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.
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.
The professional scientific social network MyScienceWork announces that the platform’s 30 million publications are now available without registration.
FOSTER (Foster Open Science Training for European Research) is an EC-funded project aiming to help young researchers learn about Open Science, OA and more.
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 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.
Copyright issues between some publishers and their authors. How to disseminate scientific articles without infringing the laws?
Despite the recent criticism on this method, systematic anonymity for reviewers seems essential for Michael McCarthy, researcher at the University of Melbourne.
