Most forms of publishing across the globe are in a state of flux. But university-based scholarly publishing faces a set of challenges all of its own. How can an industry whose target audience is so highly…
What does it mean to be truly open?
D Sharon Pruitt
The word “open” has grown educational wings over the past decade. From the British Open University, which enrolled its first students in 1971, the concept has expanded to mean various ways of relaxing…
Is it time to abandon traditional academic publishing models?
Chea Phal
Scientists just want to share – at least in one sense. When we believe we’ve discovered something new, we want to tell as many others as possible. We also want to provide all the information required to…
If the US Research Works Bill passes, public access to US research will be restricted.
Flickr/the Firebottle
Over the Christmas period, a short Bill was introduced into the US House of Representatives. The Research Works Act aims to make it illegal to require researchers to make their work publicly available…
Is Open CourseWare a spiral of doom or virtuous circle for academies?
glenn
Universities pride themselves on the quality of their teaching. They spruik superior teachers, superior facilities, superior learning experiences, superior learning outcomes. High scores on these four…
Should the heights of academic endeavour be available for all?
andrevanb
For researchers, not least those in the sciences, being published in the right sort of journals is no vanity project. It’s a matter of huge importance, with very real implications for people’s careers…
Academic knowledge is boxed in by exclusive, expensive journals.
Scientists – myself included – are increasingly frustrated by the outmoded academic publishing system.
The situation as it stands made sense in the pre-internet era, when one needed a printing press to…
Universities already stockpile academic papers so they can report their output to the government. But stockpiling the wrong version of the paper can restrict their right to make the paper available on open access.
Flickr/Gideon Burton
Providing equitable access to the findings of scholarly research is an expensive and vexed business, as many recent stories here on The Conversation have highlighted.
Open access offers a way to freely…
Breaking free of the stranglehold of academic publishers holds appeal -- but what are the dangers?
Flickr
There are three tensions in the field of academic publishing (1) who pays to publish research? (2) who decides what gets published? and (3) who takes any profits?
In the traditional model, based on publishing…
A growing number of academic institutions are building free online databases of their scholarly output. But publication in a big name academic journal still holds cachet for most academics.
Flickr/mandiberg
As the cost of accessing academic journal articles increases, a growing number of academic institutions are building publicly accessible databases of scholarly work.
But how much of a threat to the traditional…
