Open Access – Page 9 – DigitalKoans

"The Future of Open Source Is Still Very Much in Flux"

Today, 96% of all code bases incorporate open-source software. GitHub, the biggest platform for the open-source community, is used by more than 100 million developers worldwide. The Biden administration’s Securing Open Source Software Act of 2022 publicly recognized open-source software as critical economic and security infrastructure. Even AWS, Amazon’s money-making cloud arm, supports the development and maintenance of open-source software; it committed its portfolio of patents to an open use community in December of last year. Over the last two years, while public trust in private technology companies has plummeted, organizations including Google, Spotify, the Ford Foundation, Bloomberg, and NASA have established new funding for open-source projects and their counterparts in open science efforts—an extension of the same values applied to scientific research.

https://tinyurl.com/4ksns2ha

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) Project: TOME Stakeholder Value Assessment: Final Report

The Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of University Presses published a final report assessing the success of the Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) project. The five-year pilot project engaged with more than 60 university presses and more than 150 open access scholarly works to encourage sustainable digital publication of and public access to scholarly books. The Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) project was launched in 2018 to publish humanities and social science scholarship on the internet, where these peer-reviewed works can be fully integrated into the larger network of scholarly and scientific research. The final report examines whether the pilot’s community of writers, institutions, libraries, and presses found it useful.

https://tinyurl.com/3wr7wv37

Paywall: "Identification and Portraits of Open Access Journals Based on Open Impact Metrics Extracted from Social Activities "

This study finds that open access journals strengthen international academic communication and cooperation, build cross-border and cross-regional knowledge-sharing projects, realize the knowledge of interdisciplinary sharing and exchange, and, most importantly, provide a one-stop service for readers. This research indicates that through the use of open impact metrics, it is possible to identify the portraits of open access journals, thus providing a new method to construct and reform open access journal evaluation systems.

https://tinyurl.com/3hvs2y8v

Paywall: "Proactive Institutional Repository Collection Development Techniques: Archiving Gold Open Access Articles and Metadata Retrieved with Web Scraping"

This article describes a method for copying open access articles and corresponding descriptive metadata from open repositories for archiving in an institutional repository using Beautiful Soup and Selenium as web scraping tools. This method quickly added hundreds of articles to an IR without relying on faculty participation or consulting publisher policies, increasing repository downloads and usage.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2023.2240190

"Care to Share? Experimental Evidence on Code Sharing Behavior in the Social Sciences"

Transparency and peer control are cornerstones of good scientific practice and entail the replication and reproduction of findings. The feasibility of replications, however, hinges on the premise that original researchers make their data and research code publicly available. This applies in particular to large-N observational studies, where analysis code is complex and may involve several ambiguous analytical decisions. To investigate which specific factors influence researchers’ code sharing behavior upon request, we emailed code requests to 1,206 authors who published research articles based on data from the European Social Survey between 2015 and 2020. In this preregistered multifactorial field experiment, we randomly varied three aspects of our code request’s wording in a 2x4x2 factorial design: the overall framing of our request (enhancement of social science research, response to replication crisis), the appeal why researchers should share their code (FAIR principles, academic altruism, prospect of citation, no information), and the perceived effort associated with code sharing (no code cleaning required, no information). Overall, 37.5% of successfully contacted authors supplied their analysis code. Of our experimental treatments, only framing affected researchers’ code sharing behavior, though in the opposite direction we expected: Scientists who received the negative wording alluding to the replication crisis were more likely to share their research code. Taken together, our results highlight that the availability of research code will hardly be enhanced by small-scale individual interventions but instead requires large-scale institutional norms.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289380

"Actually Accessible Data: An Update and a Call to Action"

As funder, journal, and disciplinary norms and mandates have foregrounded obligations of data sharing and opportunities for data reuse, the need to plan for and curate data sets that can reach researchers and end-users with disabilities has become even more urgent. We begin by exploring the disability studies literature, describing the need for advocacy and representation of disabled scholars as data creators, subjects, and users. We then survey the landscape of data repositories, curation guidelines, and research-data-related standards, finding little consideration of accessibility for people with disabilities. We suggest three sets of minimal good practices for moving toward truly accessible research data: 1) ensuring Web accessibility for data repositories; 2) ensuring accessibility of common text formats, including those used in documentation; and 3) enhancement of visual and audiovisual materials. We point to some signs of progress in regard to truly accessible data by highlighting exemplary practices by repositories, standards, and data professionals. Accessibility needs to become a mainstream component of curation practice included in every training, manual, and primer.

