scholarly publishing

As a kind of quick follow up to my long ago post on Some perspective on “predatory” open access journals (presentation version, more or less, here and very short video version here) and in partial response to the recent What I learned from predatory publishers, I thought I would gather a bunch of worthwhile items here today. Want to prepare yourself to counter panic around predatory open access journals? Here's some great places to start. How to talk about “Predatory” Publishing: Reclaiming the Narrative Beyond Beall’s List: Better understanding predatory publishers Blacklists are…

My library's Hackfest was yesterday so I'm feeling kind of burnt out today. Today's linked post cheers me immensely, in a side-eye, gallows humour kind of way. This recent Retraction Watch post is funny and you should read the whole thing: Got “significosis?” Here are the five diseases of academic publishing. Significosis Neophilia Theorrhea Arigorium Disjunctivitis is a disease that is about a collective proclivity to produce large quantities of redundant, trivial, and incoherent works. This happens because of several reasons, but primarily because quantity of publications is usually…

It's been a very bizarre week for those of us interested in science policy and the interface between government research and the public interest. To say the least: Trump bans agencies from 'providing updates on social media or to reporters'. Which is, of course, very reminiscent of the Canadian Conservative government under Stephen Harper and how they muzzled government scientists. Where Canadian scholarly and professional societies weren't really prepared for what happened and took a while to respond, in the US these societies have been quite a bit more pro-active in responding President…

The STM Publishing News Group is a professional news site for the publishing industry which bring together a range of science, technology and medicine publishing stakeholders with the idea that they'll be able to share news amongst themselves as well as beyond the publishing world to the broader constituency of academics and librarians and others. You can imagine how thrilled I was to see a post with the words, "How can publishers help librarians?" in the title? I was a little disappointed to find the entire title of the post is "How can publishers help librarians? Cambridge University Press…

I don't have the time right now to do this justice, so I'll just lay out the story over the last year or so and let you, faithful reader, follow the thread. This is an amazing story. This is an amazing initiative at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University in Montreal. From the press release: McGill University announces a transformative $20 million donation to the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital Tanenbaum Open Science Institute to open new horizons and accelerate discovery in neuroscience The Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, was present…

The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review Scholarly Communications: Less of a market, more like general taxation? “We don’t need OA in our field, everything is on arXiv”. Nope.>When is the Library Open? and the PS Scholarly Communication and the Dilemma of Collective Action: Why Academic Journals Cost Too Much Open Access: the beast that no-one could – or should – control? Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it? Why embargo periods are bad for academic publishers Infrastructure is Invisible / Infrastructure is…

Main event. Definitely. Elsevier's acquisition of the open access journal article and working papers repository and online community Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is definitely a case of Elsevier tipping their hand and giving us all a peek at their real long term strategy. Much more so than their whack-a-mole antics with Sci-Hub and other "pirate" services. One of the big hints is how they've tied it's acquisition so closes with their last important, strategic acquisition -- Mendeley. Another hint is that they also tie it in to one of their cornerstone products, Scopus. From the…

Reader Beware: Please note the date of publication of this post. It's been really gratifying over the last year to see how my DSCaM scholarly communications empire has grown. From it's small beginnings, Dupuis Science Computing & Medicine has craved out a small but important niche in the discount APC publishing community. And I really appreciate how the scholarly communications community has encouraged my career progression from publisher of a journal at Elsevier to Chief Advisor on Science Libraries for the Government of Canada to last year's huge launch of DSCaM. And the DSCaM empire…

Yeah, you have to figure good old Indy wasn't much of an academic colleague. Too flashy, never around to sit on a search committee, never willing to take his turn as chair, always blowing up the wrong building or disrupting the wrong classroom. And then there's the ghosts and arcs and demons and what not. And not even a book chapter or high-impact-factor publication to show for it! What, Science or Nature should have been beating down his door! Well, let's see what his colleagues had to say about all this! Why Professor Indiana Jones Was Hated By His Colleagues Aug. 27, 1936 Dr. Henry Walton…

The controversy about Sci-Hub is raging in the halls of scholarship and academic publishing. What's the story, in a nutshell? Sci-Hub is a Russian website that has used donated institutional login credentials to harvest tens of millions of academic articles and has posted them on their site, free to access and read for everyone. This has not pleased the academic publishing community, to say the least. Elsevier is leading the charge to shut them down, succeeding with one iteration of the site last year until, mushroom-like, Sci-Hub has popped up again this year. My take? Mostly that it's a…

