Ross Mounce

So I read Jeffrey Brainard’s piece in

 Science

magazine on Clarivate’s decision to punish

 eLife

for innovating – by stripping

 eLife

of a proprietary Journal Impact Factor™ number, that Clarivate itself awards (sidenote: to be clear, I see no value in Journal Impact Factors as they are statistically illiterate, irreproducible, and easily gameable, amongst many other issues that have long been documented). With the

Web of Science can’t handle innovation

If you’re getting a sense of déjà vu from this blog post title it is probably because we’ve been here before e.g. in 2017, in 2016, in 2015, in 2014. These profitable ‘errors’ seem to keep occurring… Today, Elsevier sold me 48-hours of access to an article in the journal

 Computational Toxicology

, with the title: “Ab initio chemical safety assessment: A workflow based on exposure considerations and non-animal methods“. The price?

Elsevier selling access to an open access article, again (2024 edition)

How best to link the figure, to the paper &amp; the underlying data? Whilst visiting EBI, Hinxton yesterday, Robert Hanson (computational chemist) reminded me of an interesting hack you can do to embed data in images. Back in 2010 it was widely reported that people were using Flickr to transmit data (secretly) in images.

Steganography, phylogenetics and Flickr

“In statistics, a central tendency (or measure of central tendency) is a central or typical value for a probability distribution. Colloquially, measures of central tendency are often called averages. The most common measures of central tendency are the arithmetic mean, the median, and the mode.” — Wikipedia.  In the UK, we teach school kids how to calculate the mean, median, and mode in Year 6 (kids aged 10-11), it’s simple stuff.

Central Tendency, Citation Distributions, and Springer Nature (Part 2)

Today I received proof that Elsevier are also sending takedown notices to

 UK universities

– asking them to takedown copies of their staff’s academic research papers, hosted on

 university

webpages. The full text is further down this post (in red). It is not just Academia.edu, it is not just the University of Calgary, University of California-Irvine, or Harvard University.

Elsevier is also sending takedown requests to UK universities

I am highly curious as to why Elsevier do not seem to be responding to emails at the moment:  Four days ago, continuing an existing thread on the public GOAL mailing list, I wrote to Dr Alicia Wise (Director of Access and Policy at Elsevier), about how Elsevier’s paywall systems are wrongly defrauding readers across the world by charging them to access content that has been paid-for to be open access.

Seeking Justice for Readers

The TL;DR summary: In February 2017, when Elsevier were accused of selling one paid-for hybrid open access article, at first they sowed doubt about it, then three days later admitted it to be true. In their admission they state that it is the only wrongly paywalled open access article “affected” at their websites.

The TL;DR summary:
 

* In February 2017, when Elsevier were accused of selling one paid-for hybrid open access article, at first they sowed doubt about it, then three days later admitted it to be true. In their admission they state that it is the only wrongly paywalled open access article “affected” at their websites.

Hybrid open access is unreliable

TL;DR Elsevier are selling access to open access articles again

I saw this humorous tweet today: This tweet references the fact that Elsevier have been caught selling access to paid-for “open access” articles in 2014, 2015, and 2016.

Elsevier selling access to open access again

Any good scientist knows that one must have an adequate experimental control when trying to determine the significance of effects. Therefore, in order to test the significance of the 106 broken DOIs I reported at OUP yesterday, I created a comparable stratified ‘control’ sample of 21 journals NOT published by OUP that are indexed in pubmed.

Comparing OUP to other publishers

Updated 2017-02-01: Mathematical equation rendering failures spotted at the journal ‘Molecular Biology &amp; Evolution’ (MBE). Added to the lengthy list.

In this post I shall try and summarise the different types of error that are occurring across Oxford University Press (OUP) journals at the moment.

Documenting the many failures across OUP journals

Last Saturday I went to Hack4Ac – a hackday in London bringing together many sections of the academic community in pursuit of two goals: To demonstrate the value of the CC-BY licence within academia. We are interested in supporting innovations around and on top of the literature. To reach out to academics who are keen to learn or improve their programming skills to better their research.

Hack4ac recap

This is a re-post, originally first blogged by myself on the Open Knowledge Foundation main blog here

Recently Science Europe published a clear and concise position statement titled:

 Principles on the Transition to Open Access to Research Publications

This is an extremely timely &amp; important document that clarifies what governments and research funders should expect during the transition to open access.

