A few weeks ago, I noted that the new journal Biology Open , which had just published its very first issue, had made the unfortunate choice to use the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.

My new piece is now up the LSE Impact Blog — in which I recognise that it’s a mistake to think of Elsevier and other for-profit barrier-based publishers as evil.  The money quote: For the rest, read the article: Visibility is currency in academia but it is scarcity in publishing. The push for open access shows that academic publishers can’t serve two masters. By the way, if you read it, do leave a comment;

A short one, because I’ve been commenting on other people’s blogs a lot recently ( Scholarly Kitchen , Open and Shut , The Scientist ) and it infuriates me how hard it is get a good back-and-forth discussion going in those venues. The contrast of course is with SV-POW!

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Well, I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog trying to determine what the terms are for Elsevier’s elective open-access articles — what they term “Sponsored Articles”.

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I have discovered a new nugget of information in my ongoing quest (part 1, part 2, part 3) to discover what the licence terms are for author-pays Gold Open Access articles in Elsevier journals. You will recall from way back in part 1 that Elsevier’s own “Sponsored Articles” page doesn’t include that information. A while after I posted that, they added a link to this page.

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I was searching for some information — what proportion of Elsevier’s revenue is from journal subscriptions.  So far, I’ve been unsuccessful with that (can anyone help?), but along the way I stumbled across Elsevier’s Annual Reports and Financial Statements for 2011. And it makes happy reading.

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In the middle of February, Times Higher Education ran a piece by Elsevier boycott originator Tim Gowers, entitled Occupy publishing .