Key points Post-publication peer review (PPPR) has not achieved its promise and potential. Few articles receive PPPR – even those in high-profile journals. PPPR is difficult to find and needs to be linked to the original article. Academics require recognition if they are to contribute their time to PPPR. Improving PPPR would improve the scholarly...Read More
Part 5: A perspective on Open Access in Germany I am very pleased to introduce the fifth article in this series of snapshots of the progress towards open access around the globe. Authors Norbert Lossau, Birgit Schmidt and Margo Bargheer from the University of Goettingen have written a definitive summary of progress towards open access...Read More
Scholarly communication is at a cross road of new technologies and publishing models. The analysis of almost two decades of use of preprints and repositories in the HEP community provides unique evidence to inform the Open Access debate, through four main findings:1.Articles submitted to an Open Access subject repository, arXiv, receive 5 times more citations...Read More
June 30, 2016: The UC Pay-It-Forward Project has concluded and the final report is now available. The project’s bibliography is also available. Data files are available from the UC Dash data repository. The previous version of the final report is here July 22, 2016: The UC Pay-It-Forward Model Calculation Tool (MCT) is an excel-based for...Read More
The Scholarly Kitchen chefs recently took time to reflect on OSI2016. What were their overall perceptions? What was accomplished? Who or what was missing? Writes Alison Mudditt, “We, like pretty much all of the delegates, approached this meeting with some degree of trepidation and uncertainly about goals and process, but ended up pleasantly surprised. As...Read More
There are more than 34,000 scientific, medical and technical peer-reviewed scholarly journals in the world. They publish nearly 2.5 million articles a year — about an article every 13 seconds. In a field of more than seven million researchers, how is anyone supposed to stay up-to-date? And for publishers, how do they know which manuscripts will capture readers’...Read More
What if more is bad? In 1963, the physicist and historian of science Derek de Solla Price looked at growth trends in the research enterprise and saw the threat of“scientific doomsday”. The number of scientists and publications had been growing exponentially for 250 years, and Price realized that the trend was unsustainable. Within a couple...Read More
It was always an ambitious project – trying to gather 250 high level delegates from all aspects of the scholarly communication process with the goal of better communication and idea sharing between sectors of the ecosystem. The first meeting of the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) happened in Fairfax, Virginia last week. Kudos to the National Science Communication...Read More
PLOS is developing a new submission system to enhance the publishing experience for our community of editors, authors and reviewers. Why are we doing this? The linear, step-by-step process of creating, submitting and reviewing a manuscript simply does not satisfy the needs of scientists today. Large-scale solutions to the current challenges of scientific publishing are...Read More
There is increasing support in the scholarly communications community for “flipping” the standard journal publishing model from subscription-based to “gold” open access, which is to say a system supported by pre-publication fees (article processing charges or APCs), rather than post-publication fees (subscriptions), and in which there is free (unpaid) access to the published articles.[1] The...Read More
