Expensive journal subscriptions charged by big commercial publishers, create a significant barrier for access to publicly funded scholarship. Increasingly, these are being replaced by Author Processing Charges (APCs), which create a significant barrier to publishing scholarship, and have cynically been branded as “Gold Open Access” by the same publishers. In my view, this kind of…
The White House announcement on Open Access is kinda big, but kinda not
Last week, the White House issued a guidance memo on Open Access, to not quite as much fanfare as could have been expected, and causing (so far) surprisingly muted controversy. The memo requires US federal agencies that fund research to ensure that any publicly funded peer-reviewed scholarly publications “are made freely available and publicly accessible…
One properly radical idea made it into the otherwise conservative Plan S principles
The revised Principles and Implementation document for Plan S remains overall quite friendly to big commercial publishers, with one glaring exception. With its principle 10, Coalition S takes a bold stand: “The Funders commit that when assessing research outputs during funding decisions they will value the intrinsic merit of the work and not consider the…
Aguzzi’s Public Service Open Access proposal: yes, but with an important caveat (emptor)
Adriano Aguzzi proposes in Nature that journals (and publishers) should “compete not for libraries’ or authors’ money, but for funds allocated by public research agencies”. I agree, with an important caveat. Here are my very quick first thougths. I strongly agree with Aguzzi that the shift from a subscription model to an Author Processing Charge…
The transition to Open Access is not up to publishers, it is up to scholars, a reply to Inchcoombe
In his recent A faster path to an open future, Steven inchcoombe, Chief Publishing Officer at Spring Nature, describes the publisher’s ideas for “the fastest and most effective route to immediate open access (OA). He wants commercial publishers to become drivers of the transition to OA. Comically, we are invited to give feedback on this…
ArcheoThoughts 