Category: Publishing

"CHORUS Gets a Boost from Federal Agencies—But Will New Approaches Make It Harder to Implement?"

Angela Cochran has published "CHORUS Gets a Boost from Federal Agencies—But Will New Approaches Make It Harder to Implement?" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Today, CHORUS and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced an agreement to use CHORUS for facilitating the discovery of NSF funded works. . . .

With the NSF on board, CHORUS has been given a big boost. However, it seems many publishers, whose membership dues are the only source of financial support for CHORUS, have been hanging back to see which agencies will participate.

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"Criteria for Open Access and Publishing"

ScienceOpen has released an e-print of "Criteria for Open Access and Publishing" by Tom Olijhoek, Lars Bjørnshauge, and Dominic Mitchell .

Here's an excerpt:

This article gives an overview of the history and current status of the DOAJ. After a brief historical overview, DOAJ policies regarding open access, intellectual property rights and questionable publishers are explained in detail. The larger part of this article is a much requested explanation on how DOAJ uses its new set of criteria for the evaluation of open access journals and the rationale behind choosing the seven extra criteria that qualify for the DOAJ Seal. A final section is devoted to the extended possibilities that DOAJ will be offering shortly to scholars and publishers for searching the database and for uploading metadata. The result is a renewed DOAJ that offers a more robust platform, a more stable database and enhanced services to allow the upload and collection of metadata.

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"Considering Non-Open Access Publication Charges in the ‘Total Cost of Publication’"

Andrew Gray has published "Considering Non-Open Access Publication Charges in the 'Total Cost of Publication'" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

Recent research has tried to calculate the "total cost of publication" in the British academic sector, bringing together the costs of journal subscriptions, the article processing charges (APCs) paid to publish open-access content, and the indirect costs of handling open-access mandates. This study adds an estimate for the other publication charges (predominantly page and colour charges) currently paid by research institutions, a significant element which has been neglected by recent studies. When these charges are included in the calculation, the total cost to institutions as of 2013/14 is around 18.5% over and above the cost of journal subscriptions—11% from APCs, 5.5% from indirect costs, and 2% from other publication charges.

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"The History and Future of Academic Library Collecting in Eleven Pictures"

David W. Lewis has self-archived "The History and Future of Academic Library Collecting in Eleven Pictures."

Here's an excerpt:

In the digital world and using the strategy I have outlined what we have is more like an open checkbook that will purchase the books an articles any library user wants. It is the difference between a public park and giving citizens free ticket s to Disney Land whenever they need recreation. Or, like the difference between a soup kitchen and food stamps.

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"Examining the Impact of the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy on the Citation Rates of Journal Articles"

Sandra L. De Groote et al. have published "Examining the Impact of the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy on the Citation Rates of Journal Articles" in PLoS One.

Here's an excerpt:

Purpose

To examine whether National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded articles that were archived in PubMed Central (PMC) after the release of the 2008 NIH Public Access Policy show greater scholarly impact than comparable articles not archived in PMC. . . .

Results

A total of 45,716 articles were examined, including 7,960 with NIH-funding. An analysis of the number of times these articles were cited found that NIH-funded 2006 articles in PMC were not cited significantly more than NIH-funded non-PMC articles. However, 2009 NIH funded articles in PMC were cited 26% more than 2009 NIH funded articles not in PMC, 5 years after publication. This result is highly significant even after controlling for journal (as a proxy of article quality and topic).

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The Future of the Monograph in the Digital Era: A Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Michael Elliott has self-archived The Future of the Monograph in the Digital Era: A Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Here's an excerpt:

Over the course of six months, our working group endeavored to consider whether a model of university-funded monograph publication could improve the publishing landscape for scholars in the humanities and facilitate the "digital transition" that Berkery foresees. Under such a model, a university would bear a high percentage of the publication costs through an initial contract. The university press would produce a high quality, open-access digital publication, as well as make the book available in print form—possibly through print-on-demand.

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"ARL, Higher Education Groups Support Lingua Editors, Open Access"

ARL has released ""ARL, Higher Education Groups Support Lingua Editors, Open Access."

Here's an excerpt:

Following in the footsteps of other editors and authors, the six editors and thirty-one editorial board members of the Elsevier journal Lingua resigned on October 27, 2015, in protest of Elsevier's practices. The Lingua editors argued that the journal's price has steadily increased year after year, far outpacing the cost of production. The editors also cited Elsevier's refusal to transition the journal to a "fair open access" model that would charge low and transparent article processing fees for authors, while allowing authors to retain copyright to their articles.

