Jeffrey Bealls, librarian at Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver has published a new list which purpose is to alert researchers to bogus metrics companies that have emerged over about the past year.

India faces many academic challenges: lack of open access, academic scams, priority given to subscription journals are brakes to the dissemination of knowledge.

European copyright law should change to help researchers extract facts and data from published research papers, legal experts have urged in a recent report for the European Commission.

The report published by the European Commission

Well established publishers receive a higher proportion of Wellcome fundings for article processing charges than newer, pure open access publishers according to a file released by the British trust.

As a major scientific publishing country with its estimated 5,000 STM journals, China’s place in the international OA publishing scene is considered in detail, with the author concluding that he believes open access to publicly funded research in China will soon become the accepted norm, as all levels of scientific policymakers fulfil their political, professional and international responsibilities, to the benefit of Chinese research and society.

In a meeting in Rome, Italy, on March 20–21, 2014, representatives from several major regional repository networks came together to develop a strategy to better align their activities. Aligning networks will enable the exchange of data among them, greatly improve access to content across regions, and allow society to extract maximum value from the products of research.

The aim of this study is to analyze the accessibility, corrosion and half-life of URLs cited in the articles of Indian LIS conference proceedings published during 2001 to 2010. A total of 5,698 URLs cited in the 1,700 articles were examined.

Open access is both a strategic challenge and an opportunity, especially for the traditional publishers which have an economic model based on subscriptions.  Two publishers from the Taylor & Francis Group explain the stakes for their company in the framework of such a disruptive context and present the initiatives they are taking to adapt to this new paradigm.

Plagiarism, in spite of it being a practice which violates ethical standards (in addition to copyright), is occurring more and more frequently. The major reason behind this growth is the ease with which access can be achieved to online content. Ernesto Spinak gives an overview of the different procedures used for detecting plagiarism.

PreSCORE is a new metric that ”measures the level of peer review conducted prior to the publication of scholarly material.”

Adam Etkin, founder and managing director of PreSCORE, describes the workings and rationale for scoring papers and journals based on the rigor of peer review.