By Rob Johnson, 09/09/2019 This is the text of a talk given by Rob Johnson, Director, at the Westminster Higher Education Forum event Next steps for protecting research integrity in the UK (9 September 2019) I’d like to tell you the story of two papers, published in perhaps the two most prestigious academic journals in the world, Nature and Science. …
A resilient and optimistic community: My first time at the ARMA conference, Belfast 2019
By Victoria Ficarra, 25/06/19 On Sunday 16th June, I boarded a small plane heading to Belfast with my colleagues, Rob Johnson and Mattia Fosci. Our destination was the 2019 ARMA Conference, which this year explored the themes of ‘prosperity and resilience in research management.’ It was my first time attending a conference on research management and I was feeling a …
Are preprints paving the way to science in real time?
Written for Knowledge Exchange (KE) by Andrea Chiarelli, 22/05/2019. This article was originally posted on the KE website and the Jisc Scholarly Communications blog. ArXiv, the most widely known preprint server, has received over 1.5 million preprints since its inception in 1991. BioRxiv, a growing equivalent in the life sciences that was started in 2013, hosts over 40,000 submissions representing …
Levelling the playing field in scholarly communications
By Andrea Powell (Research4Life) and Rob Johnson, 04/03/19 Levelling the Playing Field: how can the global scholarly communications community address economic and infrastructure imbalances that prevent researchers from the Global South from achieving equality? This was the question posed to a group of delegates at this year’s Researcher 2 Reader conference, held at BMA House in London on 25th & …
Publication of the STM Report 2018
By Rob Johnson, 09/10/2018 Today sees the launch of the 50th anniversary edition of ‘The STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly publishing’ (2018). Over the last six months I and my co-authors, Anthony Watkinson and Michael Mabe, have been hard at work pulling together the evidence base for this authoritative report covering all aspects of journal publishing, including …
The end of the road for hybrid open access?
By Rob Johnson, 17/07/2018 Over the past few weeks, I have discussed the role of ‘hybrid’ open access (OA) in a post on the Scholarly Kitchen (Time to Check Out of the Hybrid Hotel?) and in a Podcast in the Copyright Clearance Center “Beyond the Book” series. Hybrid journals are closed-access subscription journals that allow authors, institutions, or funders to …
Getting ready for open research
By Andrea Chiarelli, 29/06/2018 On Tuesday 26th June, I attended the Inside Government event Moving Towards Full Open Access in Higher Education in London. The event dealt with open access and its challenges but also, more broadly, with open research. Thanks to a pool of high-profile speakers, we were presented with a series of significant observations – in this post, …
Eight reasons early posting models are taking off in 2018
Guest post by Christine Ferguson, 06/03/2018 Momentum continues to grow for early posting initiatives such as preprints and ‘Open Research’ platforms. In a previous post, I provided a recap of early posting models that have attracted buy-in from key stakeholders in the life sciences in recent years. Below, I recount eight reasons why these platforms are likely to be used …
The Role of Hybrid Open Access in Extending Author Choice
by Andrea Chiarelli, 26/02/2018 Our report for the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC) has been released on 23 February. Working in partnership with Pleiade Management and Consultancy, we interviewed 33 authors of gold open access articles to understand their motivations and influencing factors when selecting the Hybrid OA option. The report found that the most important factor for researchers when deciding where …
Why are new university presses on the rise, and how can you get involved?
Guest post by Megan Taylor, University of Huddersfield Press, 05/02/2018 Publishing has been part of the UK university landscape since the 16th century. At that time, Cambridge University Press was launched, closely followed by Oxford University Press. Since then, many other presses, including Edinburgh, Liverpool and Manchester, have joined the ranks and grown to rival even some of the larger …