This end-of-the-year festive summary is different from previous ones:  For the first time, we can look back at a full publication year of our new baby, GigaByte journal. The older sibling GigaScience will also get the attention it deserves, before celebrating its 10th birthday in 2022. Let’s first have a look at how the new family member is doing.

Well, this is a very pleasant surprise on the last day of the semester: Tito Aureliano, Aline M. Ghilardi, Bruno A. Navarro, Marcelo A. Fernandes, Fresia Ricardi-Branco, & Mathew J. Wedel. 2021. Exquisite air sac histological traces in a hyperpneumatized nanoid sauropod dinosaur from South America. Scientific Reports 11: 24207.

“*What role does ‘open’ play in making this project special?”* This apparently easy, but not banal, question was asked in the Open Publishing Awards nomination form, and at OpenCitations we prefaced our answer to it by stating “For OpenCitations, ‘open’ is the crucial value and the final purpose.” We consider the free availability of bibliographic citation data to be a necessary condition for the establishment of an open knowledge graph, and

Unter dem Leitthema „Open Access und die Frage der Teilhabe“ fand am 3. Dezember 2021 der 18. Open-Access-Smalltalk mit 15 Beteiligten statt. Diesmal diskutierten wir, wie fair und frei zugänglich Open Access wirklich ist. Ein Ausgangspunkt des Diskussion waren aktuelle Entwicklungen wie die Übernahme des vormals nicht-kommerziellen Unternehmens Knowledge Unlatched durch Wiley.

As I was clearing out some old documents, I stumbled on this form from 2006: This was back when Paul Upchurch’s dissertation, then only 13 years old, contained much that still unpublished in more formal venues, notably the description of what was then “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii . As a fresh young sauropod researcher I was keen to read this and other parts of what was then almost certainly the most important and comprehensive

Zur Rubrik „OA Takeaways“ in diesem Blog Eine Aufgabe der Vernetzungs- und Kompetenzstelle Open Access Brandenburg liegt, ihrem Namen entsprechend, in der gezielten Vermittlung von Open-Access-Kompetenz und damit für Open Access und Open Research relevanten Wissen. Dazu gehört auch der regelmäßige Blick in die Fachliteratur.

As an Open Science journal, one of the main aims of GigaScience has always been to break down barriers. Both in the access of research and the underlying data and code supporting it, and the barriers holding back the researchers themselves. See our recent Review centering on inclusivity on the organization of meetings to see how it is important from an Open Science perspective.

This week is International Open Access Week, and with the theme “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity”. This aims at highlighting the individual and collective action required alongside the decisions, actions, and investments in knowledge sharing to ensure that equity is foundational.

Last time, we looked at the difference between cost, value and price, and applied those concepts to simple markets like the one for chairs, and the complex market that is scholarly publication. We finished with the observation that the price our community pays for the publication of a paper (about $3,333 on average) is about 3–7 times as much as its costs to publish ($500-$1000)? How is this possible?

We have a tendency to be sloppy about language in everyday usage, so that words like “cost”, “value” and “price” are used more or less interchangeably. But economists will tell you that the words have distinct meanings, and picking them apart is crucial to understand economic transaction. Suppose I am a carpenter and I make chairs: The cost of the chair is what it costs me to make it: raw materials, overheads, my own time, etc.