https://tinyurl.com/2p4au2ar

"Data Journals: Where Data Sharing Policy Meets Practice"

Data journals incorporate elements of traditional scholarly communications practices—reviewing for quality and rigor through editorial and peer-review—and the data sharing / open data movement—prioritizing broad dissemination through repositories, sometimes with curation or technical checks. Their goals for dataset review and sharing are recorded in journal-based data policies and operationalized through workflows. In this qualitative, small cohort semi-structured interview study of eight different journals that review and publish research data, we explored (1) journal data policy requirements, (2) data review standards, and (3) implementation of standardized data evaluation workflows. Differences among the journals can be understood by considering editors’ approaches to balancing the interests of varied stakeholders. Assessing data quality for reusability is primarily conditional on fitness for use which points to an important distinction between disciplinary and discipline-agnostic data journals.

https://doi.org/10.17615/nqtz-b568

"Who Re-Uses Data? A Bibliometric Analysis of Dataset Citations"

Open data is receiving increased attention and support in academic environments, with one justification being that shared data may be re-used in further research. But what evidence exists for such re-use, and what is the relationship between the producers of shared datasets and researchers who use them? Using a sample of data citations from OpenAlex, this study investigates the relationship between creators and citers of datasets at the individual, institutional, and national levels. We find that the vast majority of datasets have no recorded citations, and that most cited datasets only have a single citation. Rates of self-citation by individuals and institutions tend towards the low end of previous findings and vary widely across disciplines. At the country level, the United States is by far the most prominent exporter of re-used datasets, while importation is more evenly distributed. Understanding where and how the sharing of data between researchers, institutions, and countries takes place is essential to developing open research practices.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04379

"The Emergence of Preprints: Comparing Publishing Behaviour in the Global South and the Global North"

Purpose: The recent proliferation of preprints could be a way for researchers worldwide to increase the availability and visibility of their research findings. Against the background of rising publication costs caused by the increasing prevalence of article processing fees, the search for other ways to publish research results besides traditional journal publication may increase. This could be especially true for lower-income countries. Design/methodology/approach: Therefore, we are interested in the experiences and attitudes towards posting and using preprints in the Global South as opposed to the Global North. To explore whether motivations and concerns about posting preprints differ, we adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining a quantitative survey of researchers with focus group interviews. Findings: We found that respondents from the Global South were more likely to agree to adhere to policies and to emphasise that mandates could change publishing behaviour towards open access. They were also more likely to agree posting preprints has a positive impact. Respondents from the Global South and the Global North emphasised the importance of peer-reviewed research for career advancement. Originality: The study has identified a wide range of experiences with and attitudes towards posting preprints among researchers in the Global South and the Global North. To our knowledge, this has hardly been studied before, which is also because preprints only have emerged lately in many disciplines and countries.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04186

"Metadata Standard for Continuous Preservation, Discovery, and Reuse of Research Data in Repositories by Higher Education Institutions: A Systematic Review"

This systematic review synthesised existing research papers that explore the available metadata standards to enable researchers to preserve, discover, and reuse research data in repositories. This review provides a broad overview of certain aspects that must be taken into consideration when creating and assessing metadata standards to enhance research data preservation discoverability and reusability strategies. Research papers on metadata standards, research data preservation, discovery and reuse, and repositories published between January 2003 and April 2023 were reviewed from a total of five databases. The review retrieved 1597 papers, and 13 papers were selected in this review. We revealed 13 research articles that explained the creation and application of metadata standards to enhance preservation, discovery, and reuse of research data in repositories. Among them, eight presented the three main types of metadata, descriptive, structural, and administrative, to enable the preservation of research data in data repositories. We noted limited evidence on how these metadata standards can be used to enhance the discovery and reuse of research data in repositories to enable the preservation, discovery, and reuse of research data in repositories. No reviews indicated specific higher education institutions employing metadata standards for the research data created by their researchers. Repository designs and a lack of expertise and technology know-how were among the challenges identified from the reviewed papers. The review has the potential to influence professional practice and decision-making by stakeholders, including researchers, students, librarians, information communication technologists, data managers, private and public organisations, intermediaries, research institutions, and non-profit organizations.

