Things do seem to be moving in Open Access (OA). First there was Plan S, proposed by science funders in the European Union, then a proposal to fund OA from submission fees rather than article processing charges, (perhaps flippantly) called Plan T, and now, in alphabetical sequence, Plan U. All three have strong merits, but Plan U has the best chance of succeeding and offers the most to the scientific community. … Read More →
The gold rush: Why open access will boost publisher profits [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in June/2019]
An important justification for transitioning from a subscription based journal publishing system to an open access journal publishing system, has been that whereas printing and distributing physical copies of journals is an expensive process, the cost of digital publication and dissemination are marginal. In this post Shaun Khoo argues that whilst a shift to gold (pay to publish) open access would deliver wider access to research, the lack of price sensitivity amongst academics presents a risk that they will be locked into a new escalating pay to publish system that could potentially be more costly to researchers than the previous subscription model. … Read More →
Journals that increased their APC value received more submissions
One of the expected contributions of Open Access (OA) was to resolve the disproportionate increase of scholarly journals’ subscriptions. Nevertheless, one of the major business models for commercial journal publishing is to charge authors a publication fee known as Article Processing Charge (APC). This rate, in the last five years, has risen more than inflation. However, counterintuitively, it seems that the authors are far from reducing their submissions due to increase of APC values, rather, submissions are increasing, and the more expensive the APC, the more articles the journals have been receiving. … Read More →
Perspectives on the open access discovery landscape [Originally published in the Jisc Scholarly Communications blog in April/2019]
Open access discovery tools enable users to find scholarly articles that are available in open form, whether on a publisher’s website or elsewhere. This is a technically-challenging endeavour and also requires a deep understanding of the scholarly communications landscape, the underpinning infrastructure and the needs of widely different stakeholder groups such as researchers, publishers, service providers and the general public. … Read More →
Launch of the Global Alliance of Open Access Scholarly Communication Platforms to democratize knowledge [Originally published in UNESCO’s website in April/2019]
Open access to scientific knowledge gained significant momentum with the alliance of 6 web-based journal publishing platforms from four continents – AJOL from Africa, AmeliCA from Latin America and Global South, Érudit from Canada, J-STAGE from Japan, OpenEdition from France and the SciELO Network that operates in Latin America, South Africa, Spain and Portugal. The Global Alliance of Open Access Scholarly Communication (GLOALL) was conceived during the SciELO 20 Years Week and formally launched on April 8 in the session dedicated to the dissemination of scientific information of the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS). The session and the launching of the GLOALL were promoted by UNESCO. The alliance defends geographic, thematic and cultural bibliodiversity in the development of the global flow of scientific information. … Read More →
Wellcome Open Research, the future of scholarly communication? [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in February/2019]
In this blog, Robert Kiley and Michael Markie, discuss the ambition behind creating Wellcome Open Research, an innovative funder led publishing platform, and assess the success of the platform over its first two years. Going on to imagine a future, in which all research is published using the principles behind Wellcome Open Research, they suggest the potential benefits such a publishing system would have for research and research assessment. … Read More →
Is a dramatic boost to open access imminent? I think so!
Recent developments, such as Plan S, a funder mandate for grantees to publish their findings with open access, as well as the growth in preprints – in terms of number of articles posted as well as preprint services becoming available – are bound to have a major impact on the amount of new scientific journal literature being openly and freely accessible by anyone, anywhere. … Read More →
Pirates of the medical literature – a worldwide bibliometric study
A large volume of medical literature is being illegally downloaded in almost every country in the world. There is a significant relationship between the scientific output of these countries and the density of illegal downloads, especially in middle-income countries. This unequal pattern of legal access to medical literature requires the attention of both the publishing industry and policy makers. … Read More →
SciELO after 20 Years: the future remains open
The present and future of the SciELO Program, of the 15 collections of the SciELO Network and, particularly, of the over 1,000 SciELO journals, was widely analyzed and debated at the SciELO 20 Years Week in the context of a globalized and inclusive scholarly communication. The alignment with open science becomes the driving force behind the operation and improvement of quality journals focused on professionalization, internationalization, and operational and financial sustainability. The expectation is that within the next three years most journals and the research they publish will be operating according to the best practices of open science. … Read More →
Plan S — and Article Processing Charges (APCs)
Recently, in Europe, a plan has been launched to accelerate the transition to open access. It is called Plan S. Its key principle is stated as follows: “After 1 January 2020 scientific publications on the results from research funded by public grants provided by national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.” Some issues are highlighted, especially the issue of the cost of APCs, and some suggestions for possible improvement of Plan S are given. … Read More →
SciELO 20 years: from visionary to indispensable [Originally published in Jornal da Unicamp in October/2018]
SciELO celebrates 20 years, surpassing in these two decades the mark of 1,200 journals from 14 countries, indexed and accessible through its portal. There are more than 700,000 daily hits. The project is still a pioneer producing an information source complementary to the international bibliographic and bibliometric databases. … Read More →
At 20 Years, the SciELO Network updates priorities and advances to open science
The 20 Years of SciELO mark the transition to a new period of development of the program, the network of 16 national collections and mainly of the journals, which will be characterized by the progressive adoption of best practices of open science communication that advocates the celerity and transparency in the evaluation processes and communication of research and the opening of the articles’ underlying content in favor of their reuse and the reproducibility of research results. The updating of the priority lines of action will contribute to updating the collections’ indexing policies and the journals’ editorial policies. … Read More →
Open Access and open science: a historic opportunity
The open access movement in Latin America has a historic opportunity to connect with other practices, tools and experiences of open science – open data, open parts evaluation, open laboratory notebooks, open software and free hardware – and invite other actors to participate and share their contributions to science. … Read More →
Series of interviews with the President and ex-presidents of the ABEC: Interview with Rui Seabra Ferreira Jr.
The Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC) and SciELO have key roles in promoting policies aimed at the advancement of Brazilian science regarding production, dissemination and internationalization, as well as always bringing to discussion topics such as ethics and best practices, aiming to foster the entire Brazilian publishing ecosystem, i.e., from the researcher/author through service providers, until its publication. … Read More →
Competitiveness and Open Access of journals in a non-English speaking country
J-STAGE is a journal platform on which Japanese academic societies can publish their journals. Although more than 80% of them are freely accessible, most of them do not claim to be open access. Some barriers to open access publishing are described based on our experience obtained through conversations with the societies. … Read More →
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