Elsevier Acquires Bepress
Elsevier announced its acquisition of bepress, an academic software firm that offers, amongst other things, the institutional repository and publishing suite Digital Commons. This move arguably makes Elsevier ‘…a major if not the foremost single player in the institutional repository landscape’ and has led to concerns being voiced by members of the scholarly communications community. This piece from the LSE Impact Blog was written in response, and calls for a future where scholarly communication is not only open, but also non-profit.
The State of OA
A recent study from Piwowar et al. has made interesting findings on the current prevalence and impact of Open Access, using large samples from the oaDOI database to estimate the proportion of articles that are now OA, and also providing fresh evidence for the open-access citation advantage. One key finding was that 47% of the 100,000 papers that users of Unpaywall (a browser extension linked to oaDOI) attempted to access during the study were found to be freely (and legally) available to read online.
Predatory Journals
After taking down his predatory journals blacklist website earlier this year, Professor Jeffrey Beall has continued to provoke debate. In an interview with Times Higher Education he accused some pro-OA librarians of being ‘social justice warriors’, more concerned with taking on the big publishers than protecting academics against predatory journals, prompting some strongly worded responses in the reader’s comments. For a different perspective to Beall’s on the actual harm caused by predatory publishers, see this article.
German Consortium Takes On Elsevier
As with the Finnish academic community’s No Deal No Review petition earlier this year, a German consortium of universities, research institutes and public libraries is now challenging Elsevier to provide a fairer country-wide licensing agreement. Demands include lower pricing, open access in Germany to all papers authored by researchers at German institutions, and permanent full-text access to all electronic journals published by Elsevier. The outcome of the negotiations could have big implications for the academic community globally, and the future of open access. Further details can be found here.
Janeway
Birkbeck’s Centre for Technology and Publishing have released “Janeway” – an open-source piece of software for academic publishing including various features such as a submission system, peer-review management workflow, and Crossref DOI integration. Janeway uses the programming languages Django and Python, and is designed to be easier to maintain than other open journal systems. The software is still under development, and is licensed under the AGPL, permitting free use and modification, as long as any new versions are also made openly available.
Thesis Commons
The Center for Open Science has released Thesis Commons, an ‘…open-source platform for the submission, dissemination, and discovery of graduate and undergraduate theses and dissertations from any discipline’ which also allows institutions to sign-up for their own branded version of the service.
Repository Fringe
The 10th Repository Fringe (aka RepoFringe) took place in Edinburgh from 3 – 4 August, a gathering for repository managers and other interested parties to discuss emerging issues in the world of repositories, open access and research data. There were 130 attendees from over 60 organisations, delivering a range of talks and workshops. Presentations are available in the University of Edinburgh’s repository.
Special Issue of Publications
OA journal Publications are inviting submissions of manuscripts for a special issue on ‘Open Access and the Library’, with some suggested topics including the changing role of university/research libraries, OA workflows and systems, and communications and engagement with authors. The submission deadline is 30 January 2018, and the Article Processing Charge (APC) will be waived for ‘well-prepared manuscripts’.
