Standard Analytics have released a very useful paper looking at platform costs for scholarly publishing. In the paper (which coincidentally demonstrates part of the platform system they are developing) they make some strong claims about the base cost of publishing scholarly articles.

This is an approximation of my talk at OpenCon Cambridge on Thursday 26 November 2015. Any inaccuracies entirely mine. There is also a video recording of the actual talk. The idea of OpenCon was borne out of the idea that the future belonged to young scholars and that helping them to be effective advocates for the world they want to work in was the best way to make progress.

This is an approximate rendering of my comments as part of the closing panel of “The End of Scientific Journal? Transformations in Publishing” held at the Royal Society, London on 27 November 2015. It should be read as a reconstruction of what I might have said rather than an accurate record. The day had focussed on historical accounts of “journals” as mediators of both professional and popular research communications.

This post wasn’t on the original slate for the Political Economics of Publishing series but it seems apposite as the arguments and consequences of the Editorial Board of Lingua resigning en masse to form a new journal published by Ubiquity Press continue to rumble on. The resignation of the editorial board of Lingua from the (Elsevier owned) journal to form a new journal, that is intended to really be “the same journal” raises

This is the approximate text of my talk at City University London on 21 October for Open Access Week 2015. If you prefer the “as live” video version then that its available at YouTube. Warning: Nearly 6000 words and I haven’t yet referenced it properly, put the pictures in or done a good edit… Eight years of Open Access Week, massive progress towards greater access to research, not to mention data and educational resources.

In the first post in this series I identified a series of challenges in scholarly publishing while stepping through some of the processes that publishers undertake in the management of articles. A particular theme was the challenge of managing a heterogenous stream of articles and their associated heterogeneous formats and problems, in particular at a large scale.

I have a Moto 360 Android Watch. People often ask how it is, whether it’s useful, and I give some answer along the lines that its great to have a watch that shows me the time in multiple places and is always updated to local, always right. It’s a true answer, but it it’s a partial answer. I can easily enough figure out what the time is somewhere else. What really matters is that those dials are a point of connection with people in those places.

Last week I was lucky enough to spend five days in North Carolina at the Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded initiative that brings teams together on a retreat style meeting to work on specific projects.

Ernesto Priego has invited me to speak at City University in London on Thursday the 22nd October as part of Open Access Week. I wanted to pull together a bunch of the thinking I’ve been doing recently around Open Knowledge in general and how we can get there from here. This is deliberately a bit on the provocative side so do come along to argue!

The University Rankings season is upon us with the QS league table released a few weeks back to much hand wringing here in the UK as many science focussed institutions tumbled downwards. The fact that this was due to a changed emphasis in counting humanities and social sciences rather than any change at the universities themselves was at least noted, although how much this was to excuse the drop rather than engage with the issue is unclear.