Academic publishing is changing fast. In this post, I’ll describe not only the exciting recent policy developments, but also several new models for the publication of scientific research.
Undoubtedly open access in set to truly break through this year, mainly thanks to strong funder mandates (e.g. RCUK and Horizon 2020). The debate has started to shift to the relative merits of author-pays-gold (or rather, funder-pays; see below) and institutional-repositories-green models. (Please see Peter Suber’s widely accepted definitions for the terminology). Richard Poynder continues his important coverage of the developments, describing in detail the controversy over the UK’s gold-first policy in the international context: