The British government has enlisted the services of Wikipedia in a push to make all taxpayer-funded academic research from the UK freely available online - regardless of whether it is also published in…
Harvard Library says it can no longer afford the vast cost of academic journal subscriptions, and has advised staff at the university to support open access publishing instead. In a memorandum posted on…
After almost five years at the helm of the Australian Research Council (ARC), Margaret Sheil will this week step down to take up the position of Provost at the University of Melbourne. Professor Sheil…
One of the world’s biggest science funding bodies will strengthen its support for free online publishing by sanctioning errant academics who take its grants but publish in subscriber-only journals. The…
A controversial US bill that was designed to block access to vast amounts of academic research appears to have collapsed after its co-sponsors renounced their support for it. The Research Works Act, introduced…
One of the important benefits that the public expects from publicly funded health and medical research is access to the published findings of that research. Patient groups, health consumers, advocacy groups…
Most forms of publishing across the globe are in a state of flux. But university-based scholarly publishing faces a set of challenges all of its own. How can an industry whose target audience is so highly…
The word “open” has grown educational wings over the past decade. From the British Open University, which enrolled its first students in 1971, the concept has expanded to mean various ways of relaxing…
Scientists just want to share – at least in one sense. When we believe we’ve discovered something new, we want to tell as many others as possible. We also want to provide all the information required to…
Over the Christmas period, a short Bill was introduced into the US House of Representatives. The Research Works Act aims to make it illegal to require researchers to make their work publicly available…
Universities pride themselves on the quality of their teaching. They spruik superior teachers, superior facilities, superior learning experiences, superior learning outcomes. High scores on these four…
For researchers, not least those in the sciences, being published in the right sort of journals is no vanity project. It’s a matter of huge importance, with very real implications for people’s careers…
Scientists – myself included – are increasingly frustrated by the outmoded academic publishing system. The situation as it stands made sense in the pre-internet era, when one needed a printing press to…
Fees charged by academic publishers to access research journals have caused no small amount of consternation among readers of scholarly research and fuelled the rise of the Open Access movement. As part…
Providing equitable access to the findings of scholarly research is an expensive and vexed business, as many recent stories here on The Conversation have highlighted. Open access offers a way to freely…
There are three tensions in the field of academic publishing (1) who pays to publish research? (2) who decides what gets published? and (3) who takes any profits? In the traditional model, based on publishing…
As the cost of accessing academic journal articles increases, a growing number of academic institutions are building publicly accessible databases of scholarly work. But how much of a threat to the traditional…