Ninth Level Ireland

“At the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Annual Meeting in San Diego last Thursday, those unfortunate enough to be speaking during the 4pm slot lost their audience as everyone’s attention turned to their phones. The wait was over! Revised Plan S implementation guidelines were released last Thursday or Friday, depending on what part of the globe you were in …” (more)

[Alison Mudditt, The Scholarly Kitchen, 3 June]

“I haven’t had time to go through the details yet, but yesterday saw the release of revised Principles and Implementation for Plan S, which I have blogged about before. There’s also a rationale for the changes here …” (more)

[In the Dark, 31 May]

“A new initiative called ‘University Journals’ has just been announced. The quotation marks I have put around the name are not scare quotes but simply a way to make it clear that we are talking about a specific service and not generic university journals …” (more)

[Joseph Esposito, The Scholarly Kitchen, 6 May]

“In a move that could signal the beginning of a significant shift for its business model, publisher Elsevier has agreed to its first ‘read-and-publish’ deal with a national consortium of universities and research institutions in Norway. Rather than paying separately to access content behind paywalls and make selected individual articles immediately available to the public, the Norwegian consortium has signed a deal that rolls the two costs into one …” (more)

[Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 24 April]

“Just time today to pass on a bit of Open Access news: the University of California has ended negotiations which academic publishing giant Elsevier and will no longer subscribe to Elsevier Journals. The negotiations broke down over two key points …” (more)

[In the Dark, 7 March]

“Debate over the future of scholarly publishing felt remote to Kathryn M Jones, an associate professor of biology at Florida State University – that is, until she attended a Faculty Senate meeting last year. There she learned that the library might renegotiate its $2-million subscription with the publishing behemoth Elsevier, which would limit her and her colleagues’ access to groundbreaking research …” (more)

[Lindsay Ellis, Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 February]

“The bad news: the scientific community can no longer afford commercial science journals. The good news: the scientific community no longer needs commercial science journals. The bottom line: open internet archives and overlay journals are the solution …” (more)

[Syksy Räsänen, In the Dark, 8 February]

“It’s been a rather busy first day back at teaching, and I’m a bit tired after my first Engineering Mathematics lecture, so I’ll just post a couple of quick items on the topic of Open Access Publishing. The most important thing is a reminder that the deadline for submission of feedback on the Plan S proposals is February 8th 2019 …” (more)

[In the Dark, 4 February]

“Our recent publication of a paper in the Open Journal of Astrophysics caused a flurry of interest in social media and a number of people have independently asked me for information about the cost of this kind of publication. I see no reason not to be fully ‘open’ about the running costs of the Open Journal, but it’s not quite as simple as a cost per paper …” (more)

[In the Dark, 1 February]

“I thought it might be useful for the research community in Ireland and beyond to share the slides for the presentations used on Tuesday’s Briefing on Plan S for Open Access …” (more, sideshows)

[In the Dark, 24 January]

“This morning I found myself in the centre of Dublin to attend an event at the Royal Irish Academy, in Dawson Street. Coincidentally this is just a few yards from the Mansion House, scene of the meeting of the First Dáil on 21st January 1919 (which I blogged about here) and also scene of the commemorations of its centenary yesterday …” (more)

[In the Dark, 22 January]

“The entire editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics resigned Thursday in protest over high open-access fees, restricted access to citation data and commercial control of scholarly work …” (more)

[Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 14 January]

“Science is built, enhanced, and developed through the open and structured sharing of knowledge. Yet some publishers charge so much for subscriptions to their academic journals that even the libraries of the world’s wealthiest universities such as Harvard are no longer able to afford the prices …” (more)

[Joi Ito, Wired, 4 January]

“ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, published an initial response to Plan S, an initiative for open access publishing supported by a consortium of research funders. The ALLEA statement welcomes the ambition of the proposal and identifies a number of challenges to be considered by funding agencies in order to prevent perverse incentives and unintended consequences in the scientific publishing sector and the research evaluation system when moving towards open access …” (more)

[AlphaGalileo, 12 December]

“Last week cOAlition S released guidance on how they anticipate their open access (OA) mandate, Plan S to be implemented. While this implementation guidance provides many new details about the plan, it has not provided reassurance to anxious society publishers …” (more)

[Michael Clarke, The Scholarly Kitchen, 5 December]

“On November 27, 2018, the cOAlition S, which is behind the Plan S for switching to Open Access in multiple European countries, has published guidelines that elaborate on the initial principles of the plan, while reformulating its more contentious points …” (more)

[Pablo Markin, AlphaGalileo, 29 November]

“Those of you interested in the topic of Open Access Publishing, and Open Science generally, will no doubt already have heard of ‘Plan S’. For those that haven’t it is a proposal by 11 European Nations to give the public free access to publicly funded science …” (more)

[In the Dark, 27 November]

“As the largest player in the journal publishing market, Elsevier is significantly exposed to the risk that illegal file downloading, such as of its paywall-protected articles through Sci-Hub, a platform for illicit sharing of copyright-protected content …” (more)

[AlphaGalileo, 26 November]

“Tuesday’s quick post about a letter of opposition to Plan S generated some comments from academics about the role of ‘Learned Societies’ in academic publishing. I therefore think it’s relevant to raise some points about the extent that these organizations (including, in my field, the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Physics) rely for their financial security upon the revenues generated by publishing traditional journals …” (more)

[In The Dark, 8 November]

“There’s an ‘Open Letter’ doing the rounds which rails against the European Plan S for open access to research papers. You can find it here on Google Docs. It is apparently initiated by some chemists, and there are very few signatories who are not chemists …” (more)

[In The Dark, 6 November]