Category: Open Access

"A Bibliometric Study of Open Educational Resources, Open Textbooks, and Academic Librarianship: Assessing Trends and Scholarly Productivity in Library and Information Science"


Open Educational Resources (OER) play a key role in reducing the financial burden and increasing the accessibility of learning for students in higher education. OER can be considered an important field of research for academic librarians and supports the democratic mission of academic libraries. This study aimed to track the publication of scholarly literature about OER and higher education from 2002 to 2022 using a bibliometric research methodology. In addition, this research sought to assess the productivity of Library and Information Science (LIS) scholarship on this topic and investigate research trends, like open textbooks. Web of Science (WOS) was searched for publications and the search results were mapped to determine publication productivity, core authors, core journals, and research topics in the scholarly literature about OER and higher education. Research on OER has been steadily increasing since 2002, and this study indicates that research has increased significantly on the topic in the last six years. The data in this study support that most productivity in research on this topic is in the field of Education, but also found a presence of scholarship on the topic in the field of LIS.

https://doi.org/10.13001/joerhe.v2i1.7877

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"Fair Sharing of Health Data: A Systematic Review of Applicable Solutions"


Health science researchers face additional specific challenges. Firstly, ethical and legal issues are barriers regarding the sharing of IPD. Legislation, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR [16]) in Europe or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA [17]) in the USA, prevents research data from being openly shared. IPD can only be shared publicly after the removal of all information allowing the identification of the individual participants, unless explicit consent has been obtained from the individual participants. Furthermore, the legislation has been growing stronger over the years. State laws have emerged in the USA, like the CCPA in California [18], as well as European legislation such as the Convention 108 [19] or the proposal for a reform of ePrivacy legislation [20].

Secondly, health data are diverse and heterogeneous and can be of very different types and formats, depending on the field they belong to, e.g., imaging, genomics, and mass spectrometry. Handling these data requires specific expertise and tools which can usually only be found in the specialized, dedicated communities.

The objective of this paper is to identify and evaluate technical solutions to implement systematic data sharing in an academic context, in order to help researchers making their data FAIR. We will evaluate various software programs and online platforms used in academic projects to manage and store data through a systematic literature review focusing on the implementation of the FAIR principles and the ability to support sharing of Individual Participant Data (IPD).

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12553-023-00789-5

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Richard Poynder Is "Signing Off from Reporting on Open Access"

On X, well-known independent journalist and blogger Richard Poynder said: "The movement has failed and is being rebranded in order to obscure the failure. Time to move on."

In a second post, he provided a further explanation (this is an JPEG file).

Richard Poynder has made 71,000 posts on X/Twitter.

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"ResearchGate and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Announce New Journal Home Partnership for Science Partner Journals"


AAAS, a leading publisher of cutting-edge research renowned for its Science family of journals, launched its Science Partner Journal (SPJ) program in 2017. Consisting of 14 high-quality, fully open access journals produced in collaboration with international research institutions, foundations, funders, and societies, the SPJ program will now expand its reach through Journal Home on ResearchGate. . . .

ResearchGate will create dedicated journal profiles on the platform that will be prominently featured on all associated articles and touchpoints on ResearchGate, significantly boosting the visibility of these titles with highly relevant authors and readers.

Authors of articles in the SPJs will enjoy the added benefit of having their content automatically added to their profiles on ResearchGate.

https://tinyurl.com/53ehxhzu

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Germany: "DEAL Consortium and Wiley Sign New 5-Year Open Access Agreement"


The DEAL Consortium and scholarly publisher Wiley today announced the signing of a new five-year agreement which will allow scientists from German academic institutions to publish their research open access (OA) within Wiley’s portfolio of scientific journals. Instituted by the Alliance of German Science Organizations the DEAL Consortium is open to more than 900 mostly publicly funded academic institutions in Germany. Signed by Wiley and MPDL Services gGmbH as the DEAL Operating Entity, the new agreement will begin in January 2024, offering further support for the needs of the scholarly community and accelerate the open access transformation.

https://tinyurl.com/3f3kn4zp

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"’On the Ruins of Seriality’: The Scientific Journal and the Nature of the Scientific Life"


The serialization of scientific print began around 1800 as an effort to challenge elite science and to make knowledge accessible to broader publics. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the scientific journal developed into the central institution of knowledge legitimization, bound up with discourses of objectivity, vocational dedication, and communal virtue. Since the last few decades, however, the journal has been at the heart of crisis narratives that warn of the erosion of science’s moral basis and creative capacity. Competition, careerism, and perverse incentives—reflected in and produced by the serial format—have left the scientific self without a sense of calling, the "scientific community" without a sense of community, and the general public of science without a sense of trust. Twenty-first-century science finds itself "on the ruins of seriality" (Lerner, 2015, p. 132).

