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 […]
An Open Invitation to OpenCon
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.
Do Scholarly Publishers Need a Creative Un-Commons?
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.
We Must Resist the Pressure to Be Interesting
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?
Feds Make First Move to Enact Open Access Mandate
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.
Will David Willetts Be Remembered For His OA Advocacy?
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.
On the Ethics of Facebook – and Drawing the Right Conclusions
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.
In Swedish Repository, OA Citations Trump Non-OA
A new study investigates whether there is a possible open access citation advantage across all fields.
Social Science Left Behind as China Embraces Open Access
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.
