Category: Open Access

"The Open Access Advantage for American Law Reviews"

James M. Donovan et al. have self-archived "The Open Access Advantage for American Law Reviews."

Here's an excerpt:

Articles available in open access formats enjoy an advantage in citation by subsequent law review works of 53%. For every two citations an article would otherwise receive, it can expect a third when made freely available on the Internet. This benefit is not uniformly spread through the law school tiers. Higher tier journals experience a lower OA advantage (11.4%) due to the attention such prestigious works routinely receive regardless of the format. When focusing on the availability of new scholarship, as compared to creating retrospective collections, the aggregated advantage rises to 60.2%. While the first tier advantage rises to 16.8%, the mid-tiers skyrocket to 89.7%. The fourth tier OA advantage comes in at 81.2%.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Data from Nature and Palgrave Macmillan’s Author Insights Survey

Nature Publishing Group and Palgrave Macmillan have released data from their Author Insights Survey.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The survey, which contains views from 30,466 researchers, is the biggest publisher survey of authors' views to be made open access.

NPG and Palgrave Macmillan are making this anonymised data available in order to achieve greater understanding between authors, funders and publishers, particularly with regard to open access.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: I. The MELIBEA Score"

Philippe Vincent-Lamarre et al. have self-archived Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: I. The MELIBEA Score.

Here's an excerpt:

MELIBEA is a Spanish database that uses a composite formula with eight weighted conditions to estimate the effectiveness of Open Access mandates (registered in ROARMAP). We analyzed 68 mandated institutions for publication years 2011-2013 to determine how well the MELIBEA score and its individual conditions predict what percentage of published articles indexed by Web of Knowledge is deposited in each institution's OA repository, and when. We found a small but significant positive correlation (0.18) between MELIBEA score and deposit percentage. We also found that for three of the eight MELIBEA conditions (deposit timing, internal use, and opt-outs), one value of each was strongly associated with deposit percentage or deposit latency (immediate deposit required, deposit required for performance evaluation, unconditional opt-out allowed for the OA requirement but no opt-out for deposit requirement). When we updated the initial values and weights of the MELIBEA formula for mandate effectiveness to reflect the empirical association we had found, the score's predictive power doubled (.36). There are not yet enough OA mandates to test further mandate conditions that might contribute to mandate effectiveness, but these findings already suggest that it would be useful for future mandates to adopt these three conditions so as to maximize their effectiveness, and thereby the growth of OA.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Exposing the Predators: Methods to Stop Predatory Journals"

Margot Wehrmeijer has self-archived "Exposing the Predators: Methods to Stop Predatory Journals."

Here's an excerpt:

This thesis looks at three possible methods to stop predatory journals: black-and white-lists, open peer review systems and new metrics. Black- and white-lists have set up rules and regulations that credible publishers and journals should follow. Open peer review systems should make it harder for predatory publishers to make false claims about their peer review process. Metrics should measure more aspects of research impact and become less liable to gaming. The question is, which of these three methods is the best candidate to stop predatory journals.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Wall Street Analysts Say Open Access Has Failed Due to Lack of Focus, but Their Analysis Might Help It Succeed"

Curt Rice has published "Wall Street Analysts Say Open Access Has Failed Due to Lack of Focus, but Their Analysis Might Help It Succeed" in The LSE's Daily Blog on American Politics and Policy.

Here's an excerpt:

The absence of clear leadership at the helm of the open access movement is made painfully clear in a recent report about Elsevier's value as a company, entitled Goodbye to Berlin—The Fading Threat of Open Access. Why could the authors of this report at Bernstein Research let go of their earlier concerns and now upgrade their predictions about Elsevier's stock? "The rise of OA," they write, "has inflicted little or no damage on the leading subscription publishers."

