When it comes to accessing online learning materials, university students don’t think much about whether their downloads might amount to piracy or copyright infringement.
Confirmation bias, the psychological effect that makes people unconsciously interpret information to confirm their beliefs, is a big threat to cosmology.
African research is largely invisible, kept in the shadows by publishing barriers and structural obstacles. A platform built in Brazil and rolled out across the developing world could be the solution.
South Africans’ access to important knowledge and research is incredibly limited. In this time of Open Access, why is this the case – and will it ever change?
To the mark the eighth annual Open Access Week, we asked our readers what they wanted to know about the initiative. Here are their questions with answers from our experts.
We have the technology and the will to expand open access to publicly funded research, but large vested interests are still putting up stiff resistance.
Public engagement of academics has increased enormously in recent decades. But this new level of engagement is producing problems and conflicts for which many academics are ill-prepared.
Much of what’s being said in support of open access publishing misses one key point: that is there is always a value chain and costs are incurred. Someone somewhere is paying for open access.
As scientific researchers, we are often surprised by some of the assumptions made about us by those outside our profession. So we put together a list of common myths we and our colleagues have heard anecdotally…
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…
The open-access movement, which aims to provide researchers and the public with free access to academic work, has been growing. But most academic research remains behind expensive paywalls, which decreases…