[I am using the term “megajournal” here to mean “journal that practices PLOS ONE -style peer-review for correctness only, ignoring guesses at possible impact”. It’s not a great term for this class of journals, but it seems to be becoming established as the default.] Bo-Christer Björk​’s (2015) new paper in PeerJ asks the question “Have the “mega-journals” reached the limits to growth?”, and suggests that the answer may be yes.

Provoked by Mike Eisen’s post today, The inevitable failure of parasitic green open access, I want to briefly lay out the possible futures of scholarly publishing as I see them.

A couple of months ago, Darren (the silent partner in the SV-POW!

Somehow this seems to have slipped under the radar: National Science Foundation announces plan for comprehensive public access to research results. They put it up on 18 March, two whole months ago, so our apologies for not having said anything until now! This is the NSF’s rather belated response to the OSTP memo on Open Access, back in January 2013.

Matt drew my attention to an old paper I’d not seen before: Riggs (1903) on the vertebral column of Brontosaurus . The page I linked there shows only the first page (which in fact is half a page, since Riggs’ work is only in the right column). Why only the first page? As Matt put it, “It’s been 110 years, just give us the PDF already.

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In response to my post Copyright from the lens of reality and other rebuttals of his original post, Elseviers General Counsel Mark Seeley has provided a lengthy comment. Here’s my response (also posted as a comment on the original article, but I’m waiting for it to be moderated.)   Hi, Mark, thanks for engaging. You write: Here, at least, we are in complete agreement.

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This post is a response to Copyright from the lens of a lawyer (and poet) , posted a couple of days ago by Elsevier’s General Counsel, Mark Seeley. Yes, I am a slave to SIWOTI syndrome. No, I shouldn’t be wasting my time responding to this. Yes, I ought to be working on that exciting new manuscript that we SV-POW!er Rangers have up and running.

While Mike’s been off having fun at the Royal Society, this has been happening: Lots of feathers flying right now over the situation at the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA). The short, short version is that AMPCo, the company that publishes MJA, made plans to outsource production of the journal, and apparently some sub-editing and administrative functions as well, to Elsevier.