ScienceGeist

Self-governance of science was supposed to mean freedom of inquiry, but it also ended up serving the business model of scientific publishers while undermining the goals of science policy.

A study suggests that the productivity and impact of gender differences are explained by different publishing career lengths and dropout rates. This inequality in academic publishing has important consequences for institutions and policy makers.

Opinion piece argues that Plan S deals have streamlined open access provision in the global North while exacerbating existing inequalities in scholarly publishing, by establishing and entrenching a two-tier system of scholarly publishing based on access to funds. 

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) and the University of California (UC) announced a two-year agreement that will make it easier and more affordable for UC researchers to publish in the nonprofit open access publisher’s suite of journals.

Reversing the relationship between authors and publishers would ease perverse incentives that impede progress, say Hilal Lashuel and Benjamin Stecher

Standard reports paint a much rosier picture of the research landscape than may be warranted. In this analysis, the first hypothesis of standard articles reported was supported by the data 96% of the time, while that rate was only 44% in registered reports.

Former editors-in-chief at European Law Journal say the departure of editorial boards raises issue about 'who owns' scholarly journals.

Do you know what is meant by the term 'transformative agreement' or how 'Read and Publish' deals are structured? Today we explain the concepts behind these increasingly important approaches.

Curtin University researchers will help create a new international data trust to improve the measurement and analysis of open-access (OA) books.

A new study found that Registered Reports are only about 50% as likely as standard, non-RR research to confirm their hypothesis.

Nature asked readers what it should focus on in the next decade. Here is what the respondents said.

Altmetrics have become an increasingly ubiquitous part of scholarly communication, although the value they indicate is contested. A recent study examined the relationship of peer review, altmetrics, and bibliometric analyses with societal and academic impact. Drawing on evidence from REF2014 submissions, it argues altmetrics may provide evidence for wider non-academic debates, but correlate poorly with peer review assessments of societal impact.

Scientific publishers as we know them today remain a threatened species. They will have to do more to prove their added value to science and society. Unless they do so, they may not deserve to survive.

Science is messy, and the results of research rarely conform fully to plan or expectation. ‘Clean’ narratives are an artefact of inappropriate pressures and the culture they have generated.

We're updating our list of free and low-cost article access programs, including patient/caregiver access. 

Papers are getting more rigorous, according to a text-mining analysis of 1.6 million papers, but progress is slower than some researchers would like.

Up to £200,000 per society available for flagging important biomedical research outputs.

The open-access era seems to be arriving for academic research, but it looks as if big publishers will still profit.

Warnings that Sci-Hub poses a cybersecurity threat to universities have intensified. But few institutions appear to be acting on them.

In a recent letter to the White House, a group of corporate publishers and scholarly organizations implore the president to leave intact…

This essay argues that giving authors a choice between submission fees and APCs has numerous benefits.

The structural transition wrought by the internet continues to transform the journal-centric model of scholarly publishing into a researcher-centric model of scholarly communication. Success requires engagement with researcher identity, which is a struggle even for most of the largest publishing.

Let 2020 be the year in which we value those who ensure that science is self-correcting.

Letters blast rumored shift to immediate open access for taxpayer-funded studies

Leading scholars and publishers from ten countries have agreed a definition of predatory publishing that can protect scholarship. It took 12 hours of discussion, 18 questions and 3 rounds to reach.

Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. The persistence of poor methods results partly from incentives that favour them, leading to the natural selection of bad science.

A study of protein databases shows that discoverers who are second to publish still end up getting a substantial portion of the recognition.

Researchers from 180 UK universities can now benefit from a national open access deal agreed between Jisc Collections and Frontiers, the second largest fully open access publisher in the UK.

Publishers rarely make publication fee spending for hybrid journals transparent. Elsevier is a remarkable exception, as the publisher provides open and machine-readable data relative to its central invoicing with funding bodies and fee waivers at the article level.

The publisher is committed to financial sustainability. How it achieves it is an open question.