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Author survey data reveals changing perceptions of scholarly communication and wider participation in open access

Dan Penny, Head of Insights at Nature Publishing Group and Palgrave Macmillan, shares findings from the recent Author Insights Survey. The survey data is openly available and offers an extensive look into researcher perceptions and understandings of academic publishing. Few researchers are now unaware of open access. But perceptions of quality still remain a significant barrier to further OA involvement.

CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI9)

Highlights from the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication which was held at the University of Geneva (June 17–19) to discuss current and emerging issues in the ever-changing field of scholarly communication. Among the broached topics: barriers to and the impact of OA, and the new OA tools.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research.

All the presentations, and some videos are now available in the Programme pages.

What do early-career researchers think about open access?

Selecting a journal to submit a manuscript to is an important decision for any researcher. To find out the factors that influence this decision for early-career researchers, a survey has been conducted among PhD students and postdocs at Max Planck Institutes across Germany.

Quality peer review ‘still essential to high scientific standards’

EDP Sciences, an international STM publisher, has released information on the findings and recommendations of a working group into the peer review process.

The aim of the workshop, held in Paris in May, was to consider whether peer review is adapting to present day demands and constraints, and to consider and make recommendations to the European Physical Journal (EPJ) and its partners regarding new practices and improvements that could be made to their procedures.

Promoting an open research culture

The Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Committee has published the TOP Guidelines, a set of author guidelines that journals can adopt to enhance the transparency of the research they publish. These guidelines represent a concrete and actionable strategy toward improving research and publishing practices.

How can scholarly communication avoid becoming just a cacophony of noise?

MOOCs, altmetrics, open peer review, open access or big data are creating opportunities for open dialogue between academics worldwide. But this wealth can also be challenging for the researchers who need to be trained to understand the communication tools but also be skilled-up to flourish in them.

Hybrid Journals: Ensuring Systematic and Standard Discoverability of the Latest Open Access Articles

An important current challenge for research information providers is ensuring the automated discovery of Open Access (OA) content in hybrid journals. Discovery services are unable to systematically identify the free full-text availability of OA articles. A systematic and standardized manner is proposed to identify OA at the article level.

Article available under subscription, the corresponding presentation given at the NASIG Annual Conference is available at this address.