Open Access

As a kind of quick follow up to my long ago post on Some perspective on “predatory” open access journals (presentation version, more or less, here and very short video version here) and in partial response to the recent What I learned from predatory publishers, I thought I would gather a bunch of worthwhile items here today. Want to prepare yourself to counter panic around predatory open access journals? Here's some great places to start. How to talk about “Predatory” Publishing: Reclaiming the Narrative Beyond Beall’s List: Better understanding predatory publishers Blacklists are…

The STM Publishing News Group is a professional news site for the publishing industry which bring together a range of science, technology and medicine publishing stakeholders with the idea that they'll be able to share news amongst themselves as well as beyond the publishing world to the broader constituency of academics and librarians and others. You can imagine how thrilled I was to see a post with the words, "How can publishers help librarians?" in the title? I was a little disappointed to find the entire title of the post is "How can publishers help librarians? Cambridge University Press…

I don't have the time right now to do this justice, so I'll just lay out the story over the last year or so and let you, faithful reader, follow the thread. This is an amazing story. This is an amazing initiative at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University in Montreal. From the press release: McGill University announces a transformative $20 million donation to the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital Tanenbaum Open Science Institute to open new horizons and accelerate discovery in neuroscience The Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, was present…

The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review Scholarly Communications: Less of a market, more like general taxation? “We don’t need OA in our field, everything is on arXiv”. Nope. >When is the Library Open? and the PS Scholarly Communication and the Dilemma of Collective Action: Why Academic Journals Cost Too Much Open Access: the beast that no-one could – or should – control? Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it? Why embargo periods are bad for academic publishers Infrastructure is Invisible / Infrastructure is…

Main event. Definitely. Elsevier's acquisition of the open access journal article and working papers repository and online community Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is definitely a case of Elsevier tipping their hand and giving us all a peek at their real long term strategy. Much more so than their whack-a-mole antics with Sci-Hub and other "pirate" services. One of the big hints is how they've tied it's acquisition so closes with their last important, strategic acquisition -- Mendeley. Another hint is that they also tie it in to one of their cornerstone products, Scopus. From the…

Reader Beware: Please note the date of publication of this post. It's been really gratifying over the last year to see how my DSCaM scholarly communications empire has grown. From it's small beginnings, Dupuis Science Computing & Medicine has craved out a small but important niche in the discount APC publishing community. And I really appreciate how the scholarly communications community has encouraged my career progression from publisher of a journal at Elsevier to Chief Advisor on Science Libraries for the Government of Canada to last year's huge launch of DSCaM. And the DSCaM empire…

The controversy about Sci-Hub is raging in the halls of scholarship and academic publishing. What's the story, in a nutshell? Sci-Hub is a Russian website that has used donated institutional login credentials to harvest tens of millions of academic articles and has posted them on their site, free to access and read for everyone. This has not pleased the academic publishing community, to say the least. Elsevier is leading the charge to shut them down, succeeding with one iteration of the site last year until, mushroom-like, Sci-Hub has popped up again this year. My take? Mostly that it's a…

I know I really shouldn't peruse NaturalNews.com too often. It's bad for my blood pressure, and, like many old farts on the wrong side of 50, I do have a touch of the ol' hypertension. Reading Mike Adams' blather risks raising that blood pressure either through causing me to laugh uproariously at the sheer idiocy of what he writes or by making me angry at just how despicable he can be at times. Still, I looked, and I saw something I almost wish I hadn't seen. However, that something that I saw illustrates a point about the dark side of open access journals; so I thought it was worth…

Kristin Briney's Data Management for Researchers: Organize, maintain and share your data for research success is a book that should be on the shelf (physical or virtual) of every librarian, researcher and research administrator. Scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanists -- anyone who's work involves generating and keeping track of digital data. This is the book for you. Like the title says -- data management for researchers. If you have data and you're a researcher, this is the book for you. Organize, maintain and share, the title says. If you're a researcher that needs to manage…

A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation as part of Open Access Week at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (ie. OCADU) on "predatory" open access journals. It seemed to be well-received at the time and since then I've gotten some positive feedback as well. So I thought I'd share the slides here in case others find what I did at OCADU useful in their own work. What I talked about is along the same lines as a post I published a while back on Some perspective on “predatory” open access journals. First of all, I'd like to thank Chris Landry of the OCADU Library for inviting me…

