Ulrich Herb

As the year nears its end, it’s time for a look back at 2023 …  My university job  Summa cum Fraude   In 2023, a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) entitled Summa cum Fraude ended, which was dedicated to the question of how journals/publishers react to reports of obviously faked/erroneous publications – usually, soberingly, not at all.

A look back at 2023

In September, a journalistic article on Diamond Open Access (by Wolfgang Benedikt Schmal and myself) and a preprint on Transformative Open Access Agreements (by Laura Rothfritz, Wolfgang Benedikt Schmal, and myself) were published. On Diamond Open Access &amp;

On Diamond Open Access &amp; Transformative Agreements

Last week (at the 22nd of August) I downloaded data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and calculated the number of Open Access Journals per country as listed by the DOAJ (this quite trivial data can be downloaded as a CSV file here). Using this CSV file with the online service CartoDB I produced this heatmap visualizing the number of Open Access Journals per country.

Open Access Heatmap 2014

Joachim Schöpfel, Niels-Oliver Walkowski and I are excited to announce the Open Divide Lecture Series (2025–2026), a year-long exploration of the challenges, contradictions, and evolving landscape of Open Access and scholarly publishing.

Open Divide Lecture Series – Critical Perspectives on Open Access &amp; Scholarly Publishing

Just as 2015 and 2014 I produced an Open Access Heatmap using data provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). I calculated the number of Open Access Journals per country as listed by the DOAJ (this quite trivial data can be downloaded as a CSV file here, it was retrieved from the DOAJ yesterday). Using this CSV file with the online service CartoDB I produced the following heatmap visualizing the number of Open Access Journals per

Open Access Heatmap 2016

Just like last summer I produced an Open Access Heatmap using data provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). I calculated the number of Open Access Journals per country as listed by the DOAJ (this quite trivial data can be downloaded as a CSV file here). Using this CSV file with the online service CartoDB I produced the following heatmap visualizing the number of Open Access Journals per country.

Open Access Heatmap 2015

The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and Cooperation E-Medien Österreich (KEMÖ) have signed a three-year contract with the publishing house John Wiley and Sons Inc.

Austria agrees with Wiley on a national Open Access consortium

According to a press release by Springer Nature there is a new contract of the group with Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).  The deal is based on the principle of  “read and publish” and shall fulfill the requirements of Plan S. As noted by Springer Nature the “agreement limits the costs of publishing all UK articles open access (OA) while maintaining access to all of Springer’s subscription articles.

Springer Nature reaches £9.6&nbsp;million agreement in the UK – not included: Nature-branded titles

nnTwo days ago Clarivate Analytics announced a partnership with Impactstory to make Open access content easier for researchers to use. Clarivate operates the citation database Web of Science and plans to support the development of Impactstory’s oaDOI-service.nnThis service identifies 90 million Open Access articles, particularly important is its integration into unpaywall.org.

Partnership between Clarivate Analytics and Impactstory

The book “Open Divide: Critical Studies on Open Access” edited by Joachim Schöpfel and me, Ulrich Herb, was published in 2018.

The book

 “Open Divide: Critical Studies on Open Access”

edited by

 Joachim Schöpfel

and me,

 Ulrich Herb

, was published in 2018.

Open Divide &#8211; Critical Studies on Open Access 2018

Plan S, an initiative by European funders to increase open access to journal articles, has led to progress, but not in the way originally intended. Although it aimed to dismantle paywalls and boost fully open-access publishing, most of the growth has occurred in hybrid journals, which mix open-access and paywalled articles.

Plan S: Mixed Outcomes in Advancing Open Access Publishing

The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has announced a Green Open Access Deal with Wolters Kluwer:  “The parties have agreed that academic articles from these 27 journals will be eligible for publishing in the public domain 6 to 12 months after the date of their publication on Navigator and Wolters Kluwer’s other platforms.” The agreement covers 27 law journals.

The Netherlands reach Green Open Access Deal with Wolters Kluwer

And again a by-product of my dissertation thesis: I compared the numbers and shares of journals from all disciplines using

 Creative Commons (CC) licenses

with the numbers and shares of Open Access journals from Sociology using CC licenses. The date of data collection was June 8, 2014, the data source was the

 Directory of Open Access Journals DOAJ

, it listed 9.834 journals at the date mentioned.

Editors of sociological Open Access journals seem hesitant to adopt Open Knowledge principles

After three exciting years, scidecode as a formal company will be discontinued. What began as a label for my freelance work in science consulting in 2012 turned into a collaborative GbR (civil-law partnership) in 2022 with Laura Rothfritz and Pablo de Castro. Our mission was to provide independent, collaborative consulting on open science, research information, and strategic questions around scholarly infrastructures.

