In late 2016, Martin Eve, Stuart Lawson and Jon Tennant referred Elsevier/RELX to the Competition and Markets Authority. Inspired by this, I thought I would try referring a complaint to the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about some blatant fibbing I saw Elsevier engage-in with their marketing spiel at a recent conference.
In 2017, we have a vast toolbox of informative methods to help us analyse large volumes of text. Sentiment analysis, topic modelling, and named entity recognition are to name but a few of these exciting approaches. Computational power and storage capacity are not the limiting factors on what we could do with the 100 million or so journal articles that comprise the ever-growing research literature so far.
This is a quick post to announce what I’ll be doing next after my postdoc at the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge. From June 2017 onwards, I’m delighted to say I’ll be the new Open Access Grants Manager for Arcadia Fund. About Arcadia Fund If you haven’t heard of it before here’s what you need to know: Arcadia is a charitable fund, set up by Peter Baldwin and Lisbet Rausing in 2002.
To: francesca.martin@oup.com, sally.iannacci@oup.com, Jennifer.Boyd@oup.com, rebecca.seger@oup.com, graham.grant@oup.com, chris.holmes@oup.com, andrea.gilbey@oup.com From: Ross Mounce <rcm61@cam.ac.uk> Subject: An Open Letter to Oxford University Press on Publishing Cc: R.VanNoorden@nature.com, Q.Schiermeier@nature.com, Ben.Taplin@jisc.ac.uk, Anna.Vernon@jisc.ac.uk,
I am highly curious as to why Elsevier do not seem to be responding to emails at the moment: Four days ago, continuing an existing thread on the public GOAL mailing list, I wrote to Dr Alicia Wise (Director of Access and Policy at Elsevier), about how Elsevier’s paywall systems are wrongly defrauding readers across the world by charging them to access content that has been paid-for to be open access.
Just a quick post tonight. Yet another paywalled open access article. It’s becoming a daily occurrence!
The TL;DR summary: In February 2017, when Elsevier were accused of selling one paid-for hybrid open access article, at first they sowed doubt about it, then three days later admitted it to be true. In their admission they state that it is the only wrongly paywalled open access article “affected” at their websites.
TL;DR Elsevier are selling access to open access articles again I saw this humorous tweet today: This tweet references the fact that Elsevier have been caught selling access to paid-for “open access” articles in 2014, 2015, and 2016.
Yesterday I published a blog post calling for ongoing monitoring of ‘hybrid’ open access articles and academic publisher services in general. Today I want to share with you some highlights from my brief checks on 2 years worth of Wellcome Trust ‘open access’ article processing charge (APC) supported published research outputs.
In a recent series of posts I’ve become fascinated with how unnecessarily fragile the scholarly communications system seems to be in 2017: Oxford University Press have failed to preserve access to the scholarly record (23-01-2017) Documenting the many failures across OUP journals (24-01-2017) Comparing OUP to other publishers (25-01-2107) As a reminder, academics literally invented the internet, I think we can and should be doing