Academic Publishing

See the following -

Degrees Of Disruption

Carl Straumsheim | Inside Higher Ed | October 24, 2013

Supporters of open-access journals and massive open online courses have been quick to label their initiatives disruptive, but a recent analysis by a York University professor suggests only one of them has the potential to spark considerable change, while the other is likely to remain an alternative alongside traditional offerings. Read More »

Did Commercial Journals Use The NYT To Smear Open Access?

David Bollier | David Bollier | April 11, 2013

A story on the front page of the New York Times a few days ago cleverly smeared open access scholarly publishing as somehow responsible for the rise of low-quality, pseudo-academic conferences and OA journals. Read More »

Does Science Need 'Open Evaluation' Before 'Open Access?'

Staff Writer | Science Codex | November 14, 2012

In an editorial accompanying an ebook titled "Beyond open access: visions for open evaluation of scientific papers by post-publication peer review," Nikolaus Kriegeskorte argues that scientists, not publishers, are in the best position to develop a fair evaluation process for scientific papers. Read More »

Elsevier Clamps Down On Academics Posting Their Own Papers Online

Olivia Solon | Wired | December 17, 2013

Academic publisher Elsevier has been targeting open access websites and universities that are posting their own academic articles online with takedown notices for copyright infringement. Read More »

Elsevier Costs Too Much

Polly Thistlethwaite | Miss Informed | May 13, 2012

When journals evolved from exclusive print formats into some variety of electronic hybrid, librarians valued the extra service their formats offered, and we justified paying more for them... Read More »

Elsevier Is Taking Down Papers From Academia.edu

Mike Taylor | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week (SV-POW) | December 6, 2013

Lots of researchers post PDFs of their own papers on their own web-sites. It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper. Preventing people from making their own work available would be insane, and the publisher that did it would be committing a PR gaffe of huge proportions. Read More »

Elsevier Launches Open Access Journal That Will Publish Sound Research Across All Disciplines

Press Release | Elsevier | January 8, 2015

High-tech publishing platform to be developed in cooperation with researchers, offering a new publishing option tailored to their needs...

Read More »

Elsevier Still Charging For Open Access Copies, Two Years After It Was Told Of The Problem

Glyn Moody | Techdirt | March 21, 2014

For some reason, Elsevier seems to take delight in being hated by the academic world. Its support for the awful Research Works Act back in 2012 led to a massive boycott of the company by researchers. More recently, it has cracked down on academics posting PDFs of their own research. Now Peter Murray-Rust, one of the leading campaigners for open access, has caught Elsevier at it again. [...] Read More »

Episciences Project To Create arXiv Open Access Journals

Fabian Scherschel and Stefan Krempl | The H (h-online) | January 22, 2013

A group of mathematicians is launching a series of free-of-charge open access journals containing articles from Cornell University's arXiv server, thereby posing increasing competition for academic publishers. Read More »

Europe Joins UK Open-access Bid

Richard Van Noorden | Nature | July 17, 2012

Being the first to try something new is nerve-wracking — so it is always a relief to see someone else follow your lead. When the UK government announced on 16 July that it would require much of the country’s taxpayer-funded research to be open-access from April 2013, it was not immediately clear whether the move would set a trend or prove to be an isolated gamble... Read More »

European Commission Report Says Open Access At 'Tipping Point'

Glyn Moody | Techdirt | August 26, 2013

Techdirt has been reporting for some time on the growing number of moves towards making academic work freely available to the public [...]. But what about the bigger picture? How is open access doing overall? The European Commission has just published a new report trying to answer these questions... Read More »

For Disruption, MOOCs Beat Open-Access Journals, Scholar Says

Megan O'Neill | The Chronicle of Higher Education | October 23, 2013

MOOCs are more disruptive to higher education than open-access megajournals are, in part because of structural protections in the scholarly-publishing world and because some policy makers are pushing massive open online courses as a means to increase productivity, a professor argues in a new article on open-access alternatives in higher education. Read More »

Four Ways Open Access Enhances Academic Freedom

Curt Rice | The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) | April 30, 2013

Are politicians stealing our academic freedom? Is their fetish with open access publishing leading to a “pay to say” system for the rich? Will the trendy goal of making publicly financed research freely available skew the world of scholarship even more in the direction of the natural sciences? I don’t think so. But it took me a while to get there. Read More »

Free Access to British Scientific Research within Two Years

Ian Sample | The Guardian | July 15, 2012

The government is to unveil controversial plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014, in the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since the invention of the internet. Read More »

Freeing The Prisoners Of NASA

Michael Hiltzik | Los Angeles Times | October 7, 2013

Like the late Swartz, who campaigned for free public access to government publications and academic papers, UC Berkeley biologist Eisen is one of the genuine pioneers of open-access academic publishing. That's the notion that scientific papers should be made available free to researchers and the community at large, rather than hidden behind the expensive paywalls of profitable scientific journals. Read More »