Monthly Archives: June 2019

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Open Access Plans — S, T, U, so far

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 →

What is Plan U: Universal access to scientific research via preprints?

Plan U proposes that funding agencies require recipients of research funds to publish scholarly communications on preprints servers, regardless of the alternative publication forms that researchers may subsequently make. The initiative could be carried out with a fraction of the current costs and would produce a significant acceleration of the pace of discoveries in the forthcoming years. Read More →

Promoting and accelerating research data sharing

The State of Open Data 2018 report surveyed researchers from all continents on the motives, habits, knowledge, and practices of data sharing. The results, compared to the 2016 and 2017 reports, provide relevant information on the evolution of open research data around the world as well as how to strengthen this practice in academia so that it achieves the expected results. Read More →

Web presence and social media metrics from articles shared on Twitter – Interview with Stefanie Haustein

Knowing how and by whom articles are shared on social media can help the challenging task of qualifying alternative metrics indicators. In this interview, Stefanie Haustein, assistant professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Information Studies in Canada and co-director of the ScholCommLab, addresses the role of social networks such as Twitter as a data source for altmetrics. She also looks at the role journals play in the dissemination of their articles on Twitter and investigates how scholarly articles from Brazil and Brazilian Twitter users tweet about scholarly outputs. 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 →