I read some sad news on Twitter recently. The Ecological Society of America has decided to publish its journals with Wiley: Whilst I think the decision to move away from their old, unloved publishing platform is a good one. The move to publish their journals with Wiley is a strategically poor one. In this post I shall explain my reasoning and some of the widespread dissatisfaction with the direction of this change.

With a first commit to github not so long ago (2015-04-13), getpapers is one of the newest tools in the ContentMine toolchain. It’s also the most readily accessible and perhaps most immediately exciting – it does exactly what it says on the tin: it gets papers for you en masse without having to click around all those different publisher websites. A superb time-saver.

Despite the hype around “big data”, a more immediate problem facing many scientific analyses is that large-scale databases must be assembled from a collection of small independent and heterogeneous fragments – the outputs of many and isolated scientific studies conducted around the globe. Collecting and compiling these fragments is challenging at both political and technical levels.

For ages I have been planning to collect some of the main aspects I would like to see improved in an upgrade to the disaster we so euphemistically call an academic publishing system. In this post I’ll try to briefly sketch some of the main issues, from several different perspectives. As a reader: I’d like to get a newspaper each morning that tells me about the latest developments, both in terms of general science news (aka.

Wiley & Readcube have done something rather sneaky recently, and it’s not escaped the attention of diligent readers of the scientific literature. On the article landing page for some, if not all(?) journal articles at Wiley, in JavaScript enabled web browsers they’ve replaced all links to download the PDF file of the article with links that direct you to Readcube instead.

Last Friday, I genuinely thought Elsevier had illegally sold me an article that should have been open access. This post is to update you all on what we’ve found out since: The Scale of the Problem No one really knows how many articles are wrongly paywalled at all of Elsevier’s various different sales websites.

you weren’t much loved in your short existence you weren’t much use to readers or text-miners because we often couldn’t find where you were – hiding amongst shadows. you were significantly more expensive than your ‘full’ open access cousins In March, 2015 ‘hybrid OA’ died after a short-life of neglect.

Last week, on Monday 19th January, I co-organised the first ever Open Research London event at Imperial College London, with the help of local organisers; Jon Tennant & Torsten Reimer. We invited two speakers for our first meeting: Chris Banks (Director of Library Services at Imperial, and an elected Board Member of Research Libraries UK) &

[Update: I’ve submitted this idea as a FORCE11 £1K Challenge research proposal 2015-01-13. I may be unemployed from April 2015 onwards (unsolicited job offers welcome!), so I certainly might find myself with plenty of time on my hands to properly get this done…!] Inspired by something I heard Stephen Curry say recently, and with a little bit of help from Jo McIntyre I’ve started a project to compare EuropePMC author manuscripts

So, apparently Elsevier are launching a new open access mega-journal some time this year, joining the bandwagon of similar efforts from almost every other major publisher. A lovely acknowledgement of the roaring success of PLOS ONE, who did it first a long time ago. They’re only ~8 years behind, but they’re learning. I for one am pleased they are asking the research community what they want from this new journal.