This excerpt by Hilda Bastian originally appeared in the PLOS Blog Absolutely Maybe.

 

This was the fifth year I tracked events in open access. Sifting through the mass of developments I collected along the way, a couple stood out.

The first is the showdown going on in Germany between the universities and Elsevier. Rolling into 2018 now, the German negotiators aim to hammer out a national access deal that’s sustainable and fair for readers and academic authors – or else pay no subscription at all.

They show no signs of backing down. At year’s end, about 200 academic institutions had cancelled their Elsevier subscriptions.

The second is the emergence of research funder journals/publishing platforms based on the f1000 research model. The Wellcome Trust were the first cab off this rank last year. The goals? More speed, less cost in getting accessible research results out to the world. The model is immediate release with comparatively low author charge, post-publication open peer review, and indexing in PubMed and other bibliographic databases once an article passes enough peer review.[…]

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