Closing the chapter on scidecode – a look back and ahead

While Finland entered into a nationwide consortium with the publishing house Elsevier, the neighbouring country Sweden did not take this step. After twenty years of business relationships with Elsevier, the Bibsam Consortium decided not to renew the agreement with the scientific publisher.  Bibsam wants to support the Swedish government’s requirement to publish all scientific output of the country in Open Access by 2026 – without embargoes.

Sweden cancels agreement with Elsevier

nnOn August 1, 2017, 9,621 journals were listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).Only 32 publishers published more than 20 of these journals and thus have a quantitatively significant influence on Open Access. PLOS can not be found among them, but still has influence – more qualitative than quantitative.nnThese 32 publishers publish 2,950 journals, which are 31% of all journals listed in the DOAJ.nnAt this date, the DOAJ

Commercial Open Access Publishers in the DOAJ

Readers of my blog know that some weeks ago I last asked the community for information on services that are owned by Elsevier. I needed the information to prepare a talk on data collection on science and event logging in science. I will soon publish my talk, together with a resume. As suggested in my talk, Elsevier uses the technology of the

Elsevier launches new Repository BioRN

Am 26. Juni 2025 durfte ich an der Fachhochschule Münster über ein Thema sprechen, das vielen Wissenschaftler*innen unter den Nägeln brennt:

 Wie publiziere ich sinnvoll, sichtbar und nachhaltig?

In meinem Vortrag „Publikationsstrategien für Wissenschaftler*innen“ ging es unter anderem um:

 Warum überhaupt publizieren?

Zwischen

 Publish or Perish

und echter Wissenschaftskommunikation: Reputation, Karrierewege

Erfolgreich Publizieren in der Wissenschaft: Strategien, Trends und Tools

Anlässlich der Open-Access-Tage 2017 in Dresden referierte ich in der Session “Debatten” dazu, inwiefern sich Open Access zu einem kommerziellen und exklusiven Modell entwickelt. Die Folien zum Vortrag sind via slideshare verfügbar und auf dieser Seite eingebettet.nnEs existiert auch eine zitierfähige Version auf Zenodo:nHerb, Ulrich (2017). Open Access: Von Inklusion zu Exklusivität?

Open Access: Von Inklusion zu Exklusivität?

Heute erschien mein Interview mit Leonid Schneider über Paper Mills, die gegen Geld scheinwissenschaftliche Publikationen inklusive gefälschter Forschungsdaten erstellen und so das Publikationssystem korrumpieren. Diese Publikationen schaffen es in schöner Regelmäßigkeit in Peer-Review-geprüfte Journale. Betroffen sind aber nicht vorrangig die bekannten Predatory Publishers, sondern anerkannte Journale arrivierter Verlage.

Paper Mills korrumpieren das Publikationssystem

Just as 2016, 2015 and 2014 I produced an Open Access Heatmap 2020. It shows how many Open Access journals are published per country using data provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).  The heatmap can be found here or embedded some lines below.

Open Access Heatmap 2020

The Norwegian consortium for higher education and research and the publishing house Elsevier agreed two days ago to a national license. This provides Norwegian researchers not only access to articles published in Elsevier’s journals (including the society journals as The Lancet or CELL Press) but also the opportunity to publish their results Open Access. Seven universities and 39 research institutions will benefit from the two-year agreement.

Norway and Elsevier meet a eighteen million Euro agreement including a Gold Open Access clause

In a study published two days ago, Miriam Redi, Dario Taraborelli and Jake Orlowitz examined the proportion of scientific references in Wikipedia articles that were published in Open Access. For the survey, the authors checked data for works referenced in Wikipedia against data from unpaywall.org. According to Redi, Taraborell &amp;

Open Access Sources in Wikipedia

Publiziert als / zitieren als: Herb, U. (2018). Zwangsehen und Bastarde. Information – Wissenschaft &amp; Praxis, 69(2-3), S. 81-88. DOI:10.1515/iwp-2018-0021 Zusammenfassung Taucht das Wort „Wissenschaft“ im Zusammenhang mit Big Data auf, denkt man zumeist an…  Read more of Zwangsehen und Bastarde. Wohin steuert Big Data die Wissenschaft?

Publiziert als / zitieren als:


 Herb, U. (2018). Zwangsehen und Bastarde. Information – Wissenschaft &amp;

Zwangsehen und Bastarde. Wohin steuert Big Data die Wissenschaft?

