Keynote presented by Juan Pablo Alperin for Open Education 2019: Transforming Teaching & Learning at SFU on May 27, 2019.

Some universities love to boast about their positions in university rankings, almost as if they were part of a football championship. However, these rankings were never intended to be used this way. This is common knowledge within the science and technology studies community, but the causes are open for debate. For example, who is to blame for the misuse?

This is our last blog post of the year. 2019 has been a very fruitful year for us, and we are looking forward to what 2020 will bring. For now, we would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a new year full of scientific discoveries.

Keynote presented by Juan Pablo Alperin at the first United Nations Open Science Conference on November 19, 2019, organized by the UN Dag Hammarskjöld Library and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition ( SPARC ). Good morning.

Aktuell machen Gerüchte über die Planung einer Executive Order der US-Administration zum Thema Open Access die Runde: Wie das Blog The Scholarly Kitchen berichtet, soll eine Verordnung in Arbeit sein, die die US-Behörden verpflichten würde, eine “zero embargo” Open-Access-Policy umzusetzen.

I'm sure the following scenario is familiar to most of the readers: You're writing a new scientific paper and are scanning the reference lists of your most important sources to see if you've missed anything interesting, maybe even a seminal paper cited by several of your current sources. Recently, a couple of web apps have come up to simplify this process by constructing and visualizing the underlying citation networks.

Im Februar 2019 habe ich bei der Universität Zürich per Öffentlichkeitsgesetz Zugang zu dem “Read & Publish Agreement” von RSC nachgefragt. Die Universität Zürich verzögerte die Antwort bis weit über die gesetzlichen Fristen, nur um dann die Einsicht letztlich gänzlich zu verwehren. Gegen diesen Ablehnung habe ich bei der Rekurskommission der Zürcher Hochschulen Beschwerde eingelegt. Nun lieg ein Zwischenentscheid der Rekurskommission vor.

This blog is cross-posted from ASAPbio and reused under CC-BY 4.0 license.

Der wirklich grosse Big Bang ist in der Schweiz ausgeblieben. Dennoch kündigen nun alle Schweizer Hochschulen ihren Big Deal mit Springer Nature (inkl. Nature Journals). Wie Swissuniversities bekannt gibt, konnte Springer Nature nun nach über 1.5 Jahren Verhandlung kein passendes Angebot liefern.

If you’re at all interested in open access publishing, you probably know that it has a long and complicated history. There are disagreements and differences over strategies, tactics, politics, definitions, motivations, disciplinary approaches, business models and routes to OA. Many words have been spilled over the ‘mess’ that open access has become and the fact that the concept of open access itself has a number of different lineages.