(7 Dec 2023) Richard Poynder has long been one of the most respected and insightful commentators on the scholarly communication ecosystem, and in particular on the development and progress of the open access (OA) movement – to which he has always been a friend, but one admirably willing to speak truth even when the truth was…
(18 November 2018) Richard Poynder interviews Arul George Scaria, Assistant Professor of Law and Co-Director at CIIPC, the Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property and Competition (CIIPC) in New Delhi. Scaria is currently working on a report based on a landscape survey of the current situation in India concerning open science for which he was the principle…
(27 October 2018) Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, produced and directed by Jason Schmitt, is a documentary which focuses on the need for open access to research and science. It is free to stream and download, and is licensed under the CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons designation. Universities interested in arranging a screening of the…
(4 September 2018) Richard Poynder views a documentary on the tug of war over paywalls in scholarly publishing. Paywall: The Business of Scholarship Director: Jason Schmitt Open Society Foundations (2018) Billed as a documentary, Paywall would be more accurately described as an advocacy film. Its intention seems to be to persuade viewers that the paywalls…
(6 September 2017) In a recently published paper, Justin Flatt and his two co-authors proposed the creation of the Self-Citation Index, or s-index writes Richard Poynder in his Open and Shut blog. The purpose of the s-index would be to measure how often a scientist cites their own work. This is desirable the authors believe…
(29 August 2017) The Center for Open Science (COS) has announced today that six new preprint services have launched using COS’ preprints platform, taking the number of such services to 14. The announcement, says Richard Poynder, comes at a time when we are seeing a rising tide of preprint servers being launched, both by for-profit…
(19 July 2016) Richard Poynder in his blog writes that the arrival of a new preprint server for the social sciences called SocArXiv comes just a month after news that Elsevier is acquiring the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a preprint repository and online community founded in 1994 by two researchers. He writes that the…
Richard Poynder writes on LIBLICENSE (9 September 2015): What many now refer to as predatory publishing first came to my attention 7 years ago, when I interviewed a publisher who — I had been told — was bombarding researchers with invitations to submit papers to, and sit on the editorial boards of, the hundreds of…
31 March 2015) Marcus Banks is interviewed by Richard Poynder about the viability of open access journals. In the spotlight is Biomedical Digital Libraries, BDL, launched in 2003 by Yale University Medical Library and BioMed Central. Four years later, however, BDL succumbed to an increase in the cost of the article-processing charges it levied. This…
(22 March 2015) Contrary to what one might expect, not all the items in open access repositories are publicly available. Estimates of the percentage of the content in repositories that is not in fact open access tend to range from around 40% to 60%. This will include bibliographic records containing only metadata, plus full-text documents…