Author Archives: pm286

I am looking for Open Access articles to mine and since I have recently become an astrophysicist I started with http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1384107614000426 Can I mine it? “Open Access” means virtually nothing. Let’s try RightsLink, the tax-collector for the toll-access scholarly publishers. … Continue reading →

I’m in den Haag (The Hague) for a meeting run by LIBER – the association of European Research Libraries – about Content Mining. Content Mining is often called TDM – Text and Data Mining – but it also applies to … Continue reading →

[term: tcPublisher – = traditional Closed Publisher such as Elsevier or Nature Publishing Group. oaPublisher, exemplified by PLoS, eLIfe, etc.] In his final address to the nation, in 1961, President Dwight D Eisenhower coined a new phrase: we must guard … Continue reading →

TL;DR Scholarly publishing is an Inhuman Machine, Out of Control. It is pillaging the digital commons. I’ve spent the last 2 days lying awake trying to get my thoughts in order about Macmillan’s use of ReadCube to distribute “free” copies … Continue reading →

[AMI and Brenda] We had a very well attended (full Unitarian Church) of Cambridge people wishing to hear about TTIP (“Tee-tip”) the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnershipl. I have been very very worried about this for some time, informed at … Continue reading →

We’ve had a long and thoughtful reply from Timo Hannay about the SciShare/ReadCube “free access”. I shall reply to it. It gives the impression that Nature is a progressive publisher committed to Open Access. That may be true in parts. … Continue reading →

Prof. Henry Rzepa recounts his recent experience with installing and running Macmillan’s Readcube; a device to allow DRM’ed access to read-only scholarly literature. [I have not used it myself (and will not) but trust Henry absolutely to give an accurate … Continue reading →

My great collaborator Henry Rzepa has read the last post and delved into Macmillan’s ReadCube and found it to be totally flawed and unacceptable (/pmr/2014/12/03/natures-fauxpen-access-leaves-me-very-sad-and-very-angry/#comment-471649). Here’s Henry: I had a good look at ReadCube, the walled-garden container for articles that … Continue reading →

Two days ago Nature/Macmillan (heareafter “Nature”) announced a new form of “access” (or better “barrier”) to scientific scholarship – “SciShare”. It’s utterly unacceptable in several ways and Michael Eisen, Ross Mounce (“beggars-access”) have castigated it; Glyn Moody gathers these and … Continue reading →

Informa have just published a 2-page article. http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/21678421.2014.984725?journalCode=afd The author tells us it’s Open Access but Informa charge 54 USD for 1 day’s read. That’s right, 27 USD per page (and probably taxes). How can ANYONE justify this? Does this … Continue reading →