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Open access: fringe or mainstream?
When I was just settling in to the world of open access and scholarly communication, I wrote about the need for open access to stop being a fringe activity and enter the mainstream of researcher behaviour: “Open access needs to stop being a ‘fringe’ activity and become part of the mainstream. It shouldn’t be an afterthought to the publication process. Whether the solution to academic inaction is better systems or, as I believe, greater engagement and reward, I feel that the scholarly communications and repository community can look forward to many interesting developments over the coming months and years.” While much has changed in the five years since I (somewhat…
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‘Be nice to each other’ – the second Researcher to Reader conference
Aaaaaaaaaaargh! was Mark Carden’s summary of the second annual Researcher to Reader conference, along with a plea that the different players show respect to one another. My take home messages were slightly different: Publishers should embrace values of researchers & librarians and become more open, collaborative, experimental and disinterested. Academic leaders and institutions should do their bit in combating the metrics focus. Big Deals don’t save libraries money, what helps them is the ability to cancel journals. The green OA = subscription cancellations is only viable in a utopian, almost fully green world. There are serious issues in the supply chain of getting books to readers. And copyright arrangements in academia do…
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Cambridge University spend on Open Access 2009-2016
Today is the deadline for those universities in receipt of an RCUK grant to submit their reports on the spend. We have just submitted the Cambridge University 2015-2016 report to the RCUK and have also made it available as a dataset in our repository. Compliance Cambridge had an estimated overall compliance rate of 76% with 46% of all RCUK funded papers available through the gold route and 30% of all RCUK funded papers available through the green route. The RCUK Open Access Policy indicates that at the end of the fifth transition year of the policy (March 2018) they expect 75% of Open Access papers from the research they fund will be delivered…