Science Europe denounces ‘hybrid’ Open Access [another repost]

My final repost today (edited) from the Open Knowledge Foundation blog. It’s a little old, originally posted on the 16th of April, 2013 but I think it definitely deserves to be here on my blog as a record of my activities…

So… it’s over.

Panton Fellowship wrap-up [OKF repost]

So, the new RCUK open access policy is now in play… and guess what – there’s plenty of journals out there that are not accommodating it at the moment. Perhaps this is just out of ignorance? Perhaps this is an area where a little nudge from interested parties e.g. open access advocates, RCUK-funded academics, and other concerned people might help? With this aim I have just emailed the editorial board of the Taylor &amp;

RCUK policy non-compliant journals

TL;DR summary: ESA data papers should be free to read but Wiley (ESA’s new publishing ‘partner’) just charged me $45.60 yesterday to access one of them. They have done this kind of ‘accidental’ profit-generation before, as have other big publishers. John Wiley &amp;

TL;DR summary:
 
 ESA data papers should be free to read but Wiley (ESA’s new publishing ‘partner’) just charged me $45.60 yesterday to access one of them. They have done this kind of ‘accidental’ profit-generation before, as have other big publishers.

John Wiley &amp; Sons (whom I will refer to as ‘Wiley’ from now on) is not a very competent company when it comes to providing free or open access to research.

ESA moves to Wiley and predictably there are problems already

This has done the rounds on Twitter a lot recently, and justifiably-so but just in case you haven’t seen it yet… I thought I’d quickly blog about this excellent graph published on a FrontiersIn blog late last year (source/credit: http://blog.frontiersin.org/2015/12/21/4782/ )   With data from 570 different journals, it appears to demonstrate that rejection rate (the percentage of papers submitted, but NOT accepted for publication at a

Why do we rejoice in rejecting perfectly valid research?

I’ve written about MOOCs last December but never actually enrolled in one myself… until now. Sure, I’ve done Codecademy courses and Codeschool courses which I’ve immensely enjoyed but they’re perhaps(?) not quite the same thing.

I’ve enrolled in some MOOCs

So a week ago, I investigated publisher-produced Version of Record PDFs with

 pdfinfo

and the results were very disappointing. Lots of missing metadata was found and one could not reliably identify most of these PDFs from metadata alone, let alone extract particular fields of interest. But Rod Page kindly alerted to me the fact that I might be using the wrong tool for this investigation.

PDF metadata: different tool, same story

Today (2015-09-01), marks the public announcement of Research Ideas &amp; Outcomes (RIO for short), a new open access journal for all disciplines that seeks to open-up the entire research cycle with some truly novel features I know what you might be thinking:

 Another open access journal? Really?

Myself, nor Daniel Mietchen simply wouldn’t be involved with this project if it was just another boring open access journal.

I am supporting RIO Journal. I think you should too

I’ve been on holiday to Japan recently, so work came to a halt on this for a while but I think I’ve largely ‘done’ PLOS ONE full text now (excluding supplementary materials).  My results are on github: https://github.com/rossmounce/NHM-specimens/tree/master/results – one prettier file without the exact provenance or in-sentence context of each putative specimen entity, and one more extensive file with provenance &amp;

Progress on specimen mining

Wow! Where to begin… In this post I shall

 attempt

to summarise some of OKFestival 2012.

 Some Background:

I had been to the Open Knowledge Conference last year (in Berlin), where I gave an invited talk on Open Palaeontology and met lots of brilliant people in the Open Science community like Bjoern Brembs, Cameron Neylon &amp; Peter Murray-Rust.

The Open Knowledge Festival 2012, Helsinki: some notes

you weren’t much loved in your short existence you weren’t much use to readers or text-miners because we often couldn’t find where you were – hiding amongst shadows. you were significantly more expensive than your ‘full’ open access cousins  In March, 2015 ‘hybrid OA’ died after a short-life of neglect.

A Eulogy for Hybrid OA

*[Update 2015-03-13: I have blogged further about this here and provided a recap here. This post has been viewed over 10,000 times. Clearly some people want to sweep this under the carpet and pretend this is just ‘a storm in a teacup’ but it did happen and people do care about this.

Elsevier illegally sold me a Creative Commons non-commercial licensed article

To try and publicize the variety of Gold Open Access article publication options on offer, I’ve decided to create a visualization of the journal data that has previously been collected as part of my survey of ‘Open Access’ publisher licenses’ spreadsheet. Here is version 0.1 of the ‘Mounce plot’ (much more data still to be added!

