Libraries as Publishers in the Early 1990s

In recent years, there has been an upsurge in interest in academic and other types libraries acting as publishers and considerable discussion about how this will transform them.

What is sometimes lost in the excitement over the library publishing movement is historical context: this trend started over a quarter century ago at the dawn of the Internet age. While most e-journals published in the early 1990s were produced by scholars acting as digital publishers, at least two academic libraries established formal digital publishing programs in this period: the University of Houston Libraries and the Virginia Tech Libraries.

In August 1989, the Director of the University of Houston Libraries, Robin N. Downes, authorized the establishment and announcement of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review), the first open access journal in the field of library and information science. The journal began publication in January 1990, became refereed in November 1991, and ceased publication in August 2000. Authors retained the copyright to PACS Review articles. Unrestricted copying of PACS Review articles was permitted for educational, noncommercial use by academic computer centers, individual scholars, and libraries.

Only partial use statistics are available for the journal. It was initially distributed using the LISTSERV software, and LISTSERV use statistics were not tallied. From 1994 through 1996, the journal received over 81,000 Gopher requests. From March 1995 through 2005, the journal received over 3.5 file requests via the Web.

In October 1996, Robin N. Downes authorized the establishment of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, an open access, updated electronic book that provided references to new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Between October 1996 and October 2006, 64 versions of the e-book were published by the University of Houston Libraries. There were over six million file requests for it during this period.

In the fall of 1989, Virginia Tech's Vice President for Information Systems, Dr. Robert Heterick, established the Scholarly Communications Project. The project was subsequently moved to the University Libraries, and it was directed by Lon Savage until December 1993, when Gail McMillan took over.

Since 1990, the Virginia Tech Libraries have published a number of e-journals, some of which were previously published by other entities prior to being migrated to the Libraries. Notably, the Scholarly Communications Project published the first issue of The Journal of the International Academy of Hospitality Research in November 1990. The journal was published in cooperation with Virginia Tech's Department of Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Management. It ceased publication in 1998. It is described in "The Journal of the International Academy of Hospitality Research."

The Virginia Tech Libraries' Scholarly Communication department currently publishes e-journals, conference proceedings, and open educational resources.

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"Open Access, Innovation, and Research Infrastructure"

Benedikt Fecher and Gert G. Wagner have published "Open Access, Innovation, and Research Infrastructure" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

In this article we argue that the current endeavors to achieve open access in scientific literature require a discussion about innovation in scholarly publishing and research infrastructure. Drawing on path dependence theory and addressing different open access (OA) models and recent political endeavors, we argue that academia is once again running the risk of outsourcing the organization of its content.

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"The Vienna Principles: A Vision for Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century"

Open Access Network Austria has released "The Vienna Principles: A Vision for Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century ."

Here's an excerpt:

Currently, there is a strong push to address the apparent deficits of the scholarly communication system. Open Science has the potential to change the production and dissemination of scholarly knowledge for the better, but there is no commonly shared vision that describes the system that we want to create.

Between April 2015 and June 2016, members of the Open Access Network Austria (OANA) working group "Open Access and Scholarly Communication" met in Vienna to discuss this matter. The main outcome of our considerations is a set of twelve principles that represent the cornerstones of the future scholarly communication system. They are designed to provide a coherent frame of reference for the debate on how to improve the current system. With this document, we are hoping to inspire a widespread discussion towards a shared vision for scholarly communication in the 21st century.

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Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015: A Subject Approach

Walt Crawford has released Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015: A Subject Approach as a free PDF or a low-cost paperback.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This book is a supplement to Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015. It adds a chapter for each of 28 subjects and slightly expands the three subject-segment chapters from the other book.

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"Wiley Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2015 Results"

John Wiley & Sons has released "Wiley Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2015 Results."

Here's an excerpt:

Revenue: Fourth quarter revenue on a constant currency basis declined 1% to $275 million, with a decline in journal subscription (-2%) and print book (-8%) revenue offsetting growth in other journal revenue (+6%), digital books (+3%), and funded access (+3%). For the year, revenue on a constant currency basis rose 2% to $1,041 million, driven by journal subscriptions (+1%), funded access (+29%), and other journal revenue (+15%), which offset an overall book decline of 7%.

See also: "Wiley Touts Digital Progress in Down Fiscal 2016."

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"Open Access Publishing Trend Analysis: Statistics Beyond the Perception"

Elisabetta Poltronieri et al. have published "Open Access Publishing Trend Analysis: Statistics Beyond the Perception" in Information Research.