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"The Imperative for Open Altmetrics"

Stacy Konkiel, Heather Piwowar, and Jason Priem have published "The Imperative for Open Altmetrics" in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

If scholarly communication is broken, how will we fix it? At Impactstory—a non-profit devoted to helping scholars gather and share evidence of their research impact by tracking online usage of scholarship via blogs, Wikipedia, Mendeley, and more—we believe that incentivizing web-native research via altmetrics is the place to start. In this article, we describe the current state of the art in altmetrics and its effects on publishing, we share Impactstory's plan to build an open infrastructure for altmetrics, and describe our company's ethos and actions.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

ACRL Releases New Version of Scholarly Communication Toolkit

ACRL has released New Version of the Scholarly Communication Toolkit.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Toolkit, developed and maintained by the ACRL Research and Scholarly Environment Committee, continues to provide content and context on a broad range of scholarly communication topics, including expanded information on data management. It provides links to examples of specific tools, including handouts, presentations, and videos for libraries to use on their own campuses, and for library school students seeking to incorporate these issues into their course work.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Nature Communications Goes Full Open Access

Formerly a born-digital hybrid journal, Nature Communications will now be an open access only journal.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Nature Communications is to become the first Nature-branded open access only journal. The number one open access journal in multidisciplinary sciences, Nature Communications is Nature Publishing Group's (NPG) flagship open access title. Nature Communications will only accept open access research submissions from 20th October 2014. . . .

NPG is also making further policy moves with this development. Nature Communications now offers the CC BY 4.0 license as default, with other Creative Commons (CC) licenses available upon request. There is no price difference for the choice of CC license. APC waivers will be available for HINARI countries, and to others on a case-by-case basis.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

CERN and APS Announce Open Access Partnership

American Physical Society and The European Organization for Nuclear Research have formed a partnership to make CERN-authored articles published in APS journals open access.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Articles in APS' Physical Review Letters, Physical Review D, and Physical Review C in 2015 and 2016 will be covered by this agreement.

Thanks to this partnership, articles will be available free of charge for everyone to read. Copyright will remain with the authors and permissive Creative Commons CC-BY licences will allow re-use of the information (e.g. in books, review articles, conference proceedings and teaching material) as well as text- and data-mining applications.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Open Access Infrastructure: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go"

Cynthia Hodgson has published "Open Access Infrastructure: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go" in Information Standards Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

There's no doubt that open access is here to stay, but the underlying infrastructure needed to support and sustain OA publishing is still very much in its development stages. This article, through a series of interviews with experts in the OA arena, highlights some of the major areas of infrastructure that are needed including institutional policies, compliance tracking and reporting, publishing tools, new economic models and licensing, and sustainability.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"The Need for Research Data Inventories and the Vision for SHARE"

Clifford Lynch has published "The Need for Research Data Inventories and the Vision for SHARE" in Information Standards Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

There is a major movement calling for public access to the results of funded research, both in the US and globally. In parallel with these developments has been a growing focus on the importance of research data management across all fields of scholarship- essentially the idea that appropriate stewardship of data used in or arising from research is essential to preserving, communicating, and replicating scholarship. SHARE (Shared Access Research Ecosystem) is a joint project of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the two key higher education presidential associations, the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU); ARL, with generous grant funding from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation and the US Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), is leading the implementation effort. This article briefly summarize the potential role of SHARE in the overall scheme of managing research data, with some emphasis on the importance of standards (both existing and to be developed) for making this vision a reality.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to Open Access"

Alexis Seeley et al. have published "A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to Open Access" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

Funded by tertiary institutions rather than individual researchers, this new model seeks to provide open access not just to traditional academic publications but to all forms of scholarly output.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Putting Open Science into Practice: A Social Dilemma?"

Kaja Scheliga and Sascha Friesike have published "Putting Open Science into Practice: A Social Dilemma?" in First Monday.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Digital technologies carry the promise of transforming science and opening up the research process. We interviewed researchers from a variety of backgrounds about their attitudes towards and experiences with openness in their research practices. We observe a considerable discrepancy between the concept of open science and scholarly reality. While many researchers support open science in theory, the individual researcher is confronted with various difficulties when putting open science into practice. We analyse the major obstacles to open science and group them into two main categories: individual obstacles and systemic obstacles. We argue that the phenomenon of open science can be seen through the prism of a social dilemma: what is in the collective best interest of the scientific community is not necessarily in the best interest of the individual scientist. We discuss the possibilities of transferring theoretical solutions to social dilemma problems to the realm of open science.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Open Access Advocate Robin Peek Retires

Noted open access advocate Robin Peek has retired from the Simmons GSLIS.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Robin Peek was one of the earliest advocates for open access to research, one of the first to write about it regularly, and one of the first to teach a course about it, which she taught at Simmons." said Dr. Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, the Harvard Open Access Project and co-founder of the Open Access Directory. "She is also the editor and co-founder of the Open Access Directory, a globally recognized encyclopedia of open access hosted by Simmons. The Open Access Directory is unique in that it is hosted and preserved by a library school, open to public contributions, edited for quality, and featured on every major list of essential resources on the topic." The six-year old Open Access Directory, a wiki managed by the OA community that provides reference lists about open access to scientists and scholars and has had more than four million views. Peek will continue to be the editor of the Open Access Directory.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"The Big Picture: Scholarly Publishing Trends 2014"

Pippa Smart has published "The Big Picture: Scholarly Publishing Trends 2014" in Science Editing.

Here's an excerpt:

Technical solutions have attempted to address the growth in research but have sometimes added to the tsunami of information and increased the need to manage quality. To this end experiments with the traditional quality control and dissemination systems have been attempted, but news of improvements are frequently overshadowed by alarms about ethical problems. There is particular concern about some of the new publishers who are not adhering to established quality control and ethical practices. Within a potentially fragmenting system, however, there are also emerging collaborative projects helping to knit together the different elements of the publishing landscape to improve quality, linkages and access.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"STM’s New Publishing Licenses Raise Antitrust Concerns Amid Wider Efforts to Pollute Open Access Standards"

Ariel Katz has published "STM's New Publishing Licenses Raise Antitrust Concerns Amid Wider Efforts to Pollute Open Access Standards" in LSE Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

For antitrust purposes, when a group of publishers adopts a set of uniform licenses, or when it recommends that its members adopt them, they tread in the area of antitrust law's core concern: "price fixing". In antitrust lingo the term price fixing is not limited to coordinating on price, but applies to any coordination that affects the quantity, quality, or any other feature of the product. Indeed, "[t]erms of use are no less a part of 'the product,'"[1] and competition between publishers is supposed to ensure optimal license terms just as it is expected to guarantee competitive prices. Therefore, when a group of publishers coordinates license terms, their concerted action is not conceptually different for antitrust purposes from a decision to coordinate subscription fees (downstream) or submission fees (upstream), and when the group represents the leading publishers and affects the majority of publications, antitrust concerns are further heightened.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

U.S. Department of Energy Public Access Plan

U.S. Department of Energy has released its Public Access Plan.

Here's an excerpt:

The Department proposes to host, a portal and a search interface tool, the Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science (PAGES), to enhance the discoverability of unclassified and otherwise unrestricted scholarly publications resulting from DOE funding. PAGES will provide metadata and abstracts for such publications in a way that is open, readable, and available for bulk download. The PAGES metadata catalog will be included in the Department's Enterprise Data Inventory and Public Data Listing. PAGES will also link to the full text VoR hosted by the publisher when the article is available on the publisher's site openly and without charge. In instances where this is not the case, PAGES will link to a full-text version of the accepted manuscript twelve months from the article publication date and then link to the VoR when and if it becomes available. Metadata accompanying the accepted manuscript, e.g., author name, journal title, and digital object identifier (DOI) for the VoR, ensures that attribution to authors, journals, and original publishers will be maintained.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"The Development of Open Access Repositories in the Asia-Oceania Region: A Case Study of Three Institutions"

IFLA has released "The Development of Open Access Repositories in the Asia-Oceania Region: A Case Study of Three Institutions."

Here's an excerpt:

In recent years, open access models of publishing have transcended traditional modes thus enabling freer access to research. This paper takes a trans-regional approach to examining open access publishing in the Asia and Oceania region focusing on three institutions—Charles Darwin University in Australia, University of Hong Kong, and University of Malaya in Malaysia—reflecting on how each is rising, in its own individual way, to meet the range of challenges that its research communities are facing. Specifically, it focuses on open access and institutional repository development, and traces their development at each of the aforementioned institutions.

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"A Current Snapshot of Institutional Repositories: Growth Rate, Disciplinary Content and Faculty Contributions"

Ellen Dubinsky has published "A Current Snapshot of Institutional Repositories: Growth Rate, Disciplinary Content and Faculty Contributions" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

Mean and median growth rates of IRs have increased since measured in 2007, with variance depending upon size and type of academic institution and age of the IR. Disciplinary content in IRs is unevenly distributed, with the Sciences predominantly represented. IR administrators remain actively involved in the submission process and in the promotion of their IRs. Personal contact with individuals or groups of faculty is the most used and successful interaction method.

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"Degrees of Openness: Access Restrictions in Institutional Repositories"

Hélène Prostand Joachim Schöpfel have published "Degrees of Openness: Access Restrictions in Institutional Repositories" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

Institutional repositories, green road and backbone of the open access movement, contain a growing number of items that are metadata without full text, metadata with full text only for authorized users, and items that are under embargo or that are restricted to on-campus access. This paper provides a short overview of relevant literature and presents empirical results from a survey of 25 institutional repositories that contain more than 2 million items. The intention is to evaluate their degree of openness with specific attention to different categories of documents (journal articles, books and book chapters, conference communications, electronic theses and dissertations, reports, working papers) and thus to contribute to a better understanding of their features and dynamics. We address the underlying question of whether this lack of openness is temporary due to the transition from traditional scientific communication to open access infrastructures and services, or here to stay, as a basic feature of the new and complex cohabitation of institutional repositories and commercial publishing.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

STM Releases Its Own Open Access Licenses

The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has released its own collection of open access licenses.

Here's an excerpt:

STM believes that publishers should have the tools to offer a wide variety of appropriate licensing terms dependent on their economic model and business strategy. To that end, the Association has produced sample licences for a variety of uses within open access publishing.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Journal Collection Management and Open Access—Relationship Status: It’s Complicated"

Miriam Lorenz has published "Journal Collection Management and Open Access—Relationship Status: It's Complicated" in IFLA WLIC 2014—Lyon.

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this study is to analyze how journal management in academic libraries (selection, cost organization and allocation) changes through the influence of Open Access and in what form the Open Access movement could be supported by established structures and processes of journal management. In the empirical part, the hypotheses will be verified through an international survey (Germany, Europe (mainly Great Britain), North America (mainly US)) of libraries' journal management staff in March and April 2014. . . . In this article, the first results of the survey will be presented and we will try to find out of how Open Access and journal collection management can be in a stable relationship and what challenges harmonic processes.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Implementing CHORUS: Big Decisions Loom for Publishers"

Angela Cochran has published "Implementing CHORUS: Big Decisions Loom for Publishers" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

The implementation is not without complications. Publishers need to make some pretty serious decisions on how to proceed. The biggest decision may be exactly what to expose in order to comply with any forthcoming public access mandates. The options are to make the accepted manuscripts (AM) publicly available for papers derived from federal funds or to allow access to the final PDF or version of record (VoR). Either is acceptable under federal requirements.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

NARA Open Government Plan

The National Archives and Records Administration has released its Open Government Plan.

Here's an excerpt:

NARA has been engaging the Wikipedia community since 2011, when we welcomed a Wikipedian in Residence and began holding events to build awareness of the records of the National Archives. In 2013, we welcomed a full-time employee devoted to engaging the Wikipedia community along with NARA staff members to promote greater access, reuse, and context for our records on Wikipedia.

Our work strengthening digitization and description fuels our ability to make records available on external platforms like Wikipedia. In 2012, we shared 100,000 digital images from our holdings to Wikimedia Commons. This work enabled digital copies of our records to be incorporated into Wikimedia projects and Wikipedia articles. The 4,000 Wikipedia articles featuring our records received more than one billion page views in Fiscal Year 2013. Over the next two years we will work to increase the number of National Archives records available on Wikimedia Commons, which furthers our strategic goal to "Make Access Happen" and expands re-use of our records by the public.

We are continuing our work to engage local communities of volunteer Wikipedians with on-site events, including skills-building workshops and "edit-a-thons" for improving Wikipedia content related to our holdings. In addition, we are establishing a model for "scan-a-thons" to enable citizen archivist stakeholder groups to digitize our records for access.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

SCOAP3 Has Published 2,000 Articles

The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) has published 2,000 articles.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Two thousand Open Access articles have been published with SCOAP3 funding since January 2014 in 10 journals from 11 publishers and learned societies. These articles are released under a CC-BY license, and openly accessible on publishers websites. In addition, articles are also immediately available on the SCOAP3 repository at repo.scoap3.org in several formats, including PDF/A and XML for text-mining and other purposes. Scientists from over 80 countries have freely published in SCOAP journals so far.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"