Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
Maximizing the Utility of Open Science
A key political driver of open access and open science policies has been the potential economic benefits that they could deliver to public and private knowledge users. However, the empirical evidence for these claims is rarely substantiated. In this post Michael Fell, discusses how open research can lead to economic benefits and suggests that if these benefits are to be more widely realized, future open research policies should focus on developing research discovery, translation and the capacity for research utilization outside of the academy.
Modernizing the Monograph Ecosystem Can Save Them From Extinction
The future of the academic monograph has been questioned for over two decades. At the heart of this ‘monograph crisis’ has been a publishing industry centred on the print publication of monographs and a failure and lack of incentives to develop business models that would support a transition to open digital monographs. In this post Mike Taylor argues that if monographs are to be appropriately valued, there is a pressing need to further integrate monographs into the digital infrastructure of scholarly communication. Failing this, the difficulty in tracking the usage and discovery of monographs online, will likely make the case for justifying further investment in monographs harder.
Before Plan S, There Was Latin America’s AmeliCA
Open access is often discussed as a process of flipping the existing closed subscription based model of scholarly communication to an open one. In Latin America an open access ecosystem for scholarly publishing has been in place for over a decade. Could efforts like Plan S actually hurt this established initiative?
Why Open Access Will Boost Publisher Profits
Shaun Khoo argues that whilst a shift to gold (pay to publish) open access would deliver wider access to research, the lack of price sensitivity amongst academics presents a risk that they will be locked into a new escalating pay to publish system that could potentially be more costly to researchers than the previous subscription model.
UC Librarian Foresees Seismic Shift from Elsevier Showdown
In the wake of Elsevier shuttering access to its current journal articles at the University of California, the university librarian at UC-Davis reviews the context of the dispute and argues open access offers the best path for academia’s future.
How Learned Societies and Open Access Will Learn to Co-Exist
Plan S, a funder led initiative to drive open access to research will influence how learned societies, the organizations tasked with representing academics in particular disciplines, operate, as many currently depend on revenues from journal subscriptions to cross-subsidise their activities. Here, Alicia Wise and Lorraine Estelle update the first phase of the SPA-OPS project assessing the options available for learned societies to make the transition to open access.
Examining Open Access and Commercial Success
If higher fees result in fewer academics wanting to publish with a journal, then it seems likely when a journal introduces or increases its fees, it should see a reduction in the number of articles published. But researcher Shaun Khoo did not find any evidence that this was the case.
Sci-Hub: The Librarian’s Response
In this post by Ruth Harrison, Yvonne Nobis & Charles Oppenheim they tell about the challenges that Sci-Hub presents to librarians who are advocating for open access to scholarly content. We published this post in recognition of lasts weeks Open Access Week around the country. The article highlights issues associated with open access and scholarly communications and the views reflect that of the authors.