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"The Institution as E-Textbook Publisher"

Andrew Barker has published "The Institution as E-Textbook Publisher" in Insights: the UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Providing students with sufficient copies of core textbooks is an increasing challenge in an age of ever higher fees, economic realities and heightened student expectations regarding provision of library resources. This article outlines the partnership between the University of Liverpool Library and Liverpool University Press (LUP), which has progressed from the creation of a library advisory board to the co-creation of two bespoke and open access (OA) e-textbooks as part of a Jisc-funded project. It tells the story of why we have gone down this route at Liverpool and what we hope to gain from the creation of these e-textbooks.

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"Maximizing the Benefits of Open Access: Strategies for Enhancing the Discovery of Open Access Content"

Maria Bonn has published "Maximizing the Benefits of Open Access: Strategies for Enhancing the Discovery 0f Open Access Content" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

To achieve some economies of scale in library acquisition of OA publications, we should leverage the library crown and work the library network. There's no point in libraries all over the world laboriously replicating the same work of evaluation, selection, and acquisition when they have the tools, methods, and community to work in collaboration. Subject specialists might organize themselves in clusters to share the initial work of discovery and establish criteria for evaluation that can be collectively trusted

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BioMed Central Implements Author Contributorship Badges

BioMed Central has implemented Author Contributorship Badges.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

To receive credit for their work, researchers must publish. However, the traditional author list on scientific research articles provides little clarification as to who actually did what on the project. Conventions around author order often mean that key contributors to research are either left off the author list entirely, or given a position that provides no real "credit" in the grant-awarding/career ladder ecosystem.

The introduction of Author Contributorship Badges is an effort to solve this problem by crediting authors for the specific ways in which they contributed to a study. For example, it might distinguish whether the author drafted the copy, verified the results or curated the data for the project. A visual badge which illustrates their full contribution will be made available on the article page and on the ORCID site.

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"’Predatory’ Open Access: A Longitudinal Study of Article Volumes and Market Characteristics"

Cenyu Shen and Bo-Christer Björk have published "'Predatory' Open Access: A Longitudinal Study of Article Volumes and Market Characteristics" in BMC Medicine.

Here's an excerpt:

Despite a total number of journals and publishing volumes comparable to respectable (indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals) open access journals, the problem of predatory open access seems highly contained to just a few countries, where the academic evaluation practices strongly favor international publication, but without further quality checks.

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Research Library Issues, no. 287

ARL has released Research Library Issues, no. 287.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

ARL has published Research Library Issues (RLI) no. 287, an issue in which Rikk Mulligan offers an overview of the history of scholarly communication from its beginnings in the 17th century to recent innovations in digital and hybrid publishing.

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"An Interview with Peter Suber on Open Access"

Cheryl LaGuardia has published "An Interview with Peter Suber on Open Access" in Library Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Because hybrid is no-risk, it has spread like wildfire. I used to think that was good, since at least it gave publishers first-hand experience with the economics of fee-based OA journals. But I changed my mind about that years ago

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Open Library of Humanities Launched

The Open Library of Humanities has been launched.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

North Beach, San Francisco It is with great pleasure that we announce the launch of the Open Library of Humanities. Over two years in the planning and execution, the platform starts with seven journals, supported by 99 institutions. Our estimated publication volume for year one is 150 articles across these venues. The economics of this work out at approximately £4 ($6) per institution per open-access article.

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Monitoring the Transition to Open Access: A Report for the Universities UK Open Access Co-ordination Group

The Universities UK's Open Access Co-ordination Group has released Monitoring the Transition to Open Access: A Report for the Universities UK Open Access Co-ordination Group.

Here's an excerpt:

This study was commissioned in response to a recommendation of the Finch Group in its second report in 2013 that reliable indicators should be gathered on key features of the transition to open access (OA) in the UK. The findings presented here are thus a first attempt at generating such indicators covering five sets of issues:

  • OA options available to authors . . . .
  • Accessibility. . . .
  • Usage. . . .
  • Financial sustainability for universities . . . .
  • Financial sustainability for learned societies

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"Campus Open Access Funds: Experiences of the KU ‘One University’ Open Access Author Fund"

Rachel Gyore et al. have published "Campus Open Access Funds: Experiences of the KU 'One University' Open Access Author Fund" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

This report documents the group's experience in developing eligibility criteria and administering the OA Fund. Here we provide insight into our efforts implementing the project, funding results, and plans for continuation. We share the results of the first two years of the OA Author Fund pilot and the lessons learned about open access fund administration.

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"The Presence of High-impact Factor Open Access Journals in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) Disciplines"

Annarita Barbara et al. have published "The Presence of High-impact Factor Open Access Journals in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) Disciplines" in the Italian Journal of Library, Archives, and Information Science.

