In the decades after the Second World War, learned society publishers struggled to cope with the expanding output of scientific research and the increased invol...

As I’ve written before, Learned Societies are one of the biggest barriers to open access. They derive revenue from publishing that they then use to pay for disciplinary goods (scholarships, prizes, public engagement etc.) Fear of new economic models for scholarly communications sometimes, although not always, drives them away from open access.

This is the third in a series of posts about each of the teams that will be attending SCI 2016, and their projects. This one was submitted by Meredith Goldsmith. What are the goals of your working …

The math is there for a new publishing model, but the will and the organizational efforts are lagging badly, especially in the leadership of ASA.

Show me the data!

Today the Renaissance Society of America announced that ProQuest has canceled the EEBO subscription for RSA members, effective October 31. Here is the full text of the email: Dear RSA members, The …

Martin Paul Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing, Birkbeck, University of London.

ACM losing members due to paywall? Maybe "journal as membership perq" isn't all it's cracked up to be.

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.

Caren Milloy looks at some of the approaches publishers are taking to experiment with open-access monographs

Dr. Martin Eve, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln, recently proposed an open access archive for the humanities and social sciences on the PLOS model. LJ caught up with him to hear about his plans.