Just a quick post to say that I think Beall’s list of “predatory journals” should be expanded to include dubious subscription access journals. I think it’s rather unfair on the open access movement to claim it’s just the open access business model that faces this kind of desperate exploitation.

I’ve been quoted in a Nature News story about Open Access journal licencing. I’m a staunch defender of the use of the Creative Commons Attribution licence, as it’s a good licence for academic research. Here’s just some of what I sent Richard Van Noorden (Nature News) by email. I don’t blame him for only using select quotes.

Just a quick post. I happened to see @wisealic Tweet about her “new Atira/Pure colleagues” yesterday. I didn’t know what Atira was, but I’d heard of PURE.

The Ecological Society of America (ESA) would like your input on how to expand access to their publications and what they should do if **gasp* *the USA also mandates some form of public or open access …like the rest of the world seems to be doing at the moment. The official call is here in this new free to access ESA publication (at the end): Collins, S., Goldberg, D., Schimel, J., and McCarter, K. 2013.

Here’s my submission for the House of Lords inquiry. I rather ran out of steam writing it so you’ll see it tails off towards the end. There’s probably loads of things I should mention too. But alas, I have lots of other work to be getting on with right now. Ironically, I highlight the excellent journal Impact Factor’s of some OA journals. Please forgive me for those sins! So here it is:

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m very passionate on the subject of data sharing in science, and after all the relevant conferences I’ve been to and research I’ve done – I don’t mind saying I’m fairly knowledgeable on the subject too. It’s part of the reason I got this Panton Fellowship that has helped me develop my work and do what I want to do in pursuit of Open Data goals. So when I saw this article come up on my RSS feeds – I thought great!

I wrote a piece for The Systematist newsletter last year which has now been published & disseminated to members. The official version won’t be freely accessible from the website until next year (instant access is currently a perk of Systematics Association membership only ) so in the meantime I’ll re-blog it here: Is this the first mention of #icanhazpdf in scholarly literature?

So a week ago, I investigated publisher-produced Version of Record PDFs with pdfinfo and the results were very disappointing. Lots of missing metadata was found and one could not reliably identify most of these PDFs from metadata alone, let alone extract particular fields of interest. But Rod Page kindly alerted to me the fact that I might be using the wrong tool for this investigation.

I’ve written about MOOCs last December but never actually enrolled in one myself… until now. Sure, I’ve done Codecademy courses and Codeschool courses which I’ve immensely enjoyed but they’re perhaps(?) not quite the same thing.

Just a quick note that BMC journal APC’s have increased from what they were in 2012.   Luckily I had the 2012 data saved on my computer so I can compare prices directly. I’ve put the data for 97 journals (not all of them) here on figshare. The mean price increase is just over 5% . Although to give it a fair statistical treatment – the median price increase is just 3.3% (to 1 d.p.). There is a lot of variance.