Key points

• Sci‐Hub has made nearly all articles freely available using a black open access model, leaving green and gold models in its dust.
• Why, after 20 years of effort, have green and gold open access not achieved more? Do we need ‘tae think again’?
• If human nature is to postpone change for as long as possible, are green and gold open access fundamentally flawed?
• Open and closed publishing models depend on bundle pricing paid by one stakeholder, the others getting a free ride. Is unbundling a fairer model?
• If publishers changed course and unbundled their product, would this open a legal, fairer route to 100% open access and see off the pirates?

Key points

• The term ‘predatory journal’ hides a wide range of scholarly publishing misconduct.
• The term ‘predatory journal’ unhelpfully bundles misconduct with poor quality.
• The term ‘predatory journal’ blinds us to important possibilities, needs, and questions arising in the developing scholarly landscape.
• The current scholarly publishing environment cannot rely on such a simplified classification of journals into predatory or not.

Key points

• Concerns about a crisis in monograph publishing date back to at least the 1990s, and for traditional journal publishing at least a decade.
• Two key trends behind concerns over book and journal models are pressures on funding and the emergence of open access.
• Despite predictions of a revolution, the academic publishing sector has proved remarkably resilient in adapting to market changes.
• Whilst showing some support for ‘open science’, even early career researchers remain committed to traditional publishing models.
• The growth in scholarly collaboration networks and in sharing across traditional boundaries is the more likely disrupter of traditional publishing.

Key points

• Scenario planning is fun and engaging and is a good opportunity to revisit your company's core strengths and competitive advantage!
• Scenario planning should drive long‐term thinking in organizations.
• It will change the nature of the strategic conversation and can be used to help validate business innovation.
• Scenarios can help to engage with other organizations in the industry and help people work together to create preferred future outcomes.
• The complexity of scenario planning should not be underestimated and shortcuts do not work.

• Open research infrastructure provides the building blocks of scientific progress, which must be available to everyone, with no barriers to access.
• Organizations enabling open research infrastructure must endorse these fundamental principles: equity, value, trust, interoperability, sustainability, and community governance.
• Finding ways to invite co‐creation and community participation engenders a strong sense of ‘buy‐in’ and is therefore essential to developing successful research infrastructure.

Key points

• Trends point to increased democratization within STEM, driven by open access, Internet delivery, and digital natives.
• The current journal publishing system does not meet the needs of researchers who want timely access to the latest results.
• Demographic and sociological changes are likely to undermine the inherent conservatism of STEM.
• Traditional STEM systems ignore the latent market of knowledge workers, but new information services do not.
• Radical approaches to STEM are required if we are to respond to the ‘perfect storm’ of changing needs and expectations.

Key points

• It is more important to a funder to know that the research advances knowledge and has an impact on the field than that it is published in a prestigious journal (or not).
• Improving journal quality assurance is more important than improving the business model.
• Focusing on open access misses the point that journals need to improve their quality standards.

Key points

• Researchers most often visit publisher platforms to ‘find’ a specific article or chapter after ‘discovering’ available resources elsewhere.
• Keywords in the title and author names are the two most important criteria for identifying relevant material.
• Students consider access to be an important criterion for item selection.
• For both humanities and social sciences (HSS) and science, technology, and medicine (STM), user behaviour when identifying relevant content is remarkably similar.
• Students and researchers tend to gather content for later use rather than read it in detail as soon as they find it.

Key points

• Accessibility of publications in academia is a non‐negotiable legal requirement.
• The accessibility of your journal or other scholarly publication is the most important design consideration in your workflow.
• EPUB Accessibility 1.0 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 provide a clear publishing pathway.
• Consider the readability chain: Any link can result in accessibility failure but an unbroken chain will benefit all readers.

Key points

• Scholarly communication – with the exception of traditional (e.g. blind and double‐blind) peer review – prizes the open exchange of ideas.
• The aim of peer review should be engagement, not judgement.
• Reviews that improve the quality of a work and thus advance the field are not merely service to the community, but contributions to existing scholarship, and need to be rewarded accordingly; an open and transparent review process is the first step in enabling such reviews to be properly recognized.

Key points

• Instructions to authors about submitting papers for publication vary hugely – from none at all to whole handbooks.
• Online submission systems have not reduced the complexity of submission and may have increased the work of authors.
• Electronic submission processes do not appear to have been adequately ‘road tested’ with authors.
• Some publishers are introducing more flexible submission rules that may help authors.

Key points

• Bookshare is the world's largest library of accessible titles provided to members and through special agreements.
• Dyslexia is often forgotten as an impediment to access but must be accounted for within accessible publications.
• Certification of accessibility provides confidence for purchasers and a marketing tool for publishers.
• Accessibility requires multiple routes to access, on different platforms and in different formats.
• Accessible artworks need particular attention, and this is often lacking in ‘accessible’ publications.

Key points

• Our collective authorship and publishing practices do not always end up ensuring that scholarly content is discoverable by readers.
• Readers of all kinds rely on a variety of ‘discovery pathways’, such as search engines, library systems, and various electronic links, some of which are blind to the content they desire.
• Efforts over the years to improve content discoverability have made great progress, but an increasing amount of freely available content brings up new issues.
• The National Information Standards Organization (NISO)’s Discovery to Delivery (D2D) Topic Committee has developed a grid comparing various ways in which content is shared with various ways in which users discover such content.
• This article brings to light a few of the current obstacles and opportunities for innovation by publishers, aggregators, search engines, and library systems, and invites Learned Publishing readers to step up and identify others.

Key points

• A more general and continuous form of ‘A short history of SHELX’ phenomenon has been found.
• The Review of Particle Physics (RPP) series, which is called the bible in the particle physics field, is highly cited by other research papers.
• The RPP phenomenon is found in different journals and is affected by the host journal's impact factor and publication size.
• The RPP phenomenon provides a big or small, but temporary, boost to its host journal's impact factor.

Key points

• Although ‘peer review’ has quasi‐sacred status, times are changing, and peer review is not necessarily a single and uniformly reliable gold standard.
• For publishers, peer review is a process not an outcome.
• Academics understand peer review, but are often ignorant about the quality checking mechanisms within wider publishing.
• Self‐publishing has led to the much wider availability of publishing services – these now being used by all stakeholders in publishing.
• How should universities evaluate comment and ideas that were first disseminated within a non‐academic market?
• Rather than an upper house, is peer review today more of a galley kitchen?

Key points

• The UK policy landscape supports access for the users whilst allowing publishers to maintain business models.
• Advancements such as EPUB 3, aligning publishing with web technologies, and the Inclusive Publishing hub help publishers reach accessibility compliance.
• Print impairment is not an on/off switch, and each reader has his or her own unique set of requirements – a fact that is supported by EPUB 3.
• The time is ripe for publishers to make firm commitments to accessibility initiatives.

• In 25 years, open access has become a significant part of scientific communication, but its success story should not conceal a fundamental change of its nature.
• Open access started at the grassroots, as a bottom‐up, community‐driven model of open journals and repositories but today the driving forces are commercial, institutional, and political interests.
• The fall of open access as a community‐driven model is running the risk of becoming dysfunctional for scientists and may create new barriers and digital divides.