Our next scholarly communication brown bag discussion will be about retractions. We hope to talk about how retractions get issued, how researchers find out about retracted articles, what happens to people who are involved in a retraction, and what impact this has on the research lifecycle. In advance of that… read more
OA Week 2018: Engaging Early and Often
A key component of scholarly communication is, in fact, communication. What’s the point of making information available if engagement doesn’t follow? One way of facilitating increased engagement with scholarly literature is through the hosting of preprint articles on institutional repositories and preprint servers. Preprints are typically defined as scholarly articles… read more
Interesting new journal selection tool
The Cofactor Journal Selector Tool has been developed to allow researchers to find an appropriate journal for their paper. It allows researchers to select options for subject, peer review process, open access availability, speed of publication, and a few additional miscellaneous categories. After answering the questions (a process that takes… read more
Publishers behaving badly-again
Once again, someone has uncovered a scam by unsavory publishers. The Ottawa Citizen recently published an article by Tom Spears about a sham article that got accepted by several fake publishers within 48 hours of being submitted. These journals claimed that articles went out for peer review, but there is no… read more
ScienceOpen
There is a new open access publisher called ScienceOpen. The idea behind ScienceOpen is to publish in all areas of science and utilize post-publication peer review. Submitted articles will go through a technical and ethical review and accepted publications are then published online with a DOI after payment of an… read more
Royal Society launching OA journal
The Royal Society of London will launch a new open access journal this fall, Royal Society Open Science (RSOS). RSOS will operate similarly to PLoS One, meaning it will publish research in all areas of science and mathematics and will base peer review on quality of the research, not novelty… read more
Open Access and UT
The Daily Texan Editorial Board published an article today on open access. They discuss the recent Science article by John Bohannon, increasing serials pricing at UT and other universities, and the benefits to making your work freely available. Daily Texan article: http://www.dailytexanonline.com/opinion/2013/10/11/despite-flaws-open-access-is-worth-the-price
Publishers behaving badly
A recent article in Science Magazine, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.summary, reveals a troubling problem with peer review at some scientific journals. The author, John Bohannon, submitted a bogus, scientifically and ethically flawed paper to 304 Gold OA journals (meaning they charge a fee to publish), and so far 157 journals have accepted the article.… read more
