Open Library of Humanities has just landed a grant for $741,000…

“Birkbeck, University of London has been awarded a three-year grant of $741,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to cement and expand a new model for open-access publishing in the humanities disciplines.”

This is to be centred on making a peer-reviewed open access…

“mega-journal, multi-journal and books platform for the humanities”, “with no author-facing charges”.

No full-text search and access at the OLH, as yet. But it looks like many major university libraries are signing up in principle.

Juan Pablo Alperin, “The Public Impact of Latin America’s Approach to Open Access”, June 2015.

“It is evident that the degree of adoption of the OA models is fairly extensive [in Latin America], although there are no exact figures. … The highest estimate, although not based on a rigorous study, comes from the director of SciELO, an expert in scholarly communications in Latin America, who suggests that 95% of all online journals published within the region are fully OA. Unfortunately, none of the databases that collect subscription information provide an adequate sample from which to gather a more exact estimate.”

“The underlying assumption, found repeatedly in the OA literature, is that the OA portals in Latin America are seen as contributing to “development” by extending the readership and circulation of Latin American research, thereby connecting them to a global “system of science” [but until now] nobody has attempted to verify the underlying assumption that there is interest from a broader community of readers in accessing research from developing regions.”

The DOAJ has removed a very large list of journal titles from the publisher SCIRP (Scientific Research Publishing Inc.), along with the titles of SCIRP’s Chinese associate publisher Hans Publishers Inc., citing alleged “Editorial misconduct” from both publishers.

Neither publisher was directly indexed in JURN.

Imaggeo : the open access geosciences image repository. A very large hi-res selection, but sadly users can’t filter by CC licence type. I’d say they need a new category: ‘Commercial use allowed’, so that print media workers can easily find a hi-res image to illustrate a science or eco news item.

CREDO has shared key findings from its 2014 survey of U.S. students (2,600) and faculty (500) on perceptions of student research skills.

A new PeerJ article claims to have looked at the indexing of 481 biomedical open access journals. It’s claimed that 86.7% were found to be listed in the DOAJ, while 36.5% were indexed in PubMed Central. However, given the level of detail in the paper itself, it seems odd to find that there’s no list given of the journal titles and URLs checked. They’re certainly not in the supplemental data file which is very misleadingly titled “All journals listed in the included databases, along with journal data”.