*When citing or referring please provide this DOI:10.6084/m9.figshare.6714038*nnRecently, I gathered data from the Bielefeld Search Engine BASE on the percentage of journal articles, books and doctoral theses published Open Access, licensed under Creative Commons Licenses and under Open License between 2013 to 2017.nnSince dissertations have been published electronically and Open Access for a long time, they have traditionally been a document

Stagnating Open Science compliance for doctoral theses?

nnUnter Nutzung der Open-Access-Policy des Verlages De Gruyter publizierte ich eben die Verlagsversion zu einem vor einem Jahr erschienen Artikel auf Zenodo:nnHerb, U. (2017). Open Access zwischen Revolution und Goldesel. Eine Bilanz fünfzehn Jahre nach der Erklärung der Budapest Open Access Initiative.

 Information. Wissenschaft &amp; Praxis

,

 68

(1), 1–10.

Open Access zwischen Revolution und Goldesel – Verlagsversion online

Hier nur eine kurze Ergänzung zum Posting über APC-Verwaltung und Bibliotheken, die ich auslagere, um besagtes Posting nicht aufzublähen.

Open Journal Systems (OJS) Installationen in Deutschland

Laut einer Pressemitteilung des Social Science Research Network (SSRN) wurde der Dienst von Elsevier aufgekauft: http://www.ssrn.com/en/index.cfm/ssrn-joins-mendeley-elsevier/. Während Springer anscheinend (s. die Fusion mit Nature) eher auf die Ausweitung des konventionellen Verlagsgeschäfts setzt, orientiert sich der Springer-Konkurrent Elsevier (neben der auch bei Springer anzutreffenden Beteiligung an Open-Access-Konsortien) eher an

Science goes Open Access: Honi soit qui mal y pense

Effektive Strategien für wissenschaftliche Publikationen: Einblicke aus meinem Workshop für die DGI

Wie wählen Wissenschaftler*innen die besten Publikationsstrategien? Wie misst man Qualität in der Wissenschaft? Und welche Fallstricke lauern beim Publizieren?

Effektive Strategien für wissenschaftliche Publikationen

Two groundbreaking research projects, ROR² and NanoBubbles, are paving the way for a more transparent and trustworthy scientific ecosystem.  ROR² examines the systemic dynamics of publication practices and platforms, addressing challenges like “Open Washing” and promoting responsible research.

Transforming Science: How ROR² and NanoBubbles are Enhancing Transparency, Trust, and Integrity in Research

Balancing Open Science and Fair Research Assessment: The push for Open Science and the reform of research evaluation are colliding, with metrics meant to encourage openness often undermining efforts to move beyond simplistic assessments. This tension highlights the challenge of balancing transparency, accessibility, and collaboration with fair, meaningful evaluation systems.

Balancing Open Science and Fair Research Assessment

nnThe Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is considered to be an important registry for quality-checked Open Access books – even if not all peer reviewed books are listed there. Two days ago, on 23.01.2018, I took a quick look at the ratio of books per publisher.nnOn that day, DOAB listed 254 publishers who had registered 10,502 books.

Books per Publisher: Data from the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)

As some people abroad were interested in my earlier posts on the German DEAL contracts, I have decided to summarise here some key points of the new contracts with Wiley, Springer Nature and Elsevier. The three contracts differ in some aspects, but at least there are two issue they have in common: They are

 opt-in contracts

, only those organisations that actively join the contract will benefit from the conditions.

The German DEAL contracts

While in Germany the boycott of the publisher Elsevier which was initiated by the DEAL project continues, an agreement was reached in Finland between Elsevier and the FinElib consortium, but the details are still unclear. The Website NoDealNoReview.org states: “For the time being, the only thing we can say for sure is that Elsevier subscriptions will not be cancelled in the beginning of 2018.

Finnish consortium FinELib reaches agreement with Elsevier

On October 22, 2024, I delivered a keynote lecture at the LundOnline Conference 2024 (not surprisingly held in Lund, Sweden) titled

 Balancing Aspirations and Outcomes – A Critical Look at Open Access Policies and Their Evolution

. In my talk, I explored the development of Open Access policies since their inception, focusing on key aspects such as who sets these policies, their intended targets, and the types of materials made openly

Balancing Aspirations and Outcomes &#8211; A Critical Look at Open Access Policies and Their Evolution

Unlocking the Secrets of Scientific Publishing

Have you or your researchers ever felt overwhelmed by the complexities of academic publishing? Do you find yourself asking questions like:

 Where should I publish? How can I maximize my impact?

