Category: scholarly communication

Bigger than the sum of its parts – Finding a focal point for engaging university communication teams

University communications functions can from the outside seem monolithic and impenetrable. Offering a brief overview of different kinds of research comms, Andy Tattersall suggests how researchers can navigate and work effectively with different profess…

Lack of sustainability plans for preprint services risks their potential to improve science

During the COVID-19 pandemic, preprint servers became a vital mechanism for the rapid sharing and review of vital research. However, discussing the findings of a recent report, Naomi Penfold finds much of the infrastructure supporting non-commercial pr…

2022 in review: The Culture of Academic Publishing

Froom books to papers, in 2022 longstanding ways of producing and thinking about academic publications have been in a state of flux. This post brings together ten of the best posts on the theme of the culture of academic publishing that were published …

Adding equity to transformative agreements and journal subscriptions –The Read & Let Read model

The transition towards open access to research articles has become a question of how, rather than why and the rise of transformative agreements has enabled publishers to strike agreements with large institutions and national research organisations to p…

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…

What do researchers think about paying to publish open access – Findings from a global survey

Through different mechanisms pay to publish models have been established globally as one of the key routes to the open access publication of academic research. This model has introduced new kinds of inequalities into scholarly communication, but to wha…

Aspirational metrics – A guide for working towards citational justice

Is it possible to have a just politics of citation? Reflecting on their work to create a guide to fairer citation practices in academic writing, Aurélie Carlier, Hang Nguyen, Lidwien Hollanders, Nicole Basaraba, Sally Wyatt and Sharon Anyango*, highlig…