The worst of both worlds: Hybrid Open Access
Hybrid Open Access journals offer researchers something that many fully Open Access journals cannot: prestige and tradition. Hybrid journals are already well-established and, over the years or decades, have accumulated a certain reputation within the research community. Whereas, Open Access still is not the norm and might, in some cases,… Read More
Preprints Don’t Promote Confusion – so Taking Them Away Won’t Fix Anything
Pressures on the first two fronts are forcing journals to stay relevant in newer ways. A big source of such pressure is the availability of preprints – i.e. manuscripts of papers made available by their authors in the public domain before they have been peer-reviewed. Preprint repositories like arXiv and… Read More
How to Access Paywalled Scientific Journal Articles
Scientific journal articles are not the same as news stories in magazines or newspapers. These journals are publications that exist to publish scientific papers, and they are typically peer-reviewed: when the journal receives a paper from a scientist, they send it to other scientists and ask whether the paper is… Read More
Intellectual Corruption and Peer Review
Three scholars have published a slew of intentionally ridiculous papers at major peer-reviewed "scholarly" journals designed to expose the intellectual corruption of parts of academia. The papers make intentionally absurd arguments or present highly implausible (and fabricated) data to justify overturning supposedly (or actually) oppressive and inegalitarian systems of power… Read More
Will Blockchain Revolutionise Scholarly Journal Publishing?
Orvium, a European start-up, recently joined those taking on the giant players. It offers a publishing and business plan based on blockchain - a coding structure that embeds origins and changes within a file. The format will allow for open-access or other licensing models to be determined by each client… Read More
Addressing the Crisis in Academic Publishing
The academic publishing system has become corrupted. Top journals in all fields have daunting backlogs of articles awaiting review. Hence new commercial publishers have emerged, seeking to capitalise on the situation with little understanding of, or concern for, the quality of what they publish. In recent years there has been… Read More
Chemists like to experiment, just not with opening peer review
Skeptics say that no one knows whether peer review is really broken because it has not been studied enough. They need a change in the incentive system to improve reviews themselves by rewarding overworked reviewers for participating. Many chemists are skeptical. They think the traditional peer review system is working… Read More
Apple comes under fire after Amazon adjusts Kindle app
(pcadvisor.co.uk): Apple has come under fire after changes to the iTunes App Store led Amazon to alter its Kindle app. The changes, which were first announced in August but only introduced on June 30, saw app developers being required to hand over 30 percent of cost of any content they… Read More
The Three Keys to Japan’s Future E-book Growth
(publishingperspectives.com): The growth of Japan’s e-book market has been stymied by its publishers. To cope, frustrated consumers are creating their own digital copies of books from printed books. The practice is called “Jisui,” (“cooking one’s own meals”). New book scanning services have emerged to meet the growing demand from the… Read More
The Research Works Act Aims to Kill Open-Access Journals
(thesocietypages.org): Almost a month ago, California Republican Congressman Darrel Issa introduced the “Research Works Act” which would kill government-assisted open-access journals. The bill prohibits government agencies (like the National Science Foundation) from disseminating any research that has been submitted to a private publisher. Read More
