Comments for OASPA News and Commentary

Comment on Publishing ethics, open access, and OASPA by Joseph

Joseph — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:54:25 +0000

“The OASPA code of conduct also requires that members are responsible in their marketing practices”

-the member must be responsible for their write-ups. make sense.

Comment on COASP 2010 Wrap Up by admin

admin — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 12:08:58 +0000

Thank you for your comment. Sometimes we forget that not everyone is well versed in these many acronyms. We will be more conscious of this in the future. In the meantime: COASP (Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing), OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association), BMJ (British Medical Journal), CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Reserach).

Comment on Launching the OASPA Showcase for Open Access Week 2010 by Sarah

Sarah — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 18:33:40 +0000

This is such an important cause! The fact is, scholarly information has been traditionally kept at-bay from the general public. Through sophisticated hierarchical systems like member-only access to academic journals or overly academic/scientific language that makes the content inaccessible, the “us-them” duality is perpetuated and keeps important information from the masses. Thank you for making your information public, I have already benefited from many of your articles as I do research for my Master’s thesis.

Comment on COASP 2010 Wrap Up by Tia Isagenix

Tia Isagenix — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:49:47 +0000

It’s a little difficult for outsiders to follow this with all the acronyms like COASP, OASPA, BMJ, CERN, etc.

Comment on COASP 2010 Wrap Up by Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:49:17 +0000

Twitter Trackbacks…

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Comment on COASP 2010 Wrap Up by admin

admin — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:20:00 +0000

I’d also like to add that the staff at the President’s Hotel in Prague was fantastic. They attended to our every detail and provided us with a wonderful experience. I’d recommend the hotel for any smaller-sized conference.

Comment on OASPA’s response to the OSTP’s request for public comment on Public Access Policies for Science and Technology Funding Agencies Across the Federal Government by Oliver Jones

Oliver Jones — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:48:22 +0000

self-publishing is always good but it may require some initial capital and labor to run it.-~,

Comment on OASPA’s response to the OSTP’s request for public comment on Public Access Policies for Science and Technology Funding Agencies Across the Federal Government by Jonathan Barcliff

Jonathan Barcliff — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 19:40:25 +0000

Great post. Just stumbled across an excellent site with UK government documents on it - www.officialdocumentwatch.com is a really well built site and them seem to be very up to date - always posting the latest UK government documents released to the public. Worth a look.

Comment on OASPA assessment of new applications and complaints procedures by Stevan Harnad

Stevan Harnad — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 11:44:51 +0000

PS: CREATION VS CONVERSION

What seems clear is that the conversion of established journals to OA, along with their track-records for quality control and ethics, is far preferable to new OA journal start-ups when what is missing and urgently needed today is more OA to the contents of existing journals, not more journal start-ups.

Comment on OASPA assessment of new applications and complaints procedures by Stevan Harnad

Stevan Harnad — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 11:37:43 +0000

PROPORTIONATE MEMBERSHIP?

It is commendable that OASPA is making efforts to ensure that members are likely to have acceptable standards of quality and ethics. The remaining weak point, however, continues to be that a fleet publisher of 999 non-OA journals plus one OA journal can officially call itself an “Open Access Publisher,” as a “full member” of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. (Meanwhile the publisher of a single journal that is considering converting to OA can only be an “associate member.”)

Perhaps the mistake is making the publisher rather than the journal the unit of currency; or perhaps “membership” should be graded: not “full” vs. “associate” but by percentage of journals that are OA: Hence a publisher of two journals, one of them OA, could would be a 50% member of OASPA, and could call itself a 50% OA publisher, whereas a publisher of 100 journals, one of them OA, would be a 1% member of OASPA, and could only call itself a 1% OA publisher.

It is less clear how to weight voting rights (especially on questions like standards and ethics). On the face of it, a 50% member publishing a fleet of 50 OA journals (and 50 non-OA journals) would seem to deserve more of a voice than a 100% member publishing one OA journal, so perhaps there needs to be some normalization and weighting along those lines. (I am not sure, though, whether in the long run it is a good idea to encourage fleet publishing at all…)