“Five years ago, when Jeffrey MacKie-Mason first joined the University of California team that negotiates with academic publishers, he asked a colleague what would happen if he failed to strike a deal. What if, instead, he simply canceled their subscription? ‘I was told I would be fired the next day’, the UC Berkeley librarian says …” (more)
[Gregory Barber, Wired, 16 June]
“… The virus is reminding us that the purpose of scholarly communication is not to allocate credit for career advancement, and neither is it to keep publishers afloat. Scholarly communication is about, well, scholars communicating with each other, to share insights for the benefit of humanity. And whilst we’ve heard all this before, in a time of crisis we realise afresh that this isn’t just rhetoric, this is reality …” (more)
[Elizabeth Gadd, Wonkhe, 22 April]
“Whilst the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a short term uptick in open research practices, both in response to the virus and the need for remote access to research and teaching materials. Samuel Moore argues that the long term impact of Covid-19 and its related economic impact will likely increase the corporate control of academic publishing …” (more)
[Impact of Social Sciences, 17 April]
“After a change in the rules of the bold open-access (OA) initiative known as Plan S, publisher Springer Nature said on 8 April that many of its non-OA journals – including Nature – were now committed to joining the plan, pending discussion of further technical details …” (more)
[Richard Van Noorden, Nature, 9 April]
“A consortium of publicly funded Irish higher education institutions and Elsevier, the 140-year-old publisher and ‘global leader in information analytics’ specialising in science and health, have agreed to the country’s first open access programme with a major scientific publisher, an important step towards the goal of securing full open access to Irish research publications …” (more)
[University World News, 20 February]
“One of the most significant impacts of Plan S (the drive to initiate an open access transition in scholarly publishing) has been to accelerate interest in national level read-and-publish deals. Whilst these deals have streamlined open access provision in the Global North, Jefferson Pooley argues that they lock in and exacerbate existing inequalities in scholarly publishing, by establishing and entrenching a two-tier system of scholarly publishing based on access to funds needed to meet publishing charges …” (more)
[Impact of Social Sciences, 21 February]
“Academic monographs will need to be made freely available within 12 months of publication if authors are supported by public research funds, according to new open access proposals from the UK’s main research body …” (more)
[Jack Grove, Times Higher Education, 13 February]
“An expected move by the Trump administration to mandate immediate open access publication of federally funded research has been hailed a major step away from the subscription journal model, with the expected damage to some of the US’ academic societies seen by some as a potentially necessary trade-off. The White House was widely understood to be drafting an executive order that would follow in the footsteps of Plan S, the European-led initiative …” (more)
[Paul Basken, Times Higher Education, 7 January]
“Publishing giant Elsevier has signed a national license deal with Couperin, France’s consortium of universities and research organizations, but critics say it doesn’t do enough to advance open access (OA) to scientific journal articles. Its terms are at odds with Plan S, a mandate to make publications immediately free to read starting in 2021, which France’s National Research Agency has backed …” (more)
[Tania Rabesandratana, Science, 13 December]
“… Although it remains unclear how well Plan S will work for researchers funded by Coalition S, it is increasingly clear that even before it has gone into effect, Plan S has achieved one of its major goals, changing the conversation around OA …” (more)
[David Crotty, The Scholarly Kitchen, 9 October]
“One of the foundational aims of the open access movement, set out in the Budapest Open Access Initiative, was to provide access to research not only to scholars, but to ‘teachers, students and other curious minds’ and in so doing ‘enrich education’. However almost two decades on from the declaration access to the research literature for educational purposes remains limited …” (more)
[Elizabeth Gadd, Jane Secker and Chris Morrison, LSE Impact Blog, 16 September]
“In numerous rants about Open Access on this blog I’ve made the point that because of the arXiv the field I work in is way ahead of the game. Most researchers in astronomy astrophysics and cosmology post their papers on the arXiv, and many do that before the work has been accepted for publication. Even before the arXiv we used to circulate preprints ahead of publication …” (more)
[In the Dark, 26 August]
“Carl Malamud is on a crusade to liberate information locked up behind paywalls – and his campaigns have scored many victories. He has spent decades publishing copyrighted legal documents, from building codes to court records, and then arguing that such texts represent public-domain law that ought to be available to any citizen online …” (more)
[Priyanka Pulla, Nature, 17 July]
“The language of Open Access (OA) is littered with so many colours, metals, and precious stones, that you would be forgiven for losing track. The proliferation of these ‘flavours’ of OA has been a useful analytical tool for those that study scholarly communication, but it has also complicated the discussion about what academics can do to realise the ‘unprecedented public good’ of opening access to research that was at the heart of the Budapest Open Access Initiative …” (more)
[Juan Pablo Alperin, Esteban Morales and Erin McKiernan, LSE Impact Blog, 17 July]
“A new government framework on ‘open research’ states that all Irish scholarly publications resulting from publicly funded research are to be made openly available from 2020. The framework was launched by Minister of State for Training, Skills, Innovation, Research and Development John Halligan and contains a set of initiatives designed to change the culture of Irish academia …” (more)
[Finn Purdy, Trinity News, 11 July]
“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]
