Assessing the findings of a recent survey into the publishing practices of independent academic publishers, Danielle Padula, head of marketing and community development at Scholastica, finds these publishers to be moving incrementally towards fully ope…
Category: Learned Societies
Do journals need societies, and do societies need journals?
Historically, there has been a tight link between journals, journal publications and a community of scholars working in specific fields of research who contribute to and manage them. As journal publishing has become a global undertaking and moreover, a…
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…
For learned societies, diversity, equity, and inclusion should be a central focus
Reporting on the findings of a recent survey of learned society members, Jonathan Roscoe discusses how diversity, equity and inclusion has become an increasingly salient issue for learned societies and suggests how societies might adapt to be more incl…
Learned Societies, the key to realising an open access future?
Plan S, a funder led initiative to drive open access to research, will have significant impacts on the ways in which academics publish and communicate their research. However, beyond simply changing the way academics disseminate their research, it will also influence how learned societies, the organisations tasked with representing academics in particular disciplines, operate, as many currently depend on revenues […]
Open and closed – What do reverse flips tell us about the scholarly publishing landscape?
The progress of Open Access (OA) is often measured by the proportion of journals that have transitioned to OA publication models. However, a number of journals have made the opposite choice and moved from open to closed access models. In this post Lisa Matthias, Najko Jahn and Mikael Laakso report on findings from the first study of journals that have […]
The value of a journal is the community it creates, not the papers it publishes
When we think about the value of journal publishing, we have a tendency to think in terms of costs per article and the potential for new technologies to reduce these costs. In this post, Lucy Montgomery and Cameron Neylon argue that we should instead focus on the social life of journals and the knowledge communities they sustain. Taking this as […]
Plan S: What About Researchers?
In this repost, Robert Harington makes an appeal to Plan S leaders and funders to take to heart the needs and interests of researchers, when implementing a new generation of open access policies. These days I wake up and strenuously attempt, and spectacularly fail, to avoid the news. Across the world it seems as if we are seeing an epidemic of […]