Category: Open Access Blogs

The African Academy of Sciences will launch next year AAS Open Research, an open access publishing platform, meant to exclusively serve researchers in the continent. The platform is based on F1000Research model. It will adopt post publication open peer-review process. This approach will remove time lag researchers face to publish their research output. AAS Open…

Researchers are constantly under pressure from their faculty to publish articles. This enormous pressure forces researchers to publish their research output as frequently as possible. However, most of the time it is not easy to publish articles on high impact factor journals; rejection is pretty common.  For instance, nature rejects 93% of articles it receives…

Five German scientists decided to quit Elsevier. They decided to resign from their editorial positions in protest of Elsevier’s open access policy. The reason behind these scientists’ decision is Elsevier’s refusal to accept a new open access payment model offered by the German libraries, universities and research institutes. German based Projekt DEAL, a consortium of leading…

Peer reviewers are enabling people in developing countries to access safe drinking water as the result of a collaboration between Springer’s journal Environmental Earth Sciences and the non-profit humanitarian organization “Filter of Hope”. Since the start of the initiative at the beginning of 2017, almost 600 water filters have been distributed in Liberia, Nicaragua, Haiti, Honduras, Russia,…

German universities have coped “easily” when cut off from Elsevier journals and do not need to rely on pirate article-sharing sites such as Sci-Hub, according to a negotiator from Germany’s biggest network of research centres. Martin Köhler, who has helped to lead negotiations between the Dutch publishing giant and the Helmholtz Association, gave Times Higher Education details…

The modern era is marked by growing faith in the power of data. “Big data”, “open data”, and “evidence-based decision-making” have become buzzwords, touted as solutions to the world’s most complex and persistent problems, from corruption and famine to the refugee crisis. While perhaps most pronounced in higher income countries, this trend is now emerging globally. In Africa, Latin America, Asia and…

A research team led by scientists at UC San Francisco has developed a computational method to systematically probe massive amounts of open-access data to discover new ways to use drugs, including some that have already been approved for other uses. The method enables scientists to bypass the usual experiments in biological specimens and to instead…

Tate Williams | The debate over open access publication of research is one we’ve followed with quite a bit of interest, and not just because philanthropy has planted a few stakes in the issue. As in many fields in recent decades, technology has unlocked all kinds of new opportunities and tensions when it comes to the…

Jennie Rose Halperin | Yesterday, the European Space Agency announced an Open Access policy for images and data under a Creative Commons BY-SA license. ESA has made various moves toward making data and images more open in the past, but this announcement is a major milestone for the organization’s commitment to openness. Previously, ESA released individual…

About 60 major German research institutions have mounted coordinated pressure on Elsevier –the giant scientific journals’ publisher. These institutions are putting pressure on Elsevier to renegotiate better terms of contract with Elsevier before the current contract runs out at the end of 2016. So far, the two sides failed to agree on contract that satisfies…