Workshop on Strategies in Scientific Publishing

Managing research data has become a monumental task. With growing volumes of diverse and complex information, traditional methods just aren’t cutting it anymore. Enter

 Data Management 4.0

, a forward-thinking approach that harnesses the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to transform how research institutions handle their information.

How AI is Revolutionising Current Research Information Systems

On December 17, 2024, I delivered a workshop on

 “Scientific Publishing: Quality Control, Review, and Impact Measurement”

at the

 Hamburg University of Applied Sciences

. The event gave participants a comprehensive overview of key aspects shaping scientific publishing today. Below, I summarize the central points discussed during the workshop.

 Why Publish?

Scientific Publishing: Quality Control, Review, and Impact Measurement

As always around the turn of the year, I reflect on the past (or passing) year and the new (or upcoming) year in my blog.

As always around the turn of the year, I reflect on the past (or passing) year and the new (or upcoming) year in my blog. A look back at 2024 and ahead to 2025 is crucial for understanding the trends and changes that have impacted me. First, I want to mention that I moved my website from the domain scidebug.com to pulse49.com. The name

 scidebug

was too similar in name to the company

 scidecode

, in which I am involved.

A look back at 2024 and ahead to 2025

nnStockholm University Library** ** has monitored gold and hybrid publication charges (or Article Processing Charges APCs) for Open Access publishing at Stockholm University. The results are published on OpenAccess.se in a short posting  by Lisa Lovén andnLiisa Hänninen.nnThe University of Stockholm has spent 2.967.093 Swedish Krona (SEK) between January and August 2017 for APCs.

Concentration in Commercial Open Access: Data from the University of Stockholm

On May 31st 2022, I gave a presentation at the German Library Congress (BiblioCon), specifically during the public session of the German Library Association (dbv) Commission for Acquisition and Collection Development, and this is an updated version of the original posting.

Open Access: APC management in libraries

nnAfter Iversity’s insolvency in 2016 the Holtzbrinck Group invested in Iversity. Some days ago Springer Nature’s acquisition of the e-learning startup was reported.nnIversity’s news on the acquisition (in German language) provides some more information, here is a translated piece of it: “For the free of charge course offers (MOOCs) currently offered on the platform, iversity provides a guarantee of existence for the foreseeable future.

Springer Nature acquires E-Learning Platform Iversity

The evaluation of scientific research is undergoing a seismic shift, driven by the integration of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), Open Science principles, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). In our recent paper, Otmane Azeroual, Joachim Schöpfel and I explore the concept of Revolutionising Research Assessment: The Role of CRIS, highlighting the transformative changes in the research landscape of France and Germany, and presenting

Revolutionising Research Assessment: The Role of CRIS, Open Science, and AI

On November 12, 2024, I had the pleasure of delivering a workshop titled “

 Scientific Publishing: Publication Strategies, Open Science, and Open Access”

at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. This event aimed to provide researchers with essential insights and practical strategies for navigating the complex world of academic publishing.

Publication Strategies, Open Science, and Open Access

Today Elsevier published its vision of Open Access, written by Gemma Hersh, and suggests a route that is neither green nor gold, but a mixture of it, one could say blue Open Access: Articles published by European institutions should be available Gold Open Access within Europe and – if deposited on a repository – Green Open Access outside of Europe.

Elsevier &amp; Open Access: “the primary reason to transition to gold open access should not be to save money”

nnIn preparation for a presentation at the Open Access Days in Dresden, I collect information on the shares of commercial publishers in the APC-based Open Access business.nnWhen I deal with this topic, I always stumble upon the publisher Frontiers:nn Back in 2013 Nature reported “Nature Publishing Group buys into open-access publisher” and noted: “the company [Nature Publishing Group] said it was taking a majority investment”.  n Wikipedia tells

What is the relationship between Springer Nature &amp; Frontiers?

nn&lt;span title=“Elseviers Einkaufbummel (man erwarb u.a. PLUM Analytics) kontert Clarivate Analytics durch den Kauf von publons.nn”&gt;Elsevier’s shopping spree (including the newest acquisition PLUM Analytics) is countered by Clarivate Analytics’ purchase of publons.nnBoth companies are already competing because they keep the two most important citation and impact databases in their portfolios with Scopus (owned by Elsevier) and the Web of

Clarivate Analytics acquires publons

Ende 2016 berichtete ich in Telepolis über die geplatzten Verhandlungen des Projekts DEAL mit dem Wissenschaftsverlag Elsevier, deren Ziel es war – unter für Bibliotheken akzeptablen finanziellen Bedingungen – ein nationales Konsortium zum Bezug von Closed-Access-Zeitschriften des Verlages inklusive Open-Access-Optionen zu verhandeln. Auch in Finnland stand eine landesweite Einigung mit Elsevier vor dem Scheitern.

