Category Archives: public access

Exploring the relationship between gender and author order and composition in NIH-funded research

Last week there was a brief but interesting conversation on Twitter about the practice of “co-first” authors on scientific papers that led me to do some research on the relationship between author order and gender using data from the NIH’s Public Access Policy. I want to note at the outset that this is my first foray […]

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The current system of scholarly publishing is the real infringement of academic freedom

Rick Anderson has a piece on “Open Access and Academic Freedom” at Inside Higher Ed arguing the open access policies being put into place by many research funders and some universities that require authors to make their work available under open licenses (most commonly Creative Commons’ CC-BY) are a violation of academic freedom and should be […]

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The DOE’s public access policy sells out the public

Yesterday the Department of Energy became one of the first federal agencies to announce its plan to comply with a 2013 White Houses directive ordering federal agencies to provide the public with access to the results of research that they fund. Here are the main features: DOE will host a centralized database of metadata (title, authors) The full-text of […]

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Why I, a founder of PLOS, am forsaking open access

PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU READ THIS THAT IT WAS WRITTEN FOR APRIL FOOLS DAY!!! I co-founded the Public Library of Science (PLOS) in 2002 because I believed deeply that the open access publishing model PLOS espoused and has come to dominate was good for science, scientists and the public.  Over the past decade open access […]

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FIRST of all, THIS is why you should never trust publishers

When President Obama announced last year that he was requiring federal agencies that fund science to develop policies to make papers arising from the work they publish freely available to the public, major subscription-based publishers responded in a generally favorable manner – reflecting the extent to which they had drawn the White House back from more aggressive […]

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PubMed Commons: Post publication peer review goes mainstream

I have written a lot about how I think the biggest problem in science communication today is the disproportionate value we place on where papers are published when assessing the validity and import of a work of science, and the contribution of its authors. And I have argued that the best way to change this […]

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Let’s not get too excited about the new UC open access policy

It was announced today that systemwide Academic Senate representing the 10 campuses of the University of California system had passed an “open access” policy. The policy will work like this. Before assigning copyright to publishers, all UC faculty will grant the university a non-exclusive license to make the works freely available, provide the university with […]

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A CHORUS of boos: publishers offer their “solution” to public access

As expected, a coalition of subscription based journal publishers has responded to the White House’s mandate that federal agencies develop systems to make the research they fund available to public by offering to implement the system themselves. This system, which they call CHORUS (for ClearingHouse for the Open Research of the United Status) would set up […]

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