Today Janneke Adema and I published a new article in the journal New Formations entitled ‘‘Just One Day of Unstructured Autonomous Time’: Supporting Editorial Labour for Ethical Publishing within the University’. The article will be available in our repositories but is also currently freely accessible via the New Formations site: https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/newformations/vol-2023-issue-110/abstract-9909/ (although I’m not sure …
Author archives: Samuel Moore
Should open access be removed from REF requirements?
In the past week, three senior research strategy figures at the University of Oxford have called for removing the open access ‘burden’ from the rules for the next Research Excellence Framework (REF). For the past REF excercise, open access has been a requirement for all submitted journal articles and UKRI are also now consulting on …
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Research integrity, preprints and where should the responsibility lie?
Last week, The Scholarly Kitchen posted an article by Angela Cochran,Vice President of Publishing at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, about the inability of publishers to deal with research fraud. She writes: “The bottom line is that journals are not equipped with their volunteer editors and reviewers, and non-subject matter expert staff to police …
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Nothing to lose but our tiny royalty cheques: on the proposed open access books policy for the next REF
Open access policy mandates have never been an effective way of convincing researchers of the benefits of exploring alternative, open publishing practices. Forcing someone to do something will not help them engage with the reasons for doing it. Instead, the mandate feels like a simple tickbox exercise that can be ignored once fulfilled. Apathy and …
What’s so bad about consolidation in academic publishing?
Today’s Scholarly Kitchen blog post is an attempt by David Crotty — the blog’s editor — to quantify the increasing consolidation of the academic publishing industry. Crotty concludes: Overall, the market has significantly consolidated since 2000 — when the top 5 publishers held 39% of the market of articles to 2022 where they control 61% …
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How to cultivate good closures: ‘scaling small’ and the limits of openness
Text of a talk given to the COPIM end-of-project conference: “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”, April 20th 2023 Open access publishing has always had a difficult relationship with smoothness and scale. Openness implies seamlessness, limitlessness or structureless-ness – or the idea that the removal of price and permission barriers is what’s needed …
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Preprints and the futures of peer review
Yesterday, the preprint repositories bioRxiv/medRxiv and arXiv released coordinated statements on the recent memo on open science from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. While welcoming the memo, the repositories claim that the ‘rational choice’ for making research immediately accessible would be to mandate preprints for all federally funded research. They write: …
New preprint: the politics of rights retention
I’ve just uploaded ‘The Politics of Rights Retention’ to my Humanities Commons site: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:52287/. The article is a preprint of a commentary currently under consideration for a special issue on open access publishing. Abstract This article presents a commentary on the recent resurgence of interest in the practice of rights retention in scholarly publishing. Led …
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The curious internal logic of open access policymaking
This week, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) declared 2023 its ‘Year of Open Science‘, announcing ‘new grant funding, improvements in research infrastructure, broadened research participation for emerging scholars, and expanded opportunities for public engagement’. This announcement builds on the OSTP’s open access policy announcement last year that will require immediate …
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Research assessment in the university without condition
Cross-posted on the Dariah Open blog as part of their series on research assessment in the humanities and social sciences In his lecture entitled ‘The future of the profession or the university without condition’, Jacques Derrida makes the case for a university dedicated to the ‘principle right to say everything, whether it be under the …
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