open access (OA)

Open access to academic research has never been a hotter topic. But it's still held back by myths and misunderstandings repeated by people who should know better. The good news is that open access has been successful enough to attract comment from beyond its circle of pioneers and experts. The bad news is that a disappointing number of policy-makers, journalists and academics opine in public without doing their homework. Read More »

A few months ago I reviewed Leah Price’s latest monograph for the European Review of History. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain explores nineteenth-century representations and perceptions of books and other printed objects such as newspapers and religious pamphlets. [...] Read More »

Sometimes we Open Access advocates tend to assume everybody is already on our side. You know, all our librarian and scientist colleagues out there. Surely by now they’ve seen the light. They understand the main issues and flavours of OA, can ably summarize the major arguments for OA and refute the major complaints against. Read More »

A study has shown that papers with publicly available data are more likely to be cited than papers with unavailable data. Read More »

This week, Campus Marketplace reported that Flat World Knowledge has been forced to drop its free access to textbooks. The decision was made largely because of the cost of supporting free access. In other words it was a business decision that many have or will face as part of the shift to open learning.

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We are establishing a company structure for a non-profit organisation called Open Library of Humanities (OLH). This will be an open access “megajournal” in the style of the US-run Public Library of Science [...]; which will publish thoroughly peer reviewed humanities and social science research under Open Access conditions at a financially fair rate. Read More »

The Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier, aka ORCID, was launched mid-October 2012 as a not-for-profit initiative for delivering a universal author ID service to the world research and scholarly community. Read More »