Elsevier: Konflikte in Taiwan, Finnland, Peru und Deutschland

Originally published as: Ulrich Herb (2016). Wissenschaftsjournale: Boykott, Verhandlungen und Vorwurf des Missbrauchs der Marktmacht.

Academic journals: boycotts, negotiations and allegation of abuse of market power

This week, I had some encounters with Diamond Open Access that got me thinking, especially about the connotations of “Diamond Open Access”. These include invoice-like payment requests from a Diamond Open Access platform, editors switching their journal from Hybrid to Diamond Open Access, purchase offers for Diamond Open Access journals and the intention of the German Research Foundation DFG to set up a service centre to further develop and

Diamond Open Access: Connotations and recent encounters

Tendenziell sympathisiere ich mit den Altmetrics, den alternativen Metriken, ermöglichen sie es Wissenschaftlern doch Resonanz auf Werke zu dokumentieren, die sich nicht in Zitationen manifestiert. Zudem können Altmetrics auch Referenzen auf Daten und Software (oder allgemeiner Nicht-Text-Objekte) in Social Media oder anderen Datenspeichern erfassen und so Wissenschaftlern Credit für die Publikation dieser Objekte verschaffen. Theoretisch.

Impact-Lotterie mit Impactstory

Nachdem sich die niederländischen Universitäten Anfang November 2014 nicht mit dem Verlag Elsevier über die Lizenzierung dessen wissenschaftlicher Zeitschriften verständigen konnten, gelang ihnen wenig später eine Einigung mit einem anderen Branchenriesen: Springer Publishing. Mit dem Springer-Deal gehen die Niederländer zugleich einen neuen Weg, denn der Vertragsabschluss umfasst nicht nur die Subskription bzw.

Systemerhaltend: Der niederländische Open-Access-Deal mit Springer

Here is an update on a study we are conducting at scidecode science consulting.

Update on the scidecode study on Persistent Identifiers (PIDs)

Just another by-product of my dissertation thesis on Open Science in the Social Sciences: Last saturday (June 14, 2014) I had a look at the ten countries that publish the most Open Access journals and the share of journals charging their authors with article processing charges (APCs) per country.

The prevalence of Open Access publication fees

On September 22, I had the honor of serving as a keynote panelist at the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) Conference. The panel addressed a crucial set of questions under the title “Who owns open knowledge? Who has the power and responsibility?”—issues at the very heart of scholarly communication and open science.

On September 22, I had the honor of serving as a keynote panelist at the

 Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) Conference

. The panel addressed a crucial set of questions under the title

 “Who owns open knowledge? Who has the power and responsibility?”

—issues at the very heart of scholarly communication and open science.

Who Owns, Produces and Certifies Open Knowledge?

Dies wurde in Deutschland anscheinend kaum bekannt: Vor einigen Tagen entfernte das Wissenschaftlernetzwerk

 Academia.edu

auf Aufforderung des Wissenschaftsverlags

 Elsevier

Artikel von seinem Server, die Autoren als Acadamia-Nutzer dort im Open Access verfügbar gemacht hatten.

Elsevier lässt Artikel aus Wissenschaftsnetzwerk Academia.edu löschen

At the beginning of June, Clarivate Analytics, vendor of the Impact database Web of Science, among others, informed about the launch of the Publisher Analytics Report. The press release mentions the following features prominently: “The ready-to-use reports provide a snapshot of journals’ performance and inform competitor analysis. They will help publishers to easily plan robust, evidence-based strategies, based on the publisher-independent”.

The next step in benchmarking in science: Clarivate Analytics launches Publisher Analytics Reports

A few hours ago, Elsevier issued a press release on the agreement with the Finnish consortium FinElib that put an end to the #nodealnoreview boycott. Below you will find some information about it:  nn There is no comprehensive Open Access clause. Elsevier promises to provide “Finnish researches with incentives to publish open access if they so choose.

News about the Elsevier agreement in Finland

nnVor knapp einem Jahr klagten Wissenschaftler der Universität Konstanz gegen die Open-Access-Satzung ihrer Hochschule.

Bundesverfassungsgericht muss die Zulässigkeit der Konstanzer Open-Access-Satzung klären

nnThe Altmetrics service Altmetric.com announced yesterday that it tracks now discussions about books listed on Amazon in social media and other not primarily scientific publications.

