The deal, which is expected to close in early 2020, further cements Ex Libris as the leader in the library systems marketplace and can be expected to put added pressure on OCLC.

Andy Stirling describes a new project aiming to help science and innovation serve global goals.

Every five minutes or so, someone tries to come up with a cost-per-article figure for academic publishing. Martin Paul Eve explains why he finds himself wanting to resist the temptation.

Many researchers still see the journal impact factor (JIF) as a key metric for promotions and tenure, despite concerns that it’s a flawed measure of a researcher’s value.

i recently applied for the editor in chief position at Psychological Science. i didn't get it, but i got far enough to be asked to write a vision statement, responding to eight prompts.

This week saw a sober assessment of the impact - both positive but also depressingly negative - of schemes to improve gender equality.

Interactive and reproducible repositories powered by Zenodo and Binder.

A couple of years ago, psychologist Susan Fiske launched a broadside against science bloggers - since taken offline - packed with name-calling.

Almost every academic article starts with a literature review. However, although these short research summaries can be beneficial they also introduce opportunities for unverifiable misrepresentation and self-aggrandizement.

There are a couple of angles to look at researcher conflict of interest from. One is that a conflict could distort their work, tilting findings and claims away from "the truth". The other is for the way the work is received, not how it is done: authors' perceived conflicts could damage credibility. How does this translate to authors of systematic reviews and meta-analyses? Are the issues the same, no matter the type of study? I've been thinking about that a lot lately. I was one of the external stakeholders consulted as part of the Cochrane Collaboration's review of its conflict of interest policy for their systematic reviews editorial teams. As they explain, they are looking to strengthen their approach to financial conflicts, and "consider a wider range of possible inherent biases". In biomedicine at least, systematic reviewers/meta-analysts are widely seen as arbiters on the state of knowledge. Their work often guides individual decisions, policy, and funding. I think that

Open Access mega-journals have in some academic disciplines become a key channel for communicating research. In others, however, they remain unknown. This article explores how authors’ perceptions of mega-journals differ across disciplines and are shaped by motivations associated with the multiple communities they function within.

Reporting results from a comprehensive survey of publishers in the German-speaking world, Christian Kaier and Karin Lackner explore the attitudes of smaller publishers towards open access, finding …

Despite the position being billed as a stepping stone on the way to tenure-track academic employment, many postdocs, discouraged by their poor prospects, are questioning their career choices and instead looking to non-academic jobs as an alternative. However, as Chris Hayter and Marla A. Parker reveal, making this transition is not as easy as it might first appear.

Getting the most out of your Google Scholar profile, creating some old-fashioned table of contents alerts, and simply setting aside time to periodically review key journal titles will ensure you rarely miss out on important research.

Ensuring we focus our definition of success around valuable contributions - instead of around the final output - would recognise and reward good research and researchers.

The active use of metrics in everyday research activities suggests academics have accepted them as standards of evaluation, that they are “thinking with indicators”. Yet when asked, many academics profess concern about the limitations of evaluative metrics and the extent of their use.

Social media can promote openness in research as international partnerships and collaborations are jeopardised, while increased adoption by scientists can also redress the balance that has shifted towards ill-evidenced news on some platforms.

Sarah Quarmby takes a look inside a knowledge broker organisation, the Wales Centre for Public Policy, to see how its day-to-day workings tally with the body of knowledge about evidence use in policymaking.

One way to push back against the pressure to “publish or perish” is to randomly audit a small proportion of researchers and take time to assess their research in detail. Auditors could examine complex measures of quality which no metric could ever capture such as originality, reproducibility, and research translation.

A short list of seven functionalities that academic publishers looking to modernize their operations might invest in; from unencumbered access and improved social components, to dynamic data visualisations and more precise hyperlinking.