Category Archives: publishing

20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing

When Harvard University says it can not afford something, people notice. So it was last month when a faculty committee examining the future of the university’s libraries declared that the continued growth of journal subscription fees was unsustainable, even for them. The accompanying calls for faculty action are being hailed as a major challenge to the traditional publishers […]

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The AAAS believes the public should read press releases not papers

There’s been a lot of media coverage of and discussion about a recent paper from Bert Vogelstein and Victor Velvulescu about the utility of whole-genome sequencing to predict disease. Using previously published data on disease occurrence in identical twins, and a relatively simple mathematical model, the authors conclude that not only isn’t sequencing very useful for […]

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Xenophobic scientific publishers: open access aids foreign enemies

The American Association of Publishers and the anti-open access DC Principles group have sent letters to both houses of Congress outlining why they oppose the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would make the results of all federally funded research publicly available. They largely trot out the same tired “not all publishers are alike, so don’t impose […]

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We won the Battle of the Research Works Act. Now let’s win the War for Open Access.

Late last year Elsevier and two of its allies in Congress quietly introduced a bill that would have halted the trend towards increased public access to the results of government funded research headlined by the NIH’s Public Access Policy. This brazen act, which its backers hoped would pass unnoticed in the quiet of the holidays, […]

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My brain just exploded: CUP pushes “article rental scheme”

With fake publishers all the rage on Twitter, I was sure that this press release from Cambridge Journals was some kind of joke. Cambridge Journals has announced a brand new Article Rental scheme, which will see single academic research articles being made available over a 24-hour period at a significantly lower cost. More brilliance from […]

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Better version of “Boycott Elsevier” t-shirt

And here’s a hi-res version of the image if you want it. Some other versions I’ve been working on:  

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New bill in Congress would EXPAND federal public access policies!

A showdown is looming in Congress as defenders of the public interest have moved to counter the special interest sellout of the pending Research Works Act (RWA), which would end public access to the results of Federally funded research. A bipartisan group of legislators in both houses of  Congress just introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act […]

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The widely held notion that high-impact publications determine who gets academic jobs, grants and tenure is wrong. Stop using it as an excuse.

In response to my previous post on boycotting non-OA journals, my friend Gavin Sherlock made the following comment: I laud what you are doing, and you have changed the world of publishing forever for the better. However, I was specifically told by my chair that I need a Nature or Science paper to make my […]

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You are Elsevier: time to overcome our fears and kill subscription journals

Having spent a decade fighting the scientific publishing establishment, the last few weeks have been kind of fun. Elsevier, the Dutch publishing conglomerate that has long served as the poster child for all that is wrong with the industry, has come under withering criticism for pushing legislation that would prevent the US government from making the […]

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Nature’s shiny sounding copout on open access

Nature has an editorial in this week’s issue on broader issues surround access to the scientific literature. Several people have sent it to me with some variation on “Wow, Nature is saying good things about open access”. I was skeptical, given that Nature has a long history of occasionally saying the right things about open access one […]

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