“The April 2021 issue of Physics World arrived this morning after the usual month in the post to Ireland. I don’t know why it takes so long. My copy of Private Eye usually takes just a couple of days. Anyway, there is an interview in the latest issue with Steve Hall, the former Managing Director of IOP Publishing who stepped down last month …” (more)
[In the Dark, 4 May]
“IReL and Taylor & Francis Group have signed a new transformative agreement, for three years starting in March 2021. IReL is a licensing consortium of nine participating Irish publicly-funded higher education institutions. This deal allows Irish researchers access to Taylor & Francis Group journals as well as the option to publish in around 2,000 titles without paying article publishing fees …” (more)
[IReL, 31 March]
“IReL has signed its first transformative open access agreement with SAGE Publishing. The three-year Read and Publish deal will provide expanded open access publishing opportunities for corresponding authors at IReL member institutions …” (more)
[IReL, 25 March]
“IReL is very pleased to announce a four year (2021-2024) Read and Publish agreement with the publisher John Wiley & Sons. The agreement will allow member institutions continued access to the complete collection over one thousand journal published by Wiley. It will also allow authors from the institutions to make their Wiley published articles open access immediately on publication …” (more)
[IReL, 18 March]
“Those nice people at cOAlition S have produced a new online tool that allows authors to check whether a given academic journal complies with the requirements of Plan S as they apply to a given funder and institution. For information on how it works see here. For the actual tool (beta version) see here …” (more)
[In the Dark, 19 November]
“I couldn’t resist passing on the news that the Max Planck Digital Library has signed an agreement with the Nature Publishing Group to enable authors in about 120 German institutes to publish Open Access articles in Nature journals …” (more)
[In the Dark, 23 October]
“Early last year, I interviewed Richard Gallagher, President and Editor-in-Chief of Annual Reviews about the organization’s rationale for pursuing open access (OA) and details of their Subscribe to Open approach. A few months ago, Lisa Hinchliffe offered us an update on Annual Reviews, providing both an expanded definition of Subscribe to Open and an overview of some of the advantages and challenges of the model …” (more)
[Ann Michael, The Scholarly Kitchen, 27 August]
“Funding agencies behind the radical open-access (OA) initiative Plan S have announced a policy that could make it possible for researchers to bypass journals’ restrictions on open publishing. The change could allow scientists affected by Plan S to publish in any journal they want – even in subscription titles, such as Science, that haven’t yet agreed to comply with the scheme …” (more)
[Richard Van Noorden, Nature, 16 July]
“We are a collective of intersectional feminist and social justice journal editors. We reject the narrow values of efficiency, transparency and compliance that inform current developments and policies in open access and platform publishing …” (more)
[Critical Legal Thinking, 15 July]
“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]
