Social Science Space

The editor of an open-access journal looks at the benefits (and some of the headaches) associated with that model.

While preparing for a panel on the subject at APSA this week, political scientist Erik Voeten looks over the launch of the open access and peer-reviewed journal ‘Research & Politics’ and discusses the opportunities and challenges of this kind of publishing.

Nick Shockey highlights OpenCon, a conference to take place in November aimed at mobilizing support around open access, open educational resources and open data among early career researchers. Funding has been made available to cover travel to attend the conference in Washington, D.C. but the deadline is Monday.

A move by an association of STEM publishers to offer a bespoke category of open-access licenses for scholarly work has stirred up proponents of the existing Creative Commons system.

Academic publishing creates incentives to simplify results, cull aberrations and focus on the exciting — often to the detriment of good research. Could more open access allows us to be good and boring?

A year after the Office of Science and Technology Policy told the U.S. government to open up publicly funded research to the public for free, the first of 21 agencies covered has begun its program.

Now that Greg Clark, has begun his tenure as the new UK minister for universities, science, and cities, the London School of Economics Impact of Social Science blog asked for further reflections on the positions taken by previous minister, David Willetts. David Prosser of the Research Libraries UK covers the dramatic influence Willetts had on open access legislation and momentum in the UK.

What does the Facebook emotional contagion study really tells us about research ethics? Perhaps, argues Robert Dingwall, that its time to deregulate public social science.

A new study investigates whether there is a possible open access citation advantage across all fields.

China’s apparent reluctance to publish it social science and humanities scholarship openly is less about what it lets out, argues Michael Hockx, and more about what opening up might let in.

It’s time for a broader dialogue about how we connect the aims of the social science enterprise to our system of journals, argues the editor of Administrative Science Quarterly.

A just-released project asking if the digital tsunami is leaving trust in scholarly communication all wet found that the academy still runs to traditional means to determine reliability.