The highly prestigious journal Nature this week announced that it is going to be publishing all peer reviews alongside the articles it publishes. This means that the reviews attached to each publication will be available for all to read, although reviewer identities will remain anonymous unless they opt to sign their review.

As a 2024-5 Open Future Fellow, I explored AI across the research and publishing lifecycle. The output of this research is available as a report here: https://openfuture.eu/publication/governing-the-scholarly-ai-commons Summary: In recent years, commercial publishers and information analytics companies have increased their reliance on AI-based technologies to conduct a range of tasks across the research lifecycle.

I’ve just published a preprint on F1000 Research of a new article on community-led publishing projects at the University of Cambridge. It’s co-authored with Dr. Mandy Wigdorowitz at the University of Alabama. Title: “I just very much love the journal”:

I’m guest editing a special issue for the Journal of Electronic Publishing on open research for the humanities and social sciences. The call for papers is below: Call for papers: Special Issue on Open Research for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Today Janneke Adema and I published a new article in the journal New Formations entitled ‘‘Just One Day of Unstructured Autonomous Time’: Supporting Editorial Labour for Ethical Publishing within the University’. The article will be available in our repositories but is also currently freely accessible via the New Formations site: https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/newformations/vol-2023-issue-110/abstract-9909/ (although I’m not

In the past week, three senior research strategy figures at the University of Oxford have called for removing the open access ‘burden’ from the rules for the next Research Excellence Framework (REF). For the past REF excercise, open access has been a requirement for all submitted journal articles and UKRI are also now consulting on plans to include books within the rules for the next exercise.

Last week, The Scholarly Kitchen posted an article by Angela Cochran,Vice President of Publishing at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, about the inability of publishers to deal with research fraud. She writes: Cochran’s argument is that although publishers manage the peer review process, it was never an expectation of peer review that they would perform ‘forensic analysis’ of datasets and associated materials.

Open access policy mandates have never been an effective way of convincing researchers of the benefits of exploring alternative, open publishing practices. Forcing someone to do something will not help them engage with the reasons for doing it. Instead, the mandate feels like a simple tickbox exercise that can be ignored once fulfilled.

Today’s Scholarly Kitchen blog post is an attempt by David Crotty — the blog’s editor — to quantify the increasing consolidation of the academic publishing industry. Crotty concludes: It’s helpful to have more data on the increasing power that a small number of academic publishers hold.

Text of a talk given to the COPIM end-of-project conference: “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”, April 20th 2023 Open access publishing has always had a difficult relationship with smoothness and scale.

Yesterday, the preprint repositories bioRxiv/medRxiv and arXiv released coordinated statements on the recent memo on open science from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. While welcoming the memo, the repositories claim that the ‘rational choice’ for making research immediately accessible would be to mandate preprints for all federally funded research.