Resources for Gold Open Access for Learned Societies

Cost-effectiveness of open access publications by Jevin West, Theodore Bergstrom and Carl T. Bergstrom. Tool: http://www.eigenfactor.org/openaccess/ Abstract: "Open access publishing has been proposed as one possible solution to the serials crisis | the rapidly growing subscription prices in scholarly journal publishing. However, open access publishing can present economic pitfalls as well, such as excessive publication charges. We discuss the decision that an author faces when choosing to submit to an open access journal. We develop an interactive tool to help authors compare among alternative open access venues and thereby get the most for their publication fees."

Blog post by OKN Fellow Ross Mounce in whiich he provides a plot of APCs against Openness of various GoldOA article options.

Coherent and thoroughly argued piece, with some telling and informative calculations in paragraph 7, and an interesting suggestion that APC fee-capping be introduced.

13 January 2013 post by Martin Paul Eve on the beginnings of a possible PLOS for Humanities and Social Sciences

Jonathan Eisen is the academic editor-in-chief of PLoS Biology. This post, which is a reaction to the #PDFtribute surge after Aaron Swartz's suicide, presents options for making articles Open as a 10-point hierarchy.

The ARC has introduced a new open access policy for ARC funded research which takes effect from 1 January 2013. ARC requires that any publications arising from an ARC supported research project must be deposited into an open access institutional repository within a twelve (12) month period from the date of publication.

Google's "Policy by the Numbers" blog has this coherent summary of the argument for author self archiving rather than Gold. Written by Andrew Adams (Professor of Information Ethics in the Graduate School of Business Administration and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics at Meiji University in Tokyo). An earlier "Policy By the Numbers" post by Andrew Adams "Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Why It Matters" is at http://policybythenumbers.blogspot.com/2012/12/open-access-to-scholarly-literature-and.html.

A consideration by Eric van de Velde of why MOOCs have caught the eye and the imagination of HE leaders in a way that OA never did. Poses three questions: 1. Why do academic leaders not make the same calculation with respect to OA? 2. Why do they fear the potential of OA-caused disruption? 3. Why do they embrace the potential of MOOCs-caused disruption? Puts forward four not entirely convincing explanatory conjectures: 1. MOOCs are in their infancy, providing cover for their pedagogic inadequacy, and allowing for experimentation. 2. MOOCs provide big first mover advantages. (Hasn't PLOS had FMA?). 3. In contrast with OA MOOCs put control in the hands of teachers (!). 4. OA is not sufficiently disruptive (PeerJ, however, is).

Videos, text transcripts, and slides from most if not all of the sessions at a two-day Conference organised by the Academy of Social Sciences, sponsored by the THE, Routledge, Wiley Blackwell and SAGE to look at the implementation of the recommendations of the Finch Review for Open Access publishing in the UK.

Interesting to see that the things which appear to be "text transcripts" are in fact edited notes with a lot of bits missed out. I discovered this by looking at my notes and then checking with the (hits less than 100) You Tube videos. I would not mind this if it made it clear that they had been amended, but it doesn't as far as I can see.