Publishing – Page 6 – DigitalKoans

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

"Elsevier Introduces Geographical Pricing Pilot to Support Authors in Low- And Middle-Oncome Countries with Equitable Open Access Publishing Options"

The GPOA [Geographical Pricing for Open Access] model, a publishing industry first, is set to take effect from January 2024. As part of the pilot, Elsevier will structure its article publishing charges for this subset of journals based on countries’ local economic conditions and average income. By tailoring pricing structures according to Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, a transparent and well-established measure used by many international organisations including Research4Life, Elsevier aims to reduce financial barriers that have traditionally hindered researchers and institutions from low and middle-income countries from publishing the latest research in Gold Open Access journals. Elsevier’s approach to GPOA and country banding based on GNI are outlined on our website. A full list of the journals taking part in this novel pilot can be found here. Elsevier will continue to waive APCs for authors in the lowest economic band and already provides affordable access to over 100,000 peer-reviewed resources for institutions in 120 low- and middle-income countries through Research4Life.

https://tinyurl.com/jxzt8d7e

"Springer Nature and Authors Successfully Use Generative AI to Publish Academic Book"

As part of an innovative experiment, Springer Nature has become the first publisher to create a whole new academic book by empowering authors to use GPT as part of the integrated workflow. Developed during a —Hack Day— in the Spring which brought together authors, editors and experts from across Springer Nature, the German-language book Einsatzmöglichkeiten von GPT in Finance, Compliance und Audit (Applications of GPT in finance, compliance and audit) has now been published. It took less than five months from inception to publication — about half the time normally taken. . . .

The process was as follows:

Working simultaneously on six screens, the team defined commands which GPT then executed chapter by chapter to create the first version of the manuscript

At each stage of the process, the content generated by the Large Language Model (LLM) was reviewed by the authors, who then asked the machine to adapt the text

This "prompt ping pong" ensured that the knowledge expertise of the authors renowned in their field was combined with the language expertise of the LLM

After the Hack Day, the authors and Springer Nature’s editorial team further checked, corrected and supplemented the text

The team then linked the relevant data sources to ensure proper attribution

https://tinyurl.com/4x7nvvks

Using Altmetric Data Responsibly: A Guide to Interpretation and Good Practice

This guide focuses specifically on data from the data provider and company, Altmetric, but other types of altmetrics are mentioned and occasionally used as a comparison in this guide, such as the Open Syllabus database to find the educational engagement with scholarly outputs. This guide opens with an introduction followed by an overview of Altmetric and the Altmetric Attention Score, Altmetrics and Responsible Research Assessment, Output Types Tracked by Altmetric, and the Altmetric Sources of Attention, which include: News and Mainstream Media, Social Media (X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Reddit, and historical data from Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Sina Weibo); Patents, Peer Review, Syllabi (historical data only), Multimedia, Public Policy Documents, Wikipedia, Research Highlights, Reference Managers, and Blogs; finally, there is a conclusion, a list of related resources and readings, two appendices, and references. This guide is intended for use by librarians, practitioners, funders, and other users of Altmetric data or those who are interested in incorporating altmetrics into their bibliometric practice and/or research analytics. It can also help researchers who are going up for annual evaluations and promotion and tenure reviews, who can use the data in informed and practical applications. It can also be a useful reference guide for research managers and university administrators who want to understand the broader online engagement with research publications beyond traditional scholarly citations, also known as bibliometrics, but who also want to avoid misusing, misinterpreting, or abusing Altmetric data when making decisions, creating policies, and evaluating faculty members and researchers at their institutions.

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/116448

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

"Springer Nature Introduces Curie, Its AI-powered Scientific Writing Assistant"

Springer Nature today announced a new AI-powered in-house writing assistant to support researchers, particularly those whose first language is not English, in their scientific writing. . . .