A visualization of Gold Open Access options

It’s the Olympics now so this work update is a) late and b) short  Nevermind…  As ever progress has been exciting – look what we can extract from some PDFs:  (click to enlarge each) Attribution: The left panel is from Cánovas et al. BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:371 doi:10.1186/1471-2148-11-371  On the left is the original figure, and on the right we have an SVG representation of the data we can extract automatically from this figure.

Panton Fellowship updates: July (month 4)

just a quick post…  I’m pretty shocked at the poor indexing service given by Thompson Reuters Web of Knowledge (or ISI Web of Science as you might know it).  I’ve unashamedly bashed them before and I’ll bash them again here.

Beware when using Thompson Reuters Web of Knowledge

I have previously commented elsewhere on other blogs, that uniquely, with BOAI-compliant Open Access literature, one is able to re-distribute research however one wishes (provided proper attribution is given). I believe this to be hugely beneficial and perhaps a rather under-appreciated facet of the plurality of benefits offered by Open Access publishing.

Libre redistribution – a key facet of Open Access

Research Councils UK (RCUK) – a partnership of seven core UK research funding bodies (AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, and STFC), has recently released a very welcome draft policy document detailing their proposed Open Access

 mandate

, for all research which they help fund.

The new RCUK draft Open Access mandate

I’ve been travelling rather a LOT in the last 6 weeks or so; Rhossili Bay, London, Edinburgh, Leicester, Barcelona, Cambridge. It’s so nice to be back in Bath for a bit again.

#RoadWarrior

I need a space to layout my thoughts in a longer form than Twitter or Facebook.  So I thought: “hey, why not start a blog?” -&gt; TA-DA!  *Posts will be infrequent and sporadic both in tempo and topic   Many thanks to http://twitter.com/jezcope for the quick hands-on WordPress tutorial, and Mark Hahnel for suggesting I blog here.

First Post

[Back when this blog was first started, it was hosted on www.science3point0.com (now defunct), and it was called Palaeophylophenomics] 1.) It’s a

 formerly was a

Googlewhackblatt 2.) It’s a Portmantaeu word combining my principle research interests, namely: Palaeontology (UK spelling!), Phylogenetics, and Phenomics sensu O’Leary and Kaufman (2011). 3.) Basically a convenient, informative unique identifier for this new blog. Love it?

What is Palaeophylophenomics?

This post is about my new preprint I’ve uploaded to PeerJ PrePrints:

 Mounce, R. (2015) Dark Research: information content in some paywalled research papers is not easily discoverable online. PeerJ PrePrints

Needless to say, it’s not peer-reviewed yet but you can change that by commenting on it at the excellent PeerJ PrePrints website. All feedback is welcome.

Dark Research: behind the preprint

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 growing monopoly of academic IP by Elsevier

Considering I emailed him on a Friday, Darin Croft has done well to reply to my questions about the SVP abstract embargo so soon, on Monday. I don’t always get such swift replies, so that is much appreciated.

Answers to questions about the SVP meeting abstract embargo

Yesterday, I made a journal scraper for the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM).  Fortunately, Richard Smith-Unna and the ContentMine team have done most of the hard work in creating the general framework with quickscrape (open-source and available on github), I just had to modify the available journal-scrapers to work with IJSEM.

Making a journal scraper

I handed in my thesis not long ago, on Thursday 3rd October 2013. No idea when my viva is yet.

Acknowledgements

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.

Opportunity Knocks

This is a parody of a recent blog post over in Elsevier-land by David Tempest.

Copyright in an Open Access World – a parody

I just sent this email to Darin Croft (of SVP). I chose to contact him because he recently answered questions about the embargo for EmbargoWatch and it was rather unclear who else I should approach. I did

 not

want to blanket email the whole council.

Some further questions for SVP about their talk abstract embargo

I’ve just given an email interview for Abby Clobridge, for a forthcoming short column in Online Searcher. I give many of these interviews and often very little material from it gets used, so I asked Abby if it was okay if I reposted what I wrote. Her response: “go for it” – thanks Abby! So here’s my thoughts on Generation Open, for a readership of librarians and information professionals:

My thoughts on Generation Open

Doing some information research ahead of my imminent OKCon 2011, Berlin talk, it’s come to my attention that the Open Access journal PLoS ONE is actually an excellent journal to publish in, with respect to Impact Factor. In the Digital Age, journals are merely vessels in which we can publish our research.

