A brief guide to Article Processing Charge waivers

‘Gold’ Open Access – which levies an article processing charge (APC) to defray the costs of publishing – can remove barriers to access, but can increase barriers to publish. This is especially true for authors from low-income countries, independent scholars, and others without ready access to grant funding. In turn,…

The rising tide of preprint servers

Progress in any industry can have a habit of sneaking up on those within it. Changes that were once new, unknown and even derided become a standard part of the seascape. It’s possible that we are seeing this phenomenon with preprint servers – online repositories that host articles before their…

Author copyright in the age of Open Access

An apparently straightforward idea, Open Access can have some important ramifications for the copyright and licensing of authors’ works. In this post, we delve into some of the issues around who owns what and when in Open Access publishing. Open Access offers unrestricted online access to research publications in combination…

How to be a good peer reviewer

Peer review underpins most phases of the research cycle: applying for research funding, obtaining ethics committee approval, vetting research plans and evaluating scholarly manuscripts (before and after publication). By undertaking editorial peer review, journals offer authors certification and validation of their research results while providing readers with a reliable source…

The power of persistent and unique identifiers

The ability to uniquely and persistently connect a string of numbers or characters to an object or entity confers a great power. Unique identifiers enable users to aggregate, link, filter, assign and otherwise use digital objects and their associated data in new and valuable ways. In recent years, considerable progress…

Editors in scholarly publishing

From guiding journal policy and making decisions on manuscripts, to correcting text and facilitating print and online publication, editors support authors at almost every stage of the publication process. How can the same title encompass so many different roles and responsibilities? The proliferation of the word ‘editor’ in publishing contexts…

Graphs of Note: Citation distributions

‘Graphs of Note’ is an occasional series of blog posts that describe interesting and informative graphs and the stories behind them. Much has been written about the limitations of the Impact Factor and its use as a metric of journal quality. In a 2015 editorial in The EMBO Journal, Chief…