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I got in a conversation recently with a friend who is about to have his first paper published. It’s been through review and is now accepted at a well-respected old-school journal owned by a legacy publisher. It’s not an open-access journal, and he asked my advice on how he could make the paper open access. We had a fruitful discussion, and we agreed that I’d write up the conclusions for this blog.

Regular readers will remember Jennifer Raff’s guest post on the PeerJ blog, How To Become Good At Peer-Review ; and my response to it, Three points of disagreement . Today I read a very different take on this piece by Chorasimilarity, who is a frequent commenter here at SV-POW!: Two pieces of all too obvious propaganda . Chorasimilarity starts by taking the original piece to task — fairly, I think — for

Jennifer Raff wrote a useful guest post on the PeerJ Blog: How To Become Good At Peer-Review. Most of its advice is excellent , and I’d heartily recommend it to anyone starting out on reviewing. But there are three points where I disagree with it. Here are the three things Jennifer said, and my counter-points.

It is, truly, excellent news that the US budget passed by Congress on Thursday night includes open-access language that effectively extends the NIH open access policy to many other federal agencies. It’s a huge and important step forward.

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[This is part 4 in an ongoing series on our recent PLOS ONE paper on sauropod neck cartilage.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about this interesting situation with Elsevier, which David Tempest’s remarks at the Oxford Evolution or Revolution debate highlighted: they can’t afford (literally or figuratively) to tell us how much they charge different institutions for the same stuff.

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The Scholarly Kitchen is the blog of the Society of Scholarly Publishers, and as such discusses lots of issues that are of interest to us. But a while back, I gave up commenting there two reasons. First, it seemed rare that fruitful discussions emerged, rather than mere echo-chamberism;

As we all know, University libraries have to pay expensive subscription fees to scholarly publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Informa, so that their researchers can read articles written by their colleagues and donated to those publishers.