The bottom line is that journals cost money
Open access is a utopian pipe dream, says Richard Hoyle.TimesHigherEducation.
Tag Archives: Times Higher Education
RCUK changes open-access guidance yet again
The re-revised guidance still contains the government-endorsed “decision tree” articulating the Publishers’ Association’s understanding of the policy’s open access options. However, it adds that the choice of green or gold “remains at the discretion of the researchers and their research organisations”. The Publishers Association have previously insisted that the decision tree entails that the gold route must be chosen when funding is available.Times Higher Education.
Fields medallists’ open-access track
Many researchers in those areas - such as former Royal Society president Lord Rees of Ludlow and Sir Timothy Gowers, the Fields medal-winning mathematician based at the University of Cambridge - already do most of their reading on arXiv. Yet even mathematicians and physicists still feel the need to publish their papers in standard journals, too. (…) But might it be possible at least to reduce the cost of journal publishing by taking it out of the hands of commercial publishers and using arXiv itself as the publishing platform? This is precisely what the Episciences Project aims to achieve by establishing a series of “epijournals” in maths.
Times Higher Education.
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.
RCUK open-access guidance revised
Longer embargo periods of up to 24 months for green open access will only apply when universities’ annual block grants for “gold” article fees have run out, Research Councils UK has confirmed.Times Higher Education.
Funding councils publish REF open-access proposals
The UK’s higher education funding councils will not express a preference for either green or gold open access in their submission rules for future research excellence frameworks.Paul Jump for Times Higher Education.
FASTR – Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act
This bill will give the American people greater access to the important scientific research results they’ve paid for,” Congressman Doyle said today.”Supporting greater collaboration among researchers in the sciences will accelerate scientific innovation and discovery, while giving the public a greater return on their scientific investment.See also this article on FASTR by Robin Lloyd, responsible for editing and assigning stories and managing the twitter feeds for Scientificamerican.com or this article by John Morgan, deputy news editor of TimesHigherEducation.co.uk Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project, collects major information material on FASTR here. Berkman Center provides further detailed information here.
Research Intelligence – Unbound possibilities
Research Intelligence - Unbound possibilitiesPaul Jump, senior research reporter for Times Higher Education, reports on how the non-profit, scholar-run publisher Open Book Publishers impresses with its open-access monograph list.