2019 Was Big for Academic Publishing. Here’s Our Year in Review

Licensing negotiations between libraries and publishers continued, a radical open-access plan made changes, and the flaws of some publishing tools and techniques came to light.

Written byDiana Kwon

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The global push to make the scholarly literature open access continued in 2019. Some publishers and libraries forged new licensing deals, while in other cases contract negotiations came to halt, and a radical open access plan made some adjustments. Here are some of the most notable developments in the publishing world in 2019:

This year, The Scientist heard scientists’ complaints about the supplementary files that accompany journal articles and concerns about predatory journals on PubMed, the massive repository of abstracts and citations belonging to the US National Library of Medicine (NLM).

The NLM has quality control procedures for PubMed in place, but some articles have slipped through the cracks. Academics began raising concerns about the presence of predatory journals on PubMed for several years—and those worries remain today.

Supplementary files, on the other hand, have been criticized by scientists for containing broken hyperlinks and being published ...

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Meet the Author

Diana Kwon
Diana is a freelance science journalist who covers the life sciences, health, and academic life. She’s a regular contributor to The Scientist and her work has appeared in several other publications, including Scientific American, Knowable, and Quanta. Diana was a former intern at The Scientist and she holds a master’s degree in neuroscience from McGill University. She’s currently based in Berlin, Germany.
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