Trump’s war on knowledge requires re-inventing academic publishing as diamond open access
A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about a growing risk that we will lose access to the world’s knowledge, because of a failure by traditional academic publishers to…
Another sign that gold open access was a mistake, and that diamond open access is the future
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the most influential funding bodies in the world. According to one ranking, it is the second largest charitable foundation,…
Another reason why diamond open access is best: no economic barriers to publishing rebuttals
Walled Culture has written numerous posts about the promise and problems of open access. An important editorial in the journal Web Ecology raises an issue for open access…
Peer review has failed, and that’s great news – for diamond open access, science and society
Over on his Experimental History blog, which he describes as “cognitive sneezing and interior design for your head“, Adam Mastroianni has two great posts about peer review in…
Why moving to diamond open access will not only save money, but also help to protect privacy
Back in September last year, Walled Culture mentioned the consistently high profit margins of 30-40% enjoyed by the academic publisher Elsevier. That’s problematic because these profits flow from…
Who knew? Diamond open access publishing is not rare at all, but actually very common
Back in December I was extolling the virtues of green open access, which involves academics self-archiving their work so that anyone can freely download it and read it.…
The world’s leading cancer charity to stop funding open access publishing because of hybrid journals
As numerous posts on this blog have emphasised, the underlying idea of open access (OA) – allowing anyone to read and share published academic research for free –…
Fans of open access, unite: you have nothing to lose but your chained libraries
When books were rare and extremely expensive, they were often chained to the bookcase to prevent people walking off with them, in what were known as “chained libraries”.…
India spends $715 million on academic journals, but with the wrong kind of open access
Numerous articles here on Walled Culture have chronicled the struggles to turn the aspirations of open access to knowledge into reality. The central reason people do not have…
Taking open access to the next level, by giving control to researchers, instead of to academic publishers
Back in February 2022, Walled Culture wrote about diamond open access (OA), perhaps the “purest” form of open access publishing, since there are no charges for either the…
Mass resignation by top academics over “too greedy” publisher, as Council of the EU calls for open access
It’s no secret that academic publishers are making fabulous profits by exploiting the work provided free of charge by researchers and funded by taxpayers. This is still happening,…
No big deal: calling the publishers’ bluff on high-price access to publicly-funded research
This blog has written a number of posts about open access, and its difficulties. One important impetus for the move towards open access was the increasing use by…
Open access is taking over, but academic institutions are paying as much money as ever: what happened?
The good news is that open access publishing, which allows anyone to read academic papers without needing a subscription, is taking over. The bad news is that academic…
Interview | Jean-Sébastien Caux: Rethinking Academic Publishing, Open Access & SciPost
Jean-Sébastien Caux is Professor in theoretical condensed matter physics at the University of Amsterdam. A Canadian citizen, he obtained his PhD in Oxford, was postdoctoral Fellow in All…
New research shows traditional open access has failed. Time to do something different
Last week, I wrote about diamond open access. I noted that one of the problems with the “mainstream” form of open access, also known as gold open access,…
Why environmental non-governmental organizations – and everyone else – should go green (open access)
Open access (OA) – making academic research freely available to all – seems self-evidently a great idea. It’s good for the public, which gains access to work it…