The pews of the Internet Archive back in 2018. tl;dr: Posts on this blog are now automatically archived, indexed and full-text searchable through The Rogue Scholar . The jury might still be out on whether the small or indie web will make a comeback, but I’ve personally enjoyed posting more on my blog here in recent months.

The DFG is a very progressive and modern funding agency. More than two years ago, the main German science funding agency signed the “Declaration on Research Assessment” DORA.

No matter how well-intended (and we all know to which place the road leads that is paved with good intentions!), transformative agreements (such as DEAL in Germany) are generally the wrong tool at the wrong time for making publicly funded science accessible to the public.

On May 23, the Council of the EU adopted a set of conclusions on scholarly publishing that, if followed through, would spell the end for academic publishers and scholarly journals as we know them. On the same day, the adoption was followed by a joint statement of support by the largest and most influential research organizations in Europe.

Here is an update on a study we are conducting at scidecode science consulting.

Hier nur eine kurze Ergänzung zum Posting über APC-Verwaltung und Bibliotheken, die ich auslagere, um besagtes Posting nicht aufzublähen.

or: how journals are like 1930s Rolls Royce Phantom IIs Recently, the “German Science and Humanities Council” (Wissenschaftsrat) has issued their “Recommendations on the Transformation of Academic Publishing: Towards Open Access”. On page 33 they write that increasing the competition between publishers is an explicit goal of current transformative agreements: This emphasis on competition refers back to the simple fact

tl;dr: Evidence suggests that the prestige signal in our current journals is noisy, expensive and flags unreliable science. There is a lack of evidence that the supposed filter function of prestigious journals is not just a biased random selection of already self-selected input material.

Sometimes, only small changes are required for potentially huge downstream effects.

Last week’s podium on the commodification of open science entitled “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product?” was surprisingly unanimous on the need to radically modernize academic publishing and abolish the current publishing system relying mainly on corporate publishers with monopoly status.