The darkest site of scholarly publishing

Today I read an incredible story- published by Declan Butler in the very informative nature special issue on “the future of publishing.”

Most of us know about the massive profit margins scholarly publishers earn every year. According to Björn Brembs the corporate scholarly publishing industry with roughly four billion US$ in profit every year, is a lucrative business. For example Reed Elsevier just published his “Annual Reports and Financial Statements” for 2012 – despite the Elsevier-Boycott in 2012 the company achieved revenues of £ 6.116 billion in 2012.

But as Butler reports in nature (“Sham journals scam authors“) also cybercriminals have understood that they can earn a lot of money with faking existing journals. But what has happened? Read the rest of this entry »

US: “Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research” – new White House Directive mandates OA

John Paul Holdren, a chief advisor of US-President Obama on science and technology issues, has issued a memorandum  that directs those agencies with more than $100 million in research and development expeditures…

“…to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication.”

According to Holdren the directive is well-balanced:

“We wanted to strike the balance between the extraordinary public benefit of increasing public access to the results of federally-funded scientific research and the need to ensure that the valuable contributions that the scientific publishing industry provides are not lost.”

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Data Policies in Open Access Journals: Not all that glitters is “gold”

At the end of September, I was in beautifull Vienna for some days and presented a few results of our project at the 6th Open Access Days in a session about “Making Research Data publicly available: opportunities and challenges“.
It’s been a very nice conference – and some blogposts [Uli Herb -> telepolis (in German) | Astrid Recker -> admtic (in English)] report on the conference and some of the presentations. My colleques Olaf Siegert, Ralf Flohr and I also wrote a summary of the conference for ZfBB (in German) that will be published in the next issue of the journal.

Well, to come back to my talk:  In this post I want to point out some single aspects of my presentation: the availability of data policies in economic scholarly journals that are published open access.
Our project compared the number and quality of data policies we found in a sample of 43 open access Journals to a sample of 141 traditional subscription journals in regard to the implementation of data availability policies.

Generally speaking I wondered how open access journals acquit themselves in this context. Prior to starting our analysis I was quite sure that the percentage of journals equipped with a data availability policy would be higher in open access journals than the proportion of subscription journals equipped with such a policy. I even thought that open access journals could have a comparative advantage to traditional subscription journals: Read the rest of this entry »

Research Works Act: Partial victory for Open Access

telepolis yesterday reported that the Research Works Act was pulled back. The bill has caused a lot of trouble within the Open-Access and Open-Data Community:  HR 3699 would have prevented agencies of the federal government from requiring public access to federally subsidized research.

A major supporter of the bill, Elsevier, has withdrawed its support for the Research Works Act – only hours before the the co-sponsors of the bill,  Darrell Issa (Republican) and Carolyn Maloney (Democrats) declared the end of the legislation process. It’s interesting (but not surprising) that after Elsevier withdrawed its support, the whole bill was stopped. Someone might think, that this course of action shows the real backers of the bill.

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US Research Works Act Proposal – a new approach to attack Open Access? #Updates

In the course of my research for data policies of economic scholarly journals for the work package 2 of the EDaWaX-project, I stumbled on the proposal H.R. 3699 of the US House of Representatives with claims “To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector”

First I thought, >okay, just another proposal, nothing to worry about<, but when I read more about it, my opinion changed.

From my personal point of view this proposal would seriously threaten public access to federally funded research in the US, when it becomes law. And the question following is, what will happen in Europe, when the publishers succeed in the US?

And this is not only my own perspective: There are libraries and researchers that got upset, too.

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