Yet there have hardly been any attempts to reimagine scholarly communication without the journal in a central position.24 Notwithstanding vigorous debate on its (de)merits and intense experimentation with peer review and open publishing platforms, the scientific journal has proven to be a "sticky" institution. . . . And although in the digital world the journal’s constitutive nature as a serial format is becoming less and less relevant, it is still primarily the paper—as the base unit of scientific publication—that conditions the modalities of scientific research, writing, and reading, and orients conceptions of scholarly selfhood in both the scientific and the general culture.

The commercial publishers have also demonstrated their stickiness. The open access movement has posed a serious challenge, but all in all the publishing companies have been able to integrate demands for "openness" into their business models (just as the scientific societies were able to adapt to the rise of commercial publishing in the postwar period). . . . So, despite predictions that "networked brains" would revolutionize scientific communication and produce "an unprecedented public good" (Guédon, 2017), open access has essentially come to mean "pay to publish," that is, a return to the situation before the ascendancy of the subscription journal (see also Noel, 2020).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2023.100885

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"Scientists Paid Large Publishers over $1 Billion in Four Years to Have Their Studies Published with Open Access"


Stefanie Haustein’s team from the University of Ottawa (Canada) has spent "years" collecting data from the period 2015-2018. According to their calculations, Springer Nature took the lion’s share, with $589.7 million, followed by Elsevier ($221.4 million), Wiley ($114.3 million), Taylor & Francis ($76.8 million), and Sage ($31.6 million). . . .

Haustein’s study reveals that two scientific journals, Scientific Reports and Nature Communications, accounted for this income, with $105.1 million and $71.1 million, respectively.

See also: "The Oligopoly’s Shift to Open Access. How the Big Five Academic Publishers Profit from Article Processing Charges."

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"Eleven Strategies for Making Reproducible Research and Open Science Training the Norm at Research Institutions"


Reproducible research and open science practices have the potential to accelerate scientific progress by allowing others to reuse research outputs, and by promoting rigorous research that is more likely to yield trustworthy results. However, these practices are uncommon in many fields, so there is a clear need for training that helps and encourages researchers to integrate reproducible research and open science practices into their daily work. Here, we outline eleven strategies for making training in these practices the norm at research institutions. The strategies, which emerged from a virtual brainstorming event organized in collaboration with the German Reproducibility Network, are concentrated in three areas: (i) adapting research assessment criteria and program requirements; (ii) training; (iii) building communities. We provide a brief overview of each strategy, offer tips for implementation, and provide links to resources. We also highlight the importance of allocating resources and monitoring impact. Our goal is to encourage researchers — in their roles as scientists, supervisors, mentors, instructors, and members of curriculum, hiring or evaluation committees — to think creatively about the many ways they can promote reproducible research and open science practices in their institutions.

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.89736

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"Editorial: Pay to Criticise? Rebuttal Articles in Open-Access Journals Should Be Published for Free"


A review of the publication policies of some major open-access publishers (e.g. Elsevier, https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing, last access: 14 August 2023; Wiley, https://authorservices.wiley.com/open-research/open-access/for-authors/publication-charges.html, last access: 14 August 2023; Springer Nature https://support.springer.com/en/support/solutions/articles/6000211135-article-processing-charges-apc-, last access: 14 August 2023) shows no explicit waivers for any type of comments, replies, or rebuttals, and fee waiving is discretionary, except for some scientists based on a specific list of less affluent countries. Some other publishers have lower fees for all types of comments. For instance, "Frontiers" journals charge USD 490 (less than half of the regular APC) to publish General Commentary articles that “provide critical comments on a previous publication at Frontiers” (https://www.frontiersin.org/about/fee-policy, last access: 14 August 2023). Overall, we could not find any mention of automatic waivers for contributions that identify fundamental flaws in published research (i.e. rebuttals) or for any other type of critical comment.

