So, the new RCUK open access policy is now in play… and guess what – there’s plenty of journals out there that are not accommodating it at the moment. Perhaps this is just out of ignorance? Perhaps this is an area where a little nudge from interested parties e.g. open access advocates, RCUK-funded academics, and other concerned people might help? With this aim I have just emailed the editorial board of the Taylor &

By Claire Sand, Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, King’s College London The Access to Understanding competition had instant appeal for me because it seemed to combine my two greatest interests – science and writing.

I was struck by this bit of prevarication in Richard Van Noorden’s new piece on open access. First the set-up: So far, so good. And then we have this: What does the weasel-word “appropriate” mean here? Is Alicia saying that she doesn’t think what Eisen’s saying is correct ? No, if that’s what she meant, she would have said so. “I don’t think it’s right to say X” is a much stronger statement.

My thanks for Richard Van Noorden for drawing my attention to his new piece Open access: The true cost of science publishing in Nature . I wrote a detailed comment on this article, but when I went to post it, I was told “This account has been banned from commenting due to posting of comments classified as inappropriate or other violations of our Terms of Service”: This news to me. No-one at Nature thought to tell

Die aktuelle Ausgabe der Nature (495(7442)) beschäftigt sich in mehreren interessanten Artikeln mit der Zukunft des wissenschaftlichen Publizierens. Themen sind u.a. Open Access, Lizenzierung (Creative Commons), „Predatory Publishers“, Altmetrics und Data Librarianship. Das Editorial unter dem Titel „A New Page“ gibt einen Überblick über die Artikel der Ausgabe: Butler, D. (2013). Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing.

There’s a good, balanced piece by Stephen Pincock in the new Nature , on the question of whether early-career researchers should publish their work in open-access journals.

Am kommenden Mittwoch beschäftigen sich die Kollegen vom Alexander von Humboldt Institut für internet und Gesellschaft (HIIG) im Rahmen des “Digitalen Salon” mit dem Thema Open Science — wer in Berlin ist und Zeit und Interesse hat, sollte vorbeischauen.

Earlier this month HEFCE invited advice on developing their open access policy in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Both EMBL-EBI, who run the Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) service, and the UK members of the Europe PMC Funders’ Group, strongly support HEFCE’s movement towards requiring that all outputs submitted to the post-2014 REF are published open access.

In the last 2 weeks I’ve given talks in Brussels & Amsterdam. The first one was given during a European Commission (Brussels) working group meeting on Text & Data Mining. There were perhaps only ~30 people in the room for that. The second presentation was given just a few days ago at Beyond The PDF 2 (#btpdf2) in Amsterdam.

We’ve seen a lot of arguments recently about the RCUK open-access policy and the length of embargoes that it allows on Green OA articles under various circumstances. When is it reasonable to insist on six months? When might publishers have cause to want to stretch it out to 24 months? And so on. The truth here is terribly simple.