EGU Blogs

Publishing

Continuing the battle for open access that’s good for science, not publishers’ profits

August 20, 2014

Two developments since the last post regarding open access things for anyone interested!

First, is a little interview I had with the Open Access Button folk about er, open access: http://blog.openaccessbutton.org/2014/08/19/every-time-you-hit-a-paywall-thats-a-publisher-announcing-that-their-role-is-to-prohibit-the-progress-of-science-as-much-as-possible/

Second, is that our open letter to the AAAS has spawned a second one addressed to the Society for Neuroscience, led by Erin McKiernan: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TwsCrAvnpTx3ggF_QXD1i826ZbsOXNo4CNy2GKsHWWw/edit

It’s not too late to sign either (leave a comment on The Winnower for our original one), and we’ll be using these as the basis to address similar letters to other publishers regarding some of their more dodgy open access policies. Glad to see the community getting behind all this!

 

Swing and a miss by the AAAS for open access

August 15, 2014

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest scientific organisation, recently announced their latest journal, the fully open access ‘Science Advances‘. While superficially this seems like a good move for them, digging into the details reveals many inherent flaws with the journal, that at worst portray the AAAS as a money-grabbing organisation and enemies to the real progress of science, and at best naive about the current state of scholarly publishing and the direction that the open access movement is pushing it in.

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Social Media and the Seven Twitter Accounts

May 12, 2014

“Postpublication peer review on social media is like the mosh pit at a punk rock conference. It’s fast, uncoordinated, a lot less subtle, more in your face, and involves a few more risks.’

Peer review is the cornerstone of scientific legitimacy – it is the process where research is analysed by your professional peers. Traditionally, this has been conducted before the publication of an article. However, with the advent of the digital age of communications, particularly with regards to social media and the advent of ‘Web 2.0’, things are beginning to change. We now have systems in place where not just experts, but anyone, can comment on and evaluate research at many stages of the research publication process.

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Every time you publish behind a paywall, a kitten dies.

April 23, 2014

“Every day, people are denied access to something they have a right to.”

That’s the opening line from a new appeal from students Joe McArthur and David Carroll. Open Access describes a form of publication of research where articles are made instantly available for free, and with unlimited reusability rights, as long as the source is attributed. There are many pseudo-open access ‘definitions’ out there from publishers to obfuscate its use, but this is the only real, least restrictive one.

There has been a global open access movement over the last 10-15 years, which has accelerated so rapidly in the last year or two that many research funders and institutions, as well as government bodies, have developed open access policies. However, despite this progress, large commercial publishers like Wiley, Taylor and Francis, and Elsevier are still the most profitable industry in the world (with margins even higher than Apple), the majority of their profits coming from obscene charges for pdfs and library subscriptions for research articles and journals.

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