A while back, Elsevier launched its journal finder, tagged “Find the perfect journal for your article”. Since our priorities in choosing a journal are a bit different from Elsevier, here is the SV-POW! journal finder. (That’s version 2, by the way.
Last October, we published a sequence of posts about misleading review/reject/resubmit practices by Royal Society journals (Dear Royal Society, please stop lying to us about publication times; We will no longer provide peer reviews for Royal Society journals until they adopt honest editorial policies; Biology Letters does trumpet its submission-to-acceptance time;
Christopher W. Schadt tells a distasteful story over on his blog, about how a PLOS ONE paper that he was a co-author on was republished as part of a non-PLOS printed volume that retails for $100. The editors and publishers of this volume neither asked the authors’ permission to do this (which is fair enough, it was published as CC By), nor even took the elementary courtesy of informing them.
I know I’ve written about this before, but Richard Poynder’s new post reminds me that we Brits really do need to be up in arms over the abject behaviour of our supposed representatives, the research councils (RCUK). As a direct result of this policy, the publisher Emerald has now introduced 24-month embargoes on RCUK-funded papers, where before it had none.
Here’s what Science Europe, an association of European research and funding organisations, said in their recent position statement Principles on the Transition to Open Access to Research Publications : The term “hybrid open access” refers to a subscription journal in which individual articles can optionally be made open access on payment of a fee — for the Big Four publishers, typically (though not always) in the
Introduction I’m sure we all remember the White House OSTP’s recent memo on open access — a huge step forward that extends an NIH-like Green OA policy to all US federally funded research. It was a triumph for common sense, an explicit repudiation of the mindset behind the Research Works Act, and an affirmation for the ongoing FASTR legislation.
As part of the progressive erosion of RCUK’s initially excellent open-access policy, barrier-based publishers somehow got them to accept their “open-access decision tree”, which you can now find on page 7 of the toothless current version of the policy. The purpose of this manoeuvre by the Publishers Association is to lend an air of legitimacy to continuing to deny citizens access to the research they funded for up to 24 months after publication.
Jeffrey Beall’s fatuous pronouncement that The Serials Crisis is Over has been nagging away at me since it was posted yesterday. I admit my first reaction was that it was some kind of parody or satire, but Beall’s subsequent comments seem to rule out that charitable interpretation.
I was reading an article recently about crowd-funded startups. One of the featured startups aims to make divorce more painless.