Unter dem Leitthema „Open Access und die Frage der Teilhabe“ fand am 3. Dezember 2021 der 18. Open-Access-Smalltalk mit 15 Beteiligten statt. Diesmal diskutierten wir, wie fair und frei zugänglich Open Access wirklich ist. Ein Ausgangspunkt des Diskussion waren aktuelle Entwicklungen wie die Übernahme des vormals nicht-kommerziellen Unternehmens Knowledge Unlatched durch Wiley.

The memorable date 20/02/2020 saw the publication by MIT Press of the first issue of Volume One of a new journal, Quantitative Science Studies (QSS), the official open access journal of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI). QSS’s Editor in Chief is Ludo Waltman (CWTS, University of Leiden, Netherlands), Vincent Larivière (Université de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada) and Staša Milojević

One of the odd things about scholarly publishing is how little any particular group of stakeholders seems to understand the perspective of others. It is easy to start with researchers ourselves, who are for the most part embarrassingly ignorant of what publishing actually involves. But those who have spent a career in publishing are equally ignorant (and usually dismissive to boot) of researchers’ perspectives.

The 2013 Galaxy Community Conference (GCC2013) and GigaScience are today announcing a call for papers for a special thematic focused series on studies utilizing large-scale datasets and workflows. Galaxy is an open, web-based platform for data intensive biomedical research allowing their growing community of users to reproduce and share analyses.

Mike Taylor has a parable on the Guardian Blog about research communication and I thought it might be useful to share one that I have been using in talks recently. For me it illustrates just how silly the situation is, and how hard it is to break out of the mindset of renting access to content for the incumbent publishers. It also, perhaps, has a happier ending.

After last months website launch, and work progressing on our associated GigaScience database (including the addition of further datasets, such as the recently published Chinese Hamster Ovary cell-line genome) our next priority is the more traditional job of an editor: papers, papers papers.