The phenomenon of predatory publishing is well known following the work of Jeffrey Beall and others in highlighting and popularising the issue. In a new book titled The Predator Effect, Simon Linacre draws on his experience in tackling deceptive publis…
Category: Academic Publishing
Reviewing the Rights Retention Strategy – A pathway to wider Open Access?
Launched in 2021 by cOAlition S (an international consortium of research funders) the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) aims to ensure that researchers funded by these organisations retain the rights to their work. Reflecting on the implementation of the…
Five lessons from four centuries of journal publishing – What the history of the Philosophical Transactions tells us about academic publishing
Drawing on research from their recently published and open access history of publishing at the Royal Society, Camilla Mørk Røstvik, discusses how a long view of scientific publication can help us better understand and better respond to current controve…
The dream of ‘editormetrics’ – Why a FAIR dataset of journal editors would benefit all researchers
The great convergence – Does increasing standardisation of journal articles limit intellectual creativity?
Drawing on a recent survey of forty years of research papers in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and interviews with authors, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Kean Birch, Thed van Leeuwen and Maria Amuchastegui observe an increasing homogenisat…
Cutting and Pasting the Past
Drawing on her book, Cut/Copy/Paste, Whitney Trettien reflects on the history of radical bookwork and what it can teach us about digital publishing today. (This feature essay first appeared on the LSE Review of Books Blog). John Mansir Wing (1844-1917…
Research funders can tackle research waste – Lessons from COVID-19 research
Whilst the COVID-19 pandemic promoted faster and more open research practices, it also revealed ongoing issues of research waste, and the widespread duplication of research efforts. Till Bruckner provides evidence for how research waste continues to im…
Article Processing Charges (APCs) and the new enclosure of research
Drawing on a recent analysis of APC pricing and movements within the commercial publishing sector, Gunnar Sivertsen and Lin Zhang argue that APCs have now firmly established themselves as the predominant business model for academic publishing. Highligh…
Open access books: A global preference for regional subjects
For many research disciplines English functions as the global language for research. But, how far does this align with patterns of research use globally? Drawing on download evidence from the OAPEN library of open access books, Ronald Snijder explores …
We need to interrogate the North-South dichotomy in African Studies publishing
Relations between Namibia and its former coloniser, Germany, are impacted by ongoing negotiations about reparations for a brutal and violent past. The 1904-8 genocide that decimated large parts of the indigenous population continues to cast a shadow in…