To try and publicize the variety of Gold Open Access article publication options on offer, I’ve decided to create a visualization of the journal data that has previously been collected as part of my survey of ‘Open Access’ publisher licenses’ spreadsheet. Here is version 0.1 of the ‘Mounce plot’ (much more data still to be added!

Gah, so much interesting stuff going on and I simply have No. Time. To. Blog. But I’m making an exception for PeerJ, a new OA journal that is coming online later this year.

We have all bemoaned the increasing difficulty of keeping up with the growing body of literature. Many of us, me included, have been relying increasingly on following only a subset of journals, but with the growing popularity of the large open-access journals I know I for one am increasingly likely to miss papers.

I just sent this email to Darin Croft (of SVP). I chose to contact him because he recently answered questions about the embargo for EmbargoWatch and it was rather unclear who else I should approach. I did not want to blanket email the whole council.

Sometimes you just have to laugh… The year is 2012, we have the internet, we have blogs, and a huge variety of other tools to enable free, efficient and rapid communication of information and yet the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting rules still insist that all information within this year’s abstract booklet remain a big secret until the day of the event. Many others have justly written to complain about this before.

[I’m cross posting this from the OKFN version so I can embed the audio of the show in the post] Last Friday (17/08/12), representing the Open Knowledge Foundation, I had the pleasure of discussing the new Research Councils UK (RCUK) plan for all UK publicly-funded research to be published Open Access, on a special half hour Voice of Russia UK broadcast radio discussion.

UPDATE: If you’re looking for publicly available grants go check out our new Open Grants website at https://www.ogrants.org/. It has way more grants and is searchable so that you can quickly find the grants most useful to you. Recently a bunch of folks in the biological sciences have started sharing their grant proposals openly.

Auf die Schnelle, hier der Hinweis auf zwei lesenswerte Beiträge zum Thema Wissenschaft und Urheberrecht. In der heutigen Ausgabe der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung findet sich unter dem Titel “Für Fairness und Ausgewogenheit” ein wichtiger und umfangreicher Beitrag von  Wolfgang Marquardt. Marquardt ist Vorsitzender des Wissenschaftsrates und Sprecher der Allianz der Wissenschaftsorganisationen.

As I announced on Twitter about a week ago, I am now making all of my grant proposals open access. To start with I’m doing this for all of my sole-PI proposals, because I don’t have to convince my collaborators to participate in this rather aggressively open style of science. At the moment this includes three funded proposals: my NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship proposal, an associated Research Starter Grant proposal, and my NSF CAREER award.

With major governments signalling a shift to Open Access it seems like a good time to be asking which organisations in the scholarly communications space will survive the transition. It is likely that the major current publishers will survive, although relative market share and focus is likely to change. But the biggest challenges are faced by small to medium scholarly societies that depend on journal income for their current viability.