Category: Publishing

"Preprints and Scholarly Communication: Adoption, Practices, Drivers and Barriers"

Andrea Chiarelli have published "Preprints and Scholarly Communication: Adoption, Practices, Drivers and Barriers" in F1000Research (awaiting peer review).

Here's an excerpt:

Background: Since 2013, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of preprint servers available online. To date, little is known about the position of researchers, funders, research performing organisations and other stakeholders with respect to this fast-paced landscape. In this article, we explore the benefits and challenges of preprint posting, along with issues such as infrastructure and financial sustainability. We also discuss the definition of a 'preprint' in different communities, and the impact this has on further uptake.

Methods: This study is based on 38 detailed semi-structured interviews of key stakeholders based on a purposive heterogeneous sampling approach. Interviews were undertaken between October 2018 and January 2019. These were recorded, transcribed and subjected to thematic analysis to identify trends. Interview questions were designed based on Innovation Diffusion Theory, which is also used to interpret the results of this study. Results: Our study is the first using empirical data to understand the new wave of preprint servers and found that early and fast dissemination is the most appealing feature of the practice. The main concerns are related to the lack of quality assurance and the 'Ingelfinger rule'. We identified trust as an essential enabler of preprint posting and stress the enabling role of Twitter in showcasing preprints and enabling comments on these.

Conclusions: The preprints landscape is evolving fast and disciplinary communities are at different stages in the innovation diffusion process. The landscape is characterised by significant experimentation, which leads to the conclusion that a one-size-fits-all approach to preprints is not feasible. Cooperation and active engagement between the stakeholders involved will play an important role in the future. In our paper, we share questions for the further development of the preprints landscape, with the most important being whether preprint posting will develop as a publisher- or researcher-centric practice.

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"Springer Nature Accelerates Its Transformative Journey with the Signing of Landmark Pure OA Deal"

Springer Nature has released "Springer Nature Accelerates Its Transformative Journey with the Signing of Landmark Pure OA Deal."

Here's an excerpt:

New agreements agreed this week with the Bibsam consortium in Sweden and Norway's Unit consortium take the number of Springer Nature’s read and publish deals to ten, putting the publisher firmly on the path to becoming a transformative publisher.

In a first for Springer Nature, Bibsam, representing the institutional libraries, and four of Sweden’s funding bodies (the Swedish Research Council, Formas, Forte and Vinnova) have agreed a deal which will see them share the costs of publishing in Springer Nature’s OA journals. . . .

Springer Nature has also agreed a transformative read and publish deal with Norway. This agreement, which will run from 2020 to 2022, will allow researchers in Norway to read articles in journals on SpringerLink and Norwegian authors to publish Open Access in over 2000 journals, making primary research with corresponding authors from Norway immediately and freely accessible from the point of publication, which Unit says will, "meet all our requirements for transition agreements, and will enable Norwegian researchers to read and publish in the majority of Springer journals".

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"Vertical Integration in Academic Publishing: Implications for Knowledge Inequality"

George Chen, Alejandro Posada, and Leslie Chan have published "Vertical Integration in Academic Publishing: Implications for Knowledge Inequality".

Here's an excerpt:

This paper attempts to illustrate the implications of a simultaneous redirection of the big publishers' business strategy towards open access business models and the acquisition of scholarly infrastructure utilizing the conceptual framework of rent-seeking theory. To document such a transformation, we utilized financial databases to analyze the mergers and acquisitions of the top publicly traded academic publishers. We then performed a service analysis to situate the acquisitions of publishers within the knowledge and education life-cycles, illustrating what we term to be their vertical integration within their respective expansion target life-cycles.

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"Open Access Policies of Leading Medical Journals: A Cross-Sectional Study"

Tim S. Ellison et al. have published "Open Access Policies of Leading Medical Journals: A Cross-Sectional Study" in BMJ Open (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Here's an excerpt:

Objectives Academical and not-for-profit research funders are increasingly requiring that the research they fund must be published open access, with some insisting on publishing with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to allow the broadest possible use. We aimed to clarify the open access variants provided by leading medical journals and record the availability of the CC BY licence for commercially funded research.

Methods We identified medical journals with a 2015 impact factor of =15.0 on 24 May 2017, then excluded from the analysis journals that only publish review articles. Between 29 June 2017 and 26 July 2017, we collected information about each journal's open access policies from their websites and/or by email contact. We contacted the journals by email again between 6 December 2017 and 2 January 2018 to confirm our findings.

Results Thirty-five medical journals publishing original research from 13 publishers were included in the analysis. All 35 journals offered some form of open access allowing articles to be free-to-read, either immediately on publication or after a delay of up to 12 months. Of these journals, 21 (60%) provided immediate open access with a CC BY licence under certain circumstances (eg, to specific research funders). Of these 21, 20 only offered a CC BY licence to authors funded by non-commercial organisations and one offered this option to any funder who required it.

Conclusions Most leading medical journals do not offer to authors reporting commercially funded research an open access licence that allows unrestricted sharing and adaptation of the published material. The journals' policies are therefore not aligned with open access declarations and guidelines. Commercial research funders lag behind academical funders in the development of mandatory open access policies, and it is time for them to work with publishers to advance the dissemination of the research they fund.

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"The Majority of Authors Agree That All Future Scholarly Books Should Be OA": The Future of Open Access Books: Findings from a Global Survey of Academic Book Authors

Springer Nature has released The Future of Open Access Books: Findings from a Global Survey of Academic Book Authors .

Here's an excerpt:

A global Springer Nature survey of more than 2,500 academic book authors provides in-depth insights into attitudes towards open access.

The survey looks at researchers' motivations for publishing a book, and analyses the parameters and key drivers which influence academics to publish OA or not. The white paper also identifies the major obstacles to OA publication which book authors still face: from a lack of awareness of OA publishing options and low funding, to concerns about how OA books are perceived.

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"Assessing the Size of the Affordability Problem in Scholarly Publishing"

Alexander Grossmann and Björn Brembs have self-archived "Assessing the Size of the Affordability Problem in Scholarly Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

For many decades, the hyperinflation of subscription prices for scholarly journals have concerned scholarly institutions. After years of fruitless efforts to solve this "serials crisis", open access has been proposed as the latest potential solution. However, also the prices for open access publishing are high and are rising well beyond inflation. What has been missing from the public discussion so far is a quantitative approach to determine the actual costs of efficiently publishing a scholarly article using state-of-the-art technologies, such that informed decisions can be made as to appropriate price levels. Here we provide a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving. We find that these costs range from less than US$200 per article in modern, large scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review, to about US$1,000 per article in prestigious journals with rejection rates exceeding 90%. The publication costs for a representative scholarly article today come to lie at around US$400. We discuss the additional non-publication items that make up the difference between publication costs and final price.

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"What Happens When Books Enter the Public Domain? Testing Copyright’s Underuse Hypothesis Across Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada"

Rebecca Giblin has self-archived "What Happens When Books Enter the Public Domain? Testing Copyright's Underuse Hypothesis Across Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

We find that books are actually less available where they are under copyright than where they are in the public domain, and that commercial publishers seem undeterred from investing in works even where others are competing to supply the same titles. We also find that exclusive rights do not appear to trigger investment in works that have low commercial demand, with books from 59% of the 'culturally valuable' authors we sampled unavailable in any jurisdiction, regardless of copyright status.

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