Universities already stockpile academic papers so they can report their output to the government. But stockpiling the wrong version of the paper can restrict their right to make the paper available on open access.
Flickr/Gideon Burton
Providing equitable access to the findings of scholarly research is an expensive and vexed business, as many recent stories here on The Conversation have highlighted. Open access offers a way to freely…
Breaking free of the stranglehold of academic publishers holds appeal – but what are the dangers?
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There are three tensions in the field of academic publishing (1) who pays to publish research? (2) who decides what gets published? and (3) who takes any profits? In the traditional model, based on publishing…
Frustration with copyright restrictions placed on scholarly work in many journals has helped fuel the Creative Commons and Open Access movements.
Flickr/TilarX
Back in 1991, in the very earliest days of the internet, a group of high energy physicists began sharing their findings on a Los Alamos-based online archive called Arxiv. Their early experiments in the…
A growing number of academic institutions are building free online databases of their scholarly output. But publication in a big name academic journal still holds cachet for most academics.
Flickr/mandiberg
As the cost of accessing academic journal articles increases, a growing number of academic institutions are building publicly accessible databases of scholarly work. But how much of a threat to the traditional…
How does the high cost of academic journal subscriptions impact the developing world?
Flickr/Book Aid International
Universities libraries in the developed world are struggling to pay academic journal subscription costs – so how can universities in developing countries hope to pay? In this Q+A, Professor Adam Habib…
ANU’s new Digital Collections database aims to make scholarly work freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
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The phrase ‘publish or perish’ is familiar to all academics, who face enormous pressure to have their work featured in the top academic journals. Career progression, job security and pay rises can depend…
Online activist Aaron Swartz has been accused of stealing more than 4 million journal articles from an MIT database.
Flickr/Joi
There was much celebrating around Australia’s university campuses when the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr announced changes to the “Excellence in Research for…
When is comes to research, it seems quantity has become much more important than quality.
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Imagine the following conversation between a finance academic and his or her supervisor during an annual performance review: Academic: So, do you think I am ready for a promotion? Supervisor: Well, I see…
A new way for academics to survive the “publish or perish” imperative has emerged. The imperative itself is not new: commentators in the 1950s were already lamenting the growing pressure for academics…