I got in a conversation recently with a friend who is about to have his first paper published. It’s been through review and is now accepted at a well-respected old-school journal owned by a legacy publisher. It’s not an open-access journal, and he asked my advice on how he could make the paper open access. We had a fruitful discussion, and we agreed that I’d write up the conclusions for this blog.

Reading the Government’s comments on the recent BIS hearing on open access, I see this: Following the link provided, I read: I’m completely, completely baffled by this.

As things stand there are two principal types of written communication in science: papers and blog posts. We’ve discussed the relative merits of formally published papers and more informal publications such as blog-posts a couple of times, but perhaps never really dug into what the differences are between them. Matt and I have been discussing this offline, and at one point Matt suggested that authorial intent is one of the key differences.

I sent this letter to Wiley today, in response to their announcement of elective open access being available in 81% of their journals.

Background Today has seen the release of a Bernstein Research investment report by Claudio Aspesi, entitled Reed Elsevier: Is Elsevier Heading for a Political Train-Wreck? It contains some stark warnings to potential investors: And: And most importantly, this conclusion: I’m not here to gloat.

The story so far … Nature Precedings is, or was, a preprint server, somewhat in the spirit of an arXiv for biology.  It describes, or described, itself as “a permanent, citable archive for pre-publication research and preliminary findings”. This is a very useful thing.