If PLoS ONE Paleontology was a journal…

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m very passionate on the subject of data sharing in science, and after all the relevant conferences I’ve been to and research I’ve done – I don’t mind saying I’m fairly knowledgeable on the subject too.  It’s part of the reason I got this Panton Fellowship that has helped me develop my work and do what I want to do in pursuit of Open Data goals.  So when I saw this article come up on my RSS feeds – I thought great!

From card catalogs to computers: databases in vertebrate paleontology

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.

The Ecological Society of America wants ‘input’ on Open Access

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:

My submission for the House of Lords inquiry

My full comments on the PLOS ONE manuscript submission modelling paper:

On 27 January 2015 at 23:05, Chris Woolston &lt;REDACTED&gt; wrote: Yep I remember. Sure why not? Thanks for the compliment :) Salinas S, Munch SB (2015) Where Should I Send It? Optimizing the Submission Decision Process. PLoS ONE 10(1): e0115451. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0115451 A worthy choice.

Manuscript submission modelling – my comments in full

Yesterday, I dragged myself out of bed (it was a Saturday!) to go to my first ever ‘hackathon’. Thankfully it was a lot less geeky than it sounds – just a cosy little get together of people interested in Open Science, to work on things in a shared public space. Nick Stenning, Stefan Wehrmeyer, Jenny Molloy, Caspar Addyman and I all beavering away on our laptops at the Barbican Centre, later joined by surprise guest Todd Vision (Dryad &amp;

Reflections on the OKFN Open Science hackday

UPDATE

01/06/11

 I’ve now submitted a modified version of this abstract. Many thanks to all who commented.

One of the many conferences I’m going to this year is a fairly big event. The abstract deadline also happens to be very soon too. So I thought I’d post a draft of my abstract here and see what peeps think. Is my Latin correctly formed? What do you think?

A Conference Abstract #OpenDraft

[Rather than summarise what’s already been said about Elsevier and their for-excessive-profit practices in recent weeks, I’ll just lazily assume you’ve read it all… right then. Here’s what I have to add.]

This post is a real-world anecdote of the problems that Elsevier’s journal bundling &amp; excessive profiteering*** causes.

Journal mega-bundles &amp; TheCostOfKnowledge

Why is it so difficult to identify academic publisher PDFs?   With published MP3 files of *audio *you get rather good metadata. Take for example an MP3 file I downloaded from Hacker Public Radio available at the bottom of this post.

PDF metadata – why so poor?

I’ve been rather preoccupied in the last few months hence the lack of blog posts. (Apologies!) Here’s a quick recap of some things I’ve done since July: Got married in China (in September) Successfully proposed that the Systematics Association (of which I’m a council member) should sign DORA Gave an invited talk on open science at an INNGE workshop at INTECOL 2013 Completed and

 handed-in my PhD thesis

last Thursday!

Setting-up AMI2 on Windows

[Update: I’ve submitted this idea as a FORCE11 £1K Challenge research proposal 2015-01-13. I may be unemployed from April 2015 onwards (unsolicited job offers welcome!), so I certainly might find myself with plenty of time on my hands to properly get this done…!]

Inspired by something I heard Stephen Curry say recently, and with a little bit of help from Jo McIntyre I’ve started a project to compare EuropePMC author manuscripts

Author manuscripts versus the publisher version of record

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

Revaluing Science in the Digital Age

After more than 6 months of waiting, my long overdue first paper has

 finally

been published in Nature Why do I say ‘long overdue’? Doesn’t it usually take a long time for academic papers to get published?

My 1st peer-review published paper

Part inspired by the ‘Bugs!’ blogging contest, part inspired by Morgan Jackson’s post I thought I’d write some thoughts and observations on the recent FlyToL paper (Wiegmann

 et al.

, PNAS, 2011). [

 IMPORTANT UPDATE


 Since I wrote this blogpost, the authors have made the data publicly available.

A FlyTree in the Ointment of Falsifiability

In this post I’ll go through an illustrated example of what I plan to do with my text mining project: linking-up biological specimens from the Natural History Museum, London (sometimes known as BMNH or NHMUK) to the published research literature with persistent identifiers. I’ve run some simple grep searches of the PMC open access subset already, and PLOS ONE make up a significant portion of the ‘hits’, unsurprisingly.

