More and more experts are calling for the broken and destructive academic journal system to be replaced with modern solutions. This post summarizes why and how this task can now be accomplished. It was first published in German on the blog of journalist Jan-Martin Wiarda. Front cover of the now-vanished Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine . Source: Scan from the-scientist.com website

The problem Text-mining - the art of answering questions by extracting patterns, data, etc. out of the published literature - is not easy. It’s made incredibly difficult because of publishers. It is a fact that the vast majority of publicly funded research across the globe is published in paywall journals.

In his fantastic Peters Memorial Lecture on occasion of receiving CNI’s Paul Evan Peters award, Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory described my calls to drop subscriptions as “radical” and “extremist” (starting at about minute 58): Regardless of what Herbert called my views, this is a must-see presentation in which Herbert essentially presents the technology and standards behind the functionalities I have been asking for

There can be little doubt that the defunding of public academic institutions is a main staple of populist movements today. Whether it is Trump’s budget director directly asking if one really needs publicly funded science at all, or the planned defunding of the endowments of arts and humanities or the initiatives to completely abolish the EPA and other science agencies.

This is an approximate rendering of my comments as part of the closing panel of “The End of Scientific Journal? Transformations in Publishing” held at the Royal Society, London on 27 November 2015. It should be read as a reconstruction of what I might have said rather than an accurate record. The day had focussed on historical accounts of “journals” as mediators of both professional and popular research communications.

Over the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about so-called “predatory publishers”, i.e., those corporations which publish journals, some or all of  which purport to peer-review submitted articles, but publish articles for a fee without actual peer-review. The origin of the discussion can be traced to a list of such publishers hosted by librarian Jeffrey Beall.

There is an interesting study out in the journal PNAS: “Evaluating big deal journal bundles”. The study details the disparity in negotiation skills between different US institutions when haggling with publishers about subscription pricing.

One reason I was able to build BioNames is because a significant fraction of the taxonomic literature for animals is now online, either due to the efforts of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, digital archives, commercial publishers, or individual institutions and scientific societies. However there are still big gaps in literature availability.

There are two major strands to position of traditional publishers have taken in justifying the process by which they will make the, now inevitable, transition to a system supporting Open Access.

The online maths community has lit up with excitement as a document, claiming to prove one of the major outstanding theorems in maths has been circulated. In response an online peer review process has swung into action that is very similar to the kind of post-publication peer review that many of us have advocated. Is this a one of, a special case?