Open Access is Broken: What Can Be Done?

The idea of “Open Access” (hereafter OA) emerged in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s with a noble goal: to provide comprehensive access to the scholarly literature for everyone around the world by making the results of scholarly research freely and immediately available online to all. After more than 20 years of OA advocacy and development, where do things stand? Has the noble goal of universal access been realized, and is the scholarly literature now accessible and open to the global community of scholars? How strong is the current OA movement and where is it headed? While significant advances have been made, to be sure, the fact is that elements of OA have taken a wrong turn somewhere, resulting in a system that is broken and has not lived up to its promise. Early OA efforts focused on the need for better access to read and reuse scholarly literature. While significant advancement has been made in this area, it has created another barrier to the free and open sharing of scholarly research–access for authors to publish their research. This is especially problematic for those without the means or support to participate in the “pay to publish” model of OA that has become dominant. There is still hope to correct this imbalance, but the scholarly community must refocus and recalibrate its efforts to get back on track

Testing for competition in the South African banking sector

This paper employs the Panzar and Rosse (1987) and the Bresnahan models to determine the level of competition in the South African banking sector. This level of competition was tested during the period 1998 to 2008 for the Panzar and Rosse approach and from 1992 to 2008 for the Bresnahan model. We �find evidence of monopolistic competition in the South African banking sector. Our fi�ndings are consistent with those of Bikker et al (2012) for South Africa

Testing for competition in the South African banking sector

This paper employs the Panzar and Rosse (1987) and the Bresnahan models to determine the level of competition in the South African banking sector. This level of competition was tested during the period 1998 to 2008 for the Panzar and Rosse approach and from 1992 to 2008 for the Bresnahan model. We �find evidence of monopolistic competition in the South African banking sector. Our fi�ndings are consistent with those of Bikker et al (2012) for South Africa

How open access is crucial to the future of science

A commentary published recently in The Journal of Wildlife Management argued that open access publication has strong negative implications for the future of science. Unfortunately, that commentary was founded in serious and deep misconceptions about the distinctions between open access, commercial, and society publications, and the rigor of peer review in open access journals. To the contrary, open access responds more appropriately than traditional closed publishing venues to the needs and participation of an increasingly global scholarly research community, and peer review by a broader community may in many cases be more rigorous, responding to the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of modern research. We respectfully suggest that The Wildlife Society consider a transition from closed access to open access for The Journal of Wildlife Management, as a means of optimizing and maximizing its role in communications in the field

The NIH public access policy did not harm biomedical journals

The United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) imposed a public access policy on all publications for which the research was supported by their grants; the policy was drafted in 2004 and took effect in 2008. The policy is now 11 years old, yet no analysis has been presented to assess whether in fact this largest-scale US-based public access policy affected the vitality of the scholarly publishing enterprise, as manifested in changed mortality or natality rates of biomedical journals. We show here that implementation of the NIH policy was associated with slightly elevated mortality rates and mildly depressed natality rates of biomedical journals, but that birth rates so exceeded death rates that numbers of biomedical journals continued to rise, even in the face of the implementation of such a sweeping public access policy.HQ received the fundings from the National Key Research and Development Project of China (2017YFC120060

Seeing red over black and white: popular and media representations of inter-racial relationships as precursors to racial violence

The recent murder in the UK of Anthony Walker attests to the lingering antipathy, indeed hostility, toward intimate inter-racial relationships, especially those involving black men and white women. Seventeen year-old Walker was brutally beaten then fatally assaulted with an axe to his head - the 'provocation' for the attack was this young black man’s relationship with his white girl friend. This paper assesses the historical and contemporary images and mythologies that continue to stigmatize inter-racial relationships. Specifically, we look at the representations disseminated through varied popular media forms. The paper suggests that these mediated constructs condition an environment that facilitates, if not encourages, violence against those in inter-racial relationships

Measles, Moral Regulation and the Social Construction of Risk: Media Narratives of “Anti-Vaxxers” and the 2015 Disneyland Outbreak

This paper examines media coverage of the 2014-15 measles outbreak that began at Disneyland and spread throughout the United States and into Canada and Mexico. Specifically, it focuses on the construction of ‘anti-vaxxers’ as a central character in the outbreak’s unfolding narrative who came to represent a threat to public health and moral order. Although parents who hold strong anti-vaccine views are small in number, media representations of ‘anti-vaxxers’ as prominent figures fail to capture the broad range of views and behaviours that constitute what we today call ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and thus delimit our understanding of this increasingly complex health issue