One of the central tensions of modern librarianship is how to allocate limited resources to both make the whole world a better place and to serve our local communities by providing them with the services and collections they need to support their teaching, learning and research. The particular way we try and change the world that I'm talking about here is working to create a fairer and more equitable scholarly communications ecosystem. We do this by both advocating for increased openness in the publishing system and working to actually create that fairer system via our own local open access…

There's lots of discussion out there right now in the twitter and blog world concerning Bjorn Brembs' call to librarians to jumpstart the mass migration to Open Access by essentially unilaterally cancelling all the journals they subscribe to. This act would force the hands of all the various players in the ecosystem to immediately figure out how to make Open Access work. Which is a great idea. I actually kind of mused about this sort of scenario a while back in a post called An Open Access thought experiment. Except what I wasn't smart enough or brave enough to do was imagine a scenario…

Elsevier has released a new scholarly article sharing policy which is definitely more disappointing than really any cause for cheer. Basically the crux is that the only place that authors are allowed to have the final publication version of an article in a non-open access Elsevier publication is on the Elsevier website itself. Of course, after any embargo period has elapse or if the author has paid an author processing charge and published in a hybrid or gold open access journal, they are allowed to post the article on their own webpage or institutional repository. During the time that the…

I really appreciate how all my Internet friends have followed me from major career announcement to major career announcement over the last few years. From my job at Elsevier all the way to last year's temporary detour as Chief Advisor on Science Libraries for the Government of Canada! The last few years sure have been exciting but it's time for a new challenge. And yes, I'm taking a leap back into the scholarly publishing world. This time I'm starting up my own open access scholarly publishing company to publish in all the STEMM fields with a special focus on computer science, which is, of…

Predatory open access journals seem to be a hot topic these days. In fact, there seems to be kind of a moral panic surrounding them. I would like to counter the admittedly shocking and scary stories around that moral panic by pointing out that perhaps we shouldn't be worrying so much about a fairly small number of admittedly bad actors and that we should be more concerned with the larger issues around the limitations of peer review and how scientific error and fraud leak through that system. I'm hoping my methodology here will be helpful. I hope to counter the predatory open access (OA)…

While I was reading Cory Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age, I was reminded of a quote of his that I blogged about a few years ago: The people in Makers experience a world in which technology giveth and taketh away. They live through the fallacy of the record and movie industries: the idea that technology will go just far enough to help them and then stop. That’s totally not what happens. technology joes that far and them keeps on going. It’s a cycle of booms and busts. There are some lovely things about when you’re riding the wave and some scary things…

Finally, the Canadian government's Tri-Agency funding councils (SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR) have released the consolidated final version of it's open access policy. The draft version came out some time ago. The consultation process garnered quite a few responses, which the Tri-Agencies were kind enough to summarize for us. And finally it is here. I have to admit I was getting a bit concerned. The final version was rumoured to have been kicking around the various departments waiting for final sign-off for months. With the rumours of the Conservatives possibly dropping the writ and calling a spring…

Why Science Journal Paywalls Have to Go Authors or journal editors: Who faces more pressure in the academic publishing system? STM Consultation on Article Sharing (Draft principles here) ICOLC Response to the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) Statement A second front STM’s new publishing licenses raise antitrust concerns amid wider efforts to pollute open access standards. Scientists have the power to change the publishing system The costs for going Gold in the Netherlands Springer and universities take key step towards open access (The Netherlands) CERN and…

I'm doing a presentation at this week's Ontario Library Association Super Conference on a case study of my Canadian War on Science work from an altmetrics perspective. In other words, looking at non-traditional ways of evaluating the scholarly and "real world" impact of a piece of research. Of course, in this case, the research output under examination is itself kind of non-traditional, but that just makes it more fun. The Canadian War on Science post I'm using as the case study is here. Here's the session description: 802F Altmetrics in Action: Documenting Cuts to Federal Government…

Think of this as a combination 2014 recap and 2015 resolutions post. Neither of which I really planned to do after doing recaps for the last couple of years. Two years ago, 2013, was very clearly a year I was more obsessed than usual with advocacy around the current Canadian government's treatment of science and information. The year before that, 2012, was a year I was very clearly more obsessed than usual with open access advocacy. This past year, 2014, was both a relatively light blogging year and a year when my twin obsessions from 2012 and 2013 seemed about tied. So I more or less decided…