[NOTE: see the updates at the bottom. In summary, there’s nothing to see here and I was mistaken in posting this in the first place.] Elsevier’s War On Access was stepped up last year when they started contacting individual universities to prevent them from letting the world read their research.

Additional new funders joining Europe PMC further expand the perspective and scope of the resource. Two new funders have today formally announced that they have joined the Europe PMC funders group, and in doing so the outputs of the research they fund will be freely available via Europe PMC. This brings the total Europe PMC funders to 26, and marks a steady growth in the open access commitment of research funders.

Over the past few weeks there has been a sudden increase in the amount of financial data on scholarly communications in the public domain. This was triggered in large part by the Wellcome Trust releasing data on the prices paid for Article Processing Charges by the institutions it funds.

Thinking more generally about the “Recursive Fury” debacle, something struck me as somewhat of an eye opener: the lack of support for the authors by Frontiers and the demonstrative support by their institution, UWA (posting the retracted article). Even though this might be the first time a scholarly journal caved in to legal pressure from anti-science groups, it should perhaps come as no surprise.

This morning sees the publication of the new Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework from HEFCE, the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

Konsequenter Schritt: Die Universität Konstanz trägt die ständig steigenden Preise für wissenschaftliche Zeitschriften nicht mehr länger mit. Die Verhandlungen mit dem Verlagsriesen Elsevier wurden jetzt abgebrochen.

In discussion of Samuel Gershman’s rather good piece The Exploitative Economics Of Academic Publishing , I got into this discusson on Twitter with David Mainwaring (who is usually one of the more interesting legacy-publisher representatives on these issues) and Daniel Allingon (who I don’t know at all). I’ll need to give a bit of background before I reach the key part of that discussion, so here goes.

I’ve been invited to come in and have an informal chat about open access with the Linnean Society on March 24th this month. Particularly with regard to what is and what is not ‘open access’ in terms of Creative Commons licences. I write this blog post to spur on other advocates to try and encourage their society journals to use proper, open access compliant article licencing that facilitates rather than prevents text &

I hate to keep flogging a dead horse, but since this issue won’t go away I guess I can’t, either. 1. Two years ago, I wrote about how you have to pay to download Elsevier’s “open access” articles.

The upcoming 2014 Galaxy Community Conference (GCC2014) has just opened early registration, and following from our series announced at the last meeting we are renewing our call for papers for our special thematic focused series on studies utilizing large-scale datasets and workflows.