YOUR GO-TO INTELLIGENCE RESOURCE FOR THE SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

Climate Responsibilities of Scholarly Publishing

Author: HASEEB IRFANULLAH In addition to societal challenges like inequity in multiple dimensions, the world is alarmingly facing climate change, recently dubbed as global “climate emergency” and “climate crisis”. Our current knowledge on human-induced climate change, predicted future scenarios, and our plan to address the crisis are essentially based upon peer-reviewed research on climate change […]

A self-correcting fallacy – Why don’t researchers correct their own errors in the scientific record?

Author: Julia Rohrer Correcting mistakes in light of new data and updating findings to reflect this is often considered to be a key characteristic of scientific research. Commenting on the ‘Loss-of-Confidence Project’, a study into self-correction amongst psychologists, Julia M. Rohrer, suggests that in practice self-correction of published research is, infrequent, difficult to achieve and […]

Guest Post – An Early Look at the Impact of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Journals Warning List

Author: CHRISTOS PETROU At the end of 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued their first “Early Warning List of International Journals”. While it includes just 65 journals, the list disproportionately targets journals that are fully open access (OA) and attract a high volume of Chinese content in absolute or relative terms, notably IEEE Access, […]

Why Do R&D Intensive Organizations Use Preprints?

Author: Keri Mattaliano Preprints have become particularly popular over the past year and the reason for the uptick was, unsurprisingly, the Covid-19 pandemic. There are challenges when it comes to discerning the quality of non-peer reviewed information, as well as the ambiguity around copyright for commercial organizations. At the end of the day, there is […]

Covid-19 underlines the need for full open access

Author: Paul Boyle The fight against Covid-19 has illuminated the value of rapid and borderless access to research. But while most coronavirus studies were commendably made freely available to all, it remains a different matter for much of the world’s publicly funded university research. Change is possible, however. Publishers, research institutions and their funders are […]

A guide to Plan S: the open-access initiative shaking up science publishing

Author: Holly Else In 2018, an influential group of research funders announced a bold pledge: the scientists they fund should publish their peer-reviewed papers outside journal paywalls. The initiative, called Plan S, caused an instant uproar over its aim of ending journal subscription models — the means by which many scholarly publications have financed their […]

Publishing should be a big deal – for the right reasons

Author: Keyan Tomaselli Nowadays, publishing has become a treadmill. Everyone is expected to do it: professors, lecturers, university executives and even students. Journals now are expected by many authors simply to offer the equivalent of product displays, and few have the time, inclination, or are rewarded, for engaging in debate, for writing book reviews or […]

Centralizing, Optimizing and Cutting Costs

Author: Barbara Rad-El Academic libraries are currently facing shrinking budgets, while at the same time finding themselves having to support inefficient existing programs or novel costs. This conundrum, called “the third rail” of modern academia, is another one of the challenges with an especially significant impact on small and medium-sized libraries. Chronic budget constraints make […]

Publishers Care about the Version of Record, Do Researchers?

Author: LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE Control of the “Version of Record” has come to serve as one of the greatest assets of scholarly publishers. It allows them to maintain their centrality in the scholarly communication system. An important strand of the green open access movement has as its purpose to disrupt the value of the Version […]

What is “Publish or Perish?”

Author: Sofía García-Bullé Publish or perish refers to the constant pressure on academicians to conduct and publish research and studies, especially in universities where research is the hub for attracting funds. Academicians are employed and remunerated in proportion to their research. The most common measure accrediting a researcher is the number of publications. This push […]