No Deal, No Review
Finnish researchers are signing up to boycott editorial and peer review duties for Elsevier journals, to encourage fair pricing and increased open access for major journals. More details can be found here.
APA Takedown Requests
APA, the American Psychological Association, launched a so-called ‘Pilot Program‘ targeting unauthorised posting of the final published version of APA articles on university websites. Several days later, following major concerns raised by authors and librarians, the Pilot Program was ‘refocused‘ to target unauthorised posting on ‘commercial piracy sites’.
New University Presses
The Chronicle of Higher Education launched a series of articles reviewing the rise of new university presses.
Open Repositories Conference
The conference programme for the annual Open Repositories Conference, to be held at the University of Queensland 26-30 June 2017, has been finalised and can be found here. This major conference aims to bring together users, managers and developers of repositories from across the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector.
Diamond Open Access
The Scholarly Kitchen highlighted the possibilities for societies to transitioning their journal publishing programmes to a ‘diamond’ open access model. Diamond open access involves no fees for gold open access for both authors and institutions.
The Academic Book of the Future
The final reports for the Academic Book of the Future have been launched. The project investigated how scholarly work in the Arts and Humanities might be produced, read, published and preserved in the near future. It involved input from all relevant stakeholders, including librarians, publishers, researchers, readers and booksellers. Discussion about the reports can be found under the Twitter hashtag #AcBookReports.
Journal Impact Factors 2017
The new Journal Impact Factors (JIF) have been announced, with many librarians and scholarly communications professionals reminding the community that the JIF, like any metric, has (many) downfalls. Read, for example: ‘Removing the Journal Impact Factor from Faculty Evaluation‘.
Research Data
New recommendations published by the CLUE (Cooperation & Liaison between Universities & Editors) working group suggest that research data should be kept for 10 years. This would particularly help to increase the transparency of research, and aid in research misconduct investigations.
Guardian Long Read
One of June’s Guardian ‘Long Reads‘ was dedicated to the practice of scholarly publishing, with the author analyzing the long history of publishers’ profiteering, and the interactions between Elsevier and the UK publisher Pergamon (now part of Elsevier). Its publication led to much discussion on Twitter, with the founder of PeerJ reminding the open access community that academics may have a responsibility to be more selective in their choice of publisher if they want a more certain move towards fair open access.
Tim Miles-Board
Tim Miles-Board, one of the key developers of EPrints, sadly passed away in June and the open access community have been paying their respects. Goldsmiths Research Online have dedicated their repository and ongoing work to him.