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this analysis was twofold: to track the number of open access journals acquiring impact factor, and to investigate the distribution of subject categories pertaining to these journals. As a case study, journals in which the researchers of the National Institute of Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanità) in Italy have published were surveyed.

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"Transparency and Openness to Scientific Publishing: The Finnish Research Organisations Pay Millions of Euros Annually to the Large Publishers"

The Open Science and Research Initiative has released "Transparency and Openness to Scientific Publishing: The Finnish Research Organisations Pay Millions of Euros Annually to the Large Publishers."

Here's an excerpt:

Open Science and Research Initiative announces the scientific publisher costs paid by Finnish universities and research organizations from 2010 to 2015. According to the data, the publisher costs have risen around ten percent per year. . . .

Publisher cost data is now available as open data licensed under CC BY 4.0 license. You are free to share and adapt the data for any purpose, with author attribution and indication if changes were made. Publisher cost details and a link to the web application can be found at openscience.fi/publisher_costs.

See also: "Scientific Journal Subscription Costs in Finland 2010-2015: A Preliminary Analysis."

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"Measuring the Degrees of Openness of Scholarly Journals with the Open Access Spectrum (OAS) Evaluation Tool"

Xiaotian Chen and Tom Olijhoek have published "Measuring the Degrees of Openness of Scholarly Journals with the Open Access Spectrum (OAS) Evaluation Tool" in Serials Review.

Here's an excerpt:

HowOpenIsIt is a guide created by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), PLOS (Public Library of Science), and OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association) to describe an array of policies a journal can have in the continuum between "Open" and "Closed." The OAS Evaluation Tool uses the HowOpenIsIt guide to measure the degree of openness of journals of all kinds with scores between 0 and 100. A total of 1,005 journal samples, both OA and non-OA journals in various languages and from various parts of the world, were evaluated and scored with the OAS Evaluation Tool by a team of information professionals in 2015 based on the policies posted on journals' websites. This article reports the findings of the OAS evaluation.

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"Cloud-Based Big Data Management and Analytics for Scholarly Resources: Current Trends, Challenges and Scope for Future Research"

Samiya Khan, Kashish A. Shakil, and Mansaf Alam have self-archived "Cloud-Based Big Data Management and Analytics for Scholarly Resources: Current Trends, Challenges and Scope for Future Research."

Here's an excerpt:

With the shifting focus of organizations and governments towards digitization of academic and technical documents, there has been an increasing need to use this reserve of scholarly documents for developing applications that can facilitate and aid in better management of research. In addition to this, the evolving nature of research problems has made them essentially interdisciplinary. As a result, there is a growing need for scholarly applications like collaborator discovery, expert finding and research recommendation systems. This research paper reviews the current trends and identifies the challenges existing in the architecture, services and applications of big scholarly data platform with a specific focus on directions for future research.

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"Scholarly Communication and the Dilemma of Collective Action: Why Academic Journals Cost Too Much"

College & Research Libraries has released an e-print of "Scholarly Communication and the Dilemma of Collective Action: Why Academic Journals Cost Too Much" by John Wenzler.

Here's an excerpt:

Why has the rise of the Internet—which drastically reduces the cost of distributing information—coincided with drastic increases in the prices that academic libraries pay for access to scholarly journals?This study argues that libraries are trapped in a collective action dilemma as defined by economist Mancur Olson in The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. To truly reduce their costs, librarians would have to build a shared online collection of scholarly resources jointly managed by the academic community as a whole, but individual academic institutions lack the private incentives necessary to invest in a shared collection. Thus, the management of online scholarly journals has been largely outsourced to publishers who have developed monopoly powers that allow them to increase subscription prices faster than the rate of inflation. Many librarians consider the Open Access Movement the best response to increased subscription costs, but the current strategies employed to achieve Open Access also are undermined by collective action dilemmas. In conclusion, some alternative strategies are proposed.

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Karger Publishers Agreement Allows Researchers at 9 UKB Members to Publish Up to 250 OA Articles per Year without APCs

Karger Publishers has reached an agreement with nine menders of the Dutch UKB consortium that allows affiliated authors to publish up to 250 open access articles per year without APCs.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The consortial agreement grants the participating UKB libraries and their clients full perpetual access to all Karger journal content of 2016 and 2017 as before. The novel part is that affiliated authors may publish up to 250 OA articles per year with Karger without having to pay the usual OA Article Processing Charges (APCs). Authors are free to submit to any of the 100 plus peer-reviewed hybrid and full OA Karger journals; however, they are asked to mention their affiliation with a participating institution during submission.

