Publishing – Page 5 – DigitalKoans

Walt Crawford: "Cites & Insights: Use It or Lose It?"

During its peak years, C&I had quite a substantial readership–as many as 55,000 downloads for one particular essay. There were more than 600,000 downloads from 2013 through 2015 and (maybe) 800,000 downloads from 2016 through 2019. But only about 38,000 in 2019. I had sponsorship for five years, and never charged for access.

I always hoped that a few people or institutions would find C&I worth preserving—and the annual print volumes even had indexes (of a sort). No print volume has ever sold more than four copies. Four have sold none at all.

But I would like to trim my Lulu catalog. (To see the list, just go to lulu.com and search for "walt crawford." I see 51 results.) So here’s the deal: The Lulu (trade paperback) versions of any C&I volumes that have no sales between now and November 12, 2024 will be deleted.

Also see: "Essential Reading: Walt Crawford’s Books on Open Access."

https://tinyurl.com/2et9ajuh

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

Paywall: "Analyzing the Relationship between Citation-Based Impact Metrics and Electronic Journal Usage: A Case Study"

We focus on the impact of major JIFs on local e-journal usage and propose an alternative approach to conventional methods for collection selectors. By treating journal usage patterns as panel data and employing fixed-effects regression models, we find that journal popularity has the greatest influence on local e-journal usage and the effects of impact factors on academic article usage can vary across different disciplines.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2023.2230166

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

"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

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

"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

"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

Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect

Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect documents a variety of data privacy practices that directly conflict with library privacy standards, and raises important questions regarding the potential for personal data collected from academic products to be used in the data brokering and surveillance products of RELX’s LexisNexis subsidiary. By analyzing the privacy practices of the world’s largest publisher, the report describes how user tracking that would be unthinkable in a physical library setting now happens routinely through publisher platforms. The analysis underlines the concerns this tracking should raise, particularly when the same company is involved in surveillance and data brokering activities. Elsevier is a subsidiary of RELX, a leading data broker and provider of "risk" products that offer expansive databases of personal information to corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies.

https://zenodo.org/records/10078610

"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

"The Gray Zone between Legitimate and Predatory Open Access Scientific Publishing"

Certain open access publishers based on the article processing charges model have found it highly profitable to operate within a gray zone that encompasses both legitimate and predatory publishing practices. In this context, maximum profits can be obtained by adequate combinations of journal acceptance rates and elevated article processing charges. Considering that the gray zone can be particularly challenging to identify and that it poses risks for authors aiming to establish academic careers, we believe it is important to provide a comprehensive description of it.

https://doi.org/10.24875/RIC.23000191

"Digitization and the Market for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project"

We study the impact of the Google Books digitization project on the market for physical books. We find that digitization significantly boosts the demand for physical versions and provide evidence for the discovery channel. Moreover, digitization allows independent publishers to introduce new editions for existing books, further increasing sales.

https://tinyurl.com/2pbuzty2

Zenodo Mandates Document Submission to a Community and Peer Review

What’s more, content submitted to Zenodo would be published automatically within the repository before and whether or not it was accepted into a community. Now, when a researcher goes to publish their outputs, they must select their community and submit their work for peer review, before it is made public. Community curators will then review the content to see if it fits within the community even have the capability to improve and correct the metadata to ensure that it meets quality standards. Once the metadata is approved, it will then be published in Zenodo and, consequently, integrated into the OpenAIRE Graph.

https://tinyurl.com/5y79y2nb

"Project MUSE Accelerates Move to Open Access with Publisher S2O Commitments"

Leading humanities and social sciences platform Project MUSE announces that many of our university press and related scholarly publisher partners have already committed to participate in the launch of our Subscribe to Open (S2O) program for journals in 2025. Fifty journals from more than 20 publishers are confirmed for participation to date, with more expected to join before the end of the year.

https://tinyurl.com/2h95xs2f

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

"The Impacts of Changes in Journal Data Policies: A Cross-disciplinary Survey"

This discipline-specific survey of journal DSP and SMP highlighted the increasing adoption rates and rankings of DSP over time. Furthermore, the findings suggest that DSP adoption may have a notable impact on the increase in JIF. The adoption of DSP by journals may be associated with the increased attention and credibility of the articles.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.924

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

"Quantifying Consolidation in the Scholarly Journals Market"

Overall, the market has significantly consolidated since 2000 — when the top 5 publishers held 39% of the market of articles to 2022 where they control 61% of it. Looking at larger sets of publishers makes the consolidation even more extreme, as the top 10 largest publishers went from 47% of the market in 2000 to 75% in 2023, and the top 20 largest publishers from 54% to controlling 83% of the corpus.

