Danny Kingsley, Head of Scholarly Communication at University of Cambridge recaps an annual academically related, publisher oriented conference held in central London early this year.  The take presents an interesting kaleidoscope of issues, comments and conversations charting various aspects of scholarly publication through a 2-day conference that develops important perspectives beyond the faculty lounge and...Read More

Scientist and former president of the American Society for Cell Biology,  Professor Ron Vale, tracks strategic efforts to move scholarly publishing forward for cell biologists and readers of the society’s monthly newsletter.  He advocates for the further development of preprints in biology.   Source: On Preprints, and Beer and Tacos – ASCBRead More

The Association of Research Libraries recently published a white paper by Dr. David Shulenberger assessing the potential impact of a systemwide flip to APCs. Did Shulenberger get it right? Some think not. Source: APCs and Competition: What Shulenberger Got Wrong | The Scholarly KitchenRead More

This report, which has been submitted for publication to UNESCO, presents a practical framework for understanding the real world benefits of open access publishing. Jean-Gabriel Bankier and Promita Chatterji group these benefits into three categories: benefits for authors, for readers, and for institutions. Within this framework they present 100 particular accounts of benefits of open...Read More

In this commentary Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman, who are both philosophers at the University of North Texas, lament the insularity of graduate study in philosophy. Individuals who earn a doctorate in philosophy are trained exclusively for the academy, despite the fact that well-framed questions are useful in any context. Briggle and Frodeman argue that...Read More

Science is in big trouble. Or so we’re told. In the past several years, many scientists have become afflicted with a serious case of doubt — doubt in the very institution of science. As reporters covering medicine, psychology, climate change, and other areas of research, we wanted to understand this epidemic of doubt. So we...Read More

A major goal of the Scholarly Commons program is to determine whether a set of high level principles that define the abstract entity known as the Scholarly Commons can be expressed in a useful way.   This exercise involves synthesis of activities from the Madrid Workshop, Re-imaginging Research Communications, and follow on activities at FORCE2016 and...Read More

During August the Research Councils UK on behalf of the UK Open Research Data Forum released a draft Concordat on Open Research Data for which they have sought feedback. The Universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford prepared a joint response which was sent to the RCUK on 28 September 2015. The response is reproduced...Read More

Éric Archambault, Grégoire Côté, Brooke Struck and Matthieu Voorons Science-Metrix and 1science, 1335 Mont-Royal E., Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H2J 1Y6 This note presents data from the 1science oaIndx on the average of relative citations (ARC) for 3.3 million papers published from 2007 to 2009 and indexed in the Web of Science (WoS). These data show...Read More

The Federal Trade Commission has charged the publisher of hundreds of purported online academic journals with deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars. The FTC’s complaint alleges that OMICS Group, Inc., along with two affiliated companies and their president and director,...Read More