Planck: The initial three-year agreement, live as of 1st January 2022, will enable authors from all 86 Max Planck Institutes to receive a discount on the standard Book Publishing Charge (BPC) to...
May 10, 2022
From the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) announcement: The Book Analytics Dashboard Project (2022-2025) is focused on creating a sustainable OA Book focused analytics service. […] In addition to scaling workflows, infrastructure and customer support, the...
May 10, 2022
Kate Eichhorn, [writing in the *Chronicle of Higher Education*](https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-gig-economy-comes-for-scholarly-work) [paywalled]: > In early March, Chegg launched a marketing campaign to convince educators to sell their teaching materials to the...
May 5, 2022
Rachel Caldwell and Robin N. Sinn, [writing in *Commonplace* in November](https://commonplace.knowledgefutures.org/pub/1qhe2fxi/release/1), propose a journal-publisher scorecard. In their vision, > a publisher’s actions are quantified based on points earned for...
May 3, 2022
From Arxiv's [blog](https://blog.arxiv.org/2022/04/21/librarians-gain-new-insights-into-their-researchers-arxiv-usage/) last week: > New among the membership benefits that all institutions receive, is access to a personalized digital dashboard, containing an overview...
April 27, 2022
The good people at COPIM have officially announced the Open Book Collective: The collective will bring together OA publishers, OA publishing service providers, libraries, and other research institutions to create a new, mutually supportive ecosystem for the thriving...
April 6, 2022
Annual Reviews, in a press release: Today, the leading nonprofit publisher Annual Reviews announced that over the next 18 months they will make their entire portfolio of 51 academic journals freely available to everyone under a new model called Subscribe to Open....
April 5, 2022
I missed this odd bit of Panglossian praise for corporate consolidation, published in the Scholary Kitchen last fall: One very good reason to favor consolidation is when it provides scale and financial stability to a specialized or niche provider. Such a specialized...
March 29, 2022
From my just-published Elephant in the Lab piece: Siphoning taxpayer, tuition, and endowment dollars to access our own behavior is a financial and moral indignity. That we are paying the sellers a second time, after budget-draining subscription and APC outlays, is a...
March 28, 2022
Alberto Pepe, Matteo Cantiello, and Josh Nicholson, in their arXiv paper calling on arXiv to overhaul itself: Disclaimer: This article has originally been written and posted on Authorea, a collaborative online platform for technical and data-driven documents. Authorea...
March 17, 2022
The Knowledge Futures Group's Gabe Stein, writing about the head-scratching hurdles faced by KFG in its effort to secure financial support from libraries: If we were selling to for-profit corporations we’d mostly be able say “enter your credit card info here” and that...
March 7, 2022
David Beer, in his love letter to the academic book review: Rather than being at the centre of disciplines, they are seen to be something of a luxury: an indulgent misuse of time spent reading, cover to cover, and then writing something that does not have any...
February 25, 2022
ResearchProfessional News: UK universities are close to sealing an open-access deal with the academic publisher Elsevier, following protracted negotiations on the replacement of the UK’s largest subscription agreement. On 24 February, a spokesperson for the higher...
