Researchers today are caught like fish in a net of slow, overpriced, unethical and dysfunctional publishing practices. Trapped by academic employment rules, funding arrangements and copyright laws, we have long tried unsuccessfully to wrest control of scholarship from corporate publishers. The fight dates back to at least the 1980s, when physicists started circulating their findings […]
Following the latest update on Elsevier this morning, I just want to draw your attention to another cool post. This one is called Keeping Up With… Antitrust and Competition Law, by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), who are part of the American Library Association. It provides a really useful overview of the […]
So I’ve been thinking a bit about copyright issues with scholarly research recently, and have a few questions about the ethics of copyright transfer. Typically, the process of copyright transfer for research articles happens something like this: Researchers submit a manuscript to a journal for peer review. Should that paper be accepted for publication after […]
Nature News covered the issue here. Reproducing in full because why not. Background here. ‘You never said my peer review was confidential’ — scientist challenges publisher Open-science advocate says journals should be clearer to peer-reviewers about terms and conditions. Quirin Schiermeier 23 January 2017 Corrected: 24 January 2017 Are peer-reviewers free to openly share the content […]
So a while back, I got in a scrap with Wiley over their breach of my rights as peer reviewer for one of their journals. Essentially, what it boiled down to was a failure to communicate what referees were agreeing to upon acceptance of a peer review, and as a result breaching their personal rights […]
I mentioned in a previous post how important it is for researchers to equip themselves with knowledge about copyright issues (like this), and to become active in the struggle against publishers in retaining fair re-use rights for research. In the European Commission, this has been quite a high-profile debate this year (see here for example), with […]