Another #spotLights episode just aired! 
We’re launching our #biologists100 conference series with @richardsever, discussing:
The launch of openRxiv The role of preprints in supporting early-career researchers What’s ahead for scholarly publishing & peer review
Recorded live in Liverpool, March 2025 by Jonathan Townson & Reinier Prosee.
Yesterday, our Experimental Publishing reading group took as one of its chosen texts Tara McPherson’s ‘Scaling Vectors: Thoughts on the Future of Scholarly Communication’, which appeared in the Journal of Electronic Publishing in 2010.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0013.208?view=text;rgn=main
It has lines such as: ‘While innovative publishing efforts have emerged from a variety of spaces … it is safe to say that change has not broadly swept through the humanities.’
And: ‘The impulse to conserve the status quo emerges largely from humanities scholars themselves. Faced with a variety of threats (both real and perceived) to the humanities, scholars tend to hold on to established modes of working.’
All raises the question, has much changed in the 15 years since these words were written? And if not, why not? Does anyone have any ideas?
#publishing
#oa
#radicalOA
#academicpublishing #experimentalpublishing #journals #humanities
Yesterday I posted on the Radical Open Access list, responding to last week's Radical OA III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism conference. Titled 'What Do We Not Think About When We Think About Money?', a version of this post is now available on my Media Gifts blog:
http://www.garyhall.info/journal/2025/4/14/what-do-we-not-think-about-when-we-think-about-money.html
'... when it comes to open access publishing projects, financial sustainability matters - of course. But to what extent has the toxic, 'neoliberal', 'managerialist' university shaped even us to focus on the money, funding and funding models, the business side of things, paid/free/volunteer/service/recognised & rewarded labour? Even how radical OA can capitalise on the current financial crisis of the university (at least in the UK and US)? ...
'... money is extremely important, yes, I appreciate that. But what gets lost when it becomes one of the main lenses through which we view radical open access? ...'
Springer Nature Says It Has Reached 50 Percent Open Access
Frank Vrancken Peeters at Springer Nature goes over key points of progress behind a key milestone for the scholarly publisher.
https://publishingperspectives.com/2025/04/springer-nature-says-it-has-reached-50-percent-open-access/
#AcademicPublishing #OpenAccess #PublishingResearch #ScholarlyPublishing #SpringerNature
@indieauthors
Check out the newly published conference report “The Empire and I: Individuals in Empires and Postimperial Spaces”! The conference was organised by @GRK2571 at @unifreiburg (28–30 Nov 2024).
Written by Lara Forster & Kaja Plate, it explores personal perspectives on imperial frameworks.
Read it here: https://t1p.de/conf-rep-24
@dfg_public @histodons @histodon #empires #histodon #histodons #conference #postimperial #academicpublishing #imperialbiographies #socialmobility #romanempire #ottomanhistory #habsburgempire #colonialhistory #genderedspaces #globalhistory #institutions #earlymodernhistory
#Wiley no license agreement with #swissuniversities in 2025 https://www.unil.ch/news/1744106269223
#OpenAccess #AcademicPublishing #NoDeal
#OASPA is launching a collective project on new alternatives for #OpenAccess promotion, bringing together publishing, editing, and funding actors in scientific communication.
The goal: ensuring most academic publications are freely available without economic barriers.
More info and participation:
A small but telling academic exchange: Dr. Oviedo-García raised concerns about how we cited her 2021 paper on watchlists. We clarified it was only a historical reference to Beall’s lists - no claims implied.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2025.103049
Elsevier’s editors now suggest we bury the hatchet. Gladly. 
EAZ Vol. 15, No. 4 (1974) is now available online! With contributions covering, among others, the archaeology and ethnography of the Caucasus, physical anthropology, along with reviews of a number of palynological publications and conference reports, including the II Symposion Byzantinon in Strasbourg, the volume is now added to our archives.
