Journal prices have long been a matter of controversy. Lacking has been any objective information on costs that could be used to judge whether price increases have been justified by rising costs. Using a rare, publicly available set of data for the American Economic Review, the premier journal in economics, this article normalizes costs for number of issues per annum, number of pages per issue, and print quantities per issue to construct an index for the costs of producing this journal. It shows that costs have in fact increased more slowly than the general rate of inflation and argues that the cost experience of this journal provides a reference point for academic journals generally.

Recession is currently causing a resurgence of the academic serials crisis. Profit-mongering by commercial publishers is once again denounced as the key driver of the crisis. However, a critical analysis of institutional and bibliometric data does not reveal excessive corporate greed in recent years; instead, it suggests that the present hurdles stem largely from years of inadequate budget allocations to academic libraries and from a publishing frenzy fuelled by simplistic methods of evaluating faculty productivity. To prevent what is likely to be the publishing equivalent of a tsunami in the next few years, universities and research institutions urgently need to re-emphasize quality over quantity in the publishing process, and they must find ways to include peer-reviewing efficiency among their criteria for productivity and impact.

Sciyo Becomes the First Academic Publisher to Introduce Usage-based Author Royalties, press release, December 18, 2009. Authors publishing with Sciyo in 2010 will be the first in academic publishing to receive royalties based on the number of downloads of their publication. For every 10 downloads, 0.2 euro will be accredited to author’s account on an annual basis. Sciyo operates under the open access publishing model, replacing subscription fees with publication fees paid by the authors or their funders. All Sciyo’s publications are available online, free to view, download, print, copy and share under Creative Commons Attribution License and without sign up, which increases their visibility and citation rates. Author royalties will be accredited directly to the author's account, with the exception of royalties under 100 euro, which will be deducted from the author's publishing fee head on the next time he or she decides to publish with Sciyo. ... Sciyo's publishing fee of 470 euro is among the lowest in the open access publishing industry. ...

A follow up to the 2006 report, 'Scientific publishing in transition: an overview of current developments,' 'The STM Report' collected the available evidence and provides a comprehensive picture of the trends and currents in scholarly communication.

growth in web technologies and increased transparency in the literature - and data - may be contributing to a shift in our perceptions of what constitutes a prior publication. Innovative online journals with virtually unlimited space provide researchers with opportunities to produce novel (original) contributions to the literature that are clearly and transparently linked to previously published articles. These include significantly extended/re-analysed reports of previously published summary findings in journals such as Trials and legitimate or incremental updates to previous studies in BMC Research Notes.

This report by the British Library and the Research Information Network (RIN) provides a unique insight into how information is used by researchers across life sciences. Undertaken by the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation, and the UK Digital Curation Centre and the University of Edinburgh’s Information Services, the report concludes that ‘one-size-fits-all’ information and data sharing policies are not achieving scientifically productive and cost-efficient information use in life sciences. The report was developed using an innovative approach to capture the day-to-day patterns of information use in seven research teams from a wide range of disciplines, from botany to clinical neuroscience. The study undertaken over 11 months and involving 56 participants found that there is a significant gap between how researchers behave and the policies and strategies of funders and service providers. This suggests that the attempts to implement such strategies have had only a limited impact. Key findings from the report include: * Researchers use informal and trusted sources of advice from colleagues, rather than institutional service teams, to help identify information sources and resources * The use of social networking tools for scientific research purposes is far more limited than expected * Data and information sharing activities are mainly driven by needs and benefits perceived as most important by life scientists rather than ‘top-down’ policies and strategies * There are marked differences in the patterns of information use and exchange between research groups active in different areas of the life sciences, reinforcing the need to avoid standardised policy approaches

As the Internet has enhanced the collection and provision of citation, usage and access metrics, the challenge lies neither in the technology nor the method, but in constructing databases that deliver services of value to the scholar. However, the development of metrics has hitherto been driven by the needs of external research assessment (governments and funders), while publishers and libraries have focused on their own needs (e.g. journal impact and usage factors). Scholars often criticize research assessment and the use of particular metrics as a zero-sum game whose undesirable consequences far outweigh the benefits. However, this is not to be confused with a general prejudice against metrics, which are principally compatible with the scholarly recognition and rewards system. But it does indicate that current metric information services often do not serve the needs of scholars. The question everybody should be asking is: What kind of metric information services would serve scholars? The argument proceeds in six steps. First, the problematic and controversial nature of assessment metrics is discussed. Second, the limited value of current metric information services is outlined. Third, the notion of metrics as research information services is clarified. Fourth, some examples of such services are offered. Fifth, the potential value is sketched from the perspective of a postdoc. Sixth, it is indicated that societies and publishers could begin building more metric information services since tried-and-tested technology and methods are available already.

SciencePipes is an environment in which students, educators, citizens, resource managers, and scientists can create and share analyses and visualizations of biodiversity data. It is built to support inquiry-based learning, allowing analysis results and visualizations to be dynamically incorporated into web sites (e.g. blogs) for dissemination and consumption beyond SciencePipes.org itself. For more information: * further introduction * presentations * status of the site * NSDL article about SciencePipes.org Alpha functionality demos: * uploading and running a Kepler workflow * editing a pipe in the SciencePipes.org authoring environment SciencePipes is a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Information Science Program and is funded by the National Science Digital Library.

Researchers are driven by a desire to enhance our knowledge and understanding of the world we inhabit, and to communicate their findings to others. But both governments and other funders are increasingly interested in demonstrating the social and economic returns from their investments in research, and in assessing research performance. The many different criteria for success, and the lack of any consensus on how success should be assessed or measured, however, mean that researchers often find themselves in receipt of confused or conflicting messages. And they are pulled in different directions in deciding which channels of communication they should adopt. This report is complimented by four supporting papers which provide detailed descriptions of the methods used, a full analysis of the data, and further details of the findings.