https://doi.org/10.3390/info14080427

"Impact and Development of an Open Web Index for Open Web Search"

Web search is a crucial technology for the digital economy. Dominated by a few gatekeepers focused on commercial success, however, web publishers have to optimize their content for these gatekeepers, resulting in a closed ecosystem of search engines as well as the risk of publishers sacrificing quality. To encourage an open search ecosystem and offer users genuine choice among alternative search engines, we propose the development of an Open Web Index (OWI). We outline six core principles for developing and maintaining an open index, based on open data principles, legal compliance, and collaborative technology development. The combination of an open index with what we call declarative search engines will facilitate the development of vertical search engines and innovative web data products (including, e.g., large language models), enabling a fair and open information space. This framework underpins the EU-funded project OpenWebSearch.EU, marking the first step towards realizing an Open Web Index.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24818

"Will Building LLMs [AI Large Language Models] Become the New Revenue Driver for Academic Publishing?"

In a world where peer-reviewed content holds value for Generative AI companies, the question arises whether content that is locked behind a paywall has greater value than OA content. . . . Will publishers who still have a lot of content locked up, such as IEEE or NEJM, retain the most valuable assets? Will publishers that limit licensing to more restrictive terms such as CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-ND have revenue streams denied to those exclusively using CC BY licenses? . . . Could authors receive income from their work via a CMO (Collective Management of Copyright) license, regardless of the agreement they have with the publisher?

https://tinyurl.com/zm6u5spc

Paywall: "Another Wiley Journal Loses Editorial Board"

At least two-thirds of the editorial board of Wiley’s Journal of Biogeography have resigned, citing the publisher’s push towards "exorbitant" open access fees and what they claimed was a policy to steer rejected manuscripts to other titles.

https://tinyurl.com/2bhf6ppp

"How Many Preprints Have Actually Been Printed and Why: A Case Study of Computer Science Preprints on arXiv"

In this paper, a case study of computer science preprints submitted to arXiv from 2008 to 2017 is conducted to quantify how many preprints have eventually been printed in peer-reviewed venues. Among those published manuscripts, some are published under different titles and without an update to their preprints on arXiv. In the case of these manuscripts, the traditional fuzzy matching method is incapable of mapping the preprint to the final published version. In view of this issue, we introduce a semantics-based mapping method with the employment of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). With this new mapping method and a plurality of data sources, we find that 66% of all sampled preprints are published under unchanged titles and 11% are published under different titles and with other modifications. A further analysis was then performed to investigate why these preprints but not others were accepted for publication. Our comparison reveals that in the field of computer science, published preprints feature adequate revisions, multiple authorship, detailed abstract and introduction, extensive and authoritative references and available source code.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01899

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D20) Achieves Second Year Goal, Opens Access to Eighty-Two New Books in 2023"

Thanks to the support of libraries participating in Direct to Open (D2O), the MIT Press will publish its full list (see below) of 2023 scholarly monographs and edited collections open access on the MIT Press Direct platform. . . .

In its second year, 322 libraries, an increase of 33% from the first year, from around the globe committed to support D2O. Expanding D2O’s international footprint, the Press also entered into all-in agreements with Big Ten Academic Alliance and the Konsortium der sächsischen Hochschulbibliotheken, as well as central licensing and invoicing agreements with Council of Australian University Librarians, Center for Research Libraries; Greater Western Library Alliance, MOBIUS, Northeast Research Libraries, Jisc, Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation, SCELC, and Lyrasis.

https://tinyurl.com/yc7vv3tc

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Paywall: "Proposal for the Publication of Linked Open Bibliographic Data"

The objective of this paper is to analyze the publishing of bibliographic data such as LOD, having as a product the elaboration of theoretical-methodological recommendations for the publication of these data, in an approach based on the ten best practices for publishing LOD, from the World Wide Web Consortium. The starting point was the conduction of a Systematic Review of Literature, where initiatives to publish bibliographic data such as LOD were identified. An empirical study of these institutions was also conducted.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2023.2234358

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"To Preprint or Not to Preprint: A Global Researcher Survey"

Open science is receiving widespread attention globally, and preprinting offers an important way to implement open science practices in scholarly publishing. To develop a systematic understanding of researchers’ adoption of and attitudes toward preprinting, we conducted a survey of authors of research papers published in 2021 and early 2022. Our survey results show that the US and Europe lead the way in the adoption of preprinting. US and European respondents reported a higher familiarity with and a stronger commitment to preprinting than their colleagues elsewhere in the world. The adoption of preprinting is much stronger in physics and astronomy as well as mathematics and computer science than in other research areas. Respondents identified free accessibility of preprints and acceleration of research communication as the most important benefits of preprinting. Low reliability and credibility of preprints, sharing results before peer review and premature media coverage are the most significant concerns about preprinting, emphasized in particular by respondents in the life and health sciences. According to respondents, the most crucial strategies to encourage preprinting are integrating preprinting into journal submission workflows and providing recognition for posting preprints.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/k7reb

"Does Double Dipping Occur? The Case of Wiley’s Hybrid Journals"

The number of open access articles published in hybrid journals has increased recently. However, there are concerns over the practice of double dipping, when hybrid journals charge for publishing the same article twice, once for subscription and once for open access. To determine whether double dipping occurs, this study examined the relationship between the subscription prices for hybrid journals and the proportions of open access articles in hybrid journals. . . . The findings suggest that article processing charges rise in tandem with increased subscription prices; therefore, university libraries and consortiums must exercise caution when making subscription contracts with publishers.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04800-8

"Big Ten Open Books"

Big Ten Open Books connects readers everywhere to fully accessible, trusted books from leading university presses. The first collection of 100 books is on the subject of Gender and Sexuality Studies. The ebooks are free-to-read by anyone with an Internet connection. They are also openly-licensed under Creative Commons licenses which make most of the titles free-to-reuse in any non-commercial way. . . .

The works in this collection have all been previously published by university presses and have undergone a rigorous selection and quality certification process that allows readers and users of this collection to trust the veracity of the content made available. Participating presses are Indiana University Press, Michigan State University Press, Northwestern University Press, Purdue University Press, University of Michigan Press, and University of Wisconsin Press.

https://tinyurl.com/37y66ccw

"Data Sharing Implementation in Top 10 Ophthalmology Journals in 2021"

Background/Aims: Deidentified individual participant data (IPD) sharing has been implemented in the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors journals since 2017. However, there were some published clinical trials that did not follow the new implemented policy. This study examines the number of clinical trials that endorsed IPD sharing policy among top ophthalmology journals.

Method: All published original articles in 2021 in 10 highest-ranking ophthalmology journals according to the 2020 journal impact factor were included. Clinical trials were determined by the WHO definition of clinical trials. Each article was then thoroughly searched for the IPD sharing statement either in the manuscript or in the clinical trial registry. We collected the number of published clinical trials that implemented IPD sharing policy as our primary outcome.

Results: 1852 published articles in top 10 ophthalmology journals were identified, and 9.45% were clinical trials. Of these clinical trials, 44% had clinical trial registrations and 49.14% declared IPD sharing statements. Only 42 (48.83%) clinical trials were willing to share IPD, and 5 (10.21%) of these share IPD via an online repository platform. In terms of sharing period, 37 clinical trials were willing to share right after the publication and only 2 showed the ending of sharing period.

Conclusion: This report shows that the number of clinical trials in top ophthalmology journals that endorsed the IPD sharing policy and the number of registrations is lower than half even though the policy has been implemented for several years. Future updates are necessary as policy evolves.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjophth-2023-001276

"The Medical Institutional Repositories in Libraries (MIRL) Symposium: A Blueprint Designed in Response to a Community of Practice Need"

Background: Health sciences libraries in medical schools, academic health centers, health care networks, and hospitals have established institutional repositories (IRs) to showcase their research achievements, increase visibility, expand the reach of institutional scholarship, and disseminate unique content. Newer roles for IRs include publishing open access journals, tracking researcher productivity, and serving as repositories for data sharing. Many repository managers oversee their IR with limited assistance from others at their institution. Therefore, IR practitioners find it valuable to network and learn from colleagues at other institutions.

Case Presentation: This case report describes the genesis and implementation of a new initiative specifically designed for a health sciences audience: the Medical Institutional Repositories in Libraries (MIRL) Symposium. Six medical librarians from hospitals and academic institutions in the U.S. organized the inaugural symposium held virtually in November 2021. The goal was to fill a perceived gap in conference programming for IR practitioners in health settings. Themes of the 2021 and subsequent 2022 symposium included IR management, increasing readership and engagement, and platform migration. Post-symposium surveys were completed by 73/238 attendees (31%) in 2021 and by 62/180 (34%) in 2022. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

Discussion: Participant responses in post-symposium surveys rated MIRL highly. The MIRL planning group intends to continue the symposium and hopes MIRL will steadily evolve, build community among IR practitioners in the health sciences, and expand the conversation around best practices for digital archiving of institutional content. The implementation design of MIRL serves as a blueprint for collaboratively bringing together a professional community of practice.

https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2023.1503

An Index, a Publisher and an Unequal Global Research Economy

This is the story of how a publisher and a citation index turned the science communication system into a highly profitable global industry. Over the course of seventy years, academic journal articles have become commodities, and their meta-data a further source of revenue. . . . During the 1950s, two men — Robert Maxwell and Eugene Garfield — begin to experiment with their blueprint for the research economy. Maxwell created an ‘international’ publisher — Pergamon Press — charming the editors of elite, not-for-profit society journals into signing commercial contracts. Garfield invented the science citation index to help librarians manage this growing flow of knowledge. . . . Sixty years later, the global science system has become a citation economy, with academic credibility mediated by the currency produced by the two dominant commercial citation indexes: Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivates Web of Science. The reach of these citation indexes and their data analytics is amplified by digitisation, computing power and financial investment. . . . Non-Anglophone journals are disproportionately excluded from these indexes, reinforcing the stratification of academic credibility geographies and endangering long established knowledge ecosystems.

https://tinyurl.com/3x7try9p

"Sustainability of Open-Access Author Fund: A Case Study of Faculty Usage Patterns and APC Cost"

The California State University, Los Angeles Library established a pilot program on Open-Access (OA) Author Fund in 2018. This article presents information about the management of the University Library’s Open-Access Author Fund. Particularly, this article focuses on faculty usage of the OA Author Fund by colleges, disciplines, and publishers. Additionally, the authors examined the article processing charges (APCs) and self-archiving policies of the top open-access journals where Cal State LA faculty publish. This analysis will assist the University Library’s Open-Access Group to understand if the University Library needs to provide additional funding and explore new ways to sustain the funding. Our research also revealed that librarians in specific academic areas can be more proactive in educating, explaining, and initiating conversations with disciplinary faculty about the benefits of open-access publications.

https://tinyurl.com/35kprj6a

"Open Access Initiatives in European Countries: Analysis of Trends and Policies"

Of the total journals (n = 25,231) published worldwide and indexed in Scopus, 53% are published in European countries, with 23.7% being OA journals. In total, 34% of the OA repositories (n = 5,714) are in European countries. The proportion of OA journal papers has grown significantly in all European countries, with a 14.3% annual growth rate. The average proportion of OA publications in European countries is significantly higher (39.07%) than the world average (30.16%), with a clear inclination for making research literature openly accessible via the green OA route (79.41%) compared to the gold OA route (52.30%).

https://doi.org/10.1108/DLP-06-2022-0051

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Comparing Different Search Methods for the Open Access Journal Recommendation Tool B!Son"

Finding a suitable open access journal to publish academic work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of predatory publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. A systematic requirements analysis was conducted in the form of a survey. The developed tool suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendations are built on open data, publisher-independent and work across domains and languages. Transparency is provided by its open source nature, an open application programming interface (API) and by specifying which matches the shown recommendations are based on. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using two different evaluation techniques, including several new recommendation methods. We were able to improve the results from our previous paper with a pre-trained transformer model. The beta version of the tool received positive feedback from the community and in several test sessions. We developed a recommendation system for open access journals to help researchers find a suitable journal. The open tool has been extensively tested, and we found possible improvements for our current recommendation technique. Development by two German academic libraries ensures the longevity and sustainability of the system.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-023-00372-3

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |