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Thousands of Scientists Publish a Paper Every Five Days

Thousands of Scientists Publish a Paper Every Five Days

To highlight uncertain norms in authorship, John P. A. Ioannidis, Richard Klavans and Kevin W. Boyack identified the most prolific scientists of recent years.

Too Much Academic Research Is Being Published

Too Much Academic Research Is Being Published

The decision by The Review of Higher Education, a highly respected academic journal, to temporarily suspend submissions due to a backlog of more than two years’ worth of articles awaiting reviews or publication set off a twitter storm and much debate in the corridors of academia about the future of academic publishing, and in particular its very foundation, blind peer review. 

Open-access Journal Editors Resign After Alleged Pressure to Publish Mediocre Papers

Open-access Journal Editors Resign After Alleged Pressure to Publish Mediocre Papers

All 10 senior editors of the open-access journal Nutrients resigned last month, alleging that the publisher, the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), pressured them to accept manuscripts of mediocre quality and importance.

Dimensions: Building Context for Search and Evaluation

Dimensions: Building Context for Search and Evaluation

Dimensions by Digital Science (owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing) is a new database that includes not only data about publications and their natural associated citation graph, but also awarded grant data, patent data and clinical data and altmetric attention data.

India Cracks down on 'Predatory Publishers' Following International Investigation

India Cracks down on 'Predatory Publishers' Following International Investigation

An international investigation has discovered that some 400,000 scientists have published papers in so-called "predatory journals".  Action taken after number of journals run by such publishers triples since 2013.

Sci-Hub Proves That Piracy Can be Dangerously Useful

Sci-Hub Proves That Piracy Can be Dangerously Useful

Despite two lost legal battles in the US, domain name seizures, and millions of dollars in damage claims, Sci-Hub continues to offer unauthorized access to academic papers. The site's founder says that she would rather operate legally, but copyright gets in the way. Sci-Hub is not the problem she argues, it's a solution, something many academics appear to agree with.

Europe Expanded the "No Elsevier Deal" Zone and This Could Change Everything

Europe Expanded the "No Elsevier Deal" Zone and This Could Change Everything

One of the effects of the national negotiations happening in Europe is cracking the secrecy around the costs of the big publisher deals - and growing academic awareness of the case for change.

Usage Statistics Launched

Usage Statistics Launched

On the research data repository Zenodo you can now view the number of views and downloads on record pages, and you can sort search results by most viewed.

DEAL and Elsevier Negotiations: Elsevier Demands Unacceptable for the Academic Community

DEAL and Elsevier Negotiations: Elsevier Demands Unacceptable for the Academic Community

"Elsevier is still not willing to offer a deal in the form of a nationwide agreement in Germany that responds to the needs of the academic community in line with the principles of open access and that is financially sustainable," says Horst Hippler, the lead negotiator and spokesperson for the DEAL Project Steering Committee.

What Is a Predatory Journal?

What Is a Predatory Journal?

The objective of this scoping review is to summarize the literature on predatory journals, describe its epidemiological characteristics, and to extract empirical descriptions of potential characteristics of predatory journals.

Scholarly Publishing Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It

Scholarly Publishing Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It

Imagine using version control to track the process of research in real time. Peer review becomes a community-governed process, where the quality of engagement becomes the hallmark of individual reputations. All research outputs can be published and credited with not an 'impact factor' in sight.

The Latest in Search: Do New Discovery Solutions Improve Search as Well as Retrieval?

The Latest in Search: Do New Discovery Solutions Improve Search as Well as Retrieval?

A heuristic (exploratory) comparison of several new, free / mainstream academic search tools, concluding that their effectivness improves if an institution's library licenses them for off-campus authentication.