1. Guest post – Scientific output in the year of COVID
Author: Christos Petrou
As 2020 nears its end, a counterintuitive picture is emerging for scientific output. Rather than suffering a COVID-driven slowdown, 2020 delivered extraordinary growth for journal content. To put it simply, journals are expected to grow by about 5,00,000 papers from 2019 to 2020, as much as they grew overall in the previous six years. Contrary to previous years when fully Open Access (OA) journals outperformed hybrid and subscription journals, they performed similarly in 2020 and are expected to grow by up to 26%. This must have been welcome news both for fully-OA and subscription/hybrid publishers, although the latter may struggle to gain from the additional content given the budget crunch that many institutions are experiencing as a result of COVID.
The full entry can be read: Here.
2. Bringing together mission and money
Author: Paola Marchionni
In the era of post truth and fake news, access to primary sources of history is becoming more and more important. Making the information accessible costs lots of time and money, but there are novel ways to do it. Libraries preserve vast amounts of original papers, books and artifacts. Libraries may invest in the digitisation of their collections themselves, but this can be quite costly, or applying for external grants to make their materials openly available for all can be very time-consuming and not always successful. Libraries seem to be caught between ‘mission and money’, on the one hand the desire to make their collections more widely available through digitisation and on the other hand being subjected to financial pressures. To bring together the best of the two models, Jisc has worked with publisher Wiley on a new model and a new history of science digital collection.
The full entry can be read: Here.
3. The need for open data sharing in the era of global pandemics
Author: Bernardo Gutierrez and Sabrina L. Li
Since the start of the pandemic, data on different countries’ case counts has been readily available. In this blog, Bernardo Gutierrez and Sabrina Li outline the need for much more detailed, open and accessible sharing to inform science and policymaking. They argue for open, accessible data sharing and highlight the need for data collection processes to be increasingly homogenised. Considerable improvements can be achieved, but it is imperative to highlight the importance of homogenising data collection approaches, especially between countries.
The full entry can be read: Here.
4. Start-up stories: Bringing dataseer, a new data-sharing toolkit, from idea to launch
Author: Charlie Rapple
DataSeer is a newly launched tool, developed by Scholarly Kitchen writer Tim Vines and colleagues. It scans through articles and other texts to look for mentions of related research data; it also annotates the text with suggestions for sharing the data. The idea is to substantially improve levels of data sharing by providing much more specific, easy-to-follow guidance about what should be shared, where, and how. It should help researchers to comply better with data policies, and help editors, publishers, and funders drive compliance more efficiently.
The full entry can be read: Here.
5. The price of knowledge – Scientific papers held for ransom
Author: Andrada Pop
The problem that lies beneath the structure of scientific publishing is clear, and the issue of paywalls is just a sip of the tea brewing in the scientific communitea. ‘Human beings are curious by nature’ said Aristotle, and thus, denying access to satisfying the human need for knowledge could be seen as a violation of rights. Paying $15 for access to a scientific article might not break the camel’s back in Western European countries, but the same cannot be said about the world. This creates an uneven access system that follows profit and not the expansion of knowledge. Sci-Hub is a website that streamlined the process of pirating scientific articles. When a user searches a specific article through Sci-Hub, the website first looks it up in its database.
The full entry can be read: Here.
6. Global outlook for open access
Author: Christopher Kenneally
The walls surrounding research and scholarship have largely fallen, razed by the coronavirus pandemic. Today, the general public avidly follows developments in research related to COVID-19. Moreover, the range of concerns goes well beyond virology or epidemiology. At the recent STM Online Conference, presenters considered the current state and future prospects of Open Access (OA) publishing in ways especially fitting for 2020. OA publishing in October 2020 may address difficult questions about equity and justice.
The full entry can be read: Here.
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