YOUR GO-TO INTELLIGENCE RESOURCE FOR THE SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

Guest Post — Why the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy Probably Won’t Work

Author: Shaun Khoo The Plan S Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) just sounds too good to be true. Anyone, whether mandated by their funder or not, can add a sentence or two to their article asserting a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) that will allow them to treat the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version of […]

Publication or Innovation? Goal displacement and lessons from the publish-or-perish culture

Author: Harry Van Dalen Drawing on a survey of academic economists in the Netherlands, Harry van Dalen¸ explores how publish or perish culture is perceived and enacted within academia. Arguing that the current arrangement of the academy along lines that promote outputs (publications) displaces both the goal of more intrinsically motivated forms of scientific innovation […]

Preprints Are Not Going to Replace Journals

Author: HASEEB IRFANULLAH At a recent meeting, a debate was held on the motion: Preprints are going to replace journals. Since 2016, the number of preprint servers has rapidly increased and now stands at more than 60. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of preprints, as a vehicle for open science, has widely been discussed, […]

Research Development: Finding Funding Opportunities and Engaging with Researchers

Author: Ex Libris blog The Annual Pivot-RP User Group Event this year included a panel discussion on some of the issues faced by research development offices. Three Research Development colleagues shared compelling insights into their experiences, roles, and best practices in identifying worthwhile funding opportunities and engaging with the research community. While the panelists represented […]

What happens when you find your open access PhD thesis for sale on Amazon?

Author: Guy Lavender, Jane Secker, Chris Morrison. Last year a number of early career academics discovered that their PhD theses, which had been deposited in institutional open access repositories, were being sold for profit via Amazon Seller pages. In this post Guy Lavender, with contributions from Jane Secker and Chris Morrison, discuss the implications of […]

Academic research should benefit society and not shareholders

Author: Silke Machold Shareholder value maximisation has been severely criticised in recent years, with a growing number of prominent business leaders recognising that companies have obligations to society as well as their shareholders. This moral responsibility is also emerging in scholarly communications. Most academic research is still published behind paywalls, but researchers and funders are […]

Guest Post — Trends, Challenges, and Needs of Research in the Global South: Learnings as Research4Life Turns 20

Author: Domiziana Francescon Access to research knowledge is essential for developing new research and for informed policy decisions. But access to knowledge is not equal around the world; researchers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are significantly disadvantaged by access challenges. This was the burning problem that Research4Life was set up to address. Every five […]

Revisiting: How to Be A Good Peer Reviewer

Author: Jasmine Wallace With the theme of Peer Review Week 2021 just announced, peer review has been front and center on our minds. This seems like a good time to revisit Jasmine Wallace’s 2019 primer on reviewer best practices for the peer review process. Aside from the content, the peer(s), whether “good” or “bad”, are […]