The books may be there, but can you access them? [my photo]
Sci-Hub, Anna’s Archive, Library Genesis – we are all familiar with these names. They are collectively known as shadow libraries; who knows, perhaps because they only exist in the …
“Here East”, the stark London venue for the conference
What is a conference for? It can be to impart information; it can be to bring people with similar interests and concerns together; but perhaps the most valuable thing a conference can …
It may surprise some that there is more than one academic book publisher in Cambridge. Open Book Publishing, founded in 2008 by Cambridge academics Rupert Gatti and Alessandro Tosi, is one of the most successful open-access publishers in the UK. …
Anyone with an interest in Open Science and the role of repositories will find the ATG interview with Abel Packer, co-founder of SciELO, fascinating. SciELO is both a national provider of publishing services for journals, and an aggregator of content, active …
Bust of Cicero, perhaps the most famous Roman orator (Vatican Museums, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Anyone with an interest in humanities studies in the US will have heard of the current struggles over funding and the National Endowment of the Humanities. Joy …
Scholarly publishing loves surveys. Perhaps because accurate quantitative information is so difficult to come by in the fragmented and often commercial (and hence private) world of scholarly publishing, many commentators opt for a …
Damian Pattinson’s interview for the ATG Podcast has just been released, and it reveals some fascinating details about his background, and about the eLife publishing model.
It turns out that Damian’s father was a bookseller, so publishing was in the family …
I recently interviewed John Willinsky, best-known for the Public Knowledge Project. What fascinated me was the link between his teaching of reading to young children and his subsequent work in scholarly communications for higher education. You may not immediately …
The Freie Universitat Berlin, which Sven Fund pointed out was actually created by the USA in 1948 as a response to Soviet influence on the existing University of Berlin [CC-BY-SA 3.0]
This event, for the first time in hybrid format, comprising …
Reading Time: 3minutesImage by Jonny Glos at Unsplash
A remarkable comment (“Open excess: remove open access burden from REF”) on the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) claims that open access is a burden on higher education. The comment, by three research managers at …