It has been specifically trained on academic literature, spanning 447+ areas of study, more than 2,000 field-specific topics and on over 1 million edits on papers published including those in leading Nature journals. It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with specialised AI digital editing developed in-house and designed specifically for scientific writing. Unlike generalist AI writing apps, Curie focuses on the unique pain points of researchers in their professional writing, including translation to English and English language editing to address grammatical errors and improve phrasing and word choice.

https://tinyurl.com/msvc28ra

"How ChatGPT and Other AI tools Could Disrupt Scientific Publishing"

In the age of LLMs, [Michael] Eisen pictures a future in which findings are published in an interactive, "paper on demand" format rather than as a static, one-size-fits-all product. In this model, users could use a generative AI tool to ask queries about the experiments, data and analyses, which would allow them to drill into the aspects of a study that are most relevant to them. It would also allow users to access a description of the results that is tailored to their needs. "I think it’s only a matter of time before we stop using single narratives as the interface between people and the results of scientific studies," says Eisen.

https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03144-w

Access to Science and Scholarship: Key Questions about the Future of Research Publishing

The health of the research enterprise is closely tied to the effectiveness of the scientific and scholarly publishing ecosystem. Policy-, technology-, and market-driven changes in publishing models over the last two decades have triggered a number of disruptions within this ecosystem:

Ongoing increases in the cost of journal publishing, with dominant open access models shifting costs from subscribers to authors

Significant consolidation and vertical (supply chain) integration in the publishing industry, and a decline in society-owned subscription journals that have long subsidized scientific and scholarly societies

A dramatic increase in the number of "predatory" journals with substandard peer review

Decline in the purchasing power of academic libraries relative to the quantity and cost of published research

To illustrate how researcher behavior, funder policies, and publisher business models and incentives interact, this report presents an historical overview of open access publishing. The report also provides a list of key questions for further investigation to understand, measure, and best prepare for the impact of new policies related to open access in research publishing, categorized into six general areas: access and business models, research data, preprint publishing, peer review, costs to researchers and universities, and infrastructure.

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/152414

"How ChatGPT and Other AI Tools Could Disrupt Scientific Publishing"

More broadly, generative AI tools have the potential to change how research is published and disseminated, says Patrick Mineault, a senior machine-learning scientist at Mila — Quebec AI Institute in Montreal, Canada. That could mean that research will be published in a way that can be easily read by machines rather than humans. "There will be all these new forms of publication," says Mineault.

https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03144-w

"IFLA ARL Section’s ‘Inclusiveness through Openness’ Conference Proceedings Now Available!"

All videos and slides from this August IFLA Academic & Research Libraries Section (ARL) Satellite conference to the 2023 WLIC in Rotterdam IFLA conference are now available:

https://tinyurl.com/4cywvp9h

"2024 EBSCO Serials Price Projection Report"

Each year, EBSCO strives to help its academic and academic medical library customers plan their library budgets by projecting publisher price increases for the upcoming year. We use recent information received from publishers, as well as historical price data to calculate these projections. As of now, we expect the overall effective publisher price increases for academic and academic medical libraries in 2024 to be in the range of three to four percent for individual titles and two to three percent for e-journal packages.

https://tinyurl.com/2s3akjmw

"A Large Scale Perspective on Open Access Publishing: Examining Gender and Scientific Disciplines in 38 OECD countries"

Gender inequality is a persistent issue in scientific publishing. Recent studies suggest that Open Access (OA) publishing can increase the visibility and impact of female scientists’ research. Despite the growing acceptance of OA as a means of disseminating research results, there is a notable gap in studies focusing on the role of gender in OA publishing trends. The presented research offers a comprehensive analysis of OA publishing with a focus on gender differences and specific scientific disciplines in 38 OECD countries. Our study using the OpenAlex database included over 20 million publications from 1990-2021 and revealed that 39.3 percent of these were freely available in some form of OA. Results showed, over time, a decline in Bronze OA and Green OA but also an increase in Gold OA and, as of 2018, a rapid increase in Hybrid OA. The results also showed that females are more likely to publish in gold OA than males, both in cases of female-only authorship and mixed-gender authorship. Disciplinary analysis showed that Biology, Physics and Mathematics had the most OA publications. The results also showed the influence of major OA initiatives on publication trends. This study highlights the need for a more inclusive scientific publishing system that promotes gender equality and wider accessibility.

https://doi.org/10.55835/6442b2f80dd9c5d18e7caff8

"Which Database with Article Processing Charges Should Be Used?"

