The Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) is a not-for-profit learned society composed of 35,000 members from across the globe. It describes itself as ‘a charitable organization supporting research and education in molecular life sciences through its journals, fellowships, courses, congress and other activities’. Indeed, in 2017 FEBS awarded €1,375,486 in bursaries, travel grants and …
Author archives: Samuel Moore
Resisting Amazon’s influence on open access publishing
I was recently given Amazon credit as payment for peer-reviewing a monograph. While this was a nice perk for doing something I probably would have done for free, it is striking to see just how much Amazon impacts on the publishing industry in often unexpected ways. The influence of Amazon on open access — from …
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Plan S: how open access can nurture new positive and collective forms of ‘academic freedom’
Following on from my last post on academic freedom and statements of principle, I want to further clarify my thoughts on how academic freedom relates to open access mandates. Paradoxically, despite claiming that objections to open access mandates on the grounds of academic freedom are mere conservatism, it is likely that the coercive aspect of …
Plan S: academic freedom and statements of principle
This is a restatement of something that I (and others no doubt) have said before, but I thought it worth putting down in writing here. I recently saw a few people on Twitter sharing a link to the Academic Freedom Monitoring Project highlighting its relevance to Plan S. The project collates and archives examples of …
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Plan S: is there another way?
Over time, people (often administrators or regulatory agencies) try to control the tacking back-and forth, and especially, to standardize and make equivalent the ill-structured and well-structured aspects of the particular boundary object. Susan Leigh Star, ‘This Is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept’, p. 614. In my previous post on …
Plan S: What’s the point of policy consultations?
The window has just closed for contributing feedback to Plan S, the policy initiative from a coalition of European research funders that seeks to mandate open access to funded research. Lisa Hinchliffe provides a helpful summary of the main themes and general trends from the feedback and it is not my intention to explore them …
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On Rushkoff’s ‘Team Human’
My manly fare is working, my vim- and vigor-aphorisms: and verily I did not feed them with flatulent vegetables! But with warrior’s food, conqueror’s food: new appetites I have awakened (Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra). Aphorisms are punchy, direct and polemical, aiming to persuade the reader through style rather than mere content. For Friedrich Nietzsche, the …