https://tinyurl.com/4xmt5zeu

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

"Measured in a Context: Making Sense of Open Access Book Data"

Open access (OA) book platforms, such as JSTOR, OAPEN Library or Google Books, have been available for over a decade. Each platform shows usage data, but this results in confusion about how well an individual book is performing overall. Even within one platform, there are considerable usage differences between subjects and languages. Some context is therefore necessary to make sense of OA books usage data. A possible solution is a new metric — the Transparent Open Access Normalized Index (TOANI) score. It is designed to provide a simple answer to the question of how well an individual open access book or chapter is performing. The transparency is based on clear rules, and by making all of the data used visible. The data is normalized, using a common scale for the complete collection of an open access book platform and, to keep the level of complexity as low as possible, the score is based on a simple metric. As a proof of the concept, the usage of over 18,000 open access books and chapters in the OAPEN Library has been analysed, to determine whether each individual title has performed as well as can be expected compared to similar titles.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.627

"UC Berkeley Library to Copyright Office: Protect Fair Uses in AI Training for Research and Education"

If the Copyright Office were to enable rightsholders to opt-out of training AI for research and teaching fair uses, then academic institutions and scholars would face even greater hurdles in licensing content for research purposes. It would be operationally difficult for academic publishers and content aggregators to amass and license the "leftover" body of copyrighted works that remain eligible for AI training. Costs associated with publishers’ efforts in compiling "AI-training-eligible" content would be passed along as additional fees charged to academic libraries, who are already financially constrained to preserve TDM and other fair uses for scholars. In addition, rightsholders might opt out of allowing their work to be used for AI training fair uses, and then turn around and charge AI usage fees to scholars (or libraries)—essentially licensing back fair uses for research. These scenarios would impede scholarship by or for research teams who lack grant or institutional funds to cover these additional expenses; penalize research in or about underfunded disciplines or geographical regions; and result in bias as to the topics and regions studied.

https://tinyurl.com/5cd2vc85

$2,500 Fee: "COAR’s response to the American Chemical Society’s New Fee or Repository Deposit"

COAR strongly objects to this charge for the following reasons:

Authors own their manuscripts and should retain their rights. Authors typically hold the copyright to their research, but too often transfer those rights to publishers when publishing their manuscript. When authors retain the copyright to their manuscript, they have the right to disseminate and use their own manuscript as they choose. If authors’ rights are retained, publishers do not own an article accepted manuscript (AAM) and researchers should not be duped into paying a fee to exercise a right they already have.

This fee is in direct contravention with the ethos of open science and scholarship and equity. . .

ACS is charging $2,500 while providing no added value. There is not a fee for an extra service offered. It requires no extra work on the side of the publisher, but rather is an attempt to develop a new revenue stream, while at the same time they will be receiving funds from subscriptions and pay-to-access for this same article.

ACS is creating a false impression about compliance with funder policies. . . . A fee is only required if you want to publish in an ACS journal and sign over your rights.

See ACS’ "Open Access Pricing for Authors: The Power of Choice" for more fee details.

https://tinyurl.com/4u4dfxsk

"On the Culture of Open Access: The Sci-Hub Paradox"

Based on a large randomized sample, this study first shows that OA publications, including those in fully OA journals, receive more citations than their subscription-based counterparts. However, the OACA has slightly decreased over the seven last years. The introduction of a distinction between those accessible or not via the Sci-hub platform among subscription-based suggest that the generalization of its use cancels the positive effect of OA publishing. The results show that publications in fully OA journals are victims of the success of Sci-hub. Thus, paradoxically, although Sci-hub may seem to facilitate access to scientific knowledge, it negatively affects the OA movement as a whole, by reducing the comparative advantage of OA publications in terms of visibility for researchers

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04792-5

Delta Think Open Access Journals Report: "Market Sizing Update 2023"

2022’s OA market grew by a little over 24% from 2021. This is around two thirds of the growth we saw in 2021. . . .

Given the exceptionally high growth in 2020 and 2021, a correction in 2022 was expected. . . .

Growth in hybrid revenues was a major factor driving growth in OA, although all types of OA saw improved revenues per article, which helped to drive growth.

Currency effects contributed to reduced growth. Many publishers operate in non-USD currencies, which lost value against the US dollar in 2022. . . .

Just over 49% of all scholarly articles were published as paid-for open access in 2022, accounting for just under 20% of the total journal publishing market value.

We anticipate a 2022-2025 CAGR (average growth each year) of 13% in OA output and 13% in OA market value.

https://tinyurl.com/5n7m6n5k

"An Open Book: Launching a Library-Based Open Access Books Hosting Service"

Edinburgh University Library launched a journal hosting service in 2009, initially to support two journals. The service has since grown into a portfolio of 19 journals and a handful of conference proceedings. The purpose of this case study is to review the 2021 launch of our book hosting service and our service rebrand to Edinburgh Diamond, looking at the reasons for launching, the timeline and challenges, and offering recommendations for those wishing to launch their own service.

https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.13745

"Researchers Express Growing Enthusiasm About Open Access, New Wiley Survey Reports"

Open access is quickly becoming the preferred publishing choice among researchers, according to new research from Wiley. 75% of respondents who have published research articles in the past three years have published open access, up from 44% just two years ago.

The survey of more than 600 scholars around the globe revealed the following insights:

Growing enthusiasm for open access. In addition to the increase in authors publishing open access, 75% of respondents agree that transformative agreements (TAs) are the right solution at this time to make research findings more openly available.

At least half of researchers engage in open research practices such as open data, open peer review and self-archiving. This demonstrates that researchers are embracing all the practices that will lead to a fully open research landscape, and are not limiting their activities to open access publishing.

Researchers who are publishing open access are motivated more by the benefits than by requirements. Respondents chose "visibility and impact" (65%) and "public benefit" (54%), followed by “transparency and reuse” (33%), when asked why they engage in open access publishing, significantly more often than journal requirements (25%) and institutional requirements (22%).

Lack of funding presents the most prominent roadblock for publishing open access. The top barrier, reported by 58% of respondents, is no or limited funds available to pay fees for open access publishing. 77% of respondents said they were likely to very likely to publish open access if their APCs were paid by their funder or institution. In addition, more than half of authors who publish open access are not clear on the license requirements from their funder (51%) or institution (55%).

https://tinyurl.com/bdetnz7y

Paywall: "Digital Ownership: The Case of E-books"

This paper presents the results of an empirical research study that used an online survey to examine e-book consumers’ perspectives on digital ownership and digital rights. The study revealed that while most participants value and desire ownership rights, certain conventional ownership rights, such as reselling, gifting, and lending, are deemed less significant and can be relinquished by consumers due to cost-related factors. Furthermore, contrary to prevailing assumptions, the study found no discernible generational gap concerning people’s perceptions of digital ownership rights.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.807

"Preprint Review Services: Disrupting the Scholarly Communication Landscape?"

The most important tension that we identified relates to anonymisation of reviewers and authors. In line with the ideas of the Democracy & Transparency school, preprint review services promote more open forms of peer review in which authors and reviewers participate on a more equal basis. However, from the perspective of the Equity & Inclusion school, this raises concerns. To make peer review processes more equitable and inclusiv e, this school emphasises the importance of enabling anonymisation of reviewers and possibly also authors, which is in tension with the focus on openness and transparency of preprint review services.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/8c6xm

"Wiley and German DEAL Consortium to Sign New 5-Year Agreement "

Wiley (NYSE: WLY) today announced its intent to enter a new five-year agreement with the DEAL Consortium, a countrywide consortium representative of more than 1,000 academic institutions in Germany, commencing January 2024. Wiley and DEAL are creating a blueprint for the next phase of open access publishing to better meet the evolving needs of the scholarly community.

Wiley and DEAL will build on the unprecedented success achieved in their first five years of partnership, which has resulted in:

Nearly 100% of eligible hybrid DEAL articles published open access across Wiley’s portfolio.

90% of Wiley’s article output from Germany published open access. Increased usage of research content in Germany by 83%, resulting in nearly 20 million full text downloads in 2022 alone.

Rapid growth in usage of German-authored content globally, especially in low-income countries.

https://tinyurl.com/3f8rvzd7

Paywall: "The Open Access Movement and its March in Africa"

While the goal of the OA movement remains good, it appears the epistemic disbalance in global knowledge creation and access has not abated. However, the promise of OA, the motivation on which it stands, its consequence and current state are reviewed in this paper with particular focus on the contribution of Africa to the global OA movement. It has been reported that the emergence of OA on the continent is albeit slow but with a mixed fortune of both progress and challenges. Notwithstanding, open access is seen as a development imperative for Africa that offers tremendous opportunities to the continent to actively contribute to global knowledge. It was reported that a number of universities and research institutions in Africa have adopted open access policies that require their researchers to publish their work in open access journals or repositories. The paper presented a number of open access initiatives and platforms that are actively being deployed to achieve OA mandate in the continent and concluded with recommendations.

https://tinyurl.com/f7zhss6m

"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