The recent call for a GlamMag boycott by Nobel laureate Randy Shekman made a lot of headlines, but will likely have no effect whatsoever. For one, the call for boycott isn’t even close in scale to “the cost of knowledge” boycott against Elsevier and even that drew less than 15,000 measly signatures, a drop in the bucket with 970,000 board members, reviewers and authors working for Elsevier largely for free.

We want you to use our stuff We get many queries regarding the policies and licenses associated with our content and supporting data, and as our co-publishers BioMed Central have just announced the migration of their licenses (including ours) to the newly released version 4.0 of the creative commons CC-BY attribution license, we thought it would be a good opportunity to clarify our policies in an easier to understand manner than

Open access and gated publishing have been discussed at length by researchers, publishers, and the media. Still, the debate got more intense when Elsevier sent takedown notices to Academia.edu. Yesterday, it got even more intense when it became public that the University of Calgary is also confronted with takedown notices from Elsevier. Elsevier responded to the critiques, but it is unlikely that this will take the heat out of the debate.

Doing science in academia involves a lot of rejection and negative feedback. Between grant agencies single digit funding rates, pressure to publish in a few “top” journals all of which have rejection rates of 90% or higher [1], and the growing gulf between the number of academic jobs and the number of graduate students and postdocs [2], spending even a small amount of time in academia pretty much guarantees that you’ll see a lot of rejection.

Barely a fortnight has passed since Science Magazine published the outcomes of a hoax perpetrated by one of their reporters, John Bohannon. Not surprisingly, the news article was widely criticized, not the least on this obscure blog. The content was simple enough: Bohannon picked a swath of largely fake journals, submitted fake manuscripts and boasted that more than 60% of his submissions were accepted.

By now, everybody reading this obscure blog knows about the so-called sting operation by John Bohannon in Science Magazine last week. As virtually everybody has pointed out, the outcome of this stunt is entirely meaningless.

Yesterday, Science Magazine published a news story (not a peer-reviewed paper) by Gonzo-Scientist John Bohannon on a sting operation in which a journalist submitted a bogus manuscript to 304 open access journals (observe that no toll access control group was used). Science Magazine reports that 157 journals accepted and 98 rejected the manuscript.

Recently, a statement of librarian Rick Anderson has made the rounds: Of course, when you can get the same content for free, why should you pay for it? Apparently, Mr. Anderson does not value the work a publisher has put into their version of a scholarly article enough to pay for it, at least not compared to the author’s copy in the ‘green’ OA repository.

Academic publishing is in a dynamic state these days with large numbers of new journals popping up on a regular basis. Some of these new journals are actively experimenting with changing traditional approaches to publication and peer review in potentially important ways. So, I thought I’d provide a quick introduction to some of the new kids on the block that I think have the potential to change our approach to academic publishing.

Sven Fund, CEO of the German publishing house de Gruyter was recently interviewed by Richard Poynder in his widely read interview series on open access. In the interview, he first avoided answering the question if de Gruyter had ever lobbied against open access.