Dear MDPI, Your journal publications have grown dramatically, and quite extraordinarily. But there are sceptics who suggest that this reflects low standards and distorting financial incentives. I was one of them. To prove my views I explored trends in publications of 140 journals for which data were available from 2015 onwards. But doing so proved…
The Labor of Open is a zine project undertaken at the 2019 Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute to examine the labor of scholar-led independent open access publishing as an equity issue in scholarly communications. The goal of our work is to make scholarly communications more equitable by advocating for spaces where scholar-led approaches can flourish within a larger structural system. We invite others to join us by sharing this zine and its message far and wide.
Several Open Access initiatives have emerged in Africa in recent years. Our own preprint repository africarxiv.org is one of a few, including the francophone Africa research repository DICAMES…
Latin America has historically led a firm and rising Open Access movement and represents the worldwide region with larger adoption of Open Access practices. Argentina has recently expressed its commitment to join Plan S, an initiative from a European consortium of research funders oriented to mandate Open Access publishing of scientific outputs. Here we suggest that the potential adhesion of Argentina or other Latin American nations to Plan S, even in its recently revised version, ignores the reality and tradition of Latin American Open Access publishing, and has still to demonstrate that it will encourage at a regional and global level the advancement of non-commercial Open Access initiatives.