An interesting article by Joseph Esposito on the Scholarly Kitchen website:

News reached me today on Twitter that Peter Binfield, Publisher of PLoS ONE, is leaving PLoS to found a new company, Peerj.com.

Peerj will be an open access publishing company with a radical new premise: publishing in a scholarly journal can cost a heck of a lot less than the extortionate fees charged by PLoS. If you go to the Web site, you will see, among other things, this statement:

If we can set a goal to sequence the human genome for $100, then why can’t we do the same for academic publishing?

Of course, setting a goal and achieving a goal are not one and the same, but you get the idea.

So now we see the Achilles Heel of the author-pays business model for open access laid bare, and every shrewd archer of the OA movement will be pointing an arrow at it. Whether or not toll-access publishing is too expensive is one thing, something we can argue about; but author-pays OA is definitely too expensive. After all, an author-pays service is essentially a hosting service with a PR department and some Web 2.0 tools. I think they’re great, but let’s not pretend that they are something more than this.

I mentioned that I became aware of Binfield’s move on Twitter because it says something about the kind of company that Peerj plans to be. Peerj will play in the pool, deep or shallow, of the social Web. Among its plans are to raise money on Kickstarter, a new source of start-up financing. This will be a company that pushes the metaphor of information technology as far as it can, automating whatever can be automated, and much more besides. This means there will be a small number of talented software developers and not much more (but don’t forget the evangelist for social media). That means a low cost basis, an essential part of the strategy to drive down costs. Low costs translate into lower author fees. We have seen this strategy before. (See Wal-Mart.)

So the OA price wars have begun. What will this mean to the new eLife, the OA ventures of Wiley and Sage, and so many others? And let’s not forget the massively overpriced PLoS ONE itself. At some point, even Peerj’s proposition of lifetime publishing services for $100 may come to seem expensive.

Read the original article and further comments here.

In an open letter the Harvard Faculty Advisory Council to the Library request that staff and students consider the following options in response to large journal publishers [that] have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive:

1. Make sure that all of your own papers are accessible by submitting them to DASH in accordance with the faculty-initiated open-access policies.

2. Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access.

3. If on the editorial board of a journal involved, determine if it can be published as open access material, or independently from publishers that practice pricing described above. If not, consider resigning.

4. Contact professional organizations to raise these issues.

5. Encourage professional associations to take control of scholarly literature in their field or shift the management of their e-journals to library-friendly organizations.

6. Encourage colleagues to consider and to discuss these or other options.

7. Sign contracts that unbundle subscriptions and concentrate on higher-use journals.

8. Move journals to a sustainable pay per use system.

9. Insist on subscription contracts in which the terms can be made public.

(see: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448)

There’s a useful article about the move toward Open Educational Practices (OEPs) in a recent issue of the Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society. The authors discuss the ways in which there is a shift in focus from OERs, which have mainly engaged educators, to a wider focus on OEPs which also require the engagement of administrators, managers and even politicians.

The recent DEANZ conference (April 11-13) had several keynotes which drew attention to the changes that are occurring in the (tertiary) educational landscape as a result of the move to open-ness in education. The OER aspect challenges some notions of how and when learners will choose to study and the concept of ‘digital badges’ seems to be emerging as a potential alternative informal accreditation mechanism… where do Universities fit and how can they engage with these changes?

The OERu model provides one answer, and there are others…  a quote from the article …. ” …many other new models may well lead to a de-institutionalization of education (Bates, 2008, 2011/10/25) whereby students are able to build up e-portfolios of work from various institutions and informal learning and then apply for certification at the university of choice.”   which brings us back to the need to be much more willing to be open and to develop a greater sense of OEPs…. read the article …

At the Open Publishing Seminar back in February I touched on the issue of predatory publishers.  One of the lists I’m on has recently had a thread on PPs some content of which may be of interest to those wanting to identify PPs or assess OA publishers.  The full posts are here: http://liblicense.crl.edu

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long piece on ‘predatory OA journals’, with a focus on the work of Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver, who tracks open-access publishers that operate on an author-pays model.

http://chronicle.com/article/Predatory-Online-Journals/131047/?key=HD10d1VhNHdJbCsyZTgRMj4EOyFoZk0hYn9JPS8pbl9cEQ%3D%3D

His blog  http://metadata.posterous.com/?tag=predatoryopenaccessjournals and web site http://scholarlyoa.com/ include summaries about apparently unethical publishers.

