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 [...]

(tl;dr version – tell students to look up this patent if they ever claim, like Thomas Friedman, that “Everything is on Google.”) A few weeks ago, in my SciFinder key contact role I received this innocuous request: This is the lowest hanging fruit among my reference requests – click the “Full Text” link, another click [...]

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 [...]

A little bit more than a year ago ACRLog covered the Research Works Act, legislation that intended to stop federal funding agencies from requiring grantees to make the results of their research freely available to all. Luckily, RWA was quickly withdrawn, thanks to pressure from academics and librarians worldwide. However, the scholarly publishing universe continues [...]