Wiley & Readcube have done something rather sneaky recently, and it’s not escaped the attention of diligent readers of the scientific literature. On the article landing page for some, if not all(?) journal articles at Wiley, in JavaScript enabled web browsers they’ve replaced all links to download the PDF file of the article with links that direct you to Readcube instead.

Last Friday, I genuinely thought Elsevier had illegally sold me an article that should have been open access. This post is to update you all on what we’ve found out since: The Scale of the Problem No one really knows how many articles are wrongly paywalled at all of Elsevier’s various different sales websites.

you weren’t much loved in your short existence you weren’t much use to readers or text-miners because we often couldn’t find where you were – hiding amongst shadows. you were significantly more expensive than your ‘full’ open access cousins In March, 2015 ‘hybrid OA’ died after a short-life of neglect.

Last week, on Monday 19th January, I co-organised the first ever Open Research London event at Imperial College London, with the help of local organisers; Jon Tennant & Torsten Reimer. We invited two speakers for our first meeting: Chris Banks (Director of Library Services at Imperial, and an elected Board Member of Research Libraries UK) &

[Update: I’ve submitted this idea as a FORCE11 £1K Challenge research proposal 2015-01-13. I may be unemployed from April 2015 onwards (unsolicited job offers welcome!), so I certainly might find myself with plenty of time on my hands to properly get this done…!] Inspired by something I heard Stephen Curry say recently, and with a little bit of help from Jo McIntyre I’ve started a project to compare EuropePMC author manuscripts

So, apparently Elsevier are launching a new open access mega-journal some time this year, joining the bandwagon of similar efforts from almost every other major publisher. A lovely acknowledgement of the roaring success of PLOS ONE, who did it first a long time ago. They’re only ~8 years behind, but they’re learning. I for one am pleased they are asking the research community what they want from this new journal.

A couple of months ago Micah J. Marty and I had a twitter conversation and subsequent email exchange about how citations worked with preprints. I asked Micah if I could share our email discussion since I thought it would be useful to others and he kindly said yes. What follows are Michah’s questions followed by my responses. At the level of the journal nothing happens.

We are very excited to announce the newest release of our EcoData Retriever software and the first release of a supporting R package, ecoretriever. If you’re not familiar with the EcoData Retriever you can read more here.

As announced by Noam Ross on Twitter (and confirmed by the Editor in Chief of Ecology Letters), Ecology Letters will now allow the submission of manuscripts that have been posted as preprints. Details will be published in an editorial in Ecology Letters. I want to say a heartfelt thanks to Marcel Holyoak and the entire Ecology Letters editorial board for listening to the ecological community and modifying their policies.

Preprints are rapidly becoming popular in biology as a way to speed up the process of science, get feedback on manuscripts prior to publication, and establish precedence (Desjardins-Proulx et al. 2013). Since biologists are still learning about preprints I regularly get asked which of the available preprint servers to use. Here’s the long-form version of my response. The good news is that you can’t go wrong right now.