This study investigated the characteristics of three databases compiling article processing charges—price lists on publishers’ official websites, Directory of Open Access Journals, and OpenAPC—for open access journals published by Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley. Although many article processing charges listed on Directory of Open Access Journals are identical to those listed on price lists for 2023, several article processing charges on the Directory are not updated. . . . journals on OpenAPC are not representative of open access journals in general. Nevertheless, the correlation between list prices and actual article processing charges paid indicates a strong positive relationship, implying that even if empirical studies on article processing charges use different databases, the database chosen might not significantly influence their conclusions.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04841-z

"What Happens When a Journal Converts to Open Access? A Bibliometric Analysis"

In recent years, increased stakeholder pressure to transition research to Open Access has led to many journals converting, or "flipping," from a closed access (CA) to an open access (OA) publishing model. Changing the publishing model can influence the decision of authors to submit their papers to a journal, and increased article accessibility may influence citation behaviour. In this paper we aimed to understand how flipping a journal to an OA model influences the journal’s future publication volumes and citation impact. We analysed two independent sets of journals that had flipped to an OA model, one from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and one from the Open Access Directory (OAD), and compared their development with two respective control groups of similar journals. For bibliometric analyses, journals were matched to the Scopus database. We assessed changes in the number of articles published over time, as well as two citation metrics at the journal and article level: the normalised impact factor (IF) and the average relative citations (ARC), respectively. Our results show that overall, journals that flipped to an OA model increased their publication output compared to journals that remained closed. Mean normalised IF and ARC also generally increased following the flip to an OA model, at a greater rate than was observed in the control groups. However, the changes appear to vary largely by scientific discipline. Overall, these results indicate that flipping to an OA publishing model can bring positive changes to a journal.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03972-5

"Preprints Are Now Searchable on Scopus!"

In total, we have 1.8M preprint records in Scopus (as of June 2023) from the following seven preprint servers:

arXiv

ChemRxiv

bioRxiv

medRxiv

SSRN

TechRxiv

Research Square

https://tinyurl.com/4jp2nayv

"The Strain on Scientific Publishing"

Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. Total articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science have grown exponentially in recent years; in 2022 the article total was 47% higher than in 2016, which has outpaced the limited growth, if any, in the number of practising scientists. Thus, publication workload per scientist (writing, reviewing, editing) has increased dramatically. We define this problem as the strain on scientific publishing. To analyse this strain, we present five data-driven metrics showing publisher growth, processing times, and citation behaviours. We draw these data from web scrapes, requests for data from publishers, and material that is freely available through publisher websites. Our findings are based on millions of papers produced by leading academic publishers. We find specific groups have disproportionately grown in their articles published per year, contributing to this strain. Some publishers enabled this growth by adopting a strategy of hosting special issues, which publish articles with reduced turnaround times. Given pressures on researchers to publish or perish to be competitive for funding applications, this strain was likely amplified by these offers to publish more articles. We also observed widespread year-over-year inflation of journal impact factors coinciding with this strain, which risks confusing quality signals. Such exponential growth cannot be sustained. The metrics we define here should enable this evolving conversation to reach actionable solutions to address the strain on scientific publishing.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15884

"Toward Non-human-Centered Design: Designing an Academic Article with ChatGPT"

Non-human-centered design tools, such as ChatGPT, have shown potential as effective aids in academic article design. This study conducts a comparative evaluation of ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4, examining their capabilities and limitations in supporting the academic article design process. The study aims to demonstrate the utility of ChatGPT as a writing tool and investigate its applicability and efficacy in the context of academic paper design. The author interacted with both versions of ChatGPT, providing prompts and analyzing the generated responses. In addition, a different expert academic was consulted to assess the appropriateness of the ChatGPT responses. The findings suggest that ChatGPT, despite its limitations, could serve as a useful tool for academic writing, particularly in the design of academic articles. Despite the limitations of both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, GPT-3.5 offers a broader perspective, whereas GPT-4 provides a more in-depth and detailed approach to the design of articles. ChatGPT exhibits capabilities in aiding the design process, generating ideas aligned with the overall purpose and focus of the paper, producing consistent and contextually relevant responses to various natural language inputs, partially assisting in literature reviews, supporting paper design in terms of both content and format, and providing reasonable editing and proofreading for articles. However, limitations were identified, including reduced critical thinking, potential for plagiarism, risk of misinformation, lack of originality and innovation, and limited access to literature.

https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2023.sep.12

"Introducing the Journal of the Medical Library Association’s Policy on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Submissions"

With the arrival of ChatGPT, the academic community has expressed concerns about how generative artificial intelligence will be used by students and researchers alike. After consulting policies from other journals and discussing among the editorial team, we have created a policy on the use of AI on submissions to JMLA. This editorial provides a brief background on these concerns and introduces our policy.

https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2023.1826

"JSTOR releasing First 100 Path to Open Books"

Launched as a pilot in January 2023, Path to Open is a delayed open access model where new books are made available to supporting libraries upon publication and become open access after three years. Thirty-seven university presses have joined the initiative along with over sixty academic libraries, including consortia like the Big Ten Academic Alliance who are looking to develop sustainable open access solutions. . . .

