The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has produced sample licences for a variety of uses within open access publishing in order to offer a wide variety of appropriate licensing terms dependent on their economic model and business strategy.

http://www.stm-assoc.org/open-access-licensing/

In response to this initiative, a large coalition which includes funders, institutions, publishers, curators and the users of public resources called on the STM Association to withdraw these licenses. According to them, in their current formulation, these licenses would limit the use, reuse and exploitation of research.

The “Open access: knowledge sharing and sustainable scholarly communication in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda project” was created to educate researchers and students about changing scholarly communication landscapes. The project advocates for the adoption of open-access policies and mandates by funding agencies, universities, and research organizations. It also builds capacities to set up open-access repositories and to publish open-access journals.

This book presents the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB), held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in June 2014.  As well as examining the role of cultural heritage and service organisations in the creation, accessibility, duration and long-term preservation of data, this conference provides a discussion forum for the appraisal, citation and licensing of research data and the new developments in reviewing, publishing and editorial technology.

An academic has succeeded in having his name removed from a listing of the supposed editorial board of a suspected “predatory” journal after his university’s legal department intervened.

How pre-submission peer review can benefit scholarly communication by increasing the quality of published research and reducing retractions and how the online platform LIBRE can help in this purpose.

LIBRE allows authors to “open” their research to the scientific community and invite expert colleagues to formally evaluate their articles. This “author-guided open peer review process” is transparent and can be implemented at any moment during an article’s lifetime: work in progress, during the peer review process and after publication.

It is now available for testing.

Top universities are paying too much for scores of academic journals provided by major publishing companies, an investigation has found.

The 9th International Conference on Open Repositories was held from 9 to 13 June, 2014 in Helsinki, Finland. Its main theme was “Towards Repository Ecosystems”. The topics discussed can be seen on this page.

The sessions were recorded and are now available online.

Two questionnaire-based surveys were carried out by an Indian publishing services company for authors of non-English speaking countries. The first was addressed to East Asian authors, the second was addressed to editors of leading international journals, mainly in Europe and the USA, and published entirely in English. The results obtained from the two questionnaires were compared to provide an interesting schema of the key players in the process of scholarly communication.

Chronology of a plagiarism case and the actions taken to address this problem within the institution concerned.

An interview with Chennai-based information scientist Subbiah Arunachalam about the open access situation in India: difficulties to access the publications for scientists, opportunities of Green/Gold Open Access, threat of the predatory publishers.