Two independent British researchers have obtained and released data on the licensing fees spent on journal subscriptions in the UK higher education sector. The data, released openly on F1000Research, shows spending by over 150 UK higher education organisations on the journals from ten publishing groups, reaching a total of £430 million from 2010 – 2014. […]

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 […]

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 […]

View exceptional real-world applications of Open Access research. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfsZ7DwsMWc&feature=youtu.be This 5min video features six teams of scientists whose innovative reuse of existing research enabled important advances in medical treatment and detection, ecology and science education. These examples demonstrate how the reuse of Open Access research can accelerate scientific progress and benefit society as a whole. […]

The Tasman Declaration came out of the Open Research Conference (mentioned previously on this blog) held in Auckland in February, representing the collective voice of the diverse group of participants, including researchers, lawyers, librarians, research infrastructure providers, technology consultants and software developers from NZ, Australia, the US and the UK. The declaration calls on Australian […]

They’re doing it in the UK. In Australia too. And in the US, they’re going to be doing it more than they already were. I’m talking about open access publication of research. In 2012 a public petition was made to the Whitehouse proposing that the public should have free access to the outcomes of scientific […]

An Australasian Open Research Conference is to be held at the University of Auckland on 6-7 February. This will be an important event for researchers interested in openness to explore with like-minded people the rapidly-developing world of open research, publishing and data in the New Zealand and Australian contexts. The line-up for Day 1 looks to be […]