In the last few weeks, it’s been my pleasure and privilege to give invited talks on open access to both UCL and the University of Ulster. (Both of them went well, thanks for asking.) Now they come to process expenses, and both universities have asked for scans of my passport. I explained to UCL that I was only expecting expenses, not a fee, and they backed down;

As has now been widely reported, NISO have a $200K grant from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation to develop standards for AltMetrics. Why? If there’s one consistent lesson from standardisation processes, it’s that standards which codify existing practice do well, while those that try to invent new practice in the form of a standard do badly.

A few days ago I explained why I don’t think “hybrid OA” is a legitimate path to the full-open-access world we all want. The TL;DR is first that it’s offered at stupidly high prices, and secondly that it’s completely impossible to detect or prevent double-dipping because journal subscriptions are the most opaquely priced good in the known universe.

I know I’ve written about this before, but Richard Poynder’s new post reminds me that we Brits really do need to be up in arms over the abject behaviour of our supposed representatives, the research councils (RCUK). As a direct result of this policy, the publisher Emerald has now introduced 24-month embargoes on RCUK-funded papers, where before it had none.

Here’s what Science Europe, an association of European research and funding organisations, said in their recent position statement Principles on the Transition to Open Access to Research Publications : The term “hybrid open access” refers to a subscription journal in which individual articles can optionally be made open access on payment of a fee — for the Big Four publishers, typically (though not always) in the

Looking again at Clay Shirky’s “How we will read” interview, I re-read these now classic words: Here’s what Shirky could have gone on to say, but didn’t. An unfortunate side-effect of this shift is that we still have these big, lumbering publishing corporations clogging up the landscape, with nothing constructive to do . And the reason that’s a problem rather than merely a waste, is that whereas it used to take special

Here’s a thing … Looks like the first ever mention of PeerJ on this blog was a year and nine days ago. All we said in that first post was “… the proliferation of other publishing experiments such as F1000 Research and PeerJ …” with no further comment. That was just before the formal launch of PeerJ, which was on 12 June.

On 29th May, I gave a frankly evangelistic talk on open access at UCL’s “Future Univercities” seminar. I was the first of three speakers on the panel.

Introduction I’m sure we all remember the White House OSTP’s recent memo on open access — a huge step forward that extends an NIH-like Green OA policy to all US federally funded research. It was a triumph for common sense, an explicit repudiation of the mindset behind the Research Works Act, and an affirmation for the ongoing FASTR legislation.

This post pulls together information on basic parameters of tubular bones from Currey & Alexander (1985), on ASP from Wedel (2005), and on calculating the densities of bones from Wedel (2009: Appendix). It’s all stuff we’ve covered at one point or another, I just wanted to have it all in one convenient place.

I just got this message from Rana Ashour of Paleontology Journal , an open-access journal published by Hindawi, who are generally felt to be a perfectly legitimate publisher: (Apart from anything else, the waiving of APCs pretty clearly indicates that this is not a scam journal.) I replied: Let’s hope they go with it. I’d love them to build another low-cost, high-quality, journal in the palaeontology OA space, to compete with