A recent OASPA guest post reminded me of something I have been wondering about for several years now. What sinister time travel device is keeping some sections of the scholarly ecosystem from leaving the past and coming back to the present?

Most academics would agree that the way scholarship is done today, in the broadest, most general terms, is in dire need of modernization. Problems abound from counter-productive incentives, inefficiencies, lack of reproducibility, to an overemphasis on competition at the expense of cooperation, or a technically antiquated digital infrastructure that charges to much and provides only few useful functionalities.

Introduction In December 2018, a University of Minnesota web librarian, Cody Hanson, participated in a workshop hosted by the Coalition for Networked Information. The topic of this, and a number of other events to date, is the drive by major scholarly publishers to more fully integrate authentication systems for accessing electronic media into their platforms.

The academic journal publishing system sure feels all too often a bit like a sinking boat: we have a reproducibility leak an affordability leak a functionality leak a data leak a code leak an interoperability leak a discoverability leak a peer-review leak a long-term preservation leak a link rot leak an evaluation/assessment leak a data visualization leak … … … and even a tiny access leak still remains even after 30 years of trying to fix it.

2020 was different for all of us to say the least and only time will tell what this pandemic will mean for our futures – personally and professionally. Science has taken center stage during this year and thus, a lot of issues that were previously only discussed within the community have gained more attention from society. After an eventful year we would like to take a look back at the Elephants in the Lab of the Year.

Think, check, submit: who hasn’t heard of this mantra to help researchers navigate the jungle of commercial publishers? Who isn’t under obligation to publish in certain venues, be it because employers ask for a particular set of journals for hiring, tenure or promotion, or because of funders’ open access mandates?

Until the late 1980s or early 1990s, academic institutions such as universities and research institutes were at the forefront of developing and implementing digital technology. After email they developed Gopher, TCP/IP, http, the NCSA Mosaic browser and experimented with Mbone. Since then, at most academic institutions, infrastructure has moved past the support of email and browsers only at a glacial pace.

There are regular discussions among academics as to who should be the prime mover in infrastructure reform. Some point to the publishers to finally change their business model. Others claim that researchers need to vote with their feet and change how they publish. Again others find that libraries should just stop subscribing to journals and use the saved money for a modern publishing system.

The impact of bioenergy research Bioenergy production (liquid biofuels for long haul transportation, for instance) and use has come to be seen as an essential component of our energy matrix and it must be expanded if we are to avoid climate change [1]. It is the only available option for fossil fuels substitution for a large sector of our economies.

Introduction As the novel coronavirus continues to spread around the world in the spring of 2020, several European governments have started to implement severe measures such as physical distancing or the closure of local commerce in order to slow down the spread of the virus. But governments have also called on science and academia to join forces to bring together expertise, knowledge and technological resources.