Editor’s Choice: Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it

Source: Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it | Aeon Ideas

By Jon Tennant on Aeon, 7/18/2018

Excerpt: “The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only around 25 per cent of the global corpus of research knowledge is ‘open access’, or accessible to the public for free and without subscription, which is a real impediment to resolving major problems, such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals…”

Read full article: https://aeon.co/ideas/scholarly-publishing-is-broken-heres-how-to-fix-it

Jon Tennant is a palaeontologist and independent researcher and consultant, working on public access to scientific knowledge. He is based in Berlin, Germany.

Editor’s Choice: OASPA members demonstrate another year of steady growth in CC BY article numbers for fully-OA journals

Source: OASPA members demonstrate another year of steady growth in CC BY article numbers for fully-OA journals

Data for this chart can be downloaded here: OASPA Members CC-BY Growth_Data to 2017_CC0

A total of 1,128,721 articles were published with the CC BY license in open access-only (fully-OA) journals by members of OASPA during the period 2000-2017, with 219,627 of those being published in 2017 alone.

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Editor’s Choice: Linking impact factor to ‘open access’ charges creates more inequality in academic publishing

This article appeared originally on the Times Higher Education blog, May 16, 2018. 

Linking impact factor to ‘open access’ charges creates more inequality in academic publishing

By Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman

The prospectus SpringerNature released on April 25 in preparation of its intended stock market listing provides a unique view into what the publisher thinks are the strengths of its business model and where it sees opportunities to exploit them, including its strategy on open access publishing. Whether the ultimate withdrawal of the IPO reflected investors’ doubt about the presented business strategies, or whether SpringerNature’s existing debts were deemed to be too great a risk, the prospectus has nonetheless given the scholarly community an insight into the publisher’s motivations in supporting and facilitating open access.

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