Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge, set online (blog post) a conversation with Springer Science+Business Media to discuss Springer’s position and explanation on SpringerImages.
See also the Springer Open statement concerning Murray-Rust’s blog entry here.
Article by Cameron Neylon.
A reasonable current lower bound for realisable added value by publication service providers is ~$1000 per paper. This is likely to drop as market pressures come to bear and existing archives and repositories seek to provide a wider range of low cost services.
Experts on Open Access are invited to reflect on e-journals. Discussion will be held in English.
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Dorotheenstraße 24, 10999 Berlin, Friday, June, 8th 2012, 2- 7 pm.
This article points out that the open access debate has to go further into opening up scientific software.
Computers need software, and some of that software will be specially written or adapted from existing code to meet the particular needs of the scientists’ work. This makes computer software a vital component of the scientific process. It also means that being able to check that code for errors is as important as being able to check the rest of the experiment’s methodology. And yet very rarely can other scientists do that, because the code employed is not made available.
The petition for open access has already reached its goal to collect 25.000 signatures by June 19th 2012.
A report for the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers (ALPSP) and The Publishers Association claims that the impact on all publishers’ revenues would be considerable. The findings of the Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project announced it had found no evidence that the self-archiving of academic papers threatened journal viability.
A list of websites on Open Science and Crowd Science including definition and principles, methods and introducing groups and individual initiatives (blogs) and projects.
A well researched article about the rise of the open access debate, including comments on iniciatives such as Open Knowledge Foundation or David Willetts.
Article on the PEER project and Neelie Kroes’ speech, see post below, claiming that 100% gold and green open access can only be achieved if universities, authors and publishers collaborate closely.
Stephen Curry on the >Big Deal< article, posted below, in confrontation with other aspects and opinions concluding that:
These are uncertain times for publishers — and academics. Change is coming, and perhaps more than any of us is bargaining for.
This article tries to give solutions to the scientific journal subscription debate.
Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, claims that open access is a must-have for Europe to remain competitive in not only knowledge-based means but also economical.
Publishers fully support expanding access to publicly funded research but only as part of a model that is financially viable.
The Guardian.
The The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has voted to adopt open access policy. All current and future scientific articles will be freely available to the public.
Visualization of the signature process concerning the US petition for open access.
Researchers of the Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Québec CANADA conclude that open access papers get twice as many citations as non-open access papers, and on top that open access raises quality.
We demonstrate that the greater citation impact of open access research is causal rather than an artifact of author bias (i.e., authors self-selectively making higher quality research open access) by showing that the citation increase is just as great when the open access is mandatory; the open access impact advantage is independent of other correlates of citation impact, and greater for higher quality research.
This video was produced by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition): http://www.arl.org/sparc
Video on USA petition for open access by FakeElsevier.
Visit www.access2research.org and sign the White House petition. We are closer than ever to making open access to taxpayer funded research a reality.
You do not need to be a US citizen to sign the petition for open access.
For our German readers:
Eine interessante Umfrage der Kieler Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften (ZWB) bestätigt diese Einschätzung jetzt. Die ZBW befragte 813 Ökonomen – und der Großteil von ihnen gab sich gleichgültig. Gerade einmal acht Prozent hatten den Boykottaufruf gegen Elsevierunterschrieben. Weitere 46 Prozent hatten nicht von der Aktion gehört, schließt aber eine Teilnahme nicht aus. 39 Prozent hatten sich bewusst dagegen entschieden, acht Prozent hatten noch nicht davon gehört und interessieren sich auch nicht weiter für das Thema.
To make it easier for EU-funded projects to make their findings public and more readily accessible, the Commission is funding, through FP7, the project ‘Open access infrastructure for research in Europe’ ( OpenAIRE). This ambitious project will provide a single access point to all the open access publications produced by FP7 projects during the course of the Seventh Framework Programme.
Essay on open access process: chronology and compared data on profit:
How profitable publishing Science can be, is illustrated by the following figures: in 2011 Elsevier asked $ 7089 for a subscription to Theoretical Computer Sciences (source: American Mathematical Society). That same year Elsevier also made a profit of £768 million on a turnover of £ 2.1 billion, a margin of 37.3%. 78% of those sales came from selling subscriptions to scientific journals. Compare this with a margin of 24% in 2011 for Apple, the highest profit ever in the history of this company. Another example: during the last 6 years, average prices for access to online content from 2 large scientific publishers have increased by an incredible 145%.
Repository Analytics tool.
CORE harvests, maintains, enriches and makes available metadata and pdf full-text content from many Open Access repositories.
The release of the new Statement of Principles for Scientific Merit Review highlights six “key elements necessary for a rigorous and transparent review system.” They include the use of expert assessment of proposals and a transparent, impartial, and confidential review process.