(7 Jun 2023) The commercial control of academic publishing and research infrastructure by a few oligopolistic companies has crippled the development of open access movement and interfered with the ethical principles of information access and privacy. In recent years, vertical integration of publishers and other service providers throughout the research cycle has led to platformisation,…
(8 Jun 2023) For scientists submitting their papers to journals, there’s an all-too-familiar drill: spend hours formatting the paper to meet the journal’s guidelines; if the paper is rejected, sink more time into reformatting it for another journal; repeat. Now an analysis has put a price tag on all that busy work: US$230 million worth…
(28 Apr 2023) This year, the infographic output is focused on the theme “Level Up” based on the concept of the game Chutes and Ladders in the US, or Snakes and Ladders around the world. The STM Trends 2027 output builds upon this idea of a game focused on six key areas where publishers face…
(3 Apr 2023) Across countries in the global north the transition to open access to research has in recent years been driven largely through library consortia and national institutions striking transformative agreements with commercial publishers. Drawing on recent work on The University of Sheffield’s content strategy, Peter Barr argues that academic libraries can play a larger role…
(20 Mar 2023) Mega-journals, those that publish large numbers of articles per year, are growing rapidly across science and especially in biomedicine. Although 11 Scopus-indexed journals published more than 2,000 biomedical full papers (articles or reviews) in 2015 and accounted for 6% of that year’s literature, in 2022 there were 55 journals publishing more than…
Discussing their analysis of a new dataset of journals published via the Open Journals Systems publishing platform, Saurabh Khanna, Jon Ball, Juan Pablo Alperin and John Willinsky argue that rather than being an aspiration an open, regional and bibliodiverse publishing ecosystem is already in existence. (7 Feb 2023) While no one really knows how many academic journals exist in…
(31 Jan 2023) The recent release of AI technology that generates new text has raised serious questions among the research community. For one, “Can ChatGPT be named an author of a research paper?” The resounding answer from arXiv leaders and advisors is, “No.” A computer program cannot, for example, take responsibility for the contents of…
(5 Jan 2023) Almost 70% of researchers based in Europe say that they have been involved in projects in the past three years that listed authors who did not contribute sufficiently to the work, according to a major survey. The survey also raises questions about whether academics in the United States are underestimating the prevalence of…
(30 Dec 2022) Goodbye to 2022 and hello to 2023; let’s look at what stories at LibraryLearningSpace.com (LLS) attracted our readers the most in 2022. The statistics show that the reader’s interest lies in specific topics that make more sense by looking at a higher level. But feel free to go directly to the…
(6 Apr 2022) Abalkina, a sociologist at the Free University of Berlin, has documented what appears to be a flourishing business on the site, www.123mi.ru. Since it debuted in December 2018, she has analyzed more than 1000 advertisements posted there and found at least 419 that appeared to match manuscripts that later appeared in dozens of different journals, she reported…