Academic Research

As Techdirt has been reporting, the idea of providing open access to publicly-funded research is steadily gaining ground. One of the key moments occurred almost exactly a year ago, when the British mathematician Tim Gowers announced that he would no longer have anything to do with the major academic publisher Elsevier... Read More »

In the 18 months since the World Bank announced its Open Access Policy with the launch of the Open Knowledge Repository, a transformation has taken place in the way the Bank’s published knowledge reaches the public. The frequency and volume of content being accessed doubled from one million downloads in the first year to two million in the subsequent six months. But measuring the impact goes beyond counting downloads and visits. Read More »

Academics are — slowly — adopting the view that publicly funded research should be made freely available. But data released yesterday suggest that, given the choice, even researchers who publish in open-access journals want to place restrictions on how their papers can be re-used — for example, sold by others for commercial profit. Read More »

The publishing giant Elsevier owns much of the world’s academic knowledge, in the form of article copyright. In the past few weeks it has stepped up enforcement of its property rights, issuing “take-down notices” to Academia.edu, where many researchers post PDFs of their articles. Read More »

A Stellenbosch-based start-up wants to debunk health myths and offer researchers, and anyone else who’s interested, access to the data from its custom-built “metabolic chamber”. Read More »

Science (real science, not the summaries in popular books and the media) is needlessly closed to the outside world. Worse, it is closed within itself, with every lab its own silo, and little sharing of data or materials. Read More »

For the first time, 2012 saw the 4th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) feature an afternoon of sessions entirely dedicated to Open Access books. Read More »