JSTOR recently released forty-three of the first 100 Path to Open titles. These books, all peer-reviewed, were selected by the participating university presses and JSTOR, and explore topics in thirty-six subjects like Public Health, Religion, Education, Communications, Literature, Conflict Resolution, and Film Studies.

https://tinyurl.com/2p92439j

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

The book consists of three parts. Part I offers definitions of scholarly communication and scholarly communication librarianship and provides an introduction to the social, economic, technological, and policy/legal pressures that underpin and shape scholarly communication work in libraries. These pressures, which have framed ACRL’s understanding of scholarly communication for the better part of the past two decades, have unsettled many foundational assumptions and practices in the field, removing core pillars of scholarly communication as it was practiced in the twentieth century. These pressures have also cleared fresh ground, and scholarly communication practitioners have begun to seed the space with values and practices designed to renew and often improve the field. Part II begins with an introduction to "open," the core response to the pressures described in part I. This part offers a general overview of the idea of openness in scholarly communication followed by chapters on different permutations and practices of open, each edited by a recognized expert of these areas with authors of their selection. Amy Buckland edited chapter 2.1, "Open Access." Brianna Marshall edited chapter 2.2, "Open Data." Lillian Hogendoorn edited chapter 2.3, "Open Education." Micah Vandegrift edited chapter 2.4, "Open Science and Infrastructure." Each of them brought on incredible expertise through contributors whom they identified, through both original contributions and repurposing existing openly licensed work, which is something we want to model where possible. Part III consists of twenty-four concise perspectives, intersections, and case studies from practicing librarians and closely related stakeholders, which we hope will stimulate discussion and reflection on theory and implications for practice. In every single case, we’re really excited by the editors and authors and the ideas they bring to the whole. Each contribution features light pedagogical apparatuses like suggested further reading, discussion or reflection prompts, and potential activities. It’s all available for free and openly licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) license, so anyone is encouraged to grab whatever parts are useful and to adapt and repurpose and improve them to meet specific course goals and student needs within the confines of the license.

https://bit.ly/SCLAOK

"Now You Have to Pay! A Deeper Look At Publishing Practices of Predatory Journals"

In this study, by using Beall’s (Scholarly open-access, 2014; Beall’s list of predatory journals and publishers, 2018) predatory journal lists as well as direct e-mail solicitations from journals, we intentionally submitted a poorly written manuscript to 58 open-access journals using counterfeit names and affiliations. . . . Regarding "positive responses," we point to five common flaws associated with such journals, namely that (1) they lack any interest in the researchers who are submitting manuscripts; (2) they do not judge academic writing in accordance with expected conventions; (3) they appear to be indifferent to scholarship including research design, plagiarism issues, and citation quality; (4) their review process is opaque and overly hasty, and (5) the tone they use in correspondence e-mail messages is highly inappropriate. Based upon the investigation, it is clear that such journals’ primary aim is in securing the article processing fee.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1583

"The Quantification of Open Scholarship — A Mapping Review"

This mapping review addresses scientometric indicators that quantify open scholarship. The goal is to determine what open scholarship metrics are currently being applied and which are discussed, e.g. in policy papers. The paper contributes to a better understanding on how open scholarship is quantitatively recorded in research assessment and where gaps can be identified. The review is based on a search in four databases, each with 22 queries. Out of 3385 hits, we coded 248 documents chosen according to the research questions. The review discusses the open scholarship metrics of the documents as well as the topics addressed in the publications, the disciplines the publications come from and the journals they were published. The results indicate that research and teaching practices are unequally represented regarding open scholarship metrics. Open research material is a central and exhausted topic in publications. Open teaching practices, on the other hand, play a role in the discussion and strategy papers of the review, but open teaching material is not recorded using concrete scientometric indicators. Here, we see a research gap and discuss potentials for further research and investigation.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00266