Barrier-based publishers have been shouting and stomping around a lot recently.  Kind of like a Vogon guard.  But we’re trying to see the situation from their point of view.

… and that’s why we’re angry. (Note: exact percentages are made up.  But based on a true story.)

A few weeks ago, software developer and pioneering blogger Joel Spolsky made an important point about SOPA/PIPA which has stayed with me: And of course the same thing applies to the RWA.

I have just sent this letter to the Editorial Office of the brand new open-access journal Biology Open, which has just published its very first issue. I feel like a bit of a jerk sending a criticism when they’re just up and running, but I think it’s the best thing in the long run.  I will let you know what they say if/when they reply. Update (28 March 2012). They did: read all about it.

A short one this time, honestly. I’ve written plenty about the Research Works Act, both on this blog and in The Guardian .  Those writings have mostly focussed on the practical implications of the bill.  But those aren’t the real reasons that it invokes such rage in me.  That comes from this definition (from the text of the bill): So if Randy Irmis gets an NIH grant to research some subject;

I know that I’ve tended to be very critical of Elsevier on these pages [peer review, economics, PLoS clone, RWA, profits].  I’ve sometimes wondered whether that’s really fair: after all, Elsevier are just one among many exploitative for-profit non-open scholarly publishers, right?  Shouldn’t I be equally harsh on Springer, Wiley, Informa and the rest? I’m not alone in this, of course.

Original Research Article Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, Volume 6, Issue 8, January 2012, Pages 1-7. Michael P. Taylor, Mathew J. Wedel, Darren Naish.

I’ve had it up to here with this misconception.  I just read it yet again, this time in a letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to Michael Eisen’s recent piece in that paper on the RWA.  The letter says some good things, but then right in the middle we have this: This is just one more example of a pernicious and persistent assumption.

Just a quick note that my article Academic publishers have become the enemies of science is now up on the Guardian’s Science Blog.  Spread the word! (You’re welcome to comment here, of course, but if you post your comments on the Guardian site, they will be much more widely read.

In an article that many of you will now have seen, Heather Morrison demonstrated the enormous profits of STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) scholarly publishers.  The figures are taken from her in-progress dissertation which in turn cites an article in The Economist.  It all checks out.  I emphasise this because I found the figures so hard to believe.