English is often claimed as the international language of research and academia. However, important bibliodiverse scholarly traditions exist across the globe. Shubhada Nagarkar describes the UGC-CARE project and how efforts to list and record social sc…
Category: scholarly communications
What the UGC-CARE initiative tells us about Humanities and Social Science publishing in Indian languages
English is often claimed as the international language of research and academia. However, important bibliodiverse scholarly traditions exist across the globe. Shubhada Nagarkar describes the UGC-CARE project and how efforts to list and record social sc…
Just how important is the problem of predatory publishing?
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…
Review papers and the creative destruction of the research literature
Review papers play a significant role in curating the scholarly record. Drawing on a study of close to six million research articles, Peter McMahan, shows how review papers not only focus and shift attention onto particular papers, but also serve to sh…
Do we need an Open Science coalition?
What exactly is Open Science? Its lack of an appropriate common definition has meant Open Science can be a variety of things; a social justice issue, part of a political capitalist regime, or a form of traditional science. But this lack of consensus leaves room for Open Science to be co-opted and even exploited. In seeking to (re)establish a common […]
A librarian perspective on Sci-Hub: the true solution to the scholarly communication crisis is in the hands of the academic community, not librarians
Sci-Hub is a pirate website that provides free access to millions of research papers otherwise locked behind paywalls. Widespread dissatisfaction with scholarly communications has led many to overlook or dismiss concerns over the site’s legality, praising its disruptive technology and seeing justification in the free access it affords people all over the world. Ruth Harrison, Yvonne Nobis and Charles Oppenheim […]
The “problem” of predatory publishing remains a relatively small one and should not be allowed to defame open access
A recent investigation led by an international group of journalists raised concerns over the scale of the problem of deceptive publishing practices, with many researchers of standing and reputation found to have published in “predatory” journals. However, while the findings of this investigation garnered significant media attention, the robustness of the study itself was not subject to the same scrutiny. […]
A variety of strategies and funding approaches are required to accelerate the transition to open access. But in all, authors are key
More than two decades of work towards liberating scholarly publishing from paywalled constraints has left many within the scholarly community exploring ways to accelerate the transition to open access. Not all institutions or author communities will agree upon which strategies or funding approaches to undertake, and nor do they need to. But whichever strategy is pursued, having university faculty lead […]
Making research evaluation processes in Europe more transparent
Researchers repeatedly cite career advancement as a key incentive for their practices and behaviours. This is critical to understanding the pace of change in scholarly communications, as those researchers inclined to innovate or experiment with new forms of research outputs, methodologies, or communication styles risk being penalised by the evaluation system used by many research institutions that are slow to […]
Releasing 1.8 million open access publications from publisher systems for text and data mining
Text and data mining offers an opportunity to improve the way we access and analyse the outputs of academic research. But the technical infrastructure of the current scholarly communication system is not yet ready to support TDM to its full potential, even for open access outputs. To address this problem, Petr Knoth, Nancy Pontika and Lucas Anastasiou have developed the […]