Why Funders Need to Mandate Institutional Deposit, Not Institution-External
(openaccess.eprints.org): The Wellcome Trust -- the very first research funder to mandate OA self-archiving -- is looking into resolving the problem of multiple deposit (IRs and multiple CRs, Central Repositories).The solution will have to be bottom-up (IRs to CRs) not top-down (CRs to IRs) for the simple reason that the… Read More
IMS Health Announces Completion of Acquisition by Affiliates of TPG and the CPP Investment Board
(imshealth.com): IMS Health, the world’s leading provider of market intelligence to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, today announced the completion of its acquisition by entities created by certain affiliates of TPG Capital, L.P. (‘TPG’) and the CPP Investment Board (“CPPIB”). Pursuant to the terms of the merger agreement, IMS Health’s… Read More
Simon Fraser University takes steps to support open access publishing
(straight.com): In the past few months, Simon Fraser University has taken steps to support open-access publishing of scholarly articles. SFU's senate library committee endorsed in January an open-access strategy for the university library. In February, SFU created an open-access fund to support researchers at the university who publish articles in… Read More
A critique of the peer review process: a flawed system but the best we have
(cambridgenetwork.co.uk): As scientific research has progressed, so have the individual branches become more specialised, and most academic scientists these days inhabit one of a myriad of individual silos. C P Snow famously criticised the inability of the two cultures of science and humanities to communicate. But now, at least at… Read More
Copyright law must be simplified
(guardian.co.uk): Modern uses of copyrighted material are more varied than we could ever legislate for, and some people are getting away with iniquitous business models while others are unfairly penalised for having great ideas that threaten established business models. The intractability of these problems has been ignored at the convenience… Read More
Updated SCImago journal rankings – BMC-series journals rank highly
(openaccesscentral.com): The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is a measure of a journals' citation impact and is calculated in a similar manner to Google's Page Rank. This approach calculates a journal rank by weighting citations from journals according to how highly cited the journal is itself. Read More
Simplifying e-book acquisition at the University of Surrey
(liveserials.blogspot.com): In the past, e-book acquisitions at Surrey were strangely paper-oriented and encompassed a number of delays. With budgets being squeezed, re-engineering was necessary to introduce efficiencies - using an aggregator to reduce the number of places to search. Crucially, the aggregator shares pricing upfront, and ordering / fulfilment via… Read More
Who should care about the future of the university?
(pacificfreepress.com): The corporate university has been waging a battle for some years now against the remaining features of the public university. The major means of this battle has been fiscal. Public funding of universities has consistently fallen for decades now and major issues about the functioning and purposes of the… Read More
The Google Book Search Settlement: Some Authors Still Fear It Robs Them of Power at the Bargaining Table
(broadbandbreakfast.com): If a federal district court judge in New York approves of a proposed legal settlement between Google and two major U.S. authors’ and publishers’ groups, the search behemoth could become the world’s largest purveyor and custodian of digital books. So far, Google has scanned more than 12 million books… Read More
Will the iPad Undercut Digital Readers?
(nytimes.com): The electronic book market is looking increasingly hot, flat and crowded. A vicious price war has broken out among producers of digital readers because of Apple’s success with the iPad. Companies like Amazon hope that selling tomes across multiple devices will fill the profit gap. But competition in e-book… Read More
