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An important justification for transitioning from a subscription based journal publishing system to an open access journal publishing system, has been that whereas printing and distributing physical copies of journals is an expensive process, the cost of digital publication and dissemination are marginal. In this post Shaun Khoo argues that whilst a shift to gold (pay to publish) open access would deliver wider access to research, the lack of price sensitivity amongst academics presents a risk that they will be locked into a new escalating pay to publish system that could potentially be more costly to researchers than the previous subscription model. …

One of the expected contributions of Open Access (OA) was to resolve the disproportionate increase of scholarly journals’ subscriptions. Nevertheless, one of the major business models for commercial journal publishing is to charge authors a publication fee known as Article Processing Charge (APC). This rate, in the last five years, has risen more than inflation. However, counterintuitively, it seems that the authors are far from reducing their submissions due to increase of APC values, rather, submissions are increasing, and the more expensive the APC, the more articles the journals have been receiving. …

Open access discovery tools enable users to find scholarly articles that are available in open form, whether on a publisher’s website or elsewhere. This is a technically-challenging endeavour and also requires a deep understanding of the scholarly communications landscape, the underpinning infrastructure and the needs of widely different stakeholder groups such as researchers, publishers, service providers and the general public. …

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent one of the largest and most sustained influences on global research to date. However, charting the effect of these 17 goals on the global research community is a complex task. In this post, Martin Szomszor draws on the findings of a recent bibliometric study to produce a ‘citation map’ of sustainability research, which highlights how the UN SDGs have enabled the development of new areas of transdisciplinary and international collaboration in research. …

Publishing peer reviews is a growing trend in scholarly communication, for the sake of transparency and as a practice associated to open science. There are, however, advantages and disadvantages that should be considered by journal editors when adopting this peer review modality. …

Open access to scientific knowledge gained significant momentum with the alliance of 6 web-based journal publishing platforms from four continents - AJOL from Africa, AmeliCA from Latin America and Global South, Érudit from Canada, J-STAGE from Japan, OpenEdition from France and the SciELO Network that operates in Latin America, South Africa, Spain and Portugal. The Global Alliance of Open Access Scholarly Communication (GLOALL) was conceived during the SciELO 20 Years Week and formally launched on April 8 in the session dedicated to the dissemination of scientific information of the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS). The session and the launching of the GLOALL were promoted by UNESCO. The alliance defends geographic, thematic and cultural bibliodiversity in the development of the global flow of scientific information. …

A pilot study was conducted with five Elsevier journals in different areas of knowledge on the effects of publishing peer review reports of 9,220 articles submitted between 2010 and 2017. The main findings of the study suggest that the publication of reviews does not influence or compromise the peer review work. The authors were unable to detect any significant effect on the readiness to perform the evaluation, content and outcome of the recommendations, nor on the time taken to perform the evaluation. However, only 8.1% of the referees agreed to disclose their identity as authors of the review reports. …

In this blog, Robert Kiley and Michael Markie, discuss the ambition behind creating Wellcome Open Research, an innovative funder led publishing platform, and assess the success of the platform over its first two years. Going on to imagine a future, in which all research is published using the principles behind Wellcome Open Research, they suggest the potential benefits such a publishing system would have for research and research assessment. …

Recent developments, such as Plan S, a funder mandate for grantees to publish their findings with open access, as well as the growth in preprints – in terms of number of articles posted as well as preprint services becoming available – are bound to have a major impact on the amount of new scientific journal literature being openly and freely accessible by anyone, anywhere. …

Open reviews and the emergence of platforms such as Publons, which publish these activities and integrate them into other academic tasks, open the possibility of the emergence of a new aspect of bibliometrics and certainly a new and prestigious market. …