Publishing – Page 81 – DigitalKoans

"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.

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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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"Faculty Use of Author Identifiers and Researcher Networking Tools"

College & Research Libraries has released an e-print of "Faculty Use of Author Identifiers and Researcher Networking Tools" by Clara Y. Tran and Jennifer A. Lyon .

Here's an excerpt:

Our survey results show that there is recognition and use of existing Author ID and researcher networking profiles, as well as some professional use of online social media platforms amongst academic faculty across all disciplines. Additionally, there was notable interest in access to training and support resources on the same resources. At this time, ORCID appears to have gained the highest level of awareness and use among Stony Brook faculty. Faculty also reported use of the two most well-known commercial authorIDs: Thomson Reuters' ResearcherID and Elsevier's Scopus Author ID.

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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?

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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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"Dramatic Growth of Open Access March 31, 2016"

Heather Morrison has published "Dramatic Growth of Open Access March 31, 2016 " in The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics.

Here's an excerpt:

There are now 150 publishers of peer-reviewed open access books listed in the Directory of Open Access Books, publishing more than 4,400 open access books. 620 books were published in this quarter alone, a 16% increase in just this quarter. The Directory of Open Access Journals has been adding titles at a net rate of 6 titles per day, 540 journals added this quarter for a total of over 11,000 journals.

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Springer Will Automatically Deposit MIT-Authored Papers in DSpace@MIT

Springer and MIT have reached an agreement that will result in Springer automatically depositing MIT-authored papers in DSpace@MIT nine months after publication.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, one of the first initiatives of its kind in the United States, made a bold commitment to disseminate the results of MIT research and scholarship as widely and openly as possible. Recently, the MIT Libraries affirmed this commitment by signing an innovative agreement with Springer, one of the world's largest scholarly publishers. Springer will send manuscripts of MIT-authored scholarly papers directly to the Open Access Articles Collection of DSpace@MIT, the Institute's open access repository.

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"A Spiritual Successor to Aaron Swartz Is Angering Publishers All Over Again"

David Kravets has published "A Spiritual Successor to Aaron Swartz Is Angering Publishers All Over Again" in Ars Technica.

Here's an excerpt:

Meet Alexandra Elbakyan, the developer of Sci-Hub, a Pirate Bay-like site for the science nerd. It's a portal that offers free and searchable access "to most publishers, especially well-known ones."

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"The Costs of Open and Closed Access: Using the Finnish Research Output as an Example"

Jyrki Ilva et al. have published "The Costs of Open and Closed Access: Using the Finnish Research Output as an Example" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

As business models of Open Access publishing are still under development, the aim of our paper is to assess the statistical tools and data that the Finnish libraries currently have for comparing the costs associated with different modes of disseminating scientific publications. We will also analyse the potential costs associated with Open Access publishing models and compare them with the current cost structure of—mostly—paywalled (PW) access. . . . We will discuss the alternatives on how best to develop statistical tools to estimate the true costs of scientific publishing.

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"Small Scholar-Led Scholarly Journals: Can They Survive and Thrive in an Open Access Future?"

Heather Morrison has published "Small Scholar-Led Scholarly Journals: Can They Survive and Thrive in an Open Access Future?" in Learned Publishing (open access article).

Here's an excerpt:

This article presents early results of a research project designed to further our understanding of how to ensure that small scholar-led journals can survive and thrive in a global open access knowledge commons. This phase of the research focuses on generation of ideas through interviews and focus groups with 15 participants involved in producing small scholar-led journals that either are or would like to become open access. Although a couple of journals reported that they could survive in an open access future based on existing resources, most were concerned about survival and none expressed confidence that they could thrive in an open-access future.

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