Last week I was lucky enough to spend five days in North Carolina at the Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded initiative that brings teams together on a retreat style meeting to work on specific projects.

We ducked a fundamental question raised by our proposal for infrastructure principles: “what exactly counts as infrastructure?” Of course this is not a straightforward question and part of the reason for leaving it in untouched in the introductory post. We believe that any definition must entail a much broader discussion from the community.

The recently discussed scenario of universal gold open access brought about by simply switching the subscriptions funds at libraries to have the libraries pay for author processing charges instead, seemed like a ghoulish nightmare. One of the few scenarios worse than the desolate state we call the status quo today.

For ages I have been planning to collect some of the main aspects I would like to see improved in an upgrade to the disaster we so euphemistically call an academic publishing system. In this post I’ll try to briefly sketch some of the main issues, from several different perspectives. As a reader: I’d like to get a newspaper each morning that tells me about the latest developments, both in terms of general science news (aka.

Geoff Bilder, Jennifer Lin, Cameron Neylon The announcement of a $3M grant from the Helmsley Trust to ORCID is a cause for celebration.

On March 30 the BBC broadcast a 40 minute talk from Martha Lane Fox. The Richard Dimbleby Lecture is an odd beast, a peculiarly British, indeed a peculiarly BBC-ish institution. It is very much an establishment platform, celebrating a legendary broadcaster and ring marshaled by his sons, a family that as our speaker dryly noted are “an entrenched monopoly” in British broadcasting.

Dies wurde in Deutschland anscheinend kaum bekannt: Vor einigen Tagen entfernte das Wissenschaftlernetzwerk Academia.edu auf Aufforderung des Wissenschaftsverlags Elsevier Artikel von seinem Server, die Autoren als Acadamia-Nutzer dort im Open Access verfügbar gemacht hatten.

Luckily, there are many roads to open access to publicly funded research.