Editor’s Choice: 2018 in review: round-up of our top posts on open access | Impact of Social Sciences

Source: 2018 in review: round-up of our top posts on open access | Impact of Social Sciences

This post originally appreared in LSE  Impact Blog http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/12/27/2018-in-review-round-up-of-our-top-posts-on-open-access/

Adoption of open access is rising – but so too are its costs Options available to authors to make their work open access are on the rise. Adoption of open access itself is also rising, and usage of open-access materials is similarly increasing. However, alongside rising access levels another, less positive rise can also be […]

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Editors Choice: Open Access 2017: A Year of Stand-Offs, Showdowns, and Funders’ Own Journals

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

Cartoon about papers being too expensive for most people to read

 

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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Editor’s Choice: It’s time for “pushmi-pullyu” open access: servicing the distinct needs of readers and authors

This excerpt by Toby Green originally appeared in LSE Impact Blog  on October 24, 2017

The open access movement has failed. Self-archiving and open-access journals are struggling to deliver 100% open access and probably never will. Moreover, readers, the curious minds it was hoped research would be opened to, have been marginalised from the debate. Toby Green suggests an unbundling of the often disparate, distinct services required by readers and authors; a new model for scholarly communications based on Doctor Dolittle’s “pushmi-pullyu”. The specific needs of authors preparing their papers and data for publication can be serviced on one side of the pushmi-pullyu; while on the other, freemium services ensure research is discoverable and readable by all, without payment, and a premium layer of reader-focused services ensures the evolving needs of readers are met…

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