Folks — important news on Research Councils UK’s new draft open access policy. A while back I wrote to RCUK asking when the deadline for submissions is, and I did eventually hear back from Jane Wakefield, Press and Communications Manager. The deadline is Tuesday 10th April — not today, as I’d originally thought thanks to a game of Chinese whispers.
The story so far … Nature Precedings is, or was, a preprint server, somewhat in the spirit of an arXiv for biology. It describes, or described, itself as “a permanent, citable archive for pre-publication research and preliminary findings”. This is a very useful thing.
Tonight, I sent my submission to Research Councils UK in response to their call for comments on the recently issued docment RCUK Proposed Policy on Access to Research Outputs . I am now posting my comments publicly.
Just a quick note that I’m the interview subject in the P.S.I.O.N podcast this week. P.S.I.O.N is the Paediatric Surgery International Online Network — an area far outside my expertise, but of course what we talked about was open access rather than paediatric surgery.
A few weeks ago, I noted that the new journal Biology Open , which had just published its very first issue, had made the unfortunate choice to use the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.
My new piece is now up the LSE Impact Blog — in which I recognise that it’s a mistake to think of Elsevier and other for-profit barrier-based publishers as evil. The money quote: For the rest, read the article: Visibility is currency in academia but it is scarcity in publishing. The push for open access shows that academic publishers can’t serve two masters. By the way, if you read it, do leave a comment;
Well, I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog trying to determine what the terms are for Elsevier’s elective open-access articles — what they term “Sponsored Articles“.
When my youngest brother was about eight years old, he quipped, “French fries: they may be high in fat, they may be high in cholesterol, but doggone it, they’re salty .” I often think about that in reference to barrier-based academic publishing. It doesn’t serve authors, it doesn’t serve readers, it doesn’t serve academic libraries, but doggone it, at least it costs vastly more than it should.
I have discovered a new nugget of information in my ongoing quest (part 1, part 2, part 3) to discover what the licence terms are for author-pays Gold Open Access articles in Elsevier journals. You will recall from way back in part 1 that Elsevier’s own “Sponsored Articles” page doesn’t include that information. A while after I posted that, they added a link to this page.