This study explores the extent to which research published in Latin America—where the vast majority of which is made freely available to the public—has an impact and reach beyond the academic commu...

Frontiers journals have become a conspicuous presence in academic publishing since they started in 2007  with the advent of Frontiers i...

Elsevier has released a new scholarly article sharing policy which is definitely more disappointing than really any cause for cheer.

Editors allege publisher focused on profit, not quality

Due to differences in citation practices amongst scientific disciplines, existing research on a possible open access citation advantage remains limited. A new study seeks to overcome these limitati…

The low level of research funding for the social sciences in the US is likely to have a direct and negative effect on researchers’ ability to pay the article processing charges associated wit…

Summary of study conducted between March and July, 2014 by placing a series of single-question pop-up surveys on the SciELO Brazil, Chile, and Mexico open access journal portals. 17,575 responses were collected with a 49% response rate. Key findings: ~25% of use was found to be from non-academic users, and ~50% from students. This poster presents a summary of some of the findings of this study.  Poster presented at the ARCS Conference: Advancing Research Communication & Scholarship, Philadelphia, April 26-28, 2015.  JPA did the research; SP designed the poster.

If you've used the records website, you know it's a pain. At last week's DC Legal Hackers Meetup, Carl Malamud laid out his plans for changing that.

For more than three-and-a-half centuries, the scholarly infrastructure—composed of commercial publishers, learned societies, libraries, and the scholars themselves—has provided the foundation functions of certification, registration, access, preservation, and reward. However, over the last two decades, the stability of this infrastructure has been disrupted by profound changes in the technological, economic, cultural, and political climate. We examine the actions of scholars in response to this infrastructure instability through the lens of Hirschman’s “exit, voice, and loyalty” framework. We describe the motivations and actions by scholars, especially those with tenure, who have chosen exit from the mainstream scholarly communication infrastructure to a proliferation of newly available alternative infrastructures. However, this option is not practical for all scholars due to the “enforced loyalty” imposed by reward systems based on metrics that are intricately tied to the traditional infrastructure. We examine the alternative of voice exercised by these scholars, combined with the threat of exit that has changed policies that are the source of dissatisfaction with the system.

Dominant logic often isolates higher learning researchfrom the teachers who need to apply it. There are pay walls that keep average everyday teachers like me from nosing around in matters reserved for ivory towers. It sort of ticks me off sometimes. Why can't ivory tower people “adopt” classroom practitioners (like me and many others) who […]

Predatory open access journals seem to be a hot topic these days. In fact, there seems to be kind of a moral panic surrounding them. I would like to counter the admittedly shocking and scary stories around that moral panic by pointing out that perhaps we shouldn't be worrying so much about a fairly small number of admittedly bad actors and that we should be more concerned with the larger issues around the limitations of peer review and how scientific error and fraud leak through that system.

More librarians walking the OA talk.

As expected, agency will link abstracts to papers on journals' websites

The Open Access Journal Starter Kit details the steps you'll need to take to get an OA journal off the ground, from cultivating a readership and attracting submissions to building a pool of reviewers during the first year of publication.

UK context. Section 3 could be assigned as intro to scholarly rep in the humanities.

Why hybrid journals suck.