Just a quick post. I happened to see @wisealic Tweet about her “new Atira/Pure colleagues” yesterday. I didn’t know what Atira was, but I’d heard of PURE.

The Ecological Society of America (ESA) would like your input on how to expand access to their publications and what they should do if **gasp* *the USA also mandates some form of public or open access …like the rest of the world seems to be doing at the moment. The official call is here in this new free to access ESA publication (at the end): Collins, S., Goldberg, D., Schimel, J., and McCarter, K. 2013.

Here’s my submission for the House of Lords inquiry. I rather ran out of steam writing it so you’ll see it tails off towards the end. There’s probably loads of things I should mention too. But alas, I have lots of other work to be getting on with right now. Ironically, I highlight the excellent journal Impact Factor’s of some OA journals. Please forgive me for those sins! So here it is:

Just a quick note that BMC journal APC’s have increased from what they were in 2012.   Luckily I had the 2012 data saved on my computer so I can compare prices directly. I’ve put the data for 97 journals (not all of them) here on figshare. The mean price increase is just over 5% . Although to give it a fair statistical treatment – the median price increase is just 3.3% (to 1 d.p.). There is a lot of variance.

I’m proud to announce I have a new article over at Palaeontology [Online] Posts at ‘P [O]’ are primarily aimed at public-engagement and since the site was launched back in July 2011, with sponsorship and support from the Palaeontology Association, one post per month has been featured on site. This month [December], I’ve written a rather different type of post for them.

An interesting move from Nature Publishing Group today… In a press release dated 7 November 2012 they’ve announced they’re allowing the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to be applied to articles in some (but not all) of their journals, specifically citing Wellcome Trust and RCUK policies that now require their funded authors to publish Gold OA with a CC BY license (or alternatively to use the Green OA route), recognizing that more

Recently I had the opportunity to collaborate on an extremely timely paper on data sharing and data re-use in phylogenetics, as part of the continuing MIAPA (Minimal Information for a Phylogenetic Analysis) working group project:

A few months ago I gave a short talk about the Open Knowledge Foundation and its activities as relevant to academics at a small (but good!) palaeontology conference in Cambridge (which I blogged about previously). I didn’t need to give this talk. Neither the OKF nor my academic progression required me to give this talk.

I said I would make an update on Tuesday (today), so if I get this posted before midnight I will ( just ) have met that  goal… In this (minor) update I have: added: Ubiquity Press (great low cost option!), SPIE (scored for 1-column per page), SAGE Open, Frontiers, WileyOpenAccess, OxfordOpen (OUP hybrid option), GigaScience, Open Biology (Royal Society) added the label for: Pensoft (sincerest

Since Sunday afternoon I’ve been at an International Council for Science (ICSU) / Royal Society invited workshop on ‘Revaluing Science in the Digital Age’. We’ve had a fascinating set of talks from academics, publishers (PLoS, Nature, BMC), librarians, policymakers, data managers, scientific societies… Attendees included: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Buneman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Boulton Jose Cotta, European