In September, a journalistic article on Diamond Open Access (by Wolfgang Benedikt Schmal and myself) and a preprint on Transformative Open Access Agreements (by Laura Rothfritz, Wolfgang Benedikt Schmal, and myself) were published. On Diamond Open Access &

Ein traditionelles Leitargument der Open-Access-Bewegung lautet, dass die freie Zugänglichkeit von wissenschaftlichen Publikationen im Schnitt auch die Wahrscheinlichkeit der Zitation erhöht. Dass dies auch tatsächlich der Fall ist, weist nun eine aktuelle Studie in Scientometrics nach, über die Science berichtet.

As some people abroad were interested in my earlier posts on the German DEAL contracts, I have decided to summarise here some key points of the new contracts with Wiley, Springer Nature and Elsevier. The three contracts differ in some aspects, but at least there are two issue they have in common: They are opt-in contracts , only those organisations that actively join the contract will benefit from the conditions.

zu Sarah Dellmann, Xenia van Edig, Jesko Rücknagel, Stefan Schmeja: F acetten eines Missverständnisses. Ein Debattenbeitrag zum Begriff „Diamond Open Access“ , in: o-bib 9 (3), 2022, S. 1-12. https://doi.org/10.5282/o-bib/5849 Neben dem zwanzigsten Jahrestag der Berliner Erklärung hatte das Jahr 2023 auch ein zehnjähriges Jubiläum zu bieten.

Last time, we looked at the difference between cost, value and price, and applied those concepts to simple markets like the one for chairs, and the complex market that is scholarly publication. We finished with the observation that the price our community pays for the publication of a paper (about $3,333 on average) is about 3–7 times as much as its costs to publish ($500-$1000)? How is this possible?

We have a tendency to be sloppy about language in everyday usage, so that words like “cost”, “value” and “price” are used more or less interchangeably. But economists will tell you that the words have distinct meanings, and picking them apart is crucial to understand economic transaction. Suppose I am a carpenter and I make chairs: The cost of the chair is what it costs me to make it: raw materials, overheads, my own time, etc.

No agreement with Frontiers in Germany As Bernhard Mittermaier, head of the central library of the Forschungszentrum Jülich, announced yesterday, there will be no agreement with Frontiers in Germany. The negotiations between the Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Open Access Publisher Frontiers on a nationwide framework contract did not succeed.

The Forschungszentrum Jülich and Frontiers signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a German Consortium with the Open Access publisher Frontiers.

Matt and I are about to submit a paper. One of the journals we considered — and would have really liked in many respects — turned out to use the CC By-NC-SA license. This is a a very well-intentioned licence that allows free use except for commercial purposes, and which imposes the same licence on all derivative works. While that sounds good, there are solid reasons to prefer the simpler CC By licence.

I’ve been on vacation for a couple of weeks, hence the radio silence here at SV-POW! after the flood of Supersaurus posts and Matt’s new paper on aberrant nerves in human legs. But the world has not stood still in my absence (how rude of it!) and one of the more significant things to have happened in this time is the announcement of RVHost, a hosted end-to-end scholarly publishing solution provided by River Valley Technologies.