Early last week I opened the New York Times and was surprised to see a front-page article about sham academic publishers and conferences. The article discussed something we in the library world have been aware of for some time: open access publishers with low (or no) standards for peer review and acceptance, sometimes even with [...]

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Sue Wiegand, Periodicals Librarian at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, IN. A chemical storm recently blew up across the blogosphere, involving the American Chemical Society journals, the serials crisis of unsustainably high prices, and one brave librarian, Jenica Rogers at SUNY Potsdam, who said “Enough!” The atmospheric conditions [...]

Last Spring, while we were in the middle of the debate over the Research Works Act, former ACRLog blogger Barbara Fister issued “a call to action.” As she wrote: “Many of our scholarly journals are published by the very corporations that supported the Research Works Act and which will continue to do what they can [...]

By now you’ve probably heard all about #OAMonday: May 21st, when the folks behind the open access advocacy site access2research.org unveiled the site and kicked off the push to petition the White House to allow public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research. The message has spread far and wide throughout the academic and library [...]

I live in New York City and have been following the Occupy Wall Street activities here (and associated activities elsewhere) since they began last fall. I hadn’t been directly involved, but recently that changed, and on May Day I facilitated an open access teach-in with my fantastic colleagues Jill Cirasella and Alycia Sellie from the [...]