https://doi.org/10.5194/we-23-131-2023

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Paywall: "Value of Open Research Data: A Systematic Evaluation Framework Based on Multi-Stakeholder Survey"


Stakeholders such as funders, data centers and data curators need specific and detailed evidence to support and justify the value of their existing or proposed open data policies and practices. A questionnaire-based evaluation framework was designed through systematic review and expert interviews, focusing on the scientific, economic, and societal values of open research data. . . . On average, participants (strongly) agreed that open research data has scientific (83.97%), economic (76.94%), and societal (86.89%) value, all 37 statements of the framework were supported and confirmed. This framework is one of the most comprehensive and systematic tools for measuring data value, which can offer support to diverse stakeholders, especially funders, data centers, and data curators in managing and promoting open data systems.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2023.101269

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"Open Access Movement in the Scholarly World: Pathways for Libraries in Developing Countries"


Open access is a scholarly publishing model that has emerged as an alternative to traditional subscription-based journal publishing. This study explores the adoption of the open access movement worldwide and the role that libraries can play in addressing those factors which are slowing its progress within developing countries. The study has drawn upon both qualitative data from a focused literature review and quantitative data from major open access platforms. The results indicate that while the open access movement is steadily gaining acceptance worldwide, the progress in developing countries within geographical areas such as Africa, Asia and Oceania is quite a bit slower. Two significant factors are the cost of publishing fees and the lack of institutional open access mandates and policies to encourage uptake. The study provides suggested strategies for academic libraries to help overcome current challenges.

https://doi.org/10.1177/01655515231202758

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"Stanford University Press and Public Knowledge Project to Collaborate on Open Access Journal Publishing Program"


This initiative, developed in consultation with the Office of Scholarly Communications at the Stanford Libraries, is a response to the rapidly increasing burdens imposed on commercial publishers’ journal editors and their boards in the form of higher article processing charges (APCs) and increased publication rates. This is a partnership of two long-established university organizations. It utilizes the strengths and resources of each to provide journals with an experienced publisher and platform developer that will offer journals both subscribe-to-open and reasonably priced APC paths, increasing access for authors and readers.

https://sup.org/oajournals/

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"Software Preservation after the Internet"


Software preservation must consider knowledge management as a key challenge. We suggest a conceptualization of software preservation approaches that are available at different stages of the software lifecycle and can support memory institutions to assess the current state of software items in their collection, the capabilities of their infrastructure, and completeness and applicability of knowledge that is required to successfully steward the collection.

https://tinyurl.com/8y9svs7x

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"US Repository Network Launches Pilot to Enhance Discoverability of Open Access Content in Repositories"


In November, the US Repository Network (USRN) will launch a pilot project aimed at improving the discoverability of articles in repositories. This pilot project involves the use of services from CORE, a not-for-profit aggregator based at Open University in the UK, to evaluate and improve local repository practices. Additional technical support will be provided by Antleaf Ltd.

As part of the project, CORE will aggregate the metadata and full text of articles from a subset of US repositories, allowing them to be findable through a centralized discovery service with prominent links back to the original full text of the repository. At the same time, the project will assess current practices related to metadata quality, the tracking of Open Access deposits, the use of PIDs, technical support for OAI-PMH, and the adoption of more recent protocols, such as FAIR Signposting. At the level of the centralized aggregation, CORE will enrich the existing US metadata with information from its larger international aggregation. A Dashboard service for participating institutions will be provided, enabling them to assess, validate and monitor their practices.

https://tinyurl.com/2utfpvj3

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Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge


Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is an open textbook and practitioner’s guide that collects theory, practice, and case studies from nearly 80 experts in scholarly communication and open education. Divided into three parts:

  • What is Scholarly Communication?
  • Scholarly Communication and Open Culture
  • Voices from the Field: Perspectives, Intersections, and Case Studies

The book delves into the economic, social, policy, and legal aspects of scholarly communication as well as open access, open data, open education, and open science and infrastructure. Practitioners provide insight into the relationship between university presses and academic libraries, defining collection development as operational scholarly communication, and promotion and tenure and the challenge for open access.

https://bit.ly/SCLAOK

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"The State of Green Open Access in Canadian Universities"


This study investigates the use of institutional repositories for self-archiving peer-reviewed work in the U15 (an association of fifteen Canadian research-intensive universities). It relates usage with university open access (OA) policy types and publisher policy embargoes. We show that of all articles found in OpenAlex attributed to U15 researchers, 45.1 to 56.6% are available as Gold or Green OA, yet only 0.5 to 10.7% (mean 4.2%) of these can be found on their respective U15 IRs. Our investigation shows a lack of OA policies from most institutions, journal policies with embargoes exceeding 12 months, and incomplete policy information.

https://doi.org/10.5206/cjils-rcsib.v46i2.15358

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The State of Open Data 2023


Support is not making its way to those who need it

Almost three-quarters of respondents had never received support with making their data openly available.

One size does not fit all

Variations in responses from different subject expertise and geographies highlight a need for a more nuanced approach to research data management support globally.

Challenging stereotypes

Are later career academics really opposed to progress? The results of the 2023 survey indicate that career stage is not a significant factor in open data awareness or support levels.

Credit is an ongoing issue

For eight years running, our survey has revealed a recurring concern among researchers: the perception that they don’t receive sufficient recognition for openly sharing their data.

AI awareness hasn’t translated to action

For the first time, this year we asked survey respondents to indicate if they were using ChatGPT or similar AI tools for data collection, processing and metadata creation.

https://tinyurl.com/mr28u6tt

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"IGI Global Releases Annual OA Survey Results on Researcher Perceptions Surrounding Open Access Publishing Support"


The survey was sent to over 200,000 worldwide researchers of all ages, experiences, fields, ethnicities, etc. . . .

Respondents were asked "What funding resources have you used for OA publishing?" and they had the ability to choose all resources that they have used.

As IGI Global had expected, the majority of respondents indicated they were "self-funded" at 48%, 8% stated "national funding body," 5% answered "international funding body," 18% indicated "my Institution/library/entity affiliated to my institution," 4.5% stated "non-profit institutions," 2% claimed they received funding through "private donors," 5% indicated "associations/societies," 2.5% indicated "business enterprise," 3.5% stated "foundations," 1% claimed "crowdfunding," 14% claimed they received a "publisher waiver," and 2% indicated they received funding from a "platinum open access publication" where the APC is waived by the publication. A large portion, 34% of respondents, had not used an OA funding resource.

https://tinyurl.com/mv4ty6hf

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Paywall: "Nature and Characteristics of Global Attention to Research on Article Processing Charges"


This paper examines research on article processing charges (APCs) to understand the extent of attention given by researchers and assess the status. The study analyses document types, source types, source titles, affiliations, and open access types of APC research. It also explores countries of researchers’ affiliations, volume and growth of literature, and visualizes keywords based on data from Scopus. . . . Many papers addressing APC were published in Green Open Access sources. Researchers from all subject categories in Scopus have contributed to APC research, but the major focus of research in the area is library and information science. Interestingly, researchers outside the field, notably from biomedicine and computer science, have also contributed significantly, reflecting interdisciplinary engagement.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2023.2230166

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"The Oligopoly’s Shift to Open Access. How the Big Five Academic Publishers Profit from Article Processing Charges"


This study aims to estimate the total amount of article processing charges (APCs) paid to publish open access (OA) in journals controlled by the five large commercial publishers Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley between 2015 and 2018. Using publication data from WoS, OA status from Unpaywall and annual APC prices from open datasets and historical fees retrieved via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, we estimate that globally authors paid $1.06 billion in publication fees to these publishers from 2015–2018. Revenue from gold OA amounted to $612.5 million, while $448.3 million was obtained for publishing OA in hybrid journals. Among the five publishers, Springer-Nature made the most revenue from OA ($589.7 million), followed by Elsevier ($221.4 million), Wiley ($114.3 million), Taylor & Francis ($76.8 million) and Sage ($31.6 million). With Elsevier and Wiley making most of APC revenue from hybrid fees and others focusing on gold, different OA strategies could be observed between publishers.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00272

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"Training to Act FAIR: A Pre-post Study on Teaching FAIR Guiding Principles to (Future) Researchers in Higher Education."


