In the sixth lecture of the Open Divide Series, Joachim Schöpfel, Hélène Prost, and Behrooz Rasuli will present “The Global South’s Role in Shaping the Open Science Paradigm — an analysis of the Globa...

Is Diamond Open Access (DOA) the savior of stressed academic library budgets and OA advocates who are clueless about how to deal with the lack of transformation of subscription-based journals and never-ending prolongations of transformative agreements[1]? One might get that impression from the enthusiasm in current debates on reshaping the academic publishing system, a billion-dollar market that absorbs taxpayer money and serves as a ‘gatekeeper of progress’, with journals determining which research gets published, read, and cited. An ever-increasing volume of research is published openly: Anyone with an internet connection can read and work with such an article. For journal articles with OA, generally, two options have existed: Gold OA for journals that are entirely published without subscriptions and Hybrid OA for journals that continue to sell subscriptions but allow for OA to specific articles. So-called “transformative agreements” make every paper from participating institutions in such outlets OA, but the universities pay for it — instead of paying for subscriptions[2]. These contracts come with a plethora of problems[3] and Gold OA struggles with its distorted incentive for publishers to accept more papers to redeem higher APC revenue[4]. DOA is meant to tackle both: Following the common definition, it implies that there exists neither subscription nor publishing fees. Does that sound too good to be true? [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.20224 [2] https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adp8882 [3] http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.20224 [4] https://doi.org/10.1257/000282805774670112

Who Owns, Produces & Certifies Open Knowledge? - my contribution as a Keynote panelist at the OASPA Conference (Sep 22, 2025)

„Wissenschaftliches Publizieren im Wandel“ – ein praxisnahes Fachbuch zu Open Access, Impact Peer Review und Forschungsbewertung.

"Scholarly Publishing in Transition" – a practice-oriented textbook on Open Access, Impact, Peer Review, and Research Evaluation

Erfolgreich Publizieren in der Wissenschaft: Strategien, Trends und Tools, Workshop an der Fachhochschule Münster

Home page for the paper ‘The Strain on Scientific Publishing’ by Mark A Hanson, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto and Pablo Gomez Barreiro

We’re pleased to continue the 2025/2026 Open Divide Lecture Series with its second talk on May 28, 2025, at 5:00 PM CEST. The second lecture in the Open Divide Series will feature Thomas Parisot and Y...

German Library Statistics reveals a clear trend: spending on Closed Access has remained stable, Open Access expenditures have surged dramatically.

Snapshot 2024: Open Access by Academic Discipline. Gold dominates in Life & Health Sciences, Social Sciences lead in Hybrid, Bronze & Diamond OA.

Open Access rose to 59% of article output by 2023 before dropping to 47% in 2024. Gold OA dominates; Diamond remains stable but marginal.

The University of Lorraine has been resolutely committed to Open Science since 2016 and the opening of its HAL-UL institutional archive

Clarivate, Elsevier, and the American Chemical Society are comfortable pursuing a strategy of pricing discrimination. But libraries don’t have to go along with it. This data can help.

Tired of spending countless hours on peer reviews? An AI-assisted workflow could help.

The Trump administration has blocked access to multiple data repositories maintained by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for researchers in several countries, including a cancer statistics d | ...

Abstract This essay traces the history of refereeing at specialist scientific journals and at funding bodies and shows that it was only in the late twentieth century that peer review came to be seen a...

Science is built on a foundation of rigor and credibility. Preprints are adding to the crumbling of that foundation, which is already under attack by anti-science political agendas.

What is Fast Track? Authors sometimes have to meet publication deadlines, e.g. for promotion & tenure, thesis defense, grant proposals, spending of research funds before a certain deadline, pub...

We are excited to announce the launch of the Open Divide Lecture Series 2025/2026, beginning on April 23, 2025, at 5:00 PM CEST. We will kick off the series with the talk:“Libraries Supporting Open Re...

Closing the chapter on scidecode – a look back and ahead. After three exciting years, scidecode as a formal company will be discontinued.

Measures intended to encourage openness are clashing with efforts to reform assessment, says Ulrich Herb