Sorry for the short notice, but I just wanted to let you all know: Today is Academic-Led Publishing Day, which the official website describes as “a global digital event to foster discussions about how members of the scholarly community can develop and support academic-led publishing initiatives”. More informally, it’s about how we can throw off the shackles of “publishers” that have made themselves our masters rather than our servants.
In a move that will surprise no-one who’s been paying attention, my and Matt’s presentation of vertebral orientation at the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress is now up as a PeerJ preprint. Sadly, with the end of the conference period on 15th December, the page for my talk has been deleted, along with some interesting comments. But here at SV-POW!, we have no truck with ephemerality, hence this more permanent manifestation of our work.
Scholastica is a publishing platform that offers support for super-low-cost open-access journals such as Discrete Analysis , led by Tim Gowers. They’re putting together the first Academic-Led Publishing Day on 7 February next year, and as part of the build-up, they kindly invited me to do an interview for them, kicking off their Academic-Led Publishing From the Experts series.
The opening remarks by the hosts of conferences are usually highly forgettable, a courtesy platform offered to a high-ranking academic who has nothing to say about the conference’s subject. NOT THIS TIME! This is the opening address of APE 2018, the Academic Publishing in Europe conference.
Open-access journalist Richard Poynder posted a really good interview today with the Gates Foundation’s Associate Officer of Knowledge & Research Services, Ashley Farley.
Lots of discussion online lately about unpaid peer reviews and whether this indicates a “degraded sense of community” in academia, improper commoditization of the unwritten responsibilities of academics, or a sign that we should rethink incentives in academia.
Excellent news this morning in a press-release from the Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics : The part that I like most here is the sense that it’s part of an inevitable and historic shift away from legacy publishers and their subscription paywalls.
This week, psychologists are the newest group of scholars to learn that their “publishers” are dedicated to preventing their work from being made public. The American Psychological Association launched a pilot to monitor and seek removal of unauthorized online postings of APA journal articles.
This is an important question, and one that is all too easy to overlook. No doubt the editorial board of Lingua assumed that they owned and controlled their journal, right up to the moment they decided to find a different publisher who would help them transition to reasonably priced open access.
This tired old argument came up again on Twitter this evening, in light of Elsevier’s me-too announcement of a preprint archive: And elsewhere in the same thread: So what’s the problem? Mendeley and SSRN are still around, right Yes, they are. But they continue to exist only by the grace of Elsevier. At any moment, that could change. And here’s why.