Before FAIR training, 81.1% of students suggest scientific actions not in line with the FAIR guiding principles. However, after the training, there is a 3.75-fold increase in scientific actions that adhere to these principles. Interestingly, the training does not significantly impact how students justify FAIR actions. The study observes a positive correlation between the presence of university legal frameworks on FAIR guiding principles and students’ inclination towards FAIR training. It explicates safe space, participation, motivation, usefulness, and satisfaction as the five highest-rated learning factors in FAIR training.

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3409769/v1

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"Dissemination Effect of Data Papers on Scientific Datasets"


This study aims to investigate the citation practices associated with data papers and to explore the role of data papers in disseminating scientific datasets. . . . The findings indicate a consistent growth in the number of biomedical data journals published in recent years, with data papers gaining attention and recognition as both publications and data sources. Although the use of data papers as citation sources for data remains relatively rare, there has been a steady increase in data paper citations for data utilization through formal data citations.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24843

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"Repository Staff Perspectives on the Benefits Of Trustworthy Digital Repository Certification"


This paper reports on the results from a qualitative study that asks whether and how staff members from TRAC certified repositories find value in the audit and certification process. While some interviewees found certification valuable, others argued that the costs outweighed the benefits or expressed ambivalence towards certification. Findings indicate that TRAC certification offered both internal and external benefits, such as improved documentation, accountability, transparency, communication, and standards, but there were concerns about high costs, implementation problems, and lack of objective evaluation criteria.

https://tinyurl.com/bddmuwjy

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"FAIR EVA: Bringing Institutional Multidisciplinary Repositories into the FAIR Picture"


The FAIR Principles are a set of good practices to improve the reproducibility and quality of data in an Open Science context. Different sets of indicators have been proposed to evaluate the FAIRness of digital objects, including datasets that are usually stored in repositories or data portals. However, indicators like those proposed by the Research Data Alliance are provided from a high-level perspective that can be interpreted and they are not always realistic to particular environments like multidisciplinary repositories. This paper describes FAIR EVA, a new tool developed within the European Open Science Cloud context that is oriented to particular data management systems like open repositories, which can be customized to a specific case in a scalable and automatic environment. It aims to be adaptive enough to work for different environments, repository software and disciplines, taking into account the flexibility of the FAIR Principles. As an example, we present DIGITAL.CSIC repository as the first target of the tool, gathering the particular needs of a multidisciplinary institution as well as its institutional repository.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02652-8

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"Reclaiming (Parts of) Scholarly Communication"


Regardless of these differences, "scholar-led" and "community-driven" publishing projects are an integral part of a diverse publishing ecosystem and fulfill two main functions within academia. First, they contribute to a culture of experimental, collaborative, and community-owned approaches to disseminating knowledge. This culture facilitates, for example, the creation of new output formats that lie beyond the standardized peer-reviewed article and make the research process more transparent and participatory (Steiner, 2022b). They also take part in the ongoing publishing movement of developing and implementing more inclusive processes of quality control, paradigmatically displayed by the idea of either or both open and collaborative peer review systems (Knöchelmann, 2019). With these new forms of research assessment, it seems possible to become aware of biases while making the review process more instructive and helpful. Much of this extends to editorial work in general, with workflows digitized to meet the needs of remote work and diverse editorial teams, such as by using open-source editorial management software and collaborative editing tools. Of course, these developments are inherently connected to advancements in electronic publishing in general and are not limited to the community-driven publishing segment.

Second, community-driven publishing projects have a protective function in the sense that they enable self-determined and autonomous decision-making at a time and in an age where the "digital sovereignty" of consumers and researchers is at stake (see Pohle & Thiel, 2020). Because many such projects use open-source software and applications (see Open Journal Systems), they can control the flows of publishing (meta) data and be transparent about its usage. At the same time, many community-driven journals question the widespread and nontransparent system of assessing impact using the over-simplified interpretation of bibliometrics and instead consider other evaluation forms, such as alt metrics (Sugimoto et al., 2017). This open approach extends to the use of licensing models that are approved for the creation of "Free Cultural Works" (see Creative Commons). Acknowledging that research benefits society as a whole and must be available for reuse, we find community-driven publishing projects widely applying the most open licenses to their publications.

https://tinyurl.com/ywzcyk5n

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