Scholarly Journals – Page 10

Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All

In Athena Unbound, Peter Baldwin offers an up-to-date look at the ideals and history behind OA, and unpacks the controversies that arise when the dream of limitless information slams into entrenched interests in favor of the status quo. . . .

Baldwin addresses the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the development of the university and research establishment. As he notes, the hard sciences have already created a funding model that increasingly provides open access, but at the cost of crowding out the humanities. Baldwin proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world.

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14887.001.0001

"European Scholarly Journals from Small- and Mid-Size Publishers: Mapping Journals and Public Funding Mechanisms"

This study investigates the relationship between scholarly journal publishing and public funding, specifically concerning the context of small- and mid-sized journal publishers in European countries. As part of the movement towards open science, an increasing number of journals globally are free to both read and publish in, which increases the need for journals to seek other resources instead of subscription income. The study includes two separate components, collecting data separately for each European country (including transcontinental states): (1) the volume and key bibliometric characteristics of small- and mid-sized journal publishers and (2) information about country-level public funding mechanisms for scholarly journals. The study found that there are 16,387 journals from small- and mid-sized publishers being published in European countries, of which 36 per cent are already publishing open access. There is a large diversity in how countries reserve and distribute funds to journals, ranging from continuous inclusive subsidies to competitive grant funding or nothing at all.

https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scac081

Council of the European Union: "Council Calls for Transparent, Equitable, and Open Access to Scholarly Publications"

In its conclusions, the Council calls on the Commission and the member states to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers. Some Member States have introduced secondary publication rights into their national copyright legislation, enabling open access to scholarly publications which involve public funds. The Council encourages national open access policies and guidelines to make scholarly publications immediately openly accessible under open licences. The conclusions acknowledge positive developments in terms of monitoring progress, like within the framework of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and suggest including open science monitoring in the European Research Area monitoring mechanism. The Council conclusions also encourage Member States to support the pilot programme Open Research Europe (to create a large-scale open access research publishing service), the use of open-source software and standards, to recognise and reward peer review activities in the assessment of researchers as well as to support the training of researchers on peer-review skills and on intellectual property rights.

https://bit.ly/3MS2leY

Paywall: "Automated Scholarly Paper Review: Concepts, Technologies, and Challenges"

In this paper, we propose the concept and pipeline of automated scholarly paper review (ASPR) and review the relevant literature and technologies of achieving a full-scale computerized review process. On the basis of the review and discussion, we conclude that there is already corresponding research and preliminary implementation at each stage of ASPR. We further look into the challenges in ASPR with the existing technologies.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2023.101830

"Gold Open Access Output and Expenditures in the United States in the Past Decade"

In this study we demonstrated some of the main differences in Gold Open Access publications and expenditures across various states and institutions in the United States. Our data shows that the majority of states published between 1,000 – 7,000 Gold Open Access publications and spent up to 6million dollars in the past 10 years. However, there are some noteworthy outliers such as Washington, Minnesota and Maryland with relatively low number of publications and high expenditures while states such as California, Ohio and especially New York which published relatively high number of Gold Open Access papers with relatively low costs comparatively.

https://doi.org/10.55835/64410a4a643beb0d90fc4707

"PeerJ Announces a New Open Access Model and the University of Bath as Their First Institutional Partner"

PeerJ has announced a new Open Access model and their first institutional partner. The award-winning publisher intends to move towards collective action for globally equitable Open Access, and their first step to this goal is a new model for institutional partners — Annual Institutional Memberships (AIMs). AIMs remove payment barriers to Open Access for authors, reduces the administration of Open Access payments, and guarantees value for partners. The University of Bath is PeerJ’s first partner in this new program, which will provide unlimited publishing for Bath’s faculty for a flat annual fee.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/989462

"Project MUSE Announces Strategic Organizational Changes"

To better align with the changing scholarly communications landscape, MUSE has created a new department for Library & Publisher Partnerships. With many