Back in mid-April, when I (Mike) was at the OSI2016 conference, I was involved in the “Moral Dimensions of Open” group. (It was in preparation for this that wrote the Moral Dimensions series of posts here on SV-POW!.) Like all the other groups, ours was tasked with making a presentation to the plenary session, taking questions and feedback, and presenting a version 2 on the final day. Here’s the title page that I contributed.

Ab 2017 wechseln 9 etablierte Subskriptionszeitschriften von Wiley in ein APC-basiertes OA-Modell unter einer neuen Partnerschaft von Wiley und Hindwai. Während der bisherige Inhalt bei Wiley verbleibt, soll die Redaktion und der Produktionsprozess der neuen Inhalte über die Hindawi Plattform abgewickelt werden.

In discussions of open access, it’s pretty common for us biologists to suffer from arXiv envy: the sense that mathematicians and physicists have the access problem solved, because they all put their work on arXiv. That’s a widespread idea, which is why we see tweets like this one, which floated past in my stream today: Turns out, not so much.

A confidential internal email has come into my hands, from Bristol University, regarding the UK’s national negotiations with Elsevier. I think it’s of general interest. (I should say that, although my own affiliation is also with Bristol, this is a complete coincidence: for avoidance of doubt, the person I received this from is not at Bristol.)

There are a lot of really interesting works being published over at Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).  If you aren’t already following the updates you can do so via RSS, Twitter, or via email (scroll to the bottom for sign-up). In this post I’m going to discuss why Chad Hammond’s contribution is so remarkable and why it could represent an exciting model for a more transparent and more immediate future of scholarly communications.

Good news! Probably by now everyone’s heard about the European Union’s conclusions on the transition towards an Open Science system. This is progressive and positive, pretty much from start to finish. It’s so good that you should really read the whole thing — but here are some edited highlights: Well, the good news just keeps coming.

** GigaScience has Tapeworms and Scabies! And Reproducible Research. **While there has been recent controversy (and hashtags in response) from some of the more conservative sections of the medical community calling those who use or build on previous data “research parasites”, as data publishers we strongly disagree with this.

I’m on a public mailing list that was initially set up for delegates of the OSI2016 conference. In a recent email to that list, I pointed out that we can never know whether or not publishers are double-dipping (accepting APCs and subscriptions for the same content) unless they are totally transparent about their finances — and nothing in their history makes it likely that that’s ever going to happen.

Heute hat der Rat für Wettbewerbsfähigkeit (“Competitiveness Council”) der Europäischen Union seine “Council Conclusions on the Transition towards an Open Science System” verabschiedet (PDF). In einer Pressemitteilung der niederländischen Ratspräsidentschaft, unter dem Titel “Europa entscheidet sich für Open Access”, wird der Kern der europäischen Open-Science-Strategie deutlich: Über diese klare Richtungsentscheidung hinaus sollen,

In a recent blog-post, Kevin Smith tells it like it is: legacy publishers are tightening their grip in an attempt to control scholarly communications. “The same five or six major publishers who dominate the market for scholarly journals are engaged in a race to capture the terms of and platforms for scholarly sharing”, says Smith.