AmeliCA before Plan S – The Latin American Initiative to develop a cooperative, non-commercial, academic led, system of scholarly communication

Open access is often discussed as a process of flipping the existing closed subscription based model of scholarly communication to an open one. However, in Latin America an open access ecosystem for scholarly publishing has been in place for over a decade. In this post, Eduardo Aguado-López and Arianna Becerril-Garcia discuss open access developments in Latin America and the AmeliCA initiative to develop a cooperative infrastructure for scientific communication. They also reflect on how the recent proposals put forward by cOAlition S to foster open access publication in the Global North, could potentially negatively impact open access efforts in Latin America.

Plan S Revisions

Rationale for the Revisions Made to the Plan S Principles and Implementation Guidance The revised Plan S maintains the fundamental principles but a number of important changes are proposed in the implementation guidance. These include: The timeline has been extended by one year to 2021;Transformative agreements will be supported until 2024;more options for transitional arrangements are supported;greater clarity is provided about the various compliance routes: Plan S is NOT just about a publication fee model of Open Access publishing.

The “impact” of the Journal Impact Factor in the review, tenure, and promotion process

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) – a measure reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles published in a journal – has been widely critiqued as a measure of individual academic performance. However, it is unclear whether these criticisms and high profile declarations, such as DORA, have led to significant cultural change. In this post, Erin McKiernan, Juan Pablo Alperin and Alice Fleerackers present evidence from a recent study of review, promotion and tenure documents, showing the extent to which (JIF) remains embedded as a measure of success in the academic job market.

Taking Stock of the Feedback on Plan S Implementation Guide

In this interesting piece Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe reviews the feedback submitted in response to the Plan S consultation and highlights 7 themes that emerged from the thousands of pages submissions made to cOAlition S. Plan S is an initiative for Open Access publishing that was launched in September 2018. The plan is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders. Plan S requires that, from 2020, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms.

Max Planck Society Ends Elsevier Subscription

The Max Planck Society, an enormous German research organization 14,000 scientists strong and comprising multiple research institutes, has ended its subscription to Elsevier journals, the organization announced in a statement on December 18. It did so in support of the German open-access initiative called Project DEAL, after unsuccessful attempts to negotiate an open-access agreement with the publisher. The organization’s digital library will no longer have access to Elsevier’s approximately 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, once the subscription expires on December 31.

Ten principles for the responsible use of university rankings

Ten principles for the responsible use of university rankings

University rankings are controversial. There is a lot of criticism on well-known rankings such as the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), commonly referred to as the Shanghai Ranking, and the World University Rankings of Times Higher Education (THE) and QS.
Nevertheless, universities often feel that they are under pressure to
show a good performance in these rankings and universities may therefore
pay considerable attention to these rankings in their decision making.

The Ten Principles are intended to guide universities, students,
governments, and other stakeholders in the responsible use of university
rankings.