Policy Without Practice
Does it matter that there's no record of the Plan S leader publishing in a peer-reviewed journal?
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European Parliament Petition on Elsevier and the Open Science Monitor - Green Tea and Velociraptors
European Parliament Petition on Elsevier and the Open Science Monitor - Green Tea and Velociraptors
Elsevier's role in the EU's Open Science Monitor is examined more closely.
Harvard Library and MIT Libraries Provide Recommendations for Plan S Implementation
Harvard Library and MIT Libraries Provide Recommendations for Plan S Implementation
Harvard Library and the MIT Libraries are in broad support of Plan S and its goals while also recomending certain adjustments to the implementation details.
Who Are You Writing For? The Role of Community Membership on Authors' Decisions to Publish in Open Access Mega-Journals
Who Are You Writing For? The Role of Community Membership on Authors' Decisions to Publish in Open Access Mega-Journals
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.
Change Ahead: How Do Smaller Publishers Perceive Open Access?
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 …
Open Access 2018: A Year of Funders and Universities Drawing Lines in the Sand
When the year began, the world's largest academic publisher, Elsevier, had increased their annual profits, with an operating profit approaching US$1.2 billion in science, technology, and medicine - a profit margin of over 36%. By year's end, a hefty chunk of the world's research community was walking away from big subscription deals with Elsevier and others.
Why We Need a Public Infrastructure for Data on Open Access
The necessity of developing a public infrastructure for open access, its benefits and the obstacles to reaching this goal.
Pay to Publish Open Access: On the DEAL-Wiley Agreement
Details of the contract between the German consortium DEAL and Wiley reveal that the transformative nature of this new big deal may come at a high cost.
Few Open Access Journals are Plan S Compliant
Much of the debate on Plan S seems to concentrate on how to make toll access journals open access, taking for granted that existing open access journals are Plan S compliant. We suspected this was not so, and set out to explore this using DOAJ's journal metadata. We conclude that an overwhelmingly large majority of open access journals are not Plan S compliant, and that it is small HSS publishers not charging APCs that are least compliant and will face major challenges with becoming compliant. Plan S need to give special considerations to smaller publishers and/or non-APC-based journals.
Elsevier's High Profit Model Makes them Anti-Open
Elsevier argues that they make their citation data available through their subscription database, Scopus, and that “[…] Elsevier cannot make such a large corpus of data, which it has added significant value to, available for free."
Groundbreaking Deal Makes Large Number of German Studies Free to Public
Groundbreaking Deal Makes Large Number of German Studies Free to Public
New contract gives researchers access to Wiley's journals and makes their papers open access
Tracking the Popularity and Outcomes of All BioRxiv Preprints
Tracking the Popularity and Outcomes of All BioRxiv Preprints
Though the popularity and practical benefits of preprints are driving policy changes at journals and funding organizations, there is little bibliometric data available to measure trends in their usage. This study collected and analyzed data on all preprints that were uploaded to bioRxiv.org in the past five years.
Editorial Mutiny at Elsevier Journal
Following in the footsteps of linguistics journal Lingua, the editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics has resigned and launched a rival journal that will be free for all to read.
Editors of Informetrics Resign at Elsevier and Start New Journal
Today the entire editorial board of Informetrics, a major publication in the field of Scientometrics and Informetrics, has unanimously resigned their position. In the future they will dedicate their time to a new full open access journal: Quantitative Science Studies.
Bold Plan to Take European Open Access Initiative Global in 2019
Robert-Jan Smits is pitching the Plan S vision to transform academic publishing to the world’s big science funding bodies.
Large Scale Publisher Survey Reveals Global Trends in Open Access Publishing
A survey of publishers with journals indexed in Directory of Open Access Journals has revealed surprising trends in the way that content is published.
The Double-bind Theory of Scholarly Publishing
Open Acess and Plan S in particular create a conflict between editorial quality and the cost of publication.
The Quest to Topple Science-Stymying Academic Paywalls
Scientific publishers charge so much that even Harvard can't afford it anymore. A new publishing infrastructure could help.
Will the World Embrace Plan S, the Radical Proposal to Mandate Open Access to Science Papers?
Will the World Embrace Plan S, the Radical Proposal to Mandate Open Access to Science Papers?
China appears to embrace Europe-led plan, but other countries are reluctant.
UC and Elsevier - Office of Scholarly Communication
The University of California is re-negotiating its systemwide licenses with some of the world's largest scholarly journal publishers, including Elsevier, to provide additional open access options for UC authors. In these negotiations, the UC is seeking a single, integrated contract with each publisher that covers both the university's subscriptions and open access publishing of UC research in their journals - what are often known as "publish and read" agreements.
Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier
The Max Planck Society is going to discontinue their Elsevier subscription. By doing so the Society joins nearly 200 universities and research institutions in Germany who have already cancelled their agreements with Elsevier.
Elsevier Willing to Compensate Editors to Prevent Them from 'Flipping'
As some editors are moving to 'flip' their journal the publishing giant offers considerable compensations to change their minds.
Plan S: The Ambitious Initiative to End the Reign of Paywalls
The funder-driven push for freely accessible scholarly literature has divided the scientific community.
When Open Access to Research Becomes Personal
I’m not the first to come up with a personal story about the importance of open access and I’m not going to tell my story right now. I want to tell two other stories from the past couple of weeks that have reinforced for me why I do what I do every day in advocating for full and immediate open access to research.
Elsevier in 2018: Decrease in Number of Fully OA Journals
In 2018, there has been a drop in the number of fully OA journals published by Elsevier, from 416 to 328 journals. The majority of Elsevier’s fully OA journals are still non-charging.
COAR Building a Sustainable Knowledge Commons
The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) reiterates its support for the goal of Plan S to achieve “immediate Open Access to all scholarly publications from research”.
Systemic Reforms and Further Consultation Needed to Make Plan S a Success
ALLEA welcomes the ambition of the coalition of European research funders to move the scientific publishing system towards open access; however, broader consultation with all parties is required during the implementation phase.
University of California Challenges Elsevier over Access to Scholarly Research
University of California System is playing hardball with Elsevier in negotiations that could transform the way it pays to read and publish research. But does the UC system have the clout to pull it off?
Discipline-specific Open Access Publishing Practices and Barriers to Change
What are the underlying mechanisms that cause disciplines to vary in their OA publishing practices.
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