No good deed goes unpunished in a world where the rules have been set by academic publishers
One of the heroes of my new book Walled Culture is Paul Ginsparg. In 1991, Ginsparg set up an automated email server while he was a staff member…
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…
The mighty Elsevier academic octopus adds another tentacle
Last year, Walled Culture noted that the academic publisher Elsevier enjoys an astonishing profit margin of 30-40%. Those profits, built on the free labour of academics writing about…
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…
From paywalled academic publishing towards free, fast and frictionless sharing of knowledge
As a post back in November explained, copyright is key to the business model of academic publishing. By pushing researchers to assign their copyright to publishers, the latter…