I got back on Tuesday from OpenCon 2015 — the most astonishing conference on open scholarship. Logistically, it works very different from most conferences: students have their expenses paid, but established scholars have to pay a registration fee and cover their own expenses. That inversion of how things are usually done captures much of what’s unique about OpenCon: its focus on the next generation is laser-sharp.
Many SV-POW! readers will already be aware that the entire editorial staff of the Elsevier journal Lingua has resigned over the journal’s high price and lack of open access. As soon as they have worked out their contracts, they will leave en bloc and start a new open access journal, Glossa — which will in fact be the old journal under a new name.
Preprints are in the air! A few weeks ago, Stephen Curry had a piece about them in the Guardian (Peer review, preprints and the speed of science) and pterosaur palaeontologist Liz Martin published Preprints in science on her blog Musings of Clumsy Palaeontologist . The latter in particular has spawned a prolific and fascinating comment stream.
A quick note to say that I got an email today — the University of Bristol Staff Bulletin — announcing some extremely welcome news: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-12446 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“12446” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2015/09/17/the-university-of-bristols-new-openaccess-policy/bristol-oa/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/bristol-oa.png” orig-size=“950,298” comments-opened=“1”
Wouldn’t it be great if, after a meeting like the 2015 SVPCA, there was a published set of proceedings? A special issue of a journal, perhaps, that collected papers that emerge from the work presented there. Of course the problem with special issues, and edited volumes in general, is that they take forever to come out.
I have watched several people go through this sequence. DENIAL. PeerJ? What even is this thing? I’ll send my work to a real journal, thanks. THAWING. Huh, so-and-so published in PeerJ, it must not be that bad. GRUDGING SUBMISSION. Oh, okay, I’ll send them this one thing. I still have reservations but I want this out quickly. And I’m tired of getting rejected because some asshat thinks my paper isn’t sexy enough. AWAKENING.
You know what’s wrong with scholarly publishing? Wait, scrub that question. We’ll be here all day. Let me jump straight to the chase and tell you the specific problem with scholarly publishing that I’m thinking of. There’s nowhere to go to find all open-access papers, to download their metadata, to access it via an open API, to find out what’s new, to act as a platform for the development of new tools.
[I am using the term “megajournal” here to mean “journal that practices PLOS ONE -style peer-review for correctness only, ignoring guesses at possible impact”. It’s not a great term for this class of journals, but it seems to be becoming established as the default.] Bo-Christer Björk’s (2015) new paper in PeerJ asks the question “Have the “mega-journals” reached the limits to growth?”, and suggests that the answer may be yes.
Provoked by Mike Eisen’s post today, The inevitable failure of parasitic green open access, I want to briefly lay out the possible futures of scholarly publishing as I see them.
Somehow this seems to have slipped under the radar: National Science Foundation announces plan for comprehensive public access to research results. They put it up on 18 March, two whole months ago, so our apologies for not having said anything until now! This is the NSF’s rather belated response to the OSTP memo on Open Access, back in January 2013.