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Open Access: The Beast That No-One Could—or Should—Control?

Stephen Curry has self-archived "Open Access: The Beast That No-One Could—or Should—Control?"

Here's an excerpt:

To set the scene, I will begin with a brief description of the open access movement and recent policy initiatives before discussing their impact on the attitudes of scientists towards the broader open science agenda and public engagement. I will then consider the effects of open access (and allied moves) on the authority and independence of science—concepts that are perturbed by the increasingly blurred boundary between the academy and the public. Lastly, I will focus attention on the various publics that are actively seeking to engage with science and scientists, mainly through advocacy groups or the growing ranks of citizen scientists; here, while the impact of open access appears relatively modest, it has the capacity to spring surprises that point to future growth.

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Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015

It is available as a free PDF or a low-cost paperback.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This book reports on a comprehensive analysis of serious open access journals as of December 31, 2015: nearly 11,000 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals. For 10,324 of the journals, the study includes whether or not there's an article processing charge (APC), how much it is, and the number of articles in each year 2011 through 2015. The state of serious gold OA is described in terms of article volume, fees and revenue, subject segments, regions, type of publisher and other aspects. The book includes two chapters on the May 2016 "delisting" of 2,900-odd journals.

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"Demographics of Scholarly Publishing and Communication Professionals"

Albert N. Greco, Robert M. Wharton, and Amy Brand have published the "Demographics of Scholarly Publishing and Communication Professionals" in Learned Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

While a great deal is known about the companies active in this sector, we need to know more about the employees of the firms that edit, produce, market, and distribute today's scholarly books and journals. To achieve this goal, the researchers conducted an international survey in late 2014 and early 2015 of approximately 6,121 scholarly publishing employees in 33 nations.

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"Amplifying the Impact of Open Access: Wikipedia and the Diffusion of Science"

Misha Teplitskiy, Grace Lu, and Eamon Duede have self-archived "Amplifying the Impact of Open Access: Wikipedia and the Diffusion of Science."

Here's an excerpt:

With the rise of Wikipedia as a first-stop source for scientific knowledge, it is important to compare its representation of that knowledge to that of the academic literature. Here we identify the 250 most heavily used journals in each of 26 research fields (4,721 journals, 19.4M articles in total) indexed by the Scopus database, and test whether topic, academic status, and accessibility make articles from these journals more or less likely to be referenced on Wikipedia. We find that a journal's academic status (impact factor) and accessibility (open access policy) both strongly increase the probability of it being referenced on Wikipedia. Controlling for field and impact factor, the odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to paywall journals. One of the implications of this study is that a major consequence of open access policies is to significantly amplify the diffusion of science, through an intermediary like Wikipedia, to a broad audience.

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"Breaking Down Pros and Cons of Preprints in Biomedicine"

Hilda Bastian has published "Breaking Down Pros and Cons of Preprints in Biomedicine" in Absolutely Maybe.

Here's an excerpt:

The pros and cons on this are arguably different for physics and biomedicine. It might be easier to copy or fold in someone else's insights into an experiment or paper and beat them to press, so the argument goes. Perhaps this is in part a concern about losing out on a citation in a higher impact journal if your work is no longer seen as exciting. If it's a common concern, then it's a serious hurdle for preprint acceptance.

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"The Mystery of Creative Commons Licenses"

De Gruyter Open has released "The Mystery of Creative Commons Licenses" by Witold Kieńć.

Here's an excerpt:

While more than half of open access papers are published under the terms of a liberal Creative Commons Attribution Licence, the majority of authors of open access works seem not to accept the terms of either this or any other Creative Commons license.

Despite the fact that the majority of journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals use liberal Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence as a default, and that probably more than half of all articles published in open access serials are published under the terms of this licence, academic authors seem not to support liberal licensing. How is it possible? Are authors of more than 600 thousand CC-BY licensed works invisible in surveys? Or do they publish under the terms of this license against their will?

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"Policy: Google Books: The Final Chapter?"

Walt Crawford has published "Policy: Google Books: The Final Chapter?" in Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt:

On Monday, April 18, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the Authors Guild appeal of a district court decision finding, once again, that Google Books Search is fair use. . . .