Kristin Briney's Data Management for Researchers: Organize, maintain and share your data for research success is a book that should be on the shelf (physical or virtual) of every librarian, researcher and research administrator. Scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanists -- anyone who's work involves generating and keeping track of digital data. This is the book for you. Like the title says -- data management for researchers. If you have data and you're a researcher, this is the book for you. Organize, maintain and share, the title says. If you're a researcher that needs to manage…

A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation as part of Open Access Week at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (ie. OCADU) on "predatory" open access journals. It seemed to be well-received at the time and since then I've gotten some positive feedback as well. So I thought I'd share the slides here in case others find what I did at OCADU useful in their own work. What I talked about is along the same lines as a post I published a while back on Some perspective on “predatory” open access journals. First of all, I'd like to thank Chris Landry of the OCADU Library for inviting me…

My library is hosting a Ada Lovelace Day event tomorrow (ok, a little late...). Continuing in a tradition of having Women in Science Wikipedia Edit-a-thons, we're hosting our own Wikipedia Women in Science Edit-a-thon! I've been doing a fair bit of reading over the last couple of years about Wikipedia culture and especially how it relates to the under-representation of women both as editors and as subjects of articles. So I thought I'd share some of my readings here with all of you. Of course, this list is in no way comprehensive or complete. I welcome suggestions for further readings in the…

One of the central tensions of modern librarianship is how to allocate limited resources to both make the whole world a better place and to serve our local communities by providing them with the services and collections they need to support their teaching, learning and research. The particular way we try and change the world that I'm talking about here is working to create a fairer and more equitable scholarly communications ecosystem. We do this by both advocating for increased openness in the publishing system and working to actually create that fairer system via our own local open access…

There's lots of discussion out there right now in the twitter and blog world concerning Bjorn Brembs' call to librarians to jumpstart the mass migration to Open Access by essentially unilaterally cancelling all the journals they subscribe to. This act would force the hands of all the various players in the ecosystem to immediately figure out how to make Open Access work. Which is a great idea. I actually kind of mused about this sort of scenario a while back in a post called An Open Access thought experiment. Except what I wasn't smart enough or brave enough to do was imagine a scenario…

I am not trying to deny the transformative nature of the Internet, but rather that we've lived with it long enough to ask tough questions. ... I've tried to avoid the Manichean view of technology, which assumes either that the Internet will save us or that it is leading us astray, that it is making us stupid or making us smart, that things are black or white. The truth is subtler: technology alone cannot deliver the cultural transformation we have been waiting for; instead, we need to first understand and then address the underlying social and economic forces that shape it. Only then can we…

Elsevier has released a new scholarly article sharing policy which is definitely more disappointing than really any cause for cheer. Basically the crux is that the only place that authors are allowed to have the final publication version of an article in a non-open access Elsevier publication is on the Elsevier website itself. Of course, after any embargo period has elapse or if the author has paid an author processing charge and published in a hybrid or gold open access journal, they are allowed to post the article on their own webpage or institutional repository. During the time that the…

I really appreciate how all my Internet friends have followed me from major career announcement to major career announcement over the last few years. From my job at Elsevier all the way to last year's temporary detour as Chief Advisor on Science Libraries for the Government of Canada! The last few years sure have been exciting but it's time for a new challenge. And yes, I'm taking a leap back into the scholarly publishing world. This time I'm starting up my own open access scholarly publishing company to publish in all the STEMM fields with a special focus on computer science, which is, of…

Predatory open access journals seem to be a hot topic these days. In fact, there seems to be kind of a moral panic surrounding them. I would like to counter the admittedly shocking and scary stories around that moral panic by pointing out that perhaps we shouldn't be worrying so much about a fairly small number of admittedly bad actors and that we should be more concerned with the larger issues around the limitations of peer review and how scientific error and fraud leak through that system. I'm hoping my methodology here will be helpful. I hope to counter the predatory open access (OA)…

While I was reading Cory Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age, I was reminded of a quote of his that I blogged about a few years ago: The people in Makers experience a world in which technology giveth and taketh away. They live through the fallacy of the record and movie industries: the idea that technology will go just far enough to help them and then stop. That’s totally not what happens. technology joes that far and them keeps on going. It’s a cycle of booms and busts. There are some lovely things about when you’re riding the wave and some scary things…