The Open Movement has made impressive strides in the past year, but do these strides stand for reform or are they just symptomatic of the further expansion and entrenchment of neoliberalism? Eric Kansa argues that it is time for the movement to broaden … Continue reading →
Category: open access
Impact Round-Up 25th January: Anonymity, metadata, and tacit knowledge vs reproducible results.
Managing Editor Sierra Williams presents a round-up of popular stories from around the web on higher education, academic impact, and trends in scholarly communication. 1. The role of anonymity in the blogosphere and in science took centre stage this week when a … Continue reading →
The evidence fails to justify publishers’ demand for longer embargo periods on publicly-funded research.
Due to disciplinary differences in the “half-life” or relative demand of a scholarly article, some publishers are looking to enact longer embargo periods before an article can be made openly available on archives and repositories, in order to protect against … Continue reading →
Academic publishers must sort out their outdated electronic submission and review processes.
With the advent of electronic and online publishing workflows, why is the submission process still so exasperating? Dorothy Bishop finds that with each publisher re-inventing senseless bureaucratic online forms, things appear to be getting worse for academic authors, rather than … Continue reading →
Preprint posting, predatory journals and peer review: our top five posts on Open Access
The on-going discussion over open access to scholarly research was a regular feature this year on the Impact of Social Sciences blog. The top posts in this category came from a range of voices in higher education, from researchers and … Continue reading →
On the Harvard Dataverse Network Project – an open-source tool for data sharing
The Harvard Dataverse Network is an open-source platform that facilitates data sharing. Samuel Moore outlines how this customisable initiative might be adopted by journals, disciplines and individuals. I am a huge fan of grass-roots approaches to scholarly openness. Successful community-led … Continue reading →
Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2013: The Battle for “Open”.
There are no simple answers to the growing demand for openness in relation to education technology and scholarly communication. Audrey Watters takes a look back at how the term ‘open’ has been discussed in the last year. As open continues … Continue reading →
The best Open Access policies put researchers in charge, and recent EU Horizon 2020 and COST policies support this.
COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) – an intergovernmental framework supporting cooperation among scientists and researchers across Europe – recently supported an independent Strategic Initiative to better understand issues pertaining to open access publishing across a range of disciplines. Here COST … Continue reading →
“Nudging” researchers toward Gold Open Access will delay the shift to wider access of research.
UK research is being conceived by the UK Government as if it were primarily an investment in the journal publishing industry rather than in research productivity and impact, argues Stevan Harnad. Since the new UK open access policy was announced, … Continue reading →
How to find an appropriate research data repository.
As more and more funders and journals adopt data policies that require researchers to deposit underlying research data in a data repository, the question over where to store this data and how to choose a repository becomes more and more … Continue reading →