That should be the final chapter in this decade-long epic case, and maybe I should stop right here.

But let's look at a couple of the early commentaries after the denial (two of many), then go back for the usual chronological citations and notes on items since the last coverage of this legal marathon. The question mark in the essay's title? Well, the Authors Litigation Guild (the middle word isn't part of the name, but maybe it should be) seems as incapable of admitting defeat as it apparently is of recognizing that it only represents the interests of a few hundred or few thousand writers. And, of course, there's the enticing if unlikely counter possibility: what if Google asked to recover its legal costs, which must surely be in the millions of dollars?

See also: “Google Case Ends, but Copyright Fight Goes On.”

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"Ebook Sales Declined in 2015; Digital Audio Continued Growth"

AAP has released "Ebook Sales Declined in 2015; Digital Audio Continued Growth."

Here's an excerpt:

Overall sales were up 0.8 percent to $7.2 billion compared to $7.1 billion in 2014.

Overall publisher revenue for 2015, however, was $15.4 billion, down 2.6 percent from the previous year. . . .

Ebook sales declined in 2015; digital audio continued to grow in popularity; trade publishers did better than educational and scholarly publishers; adult books performed better than other trade categories.

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"Fracking the Ecosystem: Periodicals Price Survey 2016"

Stephen Bosch and Kittie Henderson have published "Fracking the Ecosystem: Periodicals Price Survey 2016" in Library Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Accordingly, we have measured the 2015 price increases of more than 5,000 e-journal packages handled by EBSCO. Our analysis indicates an average e-journal package price increase of 5.8% to 6.3%, down slightly from last year's average of 6.6%.

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"The Open Access Interviews: Sir Timothy Gowers, Mathematician"

Richard Poynder has published "The Open Access Interviews: Sir Timothy Gowers, Mathematician " in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

The idea of arXiv overlay journals was in the air for a long time. I think one impulse behind Discrete Analysis was the very hostile reaction from many people to the setting up of the open access journal Forum of Mathematics by Cambridge University Press, which (after a three-year free period) charges £750 per article.

It seems that a large proportion of mathematicians are implacably opposed to article processing charges, no matter what assurances are given that authors themselves will never be expected to pay out of their own pocket, and that ability to pay will not affect the choice of which articles to publish.

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"Comparing Published Scientific Journal Articles to Their Pre-print Versions"

Martin Klein et al. have self-archived "Comparing Published Scientific Journal Articles to Their Pre-print Versions."

Here's an excerpt:

Academic publishers claim that they add value to scholarly communications by coordinating reviews and contributing and enhancing text during publication. . . . We have investigated the publishers' value proposition by conducting a comparative study of pre-print papers and their final published counterparts. This comparison had two working assumptions: 1) if the publishers' argument is valid, the text of a pre-print paper should vary measurably from its corresponding final published version, and 2) by applying standard similarity measures, we should be able to detect and quantify such differences. Our analysis revealed that the text contents of the scientific papers generally changed very little from their pre-print to final published versions.

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"On the Marginal Cost of Scholarly Communication"

Tiffany Bogich et al. have published "On the Marginal Cost of Scholarly Communication" in Standard Analytics' Research.

Here's an excerpt:

We assessed the marginal cost of scholarly communication from the perspective of an agent looking to start an independent, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. We found that various vendors can accommodate all of the services required for scholarly communication for a price ranging between $69 and $318 per article.

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"The Academic, Economic and Societal Impacts of Open Access: An Evidence-Based Review"

Jonathan P. Tennant et al. have published an e-print for review of "The Academic, Economic and Societal Impacts of Open Access: An Evidence-Based Review" in F1000 Research.

Here's an excerpt:

This review presents published evidence of the impact of Open Access on the academy, economy and society. Overall, the evidence points to a favorable impact of OA on the scholarly literature through increased dissemination and reuse. OA has the potential to be a sustainable business venture for new and established publishers, and can provide substantial benefits to research- and development-intensive businesses, including health organisations, volunteer sectors, and technology. OA is a global issue, highlighted by inequalities beset at all levels between developing and developed nations, and largely fueled by financial inequality. Current levels of access in the developing world are insufficient and unstable, and only OA has the potential to foster the development of stable research ecosystems. While predatory publishing remains an ongoing issue, particularly in the developing world, increasing public engagement, development of OA policies, and discussion of sustainable and ethical publishing practices can remove this potential threat to OA.

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