There has been some outrage at the announcement that Nature is following through with their 2004 declaration of charging ~10k ($/€) in article processing charges (APCs). However, not only have these charges been 16 years in the making but the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posts Tagged open access
Last week, there was a lot of outrage at the announcement of Nature’s new pricing options for their open access articles. People took to twitter to voice their, ahem, concern. Some examples: There are many more that all express their […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
NIH, 1961: Journals are slow and cumbersome, why don’t we experiment with circulating preprints among peers to improve on the way we do science (Information Exchange Groups)? Publishers, 1967: You have got to be kidding. Nobody cares about improving science, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
By now, it is public knowledge that subscription prices for scholarly journals have been rising beyond inflation for decades (i.e., the serials crisis): A superficially very similar graph was recently published for APC price increases: When not paying too much […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Over the last ten years, scientific funding agencies across the globe have implemented policies which force their grant recipients to behave in a compliant way. For instance, the NIH OA policy mandates that research articles describing research they funded must […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Notwithstanding the barrage of criticisms and warnings from every corner of the scholarly community, various initiatives, mainly in the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, France and the UK, continue their efforts for a smooth transition from subscriptions to open access without any […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Current estimates for the cost of subscription articles converge around US$5,000 per article. This number is reached by dividing the estimated US$10b spent on subscriptions annually world-wide by the two million published articles every year. Current initiatives aiming for a […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
After almost 25 years since Stevan Harnad’s “subversive proposal“, now, finally, scholars and the public have a range of avenues at their disposal to access nearly every scholarly article. Public access, while not the default, has finally arrived. Granted, while […] ↓ 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…
In which a Science editorial demonstrates the ineffectiveness of OA activism
In: science politicsIn her recent editorial on Sci-Hub (an initiative I support), editor-in-chief of Science Magazine Marcia McNutt wrote: For those who have such avenues but choose to pirate a paper instead, ask yourself whether it is worth risking the viability of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…