I've put off writing this post about the Bouchout Declaration for a number of reasons. I attended the meeting that launched the declaration last year, and from my perspective that was a frustrating meeting.

Roughly ten days after I first blogged about this (see: Springer caught red-handed selling access to an Open Access article), Springer have now made a curious public statement acknowledging this debacle: Statement on Annals of Forest Science article Berlin, 6 May 2015 A number of tweets posted by Prof.

Open Access (OA) pioneer and OA journal eLife founding member and sponsor, the Max Planck Society just released a white paper (PDF) analyzing open access costs in various countries and institutions and comparing them to subscription costs. Such studies are fundamental prerequisites for evidence-based policies and informed decisions on how to proceed with bitterly needed reforms.

[This is a guest-post by Richard Poynder , a long-time observer and analyst of academic publishing now perhaps best known for the very detailed posts on his Open and Shut blog. It was originally part of a much longer post on that blog, the introduction to an interview with the publisher MDPI.

Copied from an email exchange. Mike: Did we know about the Royal Society’s PLOS ONE-clone? http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/about I am in favour of this. I might well send them my next paper while the universal waiver is still in place. Matt: Did not know about it. Their post-waiver APC is insane. How can they possibly justify $1600?

This abomination — a proposal for a “UK National Licence” for open-access papers, making them available only in the UK, is not an April Fool joke.

I had an email out of the blue this morning, from someone I’d not previously corresponded with, asking me an important question about PeerJ. I thought it was worth sharing the question, and its answer, more generally.

Open Science has emerged into the mainstream, primarily due to concerted efforts from various individuals, institutions, and initiatives. This small, focused gathering brought together several of those community leaders.  The purpose of the meeting was to define common goals, discuss common challenges, and coordinate on common efforts.

Our most recent manuscript was almost ready for submission. We were planning to send it to an open access journal. It was then that I had the thought: how many papers in the reference list are freely available? It somehow didn’t make much sense to point readers towards papers that they might not be able to access. So, I wondered if there was a quick way to determine how papers in my reference list were open access.

Last Friday, I genuinely thought Elsevier had illegally sold me an article that should have been open access. This post is to update you all on what we’ve found out since: The Scale of the Problem No one really knows how many articles are wrongly paywalled at all of Elsevier’s various different sales websites.