#Archaeology #Palynology #AcademicPublishing #EAZ #EAZArchives
Read here: https://www.eaz-journal.org/index.php/eaz/issue/view/103
Redaktion geschlossen zurückgetreten: Wegen Differenzen mit #Wiley verlässt das gesamte Editorial Board die Mathematical Logic Quarterly – und gründet ein neues Diamond Open Access Journal: ZML – Zeitschrift für Mathematische Logik.
https://open-access.network/services/news/artikel/ruecktritt-des-mlq-editorial-teams
https://zml.international
Offener Brief: https://zml.international/files/zml-open-letter.pdf
Publishing Perspectives: A Win in Ukraine’s Academic ‘Metadata War’. “[Frances] Pinter has reached Publishing Perspectives with the news that ‘publications in territories presently occupied by Russia’ are ‘unjustifiably using the ISSNs of Ukrainian journals originally founded by displaced Ukrainian higher education institutions, or obtaining entirely new ISSNs while falsely claiming to […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2025/04/07/publishing-perspectives-a-win-in-ukraines-academic-metadata-war/
A Win in Ukraine’s Academic ‘Metadata War’
Preserving global trust in academic systems' is involved in some coordinated reacytions to illicit ISSN usage in Ukraine.
The post A Win in Ukraine’s Academic ‘Metadata War’ appeared first on Publishing Perspectives.
https://publishingperspectives.com/2025/04/a-win-in-ukraines-academic-metadata-war/
#AcademicPublishing #AmsterdamUniversityPress #CEUPress #Identifiers #InternationalPublishersAssociation
@indieauthors
UK IOPP Fosters Raises Requirement for Data Behind Articles
The suite of society journals in the UK named IOP Publishing is testing a requirement to have researchers publicly reveal their research data.
https://publishingperspectives.com/2025/04/iopp-trust-in-science/
#AcademicPublishing #ClimateCrisis #IOPPublishing #PublishingResearch #ScholarlyJournals
@indieauthors
"On improving the sustainability of peer review" - a good editorial from #PLOSBiology https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003127 #peerreview #academicchatter #academicpublishing
Not a great morning as woke up to very disappointing news about a paper, that I'll now have to submit to another publisher. Considering a) the extra work involved and b) many publishers now give all their content to AI companies, this thought does not fill me with enthusiasm. Another nail in the coffin of my academic life I think.
Recap in pictures from the #UKSG2025 and sunny Brighton 
Our latest #newsletter comes with some #breakingnews. On 31 March, the Swiss negotiations with Wiley were discontinued. We wrap up what happened, how the researchers at our institutes will be affected and provide some recommendations for action, as compiled by swissuniversities. Find more here: https://www.lib4ri.ch/lib4ri-update-39-no-deal-wiley #OpenScience #OpenAccess #AcademicPublishing
'It doesn’t matter what transformative anticapitalist, antiracist or antiheteropatriarchal ideas we profess in the content of our work. They can be inspired by Karl Marx, Audre Lorde, Gilles Deleuze, María Lugones, Walter Mignolo, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alain Badiou, Donna Haraway, Silvia Federici, Byung-Chul Han, Benjamin Bratton … whoever. But when it comes to our knowledge-making practices – the taken-for-granted forms our writing takes, the habitual ways in which we disseminate and monetise it, the associated upholding of notions of individualism, human rights and property rights – we still have to operate according to what is actually a Euro-Western, modernist and middle-class, straight white male model of the humanities researcher.'
- Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/
#newmedia
#academicpublishing
#experimentalwriting
#genai
#posthumanism
#copyright #OA
Imagine paying a $3,750 APC and then also choosing to pay an extra $5,000 to have someone (or some LLM?) write a plain language summary of your work for you.
I know this is April Fool's Day but this is actually real 
source: https://becarispublishing.com/journal/cer/journal-information#Journal_pricing_information
EAZ Vol. 15, No. 4 (1974) is now available online! With contributions covering, among others, the #archaeology and #ethnography of the #caucasus, #physicalanthropology along with reviews of a number of palynological publications and conference reports, including the II Symposion Byzantinon in Strasbourg, the volume is now added to our archives.
#Archaeology #Palynology #AcademicPublishing #EAZ #EAZArchives
Read here: https://www.eaz-journal.org/index.php/eaz/issue/view/103
