In an article that many of you will now have seen, Heather Morrison demonstrated the enormous profits of STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) scholarly publishers.  The figures are taken from her in-progress dissertation which in turn cites an article in The Economist.  It all checks out.  I emphasise this because I found the figures so hard to believe.

Hot on the heels of PLoS ONE -like open-access megajournals such as BMJ Open , Nature’s Scientific Reports , the Royal Society’s Open Biology and SAGE’s SAGE Open , now the king of evil predatory price-gouging publishers-whose-business-model-is-to-prevent-papers-being-read Elsevier are — you won’t believe this — launching their own PLoS ONE clone, FEBS Open Bio . So please join me in giving a

In a comment on an previous post, wycx articulated a position that sounds all too familiar: I have heard a lot of people say things like this in the last couple of months.  It makes pretty depressing reading.

[This post is mostly a rehash of a comment I made on the last one, but I guess more people see posts than comments.

Regular readers will know that, as part of a broader strategy favouring open-access publishing, I no longer perform peer-reviews for non-open journals.  (I mentioned a recent example in a comment on the last article.)  I’ve had support for this stance from some impressive quarters; but also a fair bit of criticism from people who I respect.

I was directed to an article entitled Rookie Review on Nature Jobs by a tweet from Andy Farke (author of the Open Source Palaeontologist and an editor at PLoS ONE).  It has a lot of good stuff in it, once you get past the opening section.

Two things to briefly report. First, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has just announced its new policy that “all published EPSRC-funded research articles submitted for publication from 1 September 2011 must be made available on an Open Access basis”.  This policy brings EPSRC in line with other UK Research Councils (EPSRC is one of seven), the Wellcome Trust, and US funding bodies such as the NSF and NIH.

You don’t need to read this. You can read Scott Aaronson’s Review of The Access Principle and Tim O’Reilly’s Piracy is Progressive Taxation and connect the blindingly obvious dots. OTOH, Aaronson and O’Reilly wrote their pieces for the same reason I’m writing this one: some things are not blinding obvious to everyone. And sometimes the situation makes me mad enough to take a swing. So here goes.

A month ago today, George Monbiot’s piece Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist was published in The Guardian.  It stirred up a lot of debate, and has garnered 365 comments so far, most of them strongly supportive.

A quick note to let you all know that George Monbiot’s piece Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist has been published in The Guardian, one of the four respected “broadsheet” national daily newspapers of the UK.  (It was online yesterday, and is in today’s print edition.) A few key quotes: I encourage you to read the whole thing. None of this will be news to long-time SV-POW!