Nature: Web of Science owner buys tool that offers one-click access to journal articles. “The owner of the large scholarly search engine Web of Science — Clarivate Analytics — has bought a start-up company whose tool gives researchers one-click, legal access to journal articles even when off campus. Clarivate announced on 10 April that it had acquired the London-based company, called Kopernio, and said it will integrate the tool into its Web of Science database service, to which more than 7,500 institutions worldwide subscribe. It did not disclose the value of the deal.”
academic journals
EurekAlert: PLOS announces new website for peer reviewers
EurekAlert: PLOS announces new website for peer reviewers . “The Reviewer Center is designed to support reviewers working on manuscripts submitted to PLOS journals, with information and resources freely available to anyone–those interested in learning more about how peer review works, those looking for instructional resources, and those reviewing for other journals and publishers. All content is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, meaning it is free and open for anyone to access, regardless of whether they review for PLOS.”
Berkeley: UC libraries launch tool to help achieve open access
Berkeley: UC libraries launch tool to help achieve open access. “For far too long, a gold mine of knowledge has been locked away behind journal paywalls, or has been otherwise inaccessible to countless people who could benefit from it. To help address this problem, the scholarly community has been working toward achieving open access, helping to unlock this wealth of information by making it free to everyone, everywhere. But after nearly 20 years of work, much of the world’s scholarly information is still not as available as it could be — only 15 percent of journal articles, for example, are openly accessible at the time of publication. Today, to accelerate toward free readership for all, the University of California Libraries published Pathways to Open Access, a toolkit for campuses and research institutions to help make more knowledge openly available.”
Twitter for Scientists: an Idea Whose Time Has Finally Come? (Chronicle of Higher Education)
Chronicle of Higher Education: Twitter for Scientists: an Idea Whose Time Has Finally Come?. “There’s abundant evidence that widely sharing a research finding in just one or two simple sentences greatly increases its use and effectiveness. But, ugh, that usually means Twitter — in the eyes of many, a low-attention-span cesspool of trolls, political partisans, and amateur comedians known more for braggadocio and snark than reason and facts. Now, with federal backing, there’s another option.”
Techdirt: Research Shows That Published Versions Of Papers In Costly Academic Titles Add Almost Nothing To The Freely-Available Preprints They Are Based On
Techdirt: Research Shows That Published Versions Of Papers In Costly Academic Titles Add Almost Nothing To The Freely-Available Preprints They Are Based On. “Academic publishers justify their high prices and fat profit margins by claiming that they ‘add value’ as papers progress through the publication process. Although many have wondered whether that is really true — does a bit of sub-editing and design really justify the ever-rising subscription costs? — hard evidence has been lacking that could be used to challenge the publishers’ narrative. A paper from researchers at the University of California and Los Alamos Laboratory is particularly relevant here. It appeared first on arXiv.org in 2016 (pdf), but has only just been ‘officially’ published (paywall). It does something really obvious but also extremely valuable: it takes around 12,000 academic papers as they were originally released in their preprint form, and compares them in detail with the final version that appears in the professional journals, sometimes years later, as the paper’s own history demonstrates. The results are unequivocal…”
University of Washington: Is there a glass ceiling in academic publishing?
University of Washington: Is there a glass ceiling in academic publishing?. “Five years ago, Nature — one of the most prestigious research journals in science — published an editorial pledging to improve on the low number of women editors and authors in its pages…. In the time since that editorial, however, not much has changed, according to a new University of Washington study published online and cited in a letter printed March 7 in Nature.”
Internet Archive: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to the Internet Archive for Long Tail Journal Preservation
Internet Archive: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to the Internet Archive for Long Tail Journal Preservation. “The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a research and development grant to the Internet Archive to address the critical need to preserve the ‘long tail’ of open access scholarly communications. The project, Ensuring the Persistent Access of Long Tail Open Access Journal Literature, builds on prototype work identifying at-risk content held in web archives by using data provided by identifier services and registries. Furthermore, the project expands on work acquiring missing open access articles via customized web harvesting, improving discovery and access to this materials from within extant web archives, and developing machine learning approaches, training sets, and cost models for advancing and scaling this project’s work.”
