Support for the open access movement has grown in recent years, and today more than a quarter of scholarly literature is freely available. Yet, despite years of advocacy work and countless policies and mandates promoting openness, the majority of researchers are still not compelled to make their research outputs publicly available. Why is this the case? What barriers stand in the way of creating real change?

From May 16 to 18, the ScholCommLab’s Research Associate Dr. Katherine Reilly and Carol Muñoz Nieves attended RightsCon Toronto, an international event that brought together policy makers, human rights advocates, business leaders, scholars, and others to tackle leading human rights issues in the digital age.

On May 2, ScholCommLab director Juan Alperin flew to Mexico City to attend the annual Congreso de Revistas, a three-day long event focused on Latin American scholarly publishing. The conference, which took place at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), brought together researchers, journal editors, students, and speakers from across the world to discuss the advancement of scientific publishing from the global south.

With more than 2.2 billion active users—six times as many as Twitter—Facebook is by far the largest social media platform on the web today. Yet despite its popularity, studies investigating Facebook sharing have reported surprisingly low levels of user engagement with scholarly research on the platform. Are Facebook users really sharing fewer academic articles than Twitter users?

Looking Ahead to SCW18’s “How I Scicomm” Panel What does it mean to be a science communicator in 2018?

Earlier this year, the ImpactStory team of Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem launched Unpaywall, a new browser extension that helps users find free, easy-to-access research. Since officially launching in April, Unpaywall has been installed by over 85,000 users who have collectively made over 75 million requests.