Jarosław Stolarski drew my attention to an article on the Nature News blog by Jeffrey Beall: Predatory publishers are corrupting open access . I’d not seen that specific article, but the issue of “predatory open access publishers” is well known — in fact, Beall himself maintains an excellent list of such publishers and a helpful set of criteria for recognising them.
Gah, so much interesting stuff going on and I simply have No. Time. To. Blog. But I’m making an exception for PeerJ, a new OA journal that is coming online later this year.
A couple of weeks ago we tried to work out what it costs the global academic community when you publish a paper behind an Elsevier paywall instead of making it open access. The tentative conclusion was that it’s somewhere between £3112 and £6224 (or about $4846-9692), which is about 3.6-7.2 times the cost of publishing in PLoS ONE.
Incredible. We knew the tide was turning, but who saw it turning this swiftly? The full story is on the Guardian web-site. Update (an hour later) More information, and useful links to exactly what the Government said, on the Nature News blog.
More of my thoughts on the Finch Report; you may wish to read part 1 first. As before I will be quoting from the executive summary (11 pages) rather than the full report (140 pages). Changing culture Section 4 ( What needs to be done , on page 7) begins as follows: This is a crucial point.
I got an interesting email a couple of days ago from Robin Wilson: It’s an important question. Before I try to answer it, let me make it clear that I have no qualifications whatsoever to comment on this subject. I am an extremely junior researcher — not even a postdoc, I have an honorary position. I have never been an editor of any journal, nor on any publication committee.
I sent this letter to Wiley today, in response to their announcement of elective open access being available in 81% of their journals.
A couple of news items from the last few days show encouraging signs that Wiley, unlike certain other academic publishers, is taking steps to move in an open-access direction. First, there was the announcement four days ago that they have created a new role within the company specifically to lead their open access efforts. The lucky recipient is Rachel Burley, whose previous job title was Publisher” and who is now Director of Open Access.
As you’ll know from all the recent AMNH basement (and YPM gallery) photos, Matt and I spent last week in New York (with a day-trip to New Haven). The week immediately before that, I spent in Boston with Index Data, my day-job employers. Both weeks were fantastic — lots of fun and very productive.
Just a link this time. Richard Smith was the editor of the British Medical Journal until 2004, and at one point he was chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group. He is currently director of the United Health Group’s chronic disease initiative, and an unpaid professor at both Warwick University and Imperial College London. He’s a pretty big hitter by any standards. Does he have the access to research that he needs?