The Week in Links — April 4

What has been happening in the world of Open Access in the last week?

Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communication Officer at Duke University, denounces the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) for attacking academic values. According to Smith, NPG recently asked Duke authors to provide waivers of the school open access policy, which stands up against university decisions regarding open access and academic values in general.The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) announced its new open access policy for after the 2014 Research Excellence Framework.

The Science Museum Group Journal, a new open access journal was launched. The journal will touch upon the collections, practice and concerns of the Science Museum Group, which includes the Science Museum in London, Museum of Science & Inquiry in Manchester, National Railway Museum in York and Shildon, and National Media Museum in Bradford, and the wider international science museum community.

The Nordic Council of Ministers announced the launch of a new e-collection with free access to all its publications.

The University of Waikato approved guidelines for an institution wide open access mandate. They are the first university in New Zealand to make a mandate for open access to academic publications.

The Wellcome Trust published a (very detailed) progress report summarizing how they spent £3.9 millionfor articles to be open access for the year 2012–2013. The report emphasize how hybrid journals, which offer Open Access option but are traditionally operating via a classic subscription mode, still charge almost twice what born-digital journals ask for open access.

The New York Public Library has announced that over 20,000 maps and cartographic works will be open access. The maps are being distributed under a Creative Commons Public Domain dedication and are available for high resolution downloads.

PLoS Computational Biology meets Wikipedia: the journal enables author to publish both an academic paper and a Wikipedia article as a way to promote open science. A case study can also be found here.

Peter Murray-Rust, reader in molecular informatics at Cambridge, discloses how Elsevier still charges for articles that authors paid open access fees for, and asks other academics to do the same.

Tempted to publish in open access “megajournals” (PLoS, BMJ Open, PeerJ, etc.) but still afraid of what we can hear about them (light peer-review, bad for your carrier, no readership)? A guide for the 2.0 researcher.

Simone Tulumello, an Urban Planning PhD student, wrote for AESOP Young Academics Network about open access, the problem of paywalls and how the Open Access Button can help.