Tag Archives: scientific publishing

Free and open access to all scientific publications at University of California

The Academic Senate of the University of California passed an Open Access Policy on July 24, 2013, ensuring that future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge. The policy covers more than 8,000 UC faculty and as many as 40,000 publications a year. By granting a license to the University of California prior to any contractual arrangement with publishers, faculty members can now make their research widely and publicly available, re-use it for various purposes, or modify it for future research publications. Faculty on three campuses (UCLA, UCI and UCSF) will begin depositing articles in eScholarship on November 1, 2013. Progress on deposit implementation will be reviewed during the following year. Deposit of articles by faculty on the remaining campuses is expected to begin on November 1, 2014.

The Empire Strikes Back

Publishers may soon compete with libraries. The business case for enticing users away from library-managed portals is simple, compelling, and growing. As funding agencies and universities enact Open Access (OA) mandates and publishers transition their journals from the site-license model to the Gold OA model, libraries will cease to be the spigots through which money streams from universities to publishers. In the Gold-OA world, the publishers' core business is developing relationships with scholars, not librarians. For publishers, it makes perfect sense to cater to scholars both as authors and readers. (...) Publishers, indexing services, journal aggregators, startups, some nonprofit organizations, and library-system vendors all have expertise to produce compelling post-OA services. However, publishers only need to protect their Gold OA income, and any new revenue streams are just icing on the cake. All others need a reasonable expectation of new revenue to develop new services. This sets the stage for a significant consolidation of the scholarly-communication industry into the hands of publishers.
SciTechSociety.

Edinburgh: Publishing Conference 2 – Live stream

See also this summary.
The publishing industry is now changing faster than ever before due to internet services, digital publishing, free blogging platforms and open access journals. How will this continue to evolve in the future? Will the erosion of traditional publishing methods continue and how will publishing companies adapt? What are the growing entrepreneurial opportunities in this dynamic industry? Join us for a day of publishing talks, discussion and networking.

Video: The importance of publishing negative studies

Keith Flaherty is Director of Developmental Therapeutics at the Massachusetts Cancer Center. In his talk he addressed the benefits of publishing negative results. He focused his talk on therapies for cancer, in particular melanoma, since that’s the area he is most familiar with. (…) In closing, he emphasized that publishing negative data in preclinical and clinical studies would save time and money, and could open up new pathways of investigation.
See the video here.

SOBA: The Reproducibility Crisis

ScienceOnline Bay Area (SOBA) is a monthly series to encourage the discussion of how science is carried out and communicated online.
Reproducibility, the ability to replicate or reproduce experimental results, is one of the major tenets of the scientific method. (…) So why do so many preclinical publications contain research that can’t be reproduced? Join our panel of distinguished guests from academia, publishing, and the startup community to hear about the latest approaches to dealing with this critically important issue. (…) *Presentations and discussion livestreamed.
Registration is open, admission is free. Date: May 6, 2013Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pm Location: swissnex San Francisco, 730 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA 94111

Open Science: Questions on the networked society

The Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin and the DRadio Wissen invite to discuss the topic of open science: advantages and potential transformations within scientific communication and scientific publishing.
Open Science. Moderne Kommunikationsmittel eröffnen neue Wege des Publizierens und Kooperierens. Verändert sich dadurch Wissenschaft? Wie sehen diese Wandlungsprozesse aus und was daran ist wirklich neu?
In German.

Imminent Changes In The Publication Process In Sciences.

 A free storage service like the arXiv should be enough for disseminating research. While this particular storage has turned elitist over time, new ones like figshare have many added features to make the work of the scientific community easier. Figshare makes good use of cloud based storage and it allows all forms of research to be published. A peer review by the whole scientific community is always better than that done by a chosen few. The journals can still survive ‘scavenging’ for their favoured research works that are already published in Open Sciencedata-repositories. They can choose works from such repositories and re-publish them if they wish to, giving due credit. However, dissemination of research in a place like figshare should be enough for the researcher in terms of publication and credit. A progressive involvement of the community of scientists, as a whole, is required for providing these new systems the much needed impetus.

Could the reddit model replace the current scientific publication system?

The reddit model works as follows. Users who sign up on reddit are given four abilities:
  1. submit links
  2. comment on links and other comments
  3. upvote links and comments they think are constructive, and
  4. downvote links and comments they think are unconstructive.
Links and comments that receive a higher score (score = upvotes minus downvotes) are ranked higher in the queue when people view the list of links on reddit. Typically high-scoring links are only ranked high for 24 hours after they are posted, after which time they rapidly decline in the queue.

Are Some Current Open Access Mandates Backfiring on the Intended Beneficiaries?

The OA bargain is becoming a bit more fraught as more people get involved and as founding concepts are stress-tested by practical matters. If the OA movement remains dogmatic about the details, and is not willing to compromise or improve on ideas established years ago and never thoroughly validated on a large scale, it run some serious risks of losing support in the wider world.
Times Higher Education.

Live Chat: Should scientific articles be free?

Read the archived chat between Heather Joseph, who advocates for open access as the executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, and Frederick Dylla, who has  expressed concerns about the implementation of open access as executive director of the American Institute of Physics.
Science Magazine.

Interview with PeerJ Editor Fabiana Kubke

This is the second in our Series of Interviews with PeerJ Editors, giving them a voice to express their thoughts about academic publishing, open access and PeerJ. This time around we spoke to Fabiana Kubke who is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Medical Sciences (Department of Anatomy with Radiology) and a member of the Centre for Brain Research at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Changing Nature

IN THE world of academic publishing, it is hard to get more traditional than Nature. The British scholarly weekly has been reporting scientific breakthroughs since 1869. It hews to the time-honoured, and time-consuming, process of peer review, in which papers’ worth is judged by anonymous experts prior to publication. Fewer than one in ten submissions make the cut. Successful ones are printed on dead trees and dispatched by mail to subscribers, who pay for the privilege of reading about the latest important findings. Their authors win kudos just for getting their paper in.
The Economist (Babbage).

Scientific publishing: Changing “Nature”

For all the differences, the fates of Nature and Frontiers have become intertwined. On February 27th Nature Publishing Group (NPG), which owns Nature and 81 other scholarly journals, announced that it has bought a controlling stake in Frontiers for an undisclosed sum. Besides 30 titles in 14 scientific fields the Swiss upstart brings a social-networking platform—a LinkedIn for boffins, if you like—to share not just research, but news, job offers, information about conferences and events. It currently boasts around 80,000 members.
The Economist. See also the article on Frontiers’ website.