Altmetric.com tracks discussions about books listed in Amazon

Bereits im Sommer wurde bekannt, dass Thomson Reuters sich von seinem Angebot Web Of Science (WoS) trennt. Die Zitationsdatenbank sowie einige andere Produkte der Intellectual-Property-Sparte des Konzerns gehen in den Besitz der ONEX Group über, einer Private Equity Gesellschaft, zu deren Portfolio z.B. auch Angebote aus dem Gesundheits- und Food-Bereich und Versicherungen gehören.

Web Of Science wird ab 2017 von Clarivate Analytics vertrieben

I am very happy to be giving a keynote on October 22nd at the LundOnline conference, which, despite its name, will take place in person in Sweden. The conference’s theme is

 Turning policy into practice – opportunities and consequences for stakeholders in scholarly communication

, and accordingly, my presentation will focus on the role of policies in Open Access.

Balancing Aspirations and Outcomes: A Critical Look at Open Access Policies and Their Evolution

APC-Verwaltung in Bibliotheken   Am 31.05. halte ich einen Vortrag beim diesjährigen Bibliothekskongress, und zwar in der öffentlichen Sitzung der dbv-Kommission Erwerbung und Bestandsentwicklung.

APC-Verwaltung in Bibliotheken

Diamond Open Access (DOA) promises a world without paywalls: no subscriptions, no article fees, free publishing and free reading. At first glance, it looks like the fair and sustainable alternative to Gold and Hybrid OA. But behind the appealing vision lie tough questions.

Diamond Open Access (DOA) promises a world without paywalls: no subscriptions, no article fees, free publishing and free reading. At first glance, it looks like the fair and sustainable alternative to Gold and Hybrid OA. But behind the appealing vision lie tough questions.

 Diamond

is vaguely defined, costs are often hidden or underestimated, and journals rely heavily on unpaid work.

Diamond Open Access — too good to be true?

In 2020, Joachim Schöpfel and I planned to publish an anthology on research data, focussing on topics such as fake data (including AI-generated data), their detection, data markets, data reuse rates, blockchain, and health data. However, we had underestimated what had changed since 2018. Back then Open Divide – Critical Studies on Open Access, edited by Joachim and me was published.

Publishing an Open Access anthology — navigating costs and author expectations

Miguel Navas F. postete gestern auf Twitter einen Link zu einer Heatmap, die den Open-Access-Anteil unter allen Journalen eines Landes darstellt. Die Heatmap ist als interaktive Google Spreadsheet angelegt und unter https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RW5fmFfkcXBlt2E0Vz1P-zaQJXSEIJhCiVoiG8KYHcQ/pubchart?oid=1841277340 erreichbar – weswegen ich sie leider nicht direkt hier einbinden kann.

Heatmap: Anteil der Open-Access-Journale pro Land

Unter dem Titel “Kalibrierung der Wissenschaft – wohin führt uns die Digitalisierung?” veranstaltet das Internationale Zentrum für Kultur- und Technikforschung (IZKT) in Stuttgart eine virtuelle Podiumsdiskussion zur datengetriebenen Wissenschaftssteuerung, an der auch ich teilnehme wegen meiner Publikationen zu Datenkapitalismus in der Wissenschaft. Die Veranstaltung startet morgen um 18:00 Uhr und endet um 20:00 Uhr.

Podiumsdiskussion zu datengetriebener Wissenschaftssteuerung

Letzte Woche bin ich auf eine Analyse gestoßen, die ich im Winter 2019 durchgeführt habe und deren Ergebnisse ich hier gerne teilen möchte. Ziel meiner Studie war es, herauszufinden, welche Tätigkeitsbereiche oder Dienstleistungen in einer bibliothekswissenschaftlichen Fachpublikation aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum thematisiert werden.

Publikationskompetenz als Aufgabe von Bibliotheken

No agreement with Frontiers in Germany   As Bernhard Mittermaier, head of the central library of the Forschungszentrum Jülich, announced yesterday, there will be no agreement with Frontiers in Germany. The negotiations between the Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Open Access Publisher Frontiers on a nationwide framework contract did not succeed.

No agreement with Frontiers in Germany

A few weeks ago an interview that I did with Frank Müller was published in the online magazine telepolis. It has the title

 Wissenschaftliches Fehlverhalten – von der Randerscheinung zum Flächenbrand

(in English: S

 cientific misconduct – from marginal phenomenon to wildfire

). Frank Müller has been gathering questionable scientific publications from the natural and material sciences for years.

