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Four Short Pieces: forging onward into the Shiny Digital Future
Four things: 1. From the start of 2013, the Royal Society is abandoning issues for its journals (Proc. B, Phil. Trans., Biology Letters and more) and moving to a continuing publishing model — as...
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What we at SV-POW! are doing for Open Access Week
If you’ve been following Twitter or the blogs, you’ll know that this has been Open Access Week. It’s been great to see many new open-access policies announced this week [Ireland, Belgium, Hungary], to...
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Questions concerning Open Access research
Last night, I got a message from Joseph Kraus, the Collections & E-Resources Analysis Librarian at Penrose Library, University of Denver. He’s asking several open-access advocates (which I am one)...
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Tutorial 19d: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 4: licences
Thanks for sticking with this series. In part 1, we looked at what open access means, and what terms to use in describing it. In part 2, we considered the Gold and Green roads to open access. In part...
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Elsevier’s new “open access” terms: so near, yet so far
I hope it’s clear to anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while that I do try to be fair to Elsevier (and indeed to everyone). Although I’ve often had occasion to be critical of them, I’ve also...
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Tutorial 19f: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 6: open access...
The best open-access publishers make their articles open from the get-go, and leave them that way forever. (That’s part of what makes them best.) But it’s not unusual to find articles which either...
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What would happen if I placed my manuscripts in the Public Domain?
We know that most academic journals and edited volumes ask authors to sign a copyright transfer agreement before proceeding with publication. When this is done, the publisher becomes the owner of the...
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One argument in favour of CC BY
[Originally written as a comment on Martin Coward's blog, but I thought the point was worth making as its own post.] Here’s my take on the widely used Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) in...
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My submission to the House of Commons inquiry on Open Access
Hot on the heels of the UK House of Lords’ inquiry into Open Access, the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee of the House of Commons has begun its own inquiry. This morning I submitted my own...
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What is a viral licence?
Earlier today, Richard Van Noorden pointed out on Twitter that in this video, at about 5:40, the speaker says that ”CC BY is essentially a viral licence”. I was surprised to say the least that the...
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The House of Lords’ terribly disappointing report on Open Access
A while back, I submitted evidence to the House of Lords’ inquiry into Open Access — pointlessly, as it turns, since they were too busy listening to the whining of publishers, and of misinformed...
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The progressive erosion of the RCUK open access policy
Here’s a timeline of what’s happened with the RCUK’s open access policy (with thanks to Richard Van Noorden for helping to elucidate it). March 2012: draft policy released for comment. As I noted in my...
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Can repositories solve the access problem?
The progressive RCUK policy on open access has recently come under fire, particularly from humanities scholars, for favouring Gold OA over Green. For various reasons — and I won’t, for now, go into the...
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The Paleontological Society’s new open access options
My thanks to Steve Wang for pointing out that The Paleontological Society (in the USA, not to be confused the UK’s Palaeontological Association) has a new open access policy. The highlights are: The...
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Guest Post: Jan Velterop on open-access licences
[Introduction from Mike. I'm on the OKFN's open-access mailing list, where we're currently embroiled in a rather tedious reiteration of the debate about the merits of the various open-access licences....
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Open Letter to the AAAS about Science Advances
Dear AAAS, This is an open letter concerning the recent launch of the new open access journal, Science Advances. In addition to the welcome diversification in journal choices for authors looking for...
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Come on, AAAS. You can do better than this.
A couple of weeks ago, more than hundred scientists sent an open letter to the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) about their new open-access journal Science Advances, which is...
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The CC By licence does not let people distort and misrepresent your work
I was skim-reading the Political Studies Association’s evidence submitted to RCUK’s review. I was struck by one part that perpetuates a common but completely unfounded misapprehension: There is little...
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CC-By documents cannot be re-enclosed if their publisher is acquired
Just a quick post today, to refute an incorrect idea about open access that has unfortunately been propagated from time to time. That is the idea that if (say) PLOS were acquired by a barrier-based...
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Sauropods’ neutral neck postures were really weird
Last night, I submitted a paper for publication — for the first time since April 2013. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like. But, because we’re living in the Shiny Digital Future, you don’t have to...
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