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 …
Monitoring the transition to open access: progress in 2017
By Rob Johnson, 6 Dec 2017 Over the past few months, we have been involved in a consortium to deliver the 2017 iteration of the ‘Monitoring the transition to open access’ report. Led by Jubb Consulting, we worked with colleagues at the University of Sheffield and Elsevier to evaluate recent developments in this ever-changing field and their implications for the …
Learned societies and open access
By Rob Johnson, 18 Oct 2017 Since 2015, the Universities’ UK Open Access Co-ordination Group has commissioned a bi-annual exercise to monitor the UK’s transition to open access, including the financial health of learned societies. As part of this exercise, I have been working with Professor Robert Dingwall to assess how 30 UK learned societies have fared between 2011 and …
Open Science in the cradle of democracy
By Andrea Chiarelli, 11 Sep 2017 From September 6th to 8th, Rob Johnson and I attended the Open Science Fair in Athens. Held in the stunning Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center designed by Renzo Piano, this was the first event of its kind, and drew over 250 delegates from all over the world. An initiative of 4 EU projects (OpenAIRE, OpenUP, …