In an article that many of you will now have seen, Heather Morrison demonstrated the enormous profits of STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) scholarly publishers.  The figures are taken from her in-progress dissertation which in turn cites an article in The Economist.  It all checks out.  I emphasise this because I found the figures so hard to believe.

Most of you will know that the major US science-funding agencies require the work they fund (from the public purse) to be made available as open-access to the public that funded it.  And it’s hard for me to imagine anyone sees that requirement as anything other than straightforwardly just.

Hot on the heels of PLoS ONE -like open-access megajournals such as BMJ Open , Nature’s Scientific Reports , the Royal Society’s Open Biology and SAGE’s SAGE Open , now the king of evil predatory price-gouging publishers-whose-business-model-is-to-prevent-papers-being-read Elsevier are — you won’t believe this — launching their own PLoS ONE clone, FEBS Open Bio . So please join me in giving a

[This post is mostly a rehash of a comment I made on the last one, but I guess more people see posts than comments.

I was directed to an article entitled Rookie Review on Nature Jobs by a tweet from Andy Farke (author of the Open Source Palaeontologist and an editor at PLoS ONE).  It has a lot of good stuff in it, once you get past the opening section.

You don’t need to read this. You can read Scott Aaronson’s Review of The Access Principle and Tim O’Reilly’s Piracy is Progressive Taxation and connect the blindingly obvious dots. OTOH, Aaronson and O’Reilly wrote their pieces for the same reason I’m writing this one: some things are not blinding obvious to everyone. And sometimes the situation makes me mad enough to take a swing. So here goes.

A month ago today, George Monbiot’s piece Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist was published in The Guardian.  It stirred up a lot of debate, and has garnered 365 comments so far, most of them strongly supportive.

This just in, forwarded to the ICZN mailing list by Donat Agosti: In short, this means that if you work on plants, you will be able, starting in January, to name new species in electronic-only publications such as PLoS ONE and Palaeontologia Electronica — publications that are becoming increasingly important due to their openness and easy accessibility. This is great news for botanists.

In most journals, in-line citations are by author and year.  So, for example, if someone writes “ Haplocanthosaurus has been recovered as a non-diplodocimorph diplodocoid (Wilson 2002)”, you know that the paper that recovered Haplo in that position was, well, Wilson 2002.  And everyone who works on sauropods is familiar with Wilson 2002.

For anyone who doesn’t already know, Palaeontologia Electronica is an on-line, open-access palaeontology journal — the only one in the world (unless you count Acta Pal Pol , which is freely available online and also published on paper.) PE is sponsored by the Palaeontological Association, the Paleontological Society and the Society of Vertebrtate Paleontology, the big three professional associations, so you