BMNH specimens used in PLOS ONE

I’ve been invited to come in and have an informal chat about open access with the Linnean Society on March 24th this month. Particularly with regard to what is and what is not ‘open access’ in terms of Creative Commons licences. I write this blog post to spur on other advocates to try and encourage their society journals to use proper, open access compliant article licencing that

 facilitates

rather than prevents text &amp;

Discussing Open Access with the Linnean Society

A quick blog from Meise, Belgium at the Pro-iBiosphere wrap-up event. Yesterday I gave a talk about my progress liberating, and making searchable, OA figures from academic literature:

 Liberating OA figures from PDF to Flickr (a Pro-iBiosphere talk)

from

 Ross Mounce

I’ve had a lot of great feedback and interest in what I’m doing with this.

Progress Update from Meise, Belgium

In the last 2 weeks I’ve given talks in Brussels &amp; Amsterdam. The first one was given during a European Commission (Brussels) working group meeting on Text &amp; Data Mining. There were perhaps only ~30 people in the room for that. The second presentation was given just a few days ago at Beyond The PDF 2 (#btpdf2) in Amsterdam.

Worldwide Dissemination

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

Gold OA Pricewatch

Having just written a lengthy blog post / rant about publishing data for another blog (I’ll link to it later if/when it gets published). I thought I’d post a technical demonstration of my issues here. I want need to extract simple matrices of numbers from research papers for my PhD research. Theoretically, I shouldn’t even need to do this.

Using off-the-shelf OCR to re-extract data

This is a

 re-post

of something I was invited to write to sum-up my experiences at OKCon 2011.

Open Palaeontology @OKCon2011 (Berlin)

I’m really pleased this new Open Access paper has just been published.

Research data should be appropriately licensed with re-use in mind

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

The Gold OA plot v0.2

I realise thus far, I may not have explained too clearly

 exactly

what I’m doing for my Panton fellowship. With this post I shall attempt to remedy this and shed a little more light on what I’ve been doing lately.

Content mining for phylogenetic data

Sometimes you just have to laugh… The year is 2012, we have the internet, we have blogs, and a huge variety of other tools to enable free, efficient and rapid communication of information and yet the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting rules still

 insist

that all information within this year’s abstract booklet remain a big secret until the day of the event. Many others have justly written to complain about this before.

The ridiculous SVP embargo is back again

It’s that time again… time to write my monthly Panton Fellowship update. The trouble is, as I start writing this it’s 6am (London, UK). I arrived back from the Hennig XXXI meeting (University of California Riverside) after a long flight yesterday and am

 supremely

jetlagged. I still can’t decide whether this is awesome (I can get more work done, by waking up earlier), or terrible as I can’t keep my eyes open past 9pm at night!

Panton Fellowship updates: June (month 3)

Building upon the instructions given here and here I thought I’d write up one of the many useful things Pablo Goloboff kindly taught us at the TNT scripting workshop after the Hennig XXXI meeting. It’s actually not the easiest thing to setup if you’re using Ubuntu… Pablo had to help me do it – I would never have got it up and running on my own.

Running TNT in parallel

This article is cross-posted from the main Open Knowledge Foundation blog, where I occasionally post. I realise I haven’t had time to post here on my own blog for over a month now(!), so I may well copy across a few more posts I’ve written for OKF.

Here at the Open Knowledge Foundation, we know Open Science is tough, but ultimately rewarding. It requires courage &amp; leadership to take the open path in science.

The White House Seeks Champions of Open Science

Earthquake shakes Twitter users

I wrote a piece for The Systematist newsletter last year which has now been published &amp; disseminated to members. The official version won’t be freely accessible from the website until next year (instant access is currently a perk of Systematics Association membership

 only

) so in the meantime I’ll re-blog it here: Is this the first mention of #icanhazpdf in scholarly literature?

Twitter tips for Systematists

So, apparently Elsevier are launching a new open access mega-journal some time this year, joining the bandwagon of similar efforts from almost every other major publisher. A lovely acknowledgement of the roaring success of PLOS ONE, who did it first a long time ago. They’re only ~8 years behind, but they’re learning. I for one am pleased they are asking the research community what they want from this new journal.

