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The research community can never remind itself too often what it repeatedly seems to forget: Peer-reviewed journal publishing is a service industry. It is performing a service to the research community (for which it is paid, abundantly, via subscriptions). Research is not funded by the public, nor conducted and published by researchers as a service to the publishing industry.

The research community can never remind itself too often what it repeatedly seems to forget: Peer-reviewed journal publishing is a service industry. It is performing a service to the research community (for which it is paid, abundantly, via subscriptions). Research is not funded by the public, nor conducted and published by researchers as a service to the publishing industry.

The research community can never remind itself too often what it repeatedly seems to forget: Peer-reviewed journal publishing is a service industry. It is performing a service to the research community (for which it is paid, abundantly, via subscriptions). Research is not funded by the public, nor conducted and published by researchers as a service to the publishing industry.

Recognition that non-science academics often lacked specific research funding led the California-based commercial publisher to launch Sage Open with an article fee of just $695, compared with PLoS ONE's $1,350 - and $5,000 at Elsevier's Cell titles. Sage Open has so far received more than 1,400 manuscripts, and published more than 160 articles. However, a recent survey of authors indicated that more than 70 per cent of Sage Open's accepted authors had paid the article fee out of their own pocket, while only 15 per cent of all articles published in 2012 across Sage's fleet of humanities and social sciences journals derived from research projects with allocated funding.

Changes expand access to Special Interest Group conference proceedings Working with the computing community, ACM leadership has responded to calls to make scholarly articles more openly accessible, to enable authors to exercise greater control of their published works, and to comply with the increasing demands placed on authors by funding agencies.  ACM authors now have three ways to manage their publication rights with ACM: A license granting ACM non-exclusive permission to publish—by choosing to pay for perpetual open access from the ACM Digital Library, authors may opt to self-manage all rights to their work. A new Publishing License Agreement granting ACM exclusive publication rights—in choosing this license authors grant ACM the right to serve as the exclusive publisher of their work and to manage ongoing rights and permissions associated with the work, including the right to defend it against improper use by third parties. This exclusive license is roughly the equivalent of ACM’s traditional Copyright Transfer Agreement except that the author continues to hold copyright. ACM's traditional Copyright Transfer Agreement—for authors comfortable with the existing agreement. Learn more by visiting the Information for Authors webpage. ACM is also implementing changes to to allow for more free access to the content of ACM journals and Special Interest Group conference proceedings in the ACM Digital Library and other online venues: SIGs may choose to enable open access to the most current proceedings volume of their sponsored conferences from the conference or SIG site.SIGs may make conference proceedings freely available via the ACM DL platform for up to two weeks before the event, and for a total of one month. These options will facilitate access to proceedings content by conference attendees. They will also enable the community at large to learn about the latest developments as they are presented at the conferences.

The problem is a library culture that gives lip service to user needs while really catering to librarians.

Unfortunately, this fight isn’t about who spends more time researching what users need; it’s an internal power struggle over whose personal vision for the library website will win out. It’s about librarian tribes and political infighting, and the end results is always a bad user experience. Always.

Now, librarians are not like library users. This is a fundamental rule of user experience design, and a mantra that we should all repeat, endlessly, as we do our work: