The growth of predatory journals is now impossible to ignore. Some universities have policies against them, but others chose to turn a blind eye to this problem. One of the reasons to explain this behavior could be that authors and universities find some benefits in this situation and, contrary to popular belief, cannot be qualified as “victims” of those journals.
Jeffrey Beall’s years long and controversial battle against ‘predatory’ publishers seems to have come to a end when his blog was taken offline in January 2017. Andy Nobes, Program Officer for Research Development at INASP, reminds how difficult it is for non-native English speakers researchers, to recognize predatory journals. He highlights the role of Think. Check. Submit. and INASP’s AuthorAID set of initiatives aiming to provide support to researchers from developing countries in preparing academic articles for publication in peer-reviewed journals.
Academic libraries have been wasting their time trying to change the scholarly communication system on the feeblest of rationalizations. Proper librarians know that the current system is obviously the most sustainable, since it has lasted this long and provided so much benefit to libraries and profit to organizations as diverse as giant publishers and scholarly societies. Moreover, faculties have proclaimed loudly and clearly that they believe libraries’ central role is to be the campus’s collective knowledge wallet, so who are librarians to argue?
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 classic publishing model as we know it is printed-only based but with the appearance of the internet, the conception of information evolved and caused the publishing industry to change as well. Those evolutions were quick enough to create some misconceptions and misunderstood problems. Nevertheless, Open Access seems to have changed schorlarly publishing forever.
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.).
