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In reforming the culture of peer review and moving towards a system that embraces the use and recognition of pre-print servers, we are cognizant of the need to avoid re-inventing the wheel, by identifying and using existing infrastructure and initiatives that can assist in furthering this goal.
Why aren’t articles on arXiv —or any other open access repository— formally credited as publications? What is it exactly that separates open access repositories from publishers? The simple answer is that publications in journals come with an amorphous quality indicator associated with the journal’s perceived prestige. Articles posted on a repository on the other hand, are considered to be “provided at the reader’s own risk”, as they are not accompanied by any measurable guarantee of their scientific merit. We think the time has come to change all that.
In this post Karen Shashok presents arguments on how pre-submission peer review can benefit scholarly communication by increasing the quality of published research and reducing retractions.
After a long delay, our debate article “Academic self-publishing: a not-so-distant future” finally appeared at Prometheus, a journal publishing critical studies in innovation. The journal issue hosting our article was originally expected in September 2013, but a series of unfortunate events resulted in an eight-month standoff between the journal’s editorial team and its publisher Taylor & Francis. In our paper we use an example to illustrate how academic self-publishing can already be implemented with the existing infrastructure.
The OpenAIRE (//www.openaire.eu) / COAR (//www.coar-repositories.org) Joint Conference “Open Access Movement to Reality: Putting the Pieces Together” took place from the 21st -22nd of May, 2014 at the Acropolis Museum in Athens. The event was attended by about 150 people and was one of a series of events related to open access and linked open data organized by Greece during its 6-month presidency of the EU.
We are happy to announce that after a long delay, a prototype of the LIBRE platform is now available for testing at the temporary address: //www.lib-res.org. We do not consider this version ready for public release, but we rather see it as a working prototype that can serve to receive feedback from the community in …
Report from the Information Days on the Horizon 2020 Research Infrastructures Work Programme with specific focus on e-infrastructures.
The slides for the talk Pandelis Perakakis gave on the 5th of December 2013 at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. The talk focuses on how the journal monopoly over three of the most basic processes in scholarly communication —validation, evaluation and dissemination— is creating problems even more important than the lack of accessibility to research output.
Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal are among the countries hit most severely by Europe’s economic crisis. Science has not been spared. Last Friday, in a meeting organized under the auspices of EuroScience, scientists from the four countries gathered in Barcelona to discuss the impact of the funding cuts. Among the speakers was Varvara Trachana, a Greek biologist and Open Scholar co-founder. Read her interview as was published by the journal Science.
On Friday 8th of November, Open Scholar Co-founders Michael Taylor and Pandelis Perakakis gave a 5-minute talk on the future of academic peer review also presenting the forthcoming platform LIBRE at the SpotOn 2013 event. We post the transcription of the talk that summarizes our vision on the future of peer review and academic publishing in general.