Featured image for “Who loses out from Open Access journals? Plus the weirdness of the Magisterium”

Who loses out from Open Access journals? Plus the weirdness of the Magisterium

March 2, 2021
Maria Faciolince and I have a paper out in a Development and Change special collection on Open Access in academic publishing (full disclosure: Maria did most of the work). One of the concerns about how OA is playing out is that many journals have responded by introducing ‘author processing charges’ (averaging around £2,000 per article). Instead of readers paying to
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Featured image for “What are the downsides for Southern Scholars of Open Access to academic journals?”

What are the downsides for Southern Scholars of Open Access to academic journals?

September 23, 2019
Duncan Green and Maria Faciolince consult #PowerShifts authors on how to try and sort out an unintended consequence of Open Access. For several years, there has been a push to make academic journals Open Access for readers, and Duncan’s been a big supporter. OA is a good thing in terms of allowing readers, North and South, to get access to
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How Change Happens is two years old this week, and Open Access has played a big part in getting people to read it

October 23, 2018
This week is International Open Access Week. It is also two years since we published How Change Happens (How Time Flies….), so here’s a summary of what’s happened since. From a publishing point of view, the most interesting aspect of HCH was that it was open access from day 1. In return for Oxfam waiving its royalties, Oxford University Press
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How Change Happens one year on – the stats, the suffering and the power of Open Access

October 27, 2017
It’s a year to the day since How Change Happens was published (I made the mistake of putting ‘narcissistic peak’ in my diary, and my wife Cathy saw it – never heard the end of it). Here’s what’s happened since. First the stats: the headline figure is that in the first year, the book has had approximately 40,000 readers. Of
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Should we boycott gated journals on social media? How about a pledge?

October 25, 2017
It’s International Open Access Week, so this seems a good time to post on something that’s been bugging me. I had a slightly tetchy exchange on twitter recently with someone (who wishes to remain anonymous) who sent me a link to their paper and asked me to circulate it if I liked it. Problem was the link was to a journal,
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How Change Happens + 3 months: how’s it going?

February 8, 2017
It’s now 3 months since How Change Happens came out (did I mention I’d published a new book?) so I dropped in at the publishers, OUP, last week to take stock. OUP took some risks with this book, notably agreeing to go Open Access from day one. That is a huge leap from the traditional publishing model of publishing only the hardback
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Can Publishers survive Open Access? We’ll find out when How Change Happens is published today

October 27, 2016
It’s Open Access Week and How Change Happens is officially published in the UK today, as both a book and an open access pdf. The process has been pretty exciting. The traditional author descends from the mountain of scholarship clutching a rather expensive tablet of stone, in which his/her wisdom is set out to a suitably grateful but largely passive
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Should ODI bite the open access bullet for its journals? Response to last week’s rant on the Academic Spring

August 14, 2013
Nick Scott, Interim Head of Communications at ODI, patiently responds to last week’s post complaining that ODI is hiding its treasure behind a paywall. Also, ODI tweeted yesterday to say that the latest issue of its Development Policy Review, (on the effectiveness of transparency and accountability initiatives), which prompted the initial rant  is now ungated (August only, so get downloading).
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