Selecting a journal to submit a manuscript to is an important decision for any researcher. To find out the factors that influence this decision for early-career researchers, a survey has been conducted among PhD students and postdocs at Max Planck Institutes across Germany.
EDP Sciences, an international STM publisher, has released information on the findings and recommendations of a working group into the peer review process.
The aim of the workshop, held in Paris in May, was to consider whether peer review is adapting to present day demands and constraints, and to consider and make recommendations to the European Physical Journal (EPJ) and its partners regarding new practices and improvements that could be made to their procedures.
The Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Committee has published the TOP Guidelines, a set of author guidelines that journals can adopt to enhance the transparency of the research they publish. These guidelines represent a concrete and actionable strategy toward improving research and publishing practices.
MOOCs, altmetrics, open peer review, open access or big data are creating opportunities for open dialogue between academics worldwide. But this wealth can also be challenging for the researchers who need to be trained to understand the communication tools but also be skilled-up to flourish in them.
An important current challenge for research information providers is ensuring the automated discovery of Open Access (OA) content in hybrid journals. Discovery services are unable to systematically identify the free full-text availability of OA articles. A systematic and standardized manner is proposed to identify OA at the article level.
Article available under subscription, the corresponding presentation given at the NASIG Annual Conference is available at this address.
Thieme, an international medical and science publisher, in collaboration with the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) of Munich’s School of Management and Department of Economics is about to launch a new open-access journal, based on an innovative business model: “Pay What You Want”. Following acceptance of a paper after peer review, authors will be given the opportunity to pay an APC fee that they feel is most suitable.
OCLC has signed agreements with leading publishers in Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine and other subject areas to add metadata for books, e-books, journals, databases and other materials that will make their content discoverable through WorldCat Discovery Services. Among these partners: DOAJ, OpenEditions, BMJ Publishing Group.
New tools dedicated to the assessment of scholarly publications have arised lately. They have gained widespread interest in many sectors, but according to Euan Adie (founder of Altmetric.com) and Mike Taylor (senior project manager for infometrics in Elsevier Research Metrics), there is still much work to be done in digging deeper into these metrics.
The Max Planck Digital Library has put forward a study on the transformation of the subscription-driven system for scientific publications to an Open Access model. For the first time, quantitative parameters are presented showing that the liberation of scholarly literature is possible at no extra costs.
The American Copyright Office has released its “Report on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization”, including recommendations for legislation on orphan works and the creation of an extended collective licensing (ECL) regime for mass digitization. This post focuses on the recommendations on orphan works.