Here's an excerpt:

The present study means to establish to what extent high-quality open access journals are available as an outlet for publication, by examining their distribution in different scientific disciplines, including the distribution of those journals without article processing charges. The study is based on a systematic comparison between the journals included in the DOAJ, and the journals indexed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Science edition 2013, released by Thomson Reuters. The impact factor of Open Access (OA) journals was lower than those of other journals by a small but statistically significant amount. Open access journals are present in the upper quartile (by impact factor) of 85 out of 176 (48.8%) categories examined. There were no OA journals with an Impact Factor in only 16 categories (9%).

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"The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014"

Walt Crawford has published "The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014" in Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt:

This issue consists of an excerpted version of The Gold OA Landscape 2011- 2014, published September 10, 2015 as a PDF ebook for $55.00 and on September 11, 2015 as a paperback book for $60.00. . . .

This book represents the first overview of essentially all of serious gold OA—that is, what's published by the journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. I believe it's important for all OA publishers and for many libraries and OA advocates. If it does well, or if there's some form of alternative funding, I'll continue tracking the field in the future.

The issue—starting with the first numbered section below—includes a little more than one-third of what's in the book (a little more than half the text, but none of the 69 graphs, and probably less than half of the many, many tables), I believe these excerpts are useful on their own, and enough to provide a reasonably good picture of gold OA in 2011-2014- but they're not the whole story. For that, you'll have to buy the book.

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"Optimizing Open Access Policy "

Stevan Harnad has self-archived "Optimizing Open Access Policy."

Here's an excerpt:

This overview of the current status of Open Access (OA) to peer-reviewed research describes the steps that need to be taken to achieve universal OA. . . . To accelerate progress, more institutions and funders need to adopt more effective OA mandates: All universities and funders should require (1) institutional deposit (2) immediately upon acceptance for publication; urge (but not require) (3) immediate OA and (4) rights-retention; (5) minimize allowable embargo length, (6) implement the copy-request Button; (7) provide rich usage and citation metrics and (8) designate repository deposit of publications as the locus for institutional performance review as well as funding applications and renewals.

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"The Share of Open Access Journals (OAJ) and Open Access Articles (OAA) Charging Article Processing Charges (APC). Data from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) 2013 to 2015"

Falk Reckling has published "The Share of Open Access Journals (OAJ) and Open Access Articles (OAA) Charging Article Processing Charges (APC). Data from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) 2013 to 2015" in The Journal of Brief Ideas.

Here's an excerpt:

83.0% (186) of the OAJ charge APC, while 17.0% (38) of the OAJ don't. On the article level, 93.6% (683) of the articles were published with and 6.4% (47) without APC.

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"Barriers to Open Access Publishing: Views from the Library Literature"

Amy Forrester has published "Barriers to Open Access Publishing: Views from the Library Literature" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

The library and information science (LIS) community has an active role in supporting access to information and, therefore, is an important stakeholder in the open access conversation. One major discussion involves the barriers that have hindered the complete transition to open access in scientific publications. Building upon a longitudinal study by Bo-Christer Björk that looked at barriers to the open access publishing of scholarly articles, this study evaluates the discussion of those barriers in the LIS literature over the ten year period 2004-2014, and compares this to Björk's conclusions about gold open access publishing.

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PubPeer Foundation Launches

The PubPeer Foundation has been established.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The overarching goal of the Foundation is to help improve the quality of scientific research by enabling innovative approaches for community interaction. Our initial focus will be on maintaining and developing the PubPeer online platform for post-publication peer review.

See also: "PubPeer's Secret Is Out: Founder of Controversial Website Reveals Himself."

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"Open Access to a High-Quality, Impartial, Point-of-Care Medical Summary Would Save Lives: Why Does It Not Exist?"

James Heilman has published "Open Access to a High-Quality, Impartial, Point-of-Care Medical Summary Would Save Lives: Why Does It Not Exist?" in PLOS Medicine.

Here's an excerpt:

Summary Points

  • Currently no open access point-of-care (POC) medical summary aimed at a professional audience exists.
  • Some nonprofit and multiple professional, for-profit POC medical summaries are frequently accessed by clinicians and policymakers.
  • Efforts to create open access POC summaries have been stymied by the difficulty of attracting high-quality contributors.
  • The open access medical publishing community can create this resource with engaged donors, crowd-sourcing, and technology.

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"Dataverse 4.0: Defining Data Publishing"

Mercè Crosas has self-archived "Dataverse 4.0: Defining Data Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

The research community needs reliable, standard ways to make the data produced by scientific research available to the community, while getting credit as data authors. As a result, a new form of scholarly publication is emerging: data publishing. Data pubishing—or making data long-term accessible, reusable and citable—is more involved than simply providing a link to a data file or posting the data to the researchers web site. In this paper, we define what is needed for proper data publishing and describe how the open-source Dataverse software helps define, enable and enhance data publishing for all.

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