Academic publishing is a multi-million dollar business dominated by just a few major publishing houses. Many academics and open access advocates believe that’s unfair—publishers simply take researchers’ work and sell it back to them, they say. Stan Correy takes a look at the state of play. • In 2001, I did a story for RN’s...

Rear Vision explores why the world of scholarly communication has become so divided over the control, access and cost of knowledge. The outsourcing of the production of the Medical journal of Australia has divided medical researchers because of the sacking of the editor in chief, Professor Stephen Leeder. At the centre of the controversy is...

In the past few years, open access repositories and their associated services have become an important component of the global eresearch infrastructure. Increasingly, repositories are also being integrated with other systems, such as research administrative systems and with research data repositories, with the aim of providing a more integrated and seamless suite of services to...

Introduction The assumption that academic research will organically find its way to those with the power to act on it is false. Some may conceive of academia as the creator of the country’s best knowledge, knowledge which automatically permeates – and is respected by – powerful decision-making networks. This is not the case. Instead, real-world...

It is widely known now that scholarly communication is in crisis, resting on an academic publishing model that is unsustainable. One response to this crisis has been the emergence of Open Access (OA) publishing, bringing scholarly literature out from behind a paywall and making it freely available to anyone online. Many research and academic libraries...