UT Austin has joined as institutional plan members of PeerJ. PeerJ publishes open access articles in the biological, medical, and computer sciences. They also host a preprint repository where authors can share a draft of an article for free. PeerJ and PeerJ Computer Science offer fast publishing turnaround (median of… read more
Publishing
Luminos and UT Austin
The University of Texas at Austin is a Futura Level member of Luminos. Luminos is a University of California open access monograph publishing program. It has the same selection, peer review, and production process as their traditional publishing model, but with a different mechanism for distributing the titles they publish.… read more
Evaluating publishers
I was asked to give a talk to the Mechanical Engineering department about ethical vs unethical publishing practices. One of the topics of that conversation was how to evaluate a journal you are unfamiliar with. There is a really great checklist that was developed by Nina Collins at Indiana Tech… read more
Flipping subscription journals to OA
Publishers requiring ORCIDs
Several publishers have announced that they will require author to use an ORCID identifier during the publication process. Those publishers are: The American Geophysical Union, eLife, EMBO, Hindawi, IEEE, Science journals, ScienceOpen, and PLOS. These publishers join the UK’s Royal Society and several funding agencies in requiring ORCIDs. This is fantastic news… read more
Editors of Lingua step down
Inside Higher Ed reports that “All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online.” This is… read more
Discrete Analysis – a diamond open access journal
I just came across a blog post about a “diamond” open access journal called, Discrete Analysis. It’s being described as diamond open access because neither the readers nor the authors pay. The journal sits on top of the arXiv infrastructure but maintains the traditional peer review process. The journal will… read more
New chart outlines public access policies
Science has just published a short news story about public access policies at federal agencies. They have a really nice chart showing U.S. science agencies, their budgets, their model of dissemination of research articles, estimated # of articles per year, and when the policy starts. For the full news… read more
OA journal from Penn State announced
Penn State has announced the start of a new OA journal called Digital Literary Studies. Digital Literary Studies will publish “scholarly articles on research concerned with computational approaches to literary analysis/criticism, or critical/literary approaches to electronic literature, digital media, and textual resources”. Their call for submissions for the inaugural issue… read more
Humanities Open Book grant program
The NEH and the Mellon Foundation are teaming up to offer grants to publishers to turn out-of-print books into freely accessible ebooks. The grant money will be used to secure rights and make the books available online under Creative Commons licenses. Press release: http://www.neh.gov/news/press-release/2015-01-15/humanities-open-book