International Identifier for serials
and other continuing resources, in the electronic and print world

Paying twice or paying thrice? Open access publishing in a global system of scholarly knowledge production and consumption

Casey Brienza, sociologist specializing in the study of the culture industries and transnational cultural production, argues that UK researchers represent too small a proportion of global scholarly knowledge production and consumption to rebalance scholarly expenditure. She considers that UK open access initiatives as currently formulated will instead lead to a significant de facto increase in costs for the UK.

Response from Library Leaders to “Usage Half-Life”

Representatives of research and academic libraries across the USA have written an Open Letter in which they contest the conclusions of a study promoting this new metric. According to the signatories, half-life reports provide an interesting metric for comparing journal downloads across disciplines, but this study fails to provide any evidence that journal subscription rates will decline as a result of public access policies.

Springer now sharing data from Altmetric on SpringerLink

Springer announced that it has added altmetrics information to every article available on SpringerLink (link.springer.com), the publishing company’s online platform. The data is provided by Altmetric, a London-based start-up which tracks and analyzes the online activity around scholarly literature.

Anonymity and peer review

Despite the recent criticism on this method, systematic anonymity for reviewers seems essential for Michael McCarthy, researcher at the University of Melbourne.

The Market for Social Sciences and Humanities Publications

A recent report on the market for social sciences and humanities (SSH) publications has been released: Global Social Science & Humanities Publishing 2013-2014 . The author underlines some of its important points: language and media used, funding, relevance in the open access environment, etc.

Ethical Editing – Ghostwriting is an unhealthy practice

Common in journalism, public speeches or collective works, ghostwriting is also considered to be a form of plagiarism, an unethical behavior in the world of academic studies in general and the field of research in particular.