Is It Time to Nationalise Academic Publishers?
With state intervention back in vogue, and publishers’ profit margins still sky-high, journals could be the next monopoly to come under scrutiny.
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Who May Swim in the Ocean of Knowledge?
Decolonising knowledge and democratising information is the great promise of our times. With universal access to knowledge, we can begin to achieve the potential of the Internet and provide a better world for future generations.
HRB Open Research
HRB Open Research is a platform for rapid, open access publication and open peer review of any research funded by the Health Research Board.
How a Partnership Over Annotation Software Fits Into Bigger Changes in Research Workflow
How a Partnership Over Annotation Software Fits Into Bigger Changes in Research Workflow
Elsevier announced a partnership with a nonprofit named Hypothesis, which makes annotation software that lets readers make margin notes on online articles.
SpringerNature Hurries 7 Billion Euro Frankfurt Listing
SpringerNature, the publisher of science magazine Nature, has brought forward a listing which may value it at more than 7 billion euros ($8.6 billion) including debt, to reduce the risk from volatile stock markets.
It's Time to Stand up to the Academic Publishing Industry: Here’s How
Academia is unique in that professionals with highly specialized expertise, who are paid by public institutions, write articles and provide peer reviews to corporations who profit greatly without giving back to the research enterprise.
"Publication Practice Has to Change"
Lutz Jäncke and Lawrence Rajendran talk about the crisis in the publication process and new solutions.
Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability
Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability
Data from several lines of evidence suggest that the methodological quality of scientific experiments does not increase with increasing rank of the journal.
Scientists Aim To Pull Peer Review Out Of The 17th Century
Some scientists want to change the old-fashioned way scientific advancements are evaluated and communicated. But they have to overcome the power structure of the traditional journal vetting process.
Open Access Technology Options
Organizations launching OA journals have many choices to make. What are their technology options?
Insights from Authors’ Editors Can Help Journal Editors Define and Refine Their Core Competencies
Insights from Authors’ Editors Can Help Journal Editors Define and Refine Their Core Competencies
Journal editors should be able to ensure that authors are given useful feedback on the language and writing in submitted manuscripts. Journal editors should be able to deal effectively with inappropriate text re-use and plagiarism.
Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability
Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability
Data from several lines of evidence suggest that the methodological quality of scientific experiments does not increase with increasing rank of the journal.
Authorial and Institutional Stratification in Open Access Publishing: the Case of Global Health Research
Authorial and Institutional Stratification in Open Access Publishing: the Case of Global Health Research
New axes of stratification are emerging in academic publishing, adding to the already complex tapestry of inequality in science. Authors working at lower-ranked universities are more likely to publish in closed/paywalled outlets, and less likely to choose outlets that involve some sort of Article Processing Charge (APCs; gold or hybrid OA).
Libraries Reject Taylor & Francis Opportunistic Change of Contract
More than hundred and ten libraries have signed an open letter to Taylor & Francis: the academic research which was previously available to universities as part of the Taylor & Francis "big deal" will now have to be purchased as a separate package.
Interactivity in Scientific Figures Is a Key Tool for Data Exploration and the Scientific Process
Interactivity in Scientific Figures Is a Key Tool for Data Exploration and the Scientific Process
Last summer we launched our interactive figures initiative with plotly. Since then, we have published 22 interactives figures in seven articles across two platforms. In this post authors describe their figures and share why they wanted to make them interactive.
Decentralizing Science
The case for decentralized, trusted platforms for the dissemination of scientific information and attribution.
The State of OA: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Prevalence and Impact of Open Access Articles
The State of OA: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Prevalence and Impact of Open Access Articles
At least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. Also, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA.
Sci-Hub Provides Access to Nearly all Scholarly Literature
For the first time, nearly all scholarly literature is available gratis to anyone with an Internet connection, suggesting the toll access business model may become unsustainable.
Preserving Comments from PubMed Commons
On 1 February 2018, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) announced the discontinuation of PubMed Commons, citing usage that had been “minimal, with comments submitted on only 6,000 of the 28 million articles indexed in PubMed.” Although sparse,
Science’s Pirate Queen: Plundering the Academic Publishing Establishment
Alexandra Elbakyan runs Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world. (Long read ...)
Title Length
A paper documenting strong and robust negative correlations between the length of the title of an economics article and different measures of scientific quality.
PLOS and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Enter Agreement to Enable Preprint Posting on bioRxiv
PLOS and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Enter Agreement to Enable Preprint Posting on bioRxiv
In order to better serve authors, an agreement between the two organizations outlines broader use of bioRxiv for preprints of papers submitted to PLOS journals.
FinELib and Elsevier Reach Agreement for Subscription Access
The FinELib consortium and Elsevier today signed an agreement making Elsevier’s globally published research articles available to Finnish academic institutions, while providing Finnish researches with incentives to publish open access if they so choose.
A Post-Publication Review and Assessment In Science Experiment
It is time to reinvent the ways we assess our research outputs and each other to make them more fair, efficient and effective, says Michael Eisen.
Nature Journals Tighten Rules on Non-Financial Conflicts
What makes a conflict of interest (COI) in science? Definitions differ, but broadly agree on one thing: an influence that can cloud a researcher’s objectivity. Nature and the other Nature Research journals are taking into account some of these non-financial sources of possible tension and conflict.
PubMed Commons to be Discontinued
PubMed Commons has been a valuable experiment in supporting discussion of published scientific literature. The service was first introduced as a pilot project in the fall of 2013.
The Importance of Being Second
Scientific research can be a cutthroat business, with undue pressure to publish quickly, first, and frequently. PLOS Biology is now formalizing a policy whereby manuscripts that confirm or extend a recently published study are eligible for consideration.
Women Edged out of Last-Named Authorships in Top Journals
Women are significantly under-represented as last authors on high-quality research papers, according to a recent analysis.
Preprint Abstracts On bioRxiv Increasing Faster Than Medline
As preprints in medicine are debated, data on how preprints are used, cited, and published are needed. This study by John P.A. Ioannidis evaluates views and downloads and Altmetric scores and citations of preprints and their publications.
The Case for the Megajournal
In the early days of digital, we were led to believe that the economics of scarcity would be repealed by the removal of supply constraints in the digital world. But that hasn’t happened.
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