News blog

New SpringerOpen Journal: Health & Justice

Health & Justice will be open to submissions from public health, criminology and criminal justice, medical science, psychology and clinical sciences, sociology, neuroscience, biology, anthropology and the social sciences, and cover a broad array of research types. It will publish original research, research notes (promising issues that are smaller in scope), commentaries, and translational notes (possible ways of introducing innovations in the justice system).

RCUK Open Access Policy – When to go Green and When to go Gold

RCUK Open Access Policy – When to go Green and When to go Gold

Mark Thorley, NERC (Natural Environment Research Council), Head of Science Information and Chair RCUK Research Outputs Network on the Research Councils UK policies concerning open access:

Our policy requires that peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access.(…) So what does this mean for authors?  If the journal they want to publish in only offers policy compliance through a Gold route, they must use that journal’s Gold option. (…) if a journal offers neither a Green nor a Gold compliant route, it is not eligible to take RCUK funded work, and the author must use a different, compliant, journal. (…) The Research Councils are not anti-Green and support a dual approach for delivering OA.  However, we do have a strong preference for Gold, and I will explain why in my next blog post. 

Cameron Neylon gives lecture at Zijzaal Refter Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Cameron Neylon gives lecture at Zijzaal Refter Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands

During the Open Access Week 2012 Cameron Neylon, Advocacy Director at the PLOS (Public Library of Science) will talk about the revolution in science: Zijzaal Refter Radboud University Nijmegen, Tuesday, Oct. 23rd 2012. Admisson free, subscription required.

Interview with Stevan Harnad on the future of Open Access strategies

Interview with Stevan Harnad on the future of Open Access strategies

Stevan Harnad, amongst others co-drafter of the BOAI (Budapest Open Access Initiative), gives statements on misconceptions of open access and reflects on the golden and green open access ways, also saying that a hybrid Gold Open Access would be a Trojan Horse.

Interview by Kerstin Stieg and Karlo Pavlovic in Mitteilungen der Vereinigung Österreichischer Bibliothekarinnen & Bibliothekare.

On the Open Access Days in Vienna

On the Open Access Days in Vienna

This article describes the importance of open access data from scientists for scientists referring to the RG-score at ResearchGate.

In German.

Die Tageszeitung (taz).

See also the review by Universität Wien, Universitätsbibliothek (Vienna university library) with slides  by Björn Brembs and others. Also in German.

10 years of BOAI (Budapest Open Access Initiative)

10 years of BOAI (Budapest Open Access Initiative)

BOAI sets recommendations for the next 10 years by emphasizing the role of OA repositories and the deposit of (peer reviewed) research papers and by strengthening the use of CC-BY licenses as well as a publisher’s permit of OA although it is not officially provided by the publisher. Also BOAI is against the further use of the impact factor. Further detailed recommendations towards infrastructure and advocacy were also mentioned.

A Clarification on Open Access by AIA (Archaeological Institute of America) President Elizabeth Bartman

A Clarification on Open Access by AIA (Archaeological Institute of America) President Elizabeth Bartman

In an editorial in Archaeology magazine (May/June 2012), I made a statement that I want to clarify, about the AIA’s position toward open access.  I talked about several bills that are currently working their way through Congress that concern research projects funded by federal dollars.  The bill that caught our attention recommends that researchers funded by federal grants submit reports to peer-reviewed journals and, within six months of publication, make these reports available online and for free. This is the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2012 (the complete seven page text of this bill is available here:http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-111s1373is/pdf/BILLS-111s1373is.pdf).

International Open Access Week 2012

International Open Access Week 2012

On Oct. 23rd 2012, 6pm, Berlin, Germany:

Panel Discussion on Open Science, Humboldt University Berlin.

On Oct. 24th 2012, 10-11:30 am, Republic of Macedonia: 

Open Access Week will be celebrated for the 3-rd time at the Faculty of Philology “Blaze Koneski”/Faculty of Philosophy. As always, the lecture will be open and public and live on the Ustream open access channel @ http://www.ustream.tv/channel/open-access

Fraud as one aspect of motivation for to retracting scientific papers

Fraud as one aspect of motivation for to retracting scientific papers

Carl Zimmer, The Loom-blog author,  writes in the New York Times:

Last year the journal Nature reported an alarming increase in the number of retractions of scientific papers — a tenfold rise in the previous decade, to more than 300 a year across the scientific literature. 

This article got corrected post published saying that fraud was not no.1- motivation for retracting an article but misconduct:

The earlier version also misstated the reason cited in the study for three-quarters of the retractions for which researchers could determine the cause. It was misconduct, not fraud. (Fraud or suspected fraud accounted for 41.3 percent of retractions; other forms of misconduct made up the rest.)

The New York Times.