When McDonald’s came under sustained criticism from campaigners in the 1980s, the company responded by constructing a carefully crafted image of corporate social responsibility. It insisted that it cared…
Just make your access open, and do away with the silly wrapper.
biblioteekje
Earlier this week the publisher Macmillan announced (in somewhat breathless prose) that subscribers to 49 of its Nature journals would be able to share links to the full text of articles that would otherwise…
What is it that sets academic publications apart from articles on The Conversation? Peer review might be your first answer. While The Conversation is built around a journalistic model, there is a big growth…
One more corner, then I’ll answer your questions.
campuspartymexico
Imagine you’re a scientist. You’re interested in testing the hypothesis that playing violent video games makes people more likely to be violent in real life. This is a straightforward theory, but there…
It may not be to everyone’s taste, but open is the way of the future.
biblioteekje
Tectonic shifts are happening in the way scientific research is done. These changes, and the ways they may eventually affect us all, are chronicled in a new collection of articles commissioned by Nature…
Open-access journals are gaining credibility and prestige.
rvm_71
While the Australian Research Council considers its policy on open-access publication and others within the scientific community call for the increased sharing of scientific data, the British are already…
Academic publishing firms have been all too keen to monopolise a crucial public good: academic knowledge.
giulia.forsythe
One of the great outrages of academia in the modern age is the privatisation of the profits accruing to publicly-financed knowledge. One form is that of academic journals, a primary method of disseminating…
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales will help the UK government design a platform where all taxpayer-funded scholarly will be available for free.
AAP/Yonhap News Agency
The British government has enlisted the services of Wikipedia in a push to make all taxpayer-funded academic research from the UK freely available online - regardless of whether it is also published in…
Publishers have made journal subscriptions prohibitively expensive, says Harvard Library.
Frederik Questier, Yanna Van Wesemael
Harvard Library says it can no longer afford the vast cost of academic journal subscriptions, and has advised staff at the university to support open access publishing instead. In a memorandum posted on…
The Wellcome Trust building in Camden, London.
geograph.org.uk
One of the world’s biggest science funding bodies will strengthen its support for free online publishing by sanctioning errant academics who take its grants but publish in subscriber-only journals. The…
Californian Republican Darrell Issa has dropped his support for a bill that would restrict free access to taxpayer-funded research.
AAP/Francis Specker
A controversial US bill that was designed to block access to vast amounts of academic research appears to have collapsed after its co-sponsors renounced their support for it. The Research Works Act, introduced…
A boycott by researchers against the academic journal publisher Elsevier has reignited the debate about open-access to scholarly work.
Flickr/limonada
One of the important benefits that the public expects from publicly funded health and medical research is access to the published findings of that research. Patient groups, health consumers, advocacy groups…
Dr Alicia Wise, Elsevier’s director of universal access, has responded to claims that the publisher charges too much for access to content, and is trying to keep research out of the public domain. When…
Traditional publishing methods could soon be a thing of the past.
Unhindered by talent
Most forms of publishing across the globe are in a state of flux. But university-based scholarly publishing faces a set of challenges all of its own. How can an industry whose target audience is so highly…
Some journal editors demand academics boost the number of references to other articles published in their journal.
Flickr/Spinstah
One in five academics from a range of fields say they have come under pressure from journals to pad out their papers with unnecessary citations to get published, a large survey has found. Analysis of 6,672…
If the US Research Works Bill passes, public access to US research will be restricted.
Flickr/the Firebottle
Over the Christmas period, a short Bill was introduced into the US House of Representatives. The Research Works Act aims to make it illegal to require researchers to make their work publicly available…
One in ten medical journal submissions are written by ghost authors.
AAP
In 2009, medical editors from around the world gathered at a Peer Review Congress in Vancouver, Canada, to discuss, among other things, “ghost authorship” of medical research articles. Ghost authorship…
Princeton University hopes its new Open Access policy will pressure academic publishers to stop requiring the copyright to the papers they publish.
Flickr/Yakinodi
Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted…
Academic knowledge is boxed in by exclusive, expensive journals.
Scientists – myself included – are increasingly frustrated by the outmoded academic publishing system. The situation as it stands made sense in the pre-internet era, when one needed a printing press to…
Much of academic publishing has shifted online but that has created new costs, the publishers say.
Flickr/rosefirerising
Fees charged by academic publishers to access research journals have caused no small amount of consternation among readers of scholarly research and fuelled the rise of the Open Access movement. As part…
Professor of Bioethics & Medicine, Sydney Health Ethics, Haematologist/BMT Physician, Royal North Shore Hospital and Director, Praxis Australia, University of Sydney