Scientific misconduct – from a marginal phenomenon to a wildfire

While preparing a workshop I was looking for journal ratings &amp; rankings in the Social Sciences &amp; Humanities and would like to share my information here. At the same time, I would like to encourage readers to make additions to the comments. Social Sciences: Journal ratings &amp; rankings

 GESIS List

(Mostly German):

Journal Ratings &amp; Rankings in the Social Sciences &amp; Humanities

While I was working on a longer text, I gathered – more or less as a by-product – information from studies and reports on the (first copy) costs of a scientific article. As a result, it can only be noted that the information available on these costs (and related costs as margins) are very different and really difficult to compare. The latter confirms my impression that there is a huge lack of transparency in the scientific publications market.

First copy costs of scientific articles – a short overview

nnNun erschien das in diesem Blog bereits erwähnte, von Konstanze Söllner und Bernhard Mittermaier herausgegebene

 Praxishandbuch Open Access

:nnK. Söllner &amp; B. Mittermaier (Hrsg.),

 Praxishandbuch Open Access

. De Gruyter.

Darf man in einem Buch zu Open Access publizieren, das 119,95 € kostet?

Der Wissenschaftsverlag Elsevier wird sich bereits seit längerer Zeit nicht mehr mit wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken über tragfähige finanzielle Konditionen zum Bezug von Elseviertiteln einig. Die Konflikte in zahlreichen Ländern, darunter neben anderen auch Deutschland und Finnland, schwelen.nnForscher in Finnland haben nun einen neuen Elsevierboykott gestartet.

No Deal, no review: Elsevierboykott in Finnland

nnNot only the The Jussieu Call for Open Science and Bibliodiversity but also the European Union as a research funder seems to be paying attention to the problem of the commercialisation of Gold Open Access.nnAs OpenAire has posted the EU published a Call for proposals for Alternative Funding Mechanism for non-author fee based Open Access Publishing.

Funding for Alternative Funding Mechanisms for non-author fee based Open Access Publishing

nnThe American Psychological Association (APA) announced a pilot project “to monitor and seek removal of unauthorized online postings of APA journal articles”. According to SHERPA/RoMEO the APA is a green publisher that allows to post articles published in its journals under the following conditions:nn Authors’ pre-print on a web-site Authors’ pre-print must be labeled with date and accompanied with statement that paper has not (yet) been

APA starts monitoring unauthorized internet posting of published articles

Yesterday, the National Contact Point Open Access (Germany) sent a mail to several mailing lists in which it pointed to a list of highly cited Open Access journals. According to the mail, this list could be helpful in motivating scientists to publish in Open Access journals [translated by the author of this posting]: “From now on, an overview is available under the resources category with approx.

What is Open Access about? Debates at the heart of the Open Access movement

nnElsevier’s shopping tour continues. Readers of my blog know that in April I published a provisional and incomplete list of services that are owned by Elsevier. Since then Elsevier launched the Preprint-Server BioRN, based on the infrastructure of the Social Science Research Network SSRN (purchased last year).  Yesterday the Dutch publishers announced the acquisition of bepress.

Elsevier acquires bepress

Dear readers of my blog: Today I do not want to write about scientific publishing or share my thoughts on it with you. Rather, I need your help! nnI want to create a list of the services Elsevier created or acquired. So far I know of theses services:nn the publishing house databases (eg. Scopus, Science Direct) a repository

The Elsevier empire – which services belong to it?

Vor Jahren entschloss ich mich, eine Promotion in Informationswissenschaft anzugehen. Das Vorhaben dümpelte lange vor sich hin und nahm erst Fahrt auf, als ich meine Stelle an der Saarländischen Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek vorübergehend auf 50 % reduzierte, um in Sachen Promotion voranzukommen.

“Das ist unkollegial!” – aber warum sollte man umsonst arbeiten?

In June 2014 I analysed the data of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to find out to what extent Open Access Journals in Sociology (as listed by the DOAJ) charge their authors with publication fees (or article processing charges APCs). A CSV-file offered for download by the DOAJ did not contain any information on APCs, in fact the whole APC-column was empty, so I gathered the information manually from the DOAJ’s search interface.

Numbers and shares of Open Access Journals in Sociology charging publication fees

Pablo de Castro (University of Strathclyde), Laura Rothfritz, research assistant and PhD candidate at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt University Berlin, Joachim Schöpfel (Université de Lille) and I will do a study on Risks and Trust in pursuit of a well functioning Persistent Identifier infrastructure for research commissioned by Knowledge Exchange (KE). The project aims to identify the best possible strategic

Study on Risks and Trust in pursuit of a well functioning Persistent Identifier infrastructure

nnHere is a short publication notice: One year after publication in German, an anthology edited by Peter Weingart and Niels Taubert has now also been published in English – “The Future of Scholarly Publishing: Open Access and the Economics of Digitisation”.nn nnThe bibliographic data of the book which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence are:nn  Weingart, P., &amp; Taubert.