Elsevier wants our feedback. Here’s mine

This post was originally posted over at the LSE Impact blog where I was kindly invited to write on this theme by the Managing Editor. It’s a widely read platform and I hope it inspires some academics to upload more of their work for everyone to read and use

Recently I tried to explain on twitter in a few tweets how everyone can take easy steps towards open scholarship with their own work.

Easy steps towards open scholarship

[UPDATE: 2015-01-07 It appears the full text of this article is now freely available from the publishers website. A moving wall system? This still doesn’t change the fact that this article was not publically available for 12 months. The maximum embargo allowed by MRC funding is just 6 months from publication.]

I note with interest that article publication charge data from the University of Edinburgh has been released on Figshare today.

Do ‘green’ access strategies actually achieve public access?

[Update 2015-09-19: since writing this, I notice my open access article has now been unpaywalled at Wiley’s site. No-one from Wiley has reached out to me to explain how, why, or when this happened. No compensation has been offered, nor any apology. I note that all the other articles in the special section, which should also be open access (CC BY) are still on sale, behind a paywall.

I&#8217;m saying NO to Wiley

Last week, on Monday 19th January, I co-organised the first ever Open Research London event at Imperial College London, with the help of local organisers; Jon Tennant &amp; Torsten Reimer. We invited two speakers for our first meeting: Chris Banks (Director of Library Services at Imperial, and an elected Board Member of Research Libraries UK) &amp;

Open Research London launch event

Nature has announced a press release about a new scheme they’ve come up with to legalise begging to view research.

Nature’s Beggar Access

Elsevier seem to have responded to my criticism yesterday and have stopped selling the article “HIV infection en route to endogenization: two cases” from their ScienceDirect website. Take what you will from that change, but I infer that they have realised that they are in the wrong. Actually, they are still selling it from the ScienceDirect website too. It only looked freely available to me because I myself had paid for access to it &amp;

Another day, another Elsevier website illegally selling articles

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.

Notes on my Palaeontology [Online] guest post

In a recent series of posts I’ve become fascinated with how unnecessarily fragile the scholarly communications system seems to be in 2017:  Oxford University Press have failed to preserve access to the scholarly record (23-01-2017)  Documenting the many failures across OUP journals (24-01-2017)  Comparing OUP to other publishers (25-01-2107)  As a reminder, academics literally invented the internet, I think we can and should be doing

Monitoring publishing services

There are a lot of really interesting works being published over at Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).  If you aren’t already following the updates you can do so via RSS, Twitter, or via email (scroll to the bottom for sign-up).  In this post I’m going to discuss why Chad Hammond’s contribution is so remarkable and why it could represent an exciting model for a more transparent and more immediate future of scholarly communications.

Publishing grant proposals, presubmission

[Update 5.30PM 2015-03-26: Wiley have now ‘freed’ the wrongly-paywalled articles in response to this. It doesn’t change the fact that these articles were wrongly on sale for 2 months and 26 days.

Wiley are charging for access to thousands of articles that should be free

Just a quick post tonight. Yet another paywalled open access article. It’s becoming a daily occurrence!

Remarkable ongoing chaos at OUP

I’d just like to point out to anyone who asks, particularly CRC Press (part of Taylor&amp;Francis Group, who are in turn part of Informa PLC) that by posting the full text of my book chapter to Academia.edu I am *not* breaching the copyright transfer agreement I signed.

Edit Your Copyright Transfer Agreement Contract

[A monthly update on my Panton Fellowship related activities]  Last month I was slightly late with my monthly report, so this month I’m going to get things back on track and write my post now, on this leisurely sunny Sunday afternoon…  It’s been a good month:  First of all, I had the chance to speak about my Fellowship work for the Ede &amp; Ravenscroft Prize final.

Panton Fellowship updates: May (month 2)

UPDATE 2024-06-11 posted here. At the time of writing this (2024-04-11), the entire content of a “key” chemistry journal called

 Heterocycles

, with over 17,000 articles in it, from 1973 to 2023, has been knocked offline due to what the publisher vaguely describes as “various circumstances”. The journal has been unavailable to access online since December 2023, which means the content has been offline for four or five months now!

Things we can learn from the ongoing Heterocycles debacle

I’ve just read a paper published in

 Systematic Biology

called ‘A Falsification of the Citation Impediment in the Taxonomic Literature‘. Having read the full paper many times, including the 64-page PDF supplementary materials file. I’m amazed the paper was published in its current form.

