Tomorrow we travel to the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and our diligent scientists have already printed their posters! Ottavia Palazzo will present her work on genome editing the FoxP locus of Drosophila with anatomical and behavioral characterizations of the various transgenic lines she has created.
Around the globe, there are initiatives and organizations devoted to bring “Open Access” to the world, i.e., the public availability of scholarly research works, free of charge.
By now, it is public knowledge that subscription prices for scholarly journals have been rising beyond inflation for decades (i.e., the serials crisis): A superficially very similar graph was recently published for APC price increases: When not paying too much attention, both figures seem to indicate a linear increase in costs over time for both business models. However, the situation is more complicated than that.
Yesterday, cOAlition S published their updated principles and implementation guidelines for #PlanS, together with the rationale behind the update. This constitutes a very much welcome effort, as evidence of the increasing awareness among funders as to their potential leverage in infrastructure modernization, at a time when institutions have apparently abandoned their faculty completely.
Scientists are used to vested interests disputing scientific claims. Tobacco corporations have tried to discredit the science about lung cancer and smoking, creationists keep raising always the same, long-debunked objections against evolution, climate-deniers claim the earth is cooling, anti-vaxxers believe the MMR vaccine causes autism and homeopaths delude themselves that a little drop of nothing has magical healing powers.
With about 2 years delay, US President Donald Trump hired Kelvin Droegemeier as director for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in February 2019.
The New England journal of Medicine has come out strongly against Open Access. Apparently, this journal does not seem to value access to medical information very highly. This lack of valuation could be due to several reasons.
Time and time again, academic publishers have managed to create the impression that publishing incurs a lot of costs which justify the outrageous prices they charge, be that US$11M p.a. for an Elsevier Big Deal subscription or an article processing charge (APC) of US$5,200 for a Nature Communications article.
Since cOAlition S is asking for recommendations from the community for the implementation of their Plan S, I have also chipped in. In their feedback form, they ask two questions, to which I have answered with the replies below.
Over the last ten years, scientific funding agencies across the globe have implemented policies which force their grant recipients to behave in a compliant way. For instance, the NIH OA policy mandates that research articles describing research they funded must be available via PubMedCentral within 12 months of publication. Other funders and also some institutions have implemented various policies with similar mandates.
This year we have two posters at the SfN meeting in sunny San Diego, Ca. The first poster is on Sunday morning, Nov.