Academic Journals: Is it time to shake things up?

Via The Guardian:

Researchers are estimated to waste 15 million person-hours a year on unpublished submissions to scientific journals. How can we make scientific communication more efficient? This was one of the questions raised at a recent debate at a conference celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Philosophical Transactions, the world’s oldest scientific journal, published by the Royal Society. I am in the team of historians from the University of St Andrews who ran the conference, and writing a history of the journal and its editorial practices. We want to bring this history right up to the present day, and so invited four experts in scientific publishing to discuss the present and future of the learned journal.

Source: The Guardian

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Why I Don’t Care About Open Access to Research—and Why You Should

Introduction:

Should paywalls stand between the taxpaying public and publicly funded research? Congress recently decided that the answer should be “no.” As part of the post-government-shutdown spending bill passed earlier this month, Congress included an “open access” provision requiring that research papers funded by the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education be made freely available to everyone within 12 months of publication in a scientific journal. This move is the latest step in a movement toward increasing public access to publicly funded research.

Source: Pacific Standard

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Science Special Issue: Communication in Science: Pressures and Predators

Science's Special Issue on Communication in Science: Pressures and Predators includes free news and reviews on the lack of scrutiny at open-access journals, the rarity of published negative studies, and publishing sensitive data.

Entire special issue available online