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.

SciELO is in the process of establishing a preprint server. This initiative is driven by the need for speeding up the publication process and enhancing its transparency. On this occasion, Jan Welterop, a consultant on open access, analyses the growth of preprints since the late 50’s onward. He thinks that communicating and sharing research results on the one hand, and formal publication in a peer-reviewed journal on the other hand, could be separate and parallel processes.

ProQuest has launched a program to provide no-cost access to its databases for students and researchers who have been separated from their universities and libraries because of travel bans or other immigration changes. The program resolves authentication problems displaced researchers may face when trying to access their institution’s holdings remotely.

GreyNet, an international grey literature network service, celebrates its 25th anniversary of providing research and reference support in the fields of academia, government, business and industry. The goal of GreyNet is to facilitate dialog, research, and communication between persons and organisations in the field of grey literature.

Read their business report.

In the last 5 years, mainstream tools like Google Scholar and ResearchGate disrupted learned publishing and academic library supply chains – right alongside the dawning of some web-scale library discovery services.

In this rapidly evolving market, there is already a new generation of cutting edge search tools, challenging the status quo and offering information users new avenues to the research literature. There are three new services in the content discovery marketplace that stand out and deserve our collective attention.

The Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB) met in Toronto for its biannual meeting. Some of the main discussion items included publication ethics, the Scopus journal re-evaluation process, and the overall review and acceptance process. The recommendations of the CSAB directly influence the overall direction of Scopus and the prioritization of new content requests to ensure that Scopus stays international and relevant for the global research community.

A new analysis, published in Current Science by the graduated student G. S. Seethapathy and his colleagues, has found that many of the weak papers in predatory journals are coming from top-flight Indian research institutions. The finding has turned the spotlight on an academic culture in India that tends to prize quantity of publications over quality when evaluating researchers. The secretary of India’s Department of Biotechnology (DBT) in New Delhi, K. Vijayraghavan, proposes some solutions to strengthen research evaluation and encourage sharing of research prior to publication.

Traditionally, scientific studies are published in peer-reviewed journals, which require other scientists to evaluate submitted research to determine its soundness for publication. Peer review is supposed to be acting as a stopgap for science that is not sound ; but it has become the slowest step in the process of sharing studies. Rather than simply bypassing peer review and contributing to increase an overloaded system, how could peer review be enhanced ?