What is Journal Visibility?

As you may have seen in the news, the British Library has been affected by a significant cyberattack. Many of the digital services it provides have gone down and stayed down for many weeks now, whilst investigations take place. I have a lot of sympathy for the BL staff. As has been observed, public services can be a relatively easy target.

Resilience: another advantage of openly-licensed content

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.

Gold OA Pricewatch #2 – BMC journal APCs increase

If you haven’t heard yet – I was successful in my Panton Fellowship proposal  I wasn’t the only successful applicant either – huge congratulations to Sophie Kershaw and her excellent proposal to train doctoral students how to do Open Science at Oxford University.

The Panton Fellowship – April (month 1)

How many learned societies publish Diamond Open Access journals? To seek an answer to the question posed in the title, I sought out reliable data on open access journals.

To seek an answer to the question posed in the title, I sought out reliable data on open access journals. My first port of call was the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Although DOAJ certainly isn’t a complete listing of open access journals, as is well documented in ‘The OA Diamond Journals Study’ (2021), it will at least help provide a minimum bound answer to the question.

How many learned societies publish Diamond Open Access journals?

The day today is Tuesday 11th June 2024. It marks at least 193 days now since the subscription access journal

 Heterocycles

(e-ISSN: 1881-0942) was taken offline by its publisher. Published since 1973, it is a “key” journal in chemistry and contains over 17,000 articles which have been cited at least 164,000 times. The journal is preserved in the CLOCKSS archive.

Time to update the CLOCKSS?

A couple of days ago I posted specifically about the data re-use session. I’m going to use this post to muse about the conference more generally. About SpotOn London 2012 It used to be called Science Online London – an informative, sensible and appropriate name. This year I hear (rumours) that it

 had

to change name to SpotOn because Science AAAS or some other litigious entity was claiming brand identity infringement.

yet another #solo12 recap (part2)

Last Friday, I genuinely thought Elsevier had illegally sold me an article that should have been open access. This post is to update you all on what we’ve found out since:

 The Scale of the Problem

No one really knows how many articles are wrongly paywalled at all of Elsevier’s various different sales websites.

Wrongly paywalled articles: a recap of what we now know

This is just a short post: to vent my anger at a fair few of my RSS feeds being totally FUBAR’d at the moment. It’s too long for a tweet, and too short for a full post, but here goes:  At least three of my ScienceDirect journal article alert RSS feeds are totally FUBAR’d at the moment.

FUBAR’d ScienceDirect RSS feeds

I’ve been quoted in a Nature News story about Open Access journal licencing. I’m a staunch defender of the use of the Creative Commons Attribution licence, as it’s a good licence for academic research. Here’s just some of what I sent Richard Van Noorden (Nature News) by email. I don’t blame him for only using select quotes.

Further info about the licences that free/open access journals use

I’m proud to announce an interesting public output from my BBSRC-funded postdoc project:

 PLUTo: Phyloinformatic Literature Unlocking Tools. Software for making published phyloinformatic data discoverable, open, and reusable

PLOS ONE PHYLOGENY

After sending a letter to my local MP, urging him to support the recommendations of the Hargreaves Report on Intellectual Property reform in parliament nearly a month ago (sent on the 17th June 2012) – I finally have a reply! Sadly, it’s not the reply I wanted. Don Foster does not appear willing to support the Early Day Motion on Intellectual Property law reform to further enable research, that I explicitly asked him to sign.

Nearly a month later my local MP responds…

Day 0 of OpenCon started with me missing the pre-conference drinks reception because my flight from Chicago was delayed by 2 hours. I got into Washington, D.C. (DCA) at about midnight &amp; then had to wait half an hour for a blue line train to take me the short distance from the airport to the conference hotel — I’m a diehard for public transport! Finally arriving at the hotel past 1 o’clock in the morning. Not a great start.

Generation Open: A Diary of OpenCon 2014

[Update: the conference itself will be in November, 2014 – this is just the first announcement!]  I’m super excited to announce I’m part of the international organizing committee for OpenCon 2014:            You can read the official first press release about this event here:  http://www.righttoresearch.org/act/opencon/announcement    here’s an excerpt from it:

A blog by Ross Mounce

It’s a small world in Palaeontology

A Conference Abstract #OpenDraft

#RoadWarrior

What is Palaeophylophenomics?

First Post