It’s now been 24 years since Stevan Harnad sparked the open access movement by suggesting in his “subversive proposal” in 1994 that scholars ought to just publish their scholarly articles on the internet: If every esoteric author in the world […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Below, I’ve taken the liberty to “peer-review” recent proposals to ‘flip’ subscription journals to open access The applicants have provided an interesting proposal of how to ‘flip’ the current subscription journals to an article processing charges (APC)-based ‘gold’ open access […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
There can be little doubt that the defunding of public academic institutions is a main staple of populist movements today. Whether it is Trump’s budget director directly asking if one really needs publicly funded science at all, or the planned […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Starting this year, I will stop traveling to any speaking engagements on open science (or, more generally, infrastructure reform), as long as these events do not entail a clear goal for action. I have several reasons for this decision, most […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
With the start of the new year 2017, about 60 universities and other research institutions in Germany are set to lose subscription access to one of the main STEM publishers, Elsevier. The reason being negotiations of the DEAL consortium (600 […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
A recurrent topic among faculty and librarians interested in infrastructure reform is the question of whose turn it is to make the next move. Researchers rightfully argue that they cannot submit their work exclusively to modern, open access journals because […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Stevan Harnad’s “Subversive Proposal” came of age last year. I’m now teaching students younger than Stevan’s proposal, and yet, very little has actually changed in these 21 years. On the contrary, one may even make the case that while efforts […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
tl;dr: Data from thousands of non-retracted articles indicate that experiments published in higher-ranking journals are less reliable than those reported in ‘lesser’ journals. Vox health reporter Julia Belluz has recently covered the reliability of peer-review. In her follow-up piece, she […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Over the last decade or two, there have been multiple accounts of how publishers have negotiated the impact factors of their journals with the “Institute for Scientific Information” (ISI), both before it was bought by Thomson Reuters and after. This […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
tl;dr: It is a waste to spend more than the equivalent of US$100 in tax funds on a scholarly article. Collectively, the world’s public purse currently spends the equivalent of US$~10b every year on scholarly journal publishing. Dividing that by […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
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