Guest post from Alex Green, Transformation Project Co-ordinator, Wellcome Trust Last month saw the publication of the 2014 Taylor & Francis Open Access Survey. Combining responses from just over 7,900 authors who published with Taylor & Francis in 2012 (9% of the total), this represents the opinions of authors from across the world in roughly the proportions they have published with Taylor &

We want you to use our stuff We get many queries regarding the policies and licenses associated with our content and supporting data, and as our co-publishers BioMed Central have just announced the migration of their licenses (including ours) to the newly released version 4.0 of the creative commons CC-BY attribution license, we thought it would be a good opportunity to clarify our policies in an easier to understand manner than

On the 1st April 2013, both the Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils UK will require that any article which attributes their funding and incurs an Article Processing Charge (APC) must be licensed using the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY). This blog posting provides an update as to those publishers who publish high volumes of Europe PMC funded research and who have put information in the public domain to confirm whether

I was honoured to talk at the symposium to celebrate Peter Murray-Rusts’ work. I didn’t want to give the usual kind of talk to this audience. I wanted to focus on what I think are the big risks and opportunities for the research community and why I believe that a focus on maximising research impact might be a way to bring the community together in a positive way.

The British Journal of Cancer – owned by Cancer Research UK (CR-UK) – has chosen to implement the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ for articles published under the BJC OPEN initiative. This licence permits distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

There has been some debate going backwards and forwards over the past few weeks about licensing, peoples expectations, and the extent to which researchers can be expected to understand, or want to understand, the details of legal terms, licensing and other technical minutiae. It is reasonable for scientific researchers not to wish to get into the details.

The issue of licensing arrangements and best practice for making data available has been brewing for some time but has just recently come to a head. John Wilbanks and Science Commons have a reasonably well established line that they have been developing for some time. Michael Nielsen has a recent blog post and Rufus Pollock, of the Open Knowledge Foundation, has also just synthesised his thoughts in response into a blog essay.

For anyone in the UK who lives under a stone, or those people elsewhere in the world who don’t follow British news, this week there has been at least some news beyond the ongoing economic crisis and a U.S. election. Two media ‘personalities’ have been excoriated for leaving what can only be described as crass and offensive messages on an elderly actor’s answer phone, while on air.