Open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) represent an increasingly important part of the scholarly communication landscape. OAMJs, such as PLOS ONE, are large scale, broad scope journals that operate an open access business model, and which employ a novel form of peer review, focusing on scientific soundness and rejecting judgement of novelty or importance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the discourses relating to OAMJs, and their place within scholarly publishing, and to consider attitudes towards mega-journals within the academic community.

MIT is launching a new way for authors of scholarly articles to legally hold onto rights to reuse and post their articles, and for others to more easily build on that work. As of April 2017, all MIT authors can opt in to an open access license — a voluntary agreement that an individual MIT author can sign and that applies to scholarly articles written while at MIT.

In an interview with Library Journal, Dr. Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication, summarizes the challenges and misconceptions surrounding OA publishing, and provides some guidance to his fellow advocates.

A study published by BMC Medicine identifies 13 evidence-based characteristics by which potential predatory journals may be distinguished from presumed legitimate ones. From a sample, the study shows how these journals are distinct in some key areas from presumed legitimate journals, and it provides evidence of how they differ. While the characteristics identified in this study may not be sensitive enough to detect all potentially predatory journals, these findings may be helpful to researchers in assessing a journal’s legitimacy and quality.

The world of citation metrics can be a confusing one. What do all these metrics mean, and how are they used to benchmark the performance of articles and journals? This infographic is based on a related post to give a quick overview of the key citation metrics and what they tell us.

In order to assert its position as an actor in the international open data movement, Persée launches its triplestore, data.persee.fr. This triplestore is intended to address the need of collecting complex corpuses and text-mining within a linked data environement. The data available in RDF format gather all the metadata created by Persée about its collections (authors, illustrations, articles, etc.), those co-created with partners (idRef, Cairo Gazeteer), and the data harvested from various repositories (GBIF, DBpedia, data.bnf, VIAF, etc.).

OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association) explain their membership application procedure, with a defined list of criteria and a set procedure for investigating problems that arise. OASPA’s goal is to allow publishers a chance to strengthen their processes before reevaluation by OASPA Membership Committee. When it comes to assessing publications themselves, OASPA reminds how INASP and the Think. Check. Submit. initiative are complementary to OASPA’s membership application procedure.

WAME (World Association of Medical Editors), aims to provide guidance to help editors, researchers, funders, academic institutions and other stakeholders distinguish predatory journals from legitimate journals. The initiatives proposed would hasten the demise or conversion of predatory journals.

Sci-Hub is a repository that makes illegal access to academic papers possible to anyone. It has generated a controversy among librarians, publishers, and open access advocates. Among people who denounced the repository, Ernesto Priego thinks that Sci-Hub might offer a technological solution to access, but it fails to address complex moral, social, and legal barriers in a sustainable way. This controversy led to a panel discussion about ethics, technology, copyright, and inequality, whose results are explained.