Interested in an OA journal but not sure of its quality? Erstwhile Otago colleague, now of the University of Canterbury, Anton Angelo has published a useful checklist to help determine the quality of an OA journal. Note that this is not to check the journal’s contribution to the discipline but rather its publishing and editorial practices. (Copyright nerd note: I could […]

We’ve just launched an Open Acess publishing survey. There has been plenty of illuminating international research in recent times that tells us what researchers think about open access. But in many other countries governments or funders are encouraging or mandating open access to the research they fund, whereas the context in New Zealand is quite […]

Why are governments, funders and institutions around the world mandating or encouraging Open Access? What does it mean for my discipline? My department? Me, as an individual researcher or teacher? Our opening event for OA Week offers an introduction to OA, its demonstrable benefits to the scholarly pursuit and the challenges it presents. This session […]

An analysis of 45 million research documents has found that the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. The digital era precipitated a massive shift from a proliferation of research publishers to an oligopoly of a small handful. This influence is particularly evident in the social […]

Open access to research is the theme for the month of Febraruy on NZCommons, the home for discussion of all things copyright and open access in New Zealand. The following are some highlights of a post of on open access publishing in the UK by Cambridge academic Dr Rupert Gatti (originally published on The Guardian). […]

The University of California Press formally launched two open access publishing programs, Collabra (an open access megajournal) and Luminos (open access monographs). Both Collabra and Luminos launch with a distinguished group of advisory board members, editors, authors, and reviewers from universities and associations around the globe. From the UC Press Announcement: “These programs have been […]

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced the world’s strongest policy in support of open research and open data. see: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/how-we-work/general-information/open-access-policy As from January 2015, Gates-funded researchers must make open their resulting papers and underlying data-sets immediately upon publication. Papers must be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY) allowing unrestricted […]

$55 million – that’s the figure Radio NZ has reported that NZ universities and Crown Research Institutes pay in subscription fees to academic publishers. The University of Auckland alone spent almost $15m — with Otago spending the second-highest amount of $8.4 — on access to journals that for the most part comprises work done and reviewed by academics around the world […]

Non-profit group Knowledge Unlatched is piloting a collective procurement approach to open access books. The model depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single title fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons license via the open access repository service OAPEN […]

2013 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine Randy Schekman has published an article in the Guardian outlining how he thinks journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science. He writes that he has committed his lab to avoiding these luxury journals and advocates for Open Access journals instead, calling on university committees and funding agencies not […]