Social Science Space

Having tracked and analysed the usage data of one university’s central open access fund over eight years, Stephen Pinfield finds that mandates, particularly if accompanied by funding, have played a very important role in encouraging uptake of Gold OA.

Stephen Pinfield, co-author of a new study looking at the role that a centralized ‘faculty publication fund’ could have on uptake of articles to the ‘gold’ version of open access publishing, discusses just how a central fund should be approached and how librarians and smaller institutions can play a role.

This archived podcast and extended question-and-answer session first appeared at SAGE Connection. *** Why do some researchers choose to publish […]

There is a divide in how academics from the humanities and social sciences view open access publishing compared to their colleagues in the science, technology and medical fields: HSS is notably more skittish about OA.

Individual academics and institutions have driven the open access process in South Africa. This bottom-up approach has its merits, argue John Butler-Adam, Susan Veldsman and Ina Smith, but a push from the top is needed to ensure that the nation stays on track.

Open Access Week starts today and in honor Stephen Pinfield provides an overview of 18 propositions on open access identified through an extensive analysis of the discourse. It is clear that whilst OA has come a long way in the last five years, there is a lot to do in making open access work.

The head of insights at Nature Publishing Group and Palgrave Macmillan shares findings from a recent survey of authors that finds few researchers are now unaware of open access, but their perceptions of quality still remain a significant barrier to further OA involvement.

No one ever assumed that everything in print was trustworthy, says Virginia Barbour, and neither should that be the case for open access content. Content is what matters – whether delivered by open access, subscription publishing, or a printed document.

The U.S. National Archives has set itself the gargantuan goal of digitizing its full collection. Social scientists can now weigh in on what documents should go to the head of the line.

Are universities able to shoulder the costs of the open access transition, especially as the total cost of publishing is, for the moment, rising? Stephen Pinfield presents findings on the current state of institutional costs.

New research indicates that self-archived, or ‘green’ open-access articles, regardless of format, receive significantly higher citation counts than do non-OA articles from the same editions of the same major political science journals.

The ‘free access’ to subscribers of the journal Nature isn’t OA-lite, argues Martin Eve. It’s not even OA. But it is a start.