When the original BOAI declaration on open access was published, one of its stated aims was to ‘save money and expand the scope of dissemination at the same time’ through open access publishing. The web offered distribution costs that the authors claimed were ‘far lower’ than print publishing and so OA was seen at least … Continue reading "How the academic publishing oligopoly skews debates on the cost of publishing"

Talks about reenclosure and other threats to open.

New diseases are mirrors that reflect how a society works—and where it fails.

The terms 'open' and 'openness' are widely used across the current higher education environment particularly in the areas of repository services and scholarly communications. Open-access licensing and open-source licensing are two prevalent manifestations of open culture within higher education research environments. As theoretical ideals, open-licensing models aim at openness and academic freedom. But operating as they do within the context of global neoliberalism, to what extent are these models constructed by, sustained by, and co-opted by neoliberalism? In this paper, we interrogate the use of open-licensing within scholarly communications and within the larger societal context of neoliberalism. Through synthesis of various sources, we will examine how open access licensing models have been constrained by neoliberal or otherwise corporate agendas, how open access and open scholarship have been reframed within discourses of compliance, how open-source software models and software are co-opted by politico-economic forces, and how the language of 'openness' is widely misused in higher education and repository services circles to drive agendas that run counter to actually increasing openness. We will finish by suggesting ways to resist this trend and use open-licensing models to resist neoliberal agendas in open scholarship.

The introduction of Plan S, an initiative for open access launched by a group of primarily European national funding agencies and two foundations in late 2018, prompted discussion about how publishers will transition to full open access. Many current open access models involve article processing charge (APC) payments. Here we describe an alternative model, Subscribe to Open (S2O).

The publisher and conference organizer is ordered to pay the US government for what some report to be predatory behavior.

If you’re at all interested in open access publishing, you probably know that it has a long and complicated history. There are disagreements and differences over strategies, tactics, politics, definitions, motivations, disciplinary approaches, business models and routes to OA. Many words have been spilled over the ‘mess’ that open access has become and the fact … Continue reading "Who are these ‘open access advocates’?"

Unpaywall has a tool for estimating cost savings on Big Deals.

The scholarly publisher has announced several new licensing agreements in both Europe and the US--but some major academic groups are still without contracts and access to journals.

Carnegie Mellon University has signed an open-access deal with Elsevier -- the first of its kind for the publisher in the U.S.

Open access is often seen as a process of switching from the existing closed-subscription model of scholarly communication to an open one. But Latin America has had an open access ecosystem for scholarly publishing for over a decade, and the recent AmeliCA initiative seeks to develop cooperative scientific communication further still. These efforts, however, could yet be undermined by recent open access proposals from the cOAlition S consortium of research funders in the Global North, write Eduardo Aguado López and Arianna Becerril García (both Redalyc, AmeliCA, and Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México).

Today’s post is from Dr. Hannah McGregor __________________________________________ In “#transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics,” …

MIT recognizes that the value in published scholarship originates in the labor of authors, peer reviewers, and editors, and the institutions that support them.  The benefits to society are greatest when this scholarship is freely and immediately available to the entire world to access, read, and use; without restriction and for any lawful purpose. As […]

Recent allegations of copyright violations against a professor who shared his own work on his website spark debate about ownership and whether peer reviewers should be paid.

We are excited to announce that our most recent study has just been posted on bioRxiv. This is the largest, most comprehensive prediction of the Future of Open Access ever done.

Khoo, S. Y.-S. (2019). Article Processing Charge Hyperinflation and Price Insensitivity: An Open Access Sequel to the Serials Crisis. LIBER Quarterly, 29(1),...

Following a public outcry over their proliferation, paralleled by a media exposé together with regulatory pressures in some countries, fake journals have appeared to be cleaning up their act.