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.

[Today’s live-blog is brought to you by Yvonne Nobis, science librarian at Cambridge, UK. Thanks, Yvonne! — Mike.] Session 1 — The Journal Article: is the end in sight? Slightly late start due to trains – ! Just arrived to hear Aileen Fyfe University of St Andrews saying that something similar to journal articles will be needed for ‘quite some time’. Steven Hall, IOP.

I’ll try to live-blog the first day of part 2 of the Royal Society’s Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication meeting, as I did for the first day of part 1. We’ll see how it goes. Here’s the schedule for today and tomorrow. Session 1: the reproducibility problem Chair: Alex Halliday, vice-president of the Royal Society Introduction to reproducibility.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

[This is a guest-post by Richard Poynder , a long-time observer and analyst of academic publishing now perhaps best known for the very detailed posts on his Open and Shut blog. It was originally part of a much longer post on that blog, the introduction to an interview with the publisher MDPI.

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When a paper goes for peer-review at PLOS ONE, the reviewers are told not to make any judgement about how important or sexy or “impacty” the paper is — to judge it only on methodical soundness. All papers that are judged sound are to be published without making guesses about which will and won’t improve the journal’s reputation through being influential down the line.

Copied from an email exchange. Mike: Did we know about the Royal Society’s PLOS ONE-clone? http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/about I am in favour of this. I might well send them my next paper while the universal waiver is still in place. Matt: Did not know about it. Their post-waiver APC is insane. How can they possibly justify $1600?

The REF (Research Excellence Framework) is a time-consuming exercise that UK universities have to go through every few years to assess and demonstrate the value of their research to the government; the way funding is allocated between universities is largely dependent on the results of the REF. The exercise is widely resented, in part because the processes of preparing and reviewing the submissions are so time-consuming.

I’m at the Royal Society today and tomorrow as part of the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication conference. Here’s the programme. I’m making some notes for my own benefit, and I thought I might as well do them in the form of a blog-post, which I will continuously update, in case anyone else is interested.

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