CAICYT (Centro Argentino de Información Científica y Tecnológica / Argentine Center of Scientific and Technological Information) has been sponsoring and hosting from 2013 regular meetings devoted to aspects of information and scholarly publishing. This year’s conference series focuses on data repositories and platforms, with a focus on scientific and technological institutions. This issue arises from the opportunities and challenges that open from the law of institutional open access digital repositories, and the international breakthrough both for open access to scientific publications and technical data.

Topics about noticeably open data and copyright in repositories were discussed.

LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries has issued a statement both welcoming the European Consultation on Science 2.0 as a step towards strengthening the competitiveness of European research, and calling on the European Commission to take measures towards enabling Open Science.

Thomson Reuters has announced a collaboration with Russia’s Scientific Electronic Library eLibrary.ru to make content from the Russian Science Citation Index accessible via the Web of Science™ its own global search and discovery platform for the sciences, social sciences and arts and humanities.

Responsabilities and impact of a suspension from Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Report (JCR). This annual publication that reports the Impact Factor for thousands of titles delists every year dozens of titles for engaging in publication behaviors that distort the citation record (self citation or citation cartel).

OpenAIRE and COAR have released a joint statement on the European Commission’s Science2.0 consultation.
In this text, the two organisations provide 9 recommendations about different Open Access related fields: Open access to publications, Policy support for open licenses, Support for further exploration of alternative metrics, Standardisation of funding information, etc.

The 5th DataCite’s Annual Conference & Special Anniversary Celebration were held in Nancy, France, 25-26 August 2014. This year’s theme, Giving Value to Data: Advocacy, Guidance, Services has highlighted recent developments in the discovery, access and reuse of research data.

The presentations and the highlights are now available online.

How the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) struggles against poor quality open access journals by asking all of the journals in its directory to reapply on the basis of stricter criteria (10000 titles) and by giving a ‘seal’ of best practice to those which meet the highest criteria. These evolutions shall help the DOAJ to become a more useful tool for funders, librarians and researchers.

Interview of Patricia Brennan, vice president of Product and Market Strategy at Thomson Reuters, about the new platform “InCites”. The platform combines Journal Citation Reports and Journal Impact Factor information with the Essential Science Indicators, which tracks trends and highly cited authors. The platform allows for some interesting analysis including looking at collaborations between individuals and institutions.

Open Access (OA), like any other model or strategy for the dissemination of knowledge, carries with it clear benefits as well as costs and downsides. These vary depending on the OA strategy in question, and in order for OA to bring maximum benefit to the world of scholarship, its costs and benefits need be examined carefully and dispassionately so that the former can be maximized and the latter minimized.

Unfortunately, the OA advocacy community tends to resist all attempts to examine OA in this way, to the point that those who approach OA in a spirit of critical analysis (rather than celebration and evangelism) are attacked and punished. This article describes the problem, provides examples of it, and proposes strategies for promoting a more rigorous and analytical discussion of OA.

An interview of Jeffrey Beall, librarian at University of Colorado Denver, USA whose blog tracks and reports on journals and publishers that abuse open access.