This does need to be treated with some caution as Mr Beall’s lists are drawn up by him based on patterns of behaviour, although there are criteria that Mr Beall uses to raise suspicions about particular publishers.  Ina Smith from Stellenbosch University, South Africa reported to the list that they have started to compile some criteria against which they measure the validity of an OA journal.  I thought this worth sharing:

The Stellenbosch criteria are:

1. Mandatory

• The journal must have a proper web page and URL with the following info e.g. Contact details, Editorial Team, Editorial Board, Advisory Board, Scope and Focus, Peer Review Process (must be an exhaustive peer review process), Publication Frequency, Open Access Policy, Author Guidelines, About the Publisher, Previously published issues (Archive) , Copyright policy (under the Creative Commons Licensing policies
• International editorial board
• Valid online ISSN registered with the ISSN International Centre (France)
• Members of CrossRef with doi’s assigned to individual articles
• Journal must have established a history of responsible reporting (not always possible with “new” OA journals)
• The journal must contain good quality articles detailing well performed research

2. Recommended

• Listed on DOAJ (not all OA journals are listed on DOAJ immediately, and there might be a slight time delay)
• (Howard’s note: some publishers and their journals considered predatory by Mr Beall (e.g. Internet Scientific Publications) are listed on DOAJ)
• Publisher must be registered with OASPA
• OA Policy of publisher must be available via SHERPA/RoMEO
• Listed on Wikipedia as an academic journal
• Digital preservation policy in place
• Journal title must be listed with one of the following:

– International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS)

– Science Citation Index

– Social Sciences Citation Index

– Arts and Humanities Citation Index

• Journal impact factor assigned to the journal – Journal Citation Reports – ISI (for impact factors)
• Journal ranking is recommended – SCImago Journal Ranking (Scopus)

If researchers are considering publishing in an unfamiliar OA journal that follows the author pays model the Liaison Librarians would be happy to assist with an assessment of the Journal.

A typically thoughtful piece by the Canadian-British fiction author, blogger, journalist and activist Cory Doctorow: “it’s time we stopped thinking about what makes good copyright policy and just think about what makes good policy.” In other words, in the connected world can’t create policy that only deals with certain aspects of it all.

Check it out on Creative Arte: Cory Doctorow: “Internet and technologies, a matter of copyright?”.

Follow the link below to submit a Conference paper, User Group Presentation, Pecha Kucha, Poster, Demonstration or Workshop proposal. Please note that the system accepts submissions in the following file formats – pdf, doc, docx, rtf, odt and txt.

https://www.conftool.net/or2012/

The deadline for submissions is 5th March 8th March (23:59 GMT) for papers, workshops or user group sessions; and 31st March 2012 (23:59 GMT) for posters, Pecha Kucha and demos.

For more information on the conference themes and different submission headings please see the earlier Call for Proposals.

Today, 16 February 2012, is the first in a series of three seminars to be held at Otago for academic leaders and senior managers. Broadly speaking the series seeks to start a discussion about how scholarship is changing with the tools at our disposal for sharing and collaboration. The open movement is growing in momentum around the world. How does this affect Otago? What are others doing? What are we doing already and what else could we do?

The first session today focuses on open publishing as a way into the topic. And we’re delighted to have two keynotes from people involved at the forefront of the growing open movement: Natalia Timiraos from BioMed Central (one of the biggest Open Access publishers of academic research) and Jane Hornibrook from Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ.

It’s going to be a great day. Otago people who want to join in by watching the stream, email me @ richard.white@otago.ac.nz . Or follow the #openotago hashtag on Twitter.