Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
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.
Criticisms of the Citation System, and Google Scholar in Particular
In his second article about the citation system and Google Scholar, Louis Coiffait looks at some of the current criticisms.
Trump Administration Requests 12 Percent Cut to NSF Budget
The two federal agencies that spend the most on making grants to social and behavioral science research in the United States, both have their budgets shaved by an eighth in the Fiscal Year 2020 budget proposal released by the Trump administration earlier this month. But the move is more symbolic than substantive.
