Taylor & Francis, a major academic publisher, is facing controversy over their censorship of a series of papers on academic publishing that appeared in the journal Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation. A June 5 article by Paul Jump on the Times Higher Education site details the story.

Editorial board of journal could quit after debate on publishing suffers delay

There is a tendency in anthropology—and in the humanities generally—to suggest that open access is a problem of the sciences and engineering, and that we are somehow victims of this juggernaut on the other side of our campuses. Aside from being a form of ressentiment, this claim fails to recognize that the financial problem is the same across the disciplines—the larger humanities disciplines (history, literature) are going to have more power than the smaller ones (classics, women’s studies)—and the same is true in the sciences. Making common cause with folks in the sciences and engineering is far more effective for everyone than manning some culture-war barricade that is irrelevant to the larger dynamics of the economy of publishing, research funding, and university revenues generally.

Presentation on how DOAJ is striving to increase the transparency and credibility of open access publishing throughout research communities. Presentation at th…

In the scramble to gain market share in cyberspace, something is getting lost: the public interest. Libraries and laboratories—crucial nodes of the World Wide Web—are buckling under economic pressure, and the information they diffuse is being diverted away from the public sphere, where it can do most good. Not that information comes free or “wants to be free,” as Internet enthusiasts proclaimed twenty years ago. It comes filtered through expensive technologies and financed by powerful corporations.

How a reporter's entirely fake study got accepted by eight terrible journals

I recently completed a one year appointment with the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries as Visiting Program Officer for Scholarly Communications. This was a wonderful opportunity to net…

On the sociological difficulties of transitioning journals to OA: apathy, cluelessness.

Library directors at liberal arts colleges see an opportunity for a new open access publisher, even though most faculty members say they are satisfied with the current state of academic publishing.

Scholars are increasingly expected to consider the wider public in their teaching and research activities, but with little to negative promotion incentive. In fact, finds Christopher Meyers, much o…

So I’m pleased to report that an article I wrote, “A Preliminary Methodology, and a Cautionary Tale, for Determining How Students Seek Research Help Online,” has been published in…

Author funds.

One morning I opened my email to find that I had become editor-in-chief of an academic journal. Well, ‘chief editor’ to be [...]