The recently released development draft for SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE), authored by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in response to the OSTP memo on public access to federally funded research in the US sounds a lot like the library-based publishing system I’ve been perpetually arguing for.

Today, finally, our manuscript on journal rank is accepted for publication at Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. One may wonder how a paper that reviews the empirical findings around journal rank ends up in a journal about human neuroscience.

Academic publishers have been parasitizing the public purse for long enough now. Steffen Böhm, director of the Essex Sustainability Institute, said it best: In his article, he mentions the successful SciELO project in South America. In a lot of ways, SciELO (scielo.org) is quite close to what I have been arguing for: SciELO means “Scientific Electronic Library Online” and is supported by the Brazilian and Chilean government.

While our own manuscript on journal rank is almost through the peer-review process, this morning I received several messages announcing the DORA ( San Francisco declaration on research Assessment ), which I signed immediately.

I’m a big fan of preprints, the posting of papers in public archives prior to peer review. Preprints speed up the scientific dialogue by letting everyone see research as it happens, not 6 months to 2 years later following the sometimes extensive peer review process. They also allow more extensive pre-publication peer review because input can be solicited from the entire community of scientists, not just two or three individuals.

Regular reader of this blog will be aware of our efforts to promote data citation using digital object identifiers (DOIs), and this week, alongside Rebecca Lawrence from F1000 Research and Kevin Ashley from the Digital Curation Centre, our Editor in Chief Laurie Goodman has a correspondence in Nature strongly making this case.

ESA has just announced that it has changed its policy on preprints and will now allow articles that have been posted on major preprint servers, like arXiv, to be considered for publication in its journals. I am very excited about this change for two reasons. First, as nicely laid out in INNGE blog post by Philippe Desjardins-Proulx*, there are many positive benefits to science of the preprint culture.

As we enter a new month, we have to announce some personnel changes to GigaScience , as we welcome Nicole Nogoy to the team as a Commissioning Editor from her base in New Zealand. It is with sadness we also have to say goodbye to our Assistant Editor Alexandra Basford, who has just left us to take up new challenges in Japan.

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.

At the end of last week, I came across a blog entry by Olaf Storbeck, reporting that a rising star from German business economics, Prof. Ulrich Lichtenthaler, is faced with numerous inquiries concerning his publishing record. Two journals have already retracted three of his articles and additional articles are under scrutiny.