“The Future of Scholarly Publishing: Open Access and the Economics of Digitisation”

A contract study on the qualitative perception of Open Access was completed at the end of last year.

Study on the qualitative perception of Open Access

The Library Journal two days ago informed about an interesting patent granted to the Social Network ResearchGate: “ResearchGate Granted U.S. Patent 10,282,424: ‘Linking Documents Using Citations’”. The abstract describes the patent as follows…“Aspects of the present disclosure relate to linking documents using citations. A server accesses a stored document in a data repository.

ReseachGate is granted a patent for (semantic) citation analysis

Wissenschaftler tun sich oft noch schwer damit, ihren Lesern (oder Nutzern) Rechte einzuräumen, die über das reine Rezipieren (oder Konsumieren) ihrer Texte hinaus gehen – sogar wenn sie diese Open Access publizieren.

Creative Commons Lizenzen und Open Access Journals

This overview is based on Open Access data for publications from 2024 only, providing a snapshot rather than a trend analysis. The data include four document types—articles, Books, Book Chapters, and Reviews—to more accurately reflect disciplinary publishing cultures. Data was taken from

 OpenAlex

on May 14, 2025.

Snapshot 2024: Open Access by Academic Discipline

The Forschungszentrum Jülich and Frontiers signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a German Consortium with the Open Access publisher Frontiers.

A German Consortium with the Open Access publisher Frontiers is to be set up. In February, the Forschungszentrum (in charge of the negotiations) and the publisher signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a new agreement that will allow researchers to publish in Frontiers journals in a streamlined procedure.

German Consortium with the Open Access publisher Frontiers

Clarivate Analytics, owner of the database Web of Science and services as publons, acquired Kopernio. Kopernio facilitates the search for Open Access documents. For pay-walled articles to which you have no access, Kopernio is looking for an alternative Open Access version. Unlike unpaywall, a similiar tool, using Kopernio requires registration.

Clarivate Analytics acquires Kopernio

The Summa Cum Fraude team dealt with retractions as part of a university project. As the person responsible for the open access repository at my university and member of this team, I am particularly interested in whether and how articles that have been retracted in a journal are still available as regular (non-retracted) articles in Open Access repositories.

Retractions in Web of Science and OpenAlex

As the Open Access publication service F1000Research announced on January 10th it was acquired by one of the largest publishers of scientific content: Taylor &amp;

Taylor &amp; Francis acquires F1000Research

Christian Gutknecht published an exciting posting on the Swiss EUR 57 million Elsevier deal in which he outlines the transformative Open Access agreement between Elsevier and swissuniversities. Since Germany has been trying for years to reach such a contract with Elsevier, it is worth comparing it with the two transformative contracts with Wiley and Springer Nature in Germany, which were reached and coordinated by Project DEAL.

Open Access Transformation in Switzerland &amp; Germany

Ende Februar ging mir eine Pressemitteilung zu wonach ResearchGate (RG), ein soziales Netzwerk für Wissenschaftler, eine Finanzierung in Höhe von 52,6 Millionen US-Dollar  durch Wellcome Trust, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners &amp; Four Rivers Group sowie  altbekannte ResearchGate-Investoren wie Bill Gates, Benchmark und Founders Fund erhält.

52,6 Millionen USD-Geldspritze für ResearchGate

As The Verge reports Microsoft acquires GitHub.

As

 The Verge

reports Microsoft acquires GitHub. According to

 The Verge

GitHub was “last valued at $2 billion back in 2015, but it’s not clear exactly how much Microsoft has paid to acquire GitHub.”

 The Verge

also considers the purchase as a promotion of Microsoft’s open source strategy and suspects the acquisition could meet mistrust in the open source scene.

Microsoft acquires GitHub

Am 23.09.2016 hielt ich im Rahmen der Tagung

 Forschungsmetriken als Dienstleistung: Herausforderungen und institutionelle Wirkungen

am Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung WZB einen Vortrag mit dem Titel

 Forschungsmetriken und Impact in den Sozialwissenschaften

. Im Mittelpunkt stand die Frage, ob Altmetrics besser als Zitationsdaten geeignet sind, den Impact (was immer man darunter verstehen mag)

Impact messen in den Sozialwissenschaften und der Soziologie – mit Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar oder Altmetrics?

Der Entwurf für ein neues Landeshochschulgesetz (LHG) in Baden-Württemberg hat es in sich. Dort findet sich unter dem zu reformierenden §44 Abs.