Unsustainable: OA Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences

From the Scholarly Kitchen blog:

A shift to an author-pays open access publishing model is not a sustainable option — this is the main message of a much-awaited study of the costs of journal publishing in the humanities and social sciences.

The report, “The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations,” was released on September 1st by the National Humanities Alliance. The study was conducted by the independent publishing consultant, Mary Waltham, and underwritten by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The study was based on a detailed analysis of the publishing costs and revenue streams of eight humanities and social science and journals (HSS), representing the flagship journals of their associations and based on three-years of data (2005-2007).

Mendeley scrobbles your papers

Mendeley is a social web application for academic authors that has been receiving quite a lot of attention recently. Victor Keegan wrote about it in The Guardian last week, likening it to the streaming music service Last.fm

You can recommend other people’s papers and see how many people are reading yours, which you can’t do in Nature and Science.

The company itself is formed of a team of researchers, graduates and software engineers from a number of prestigious UK, German and US institutions (including several of our Partners - Stanford, Imperial College, Warwick and Cambridge). It currently has over 4.7m downloadable items and is adding tens of thousands every day. I checked over the last two days, and it added just over 62,000 on Tuesday, and nearly 64,000 on Wednesday. Statistics for users reveal that bioscientists (19.4%) and computer and information scientists (19.1%) are the largest groups, with medics (7%) trailing way behind in third place

NPG launches an online only open access journal - Cell Death & Disease

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) along with the Associazione Differenziamento e Morte Cellulare is publishing an open access online journal called Cell Death & Disease in January 2010

The journal aims at exploring the area of cell death from a translational medicine perspective. It will be a peer-reviewed author-pays online journal that will publish full-length papers, reviews and commentaries describing original research in the field of translational cell death.
The scientific and medical information publisher said that the upcoming journal has started accepting submissions. This journal marks the first launch of several open access journals NPG is planning to introduce within its academic and society journal program in 2010

Live webcast from 1st OA conference at Lund

You can watch the various speakers at this conference live!

Data sharing - Nature News Special on need for OA to data

Most researchers agree that open access to data is the scientific ideal, so what is stopping it happening? Bryn Nelson investigates why many researchers choose not to share.

Google Book Settlement - summary of what it is and implications

A very clear statement from EBLIDA on what the Google Book Settlement allows and issues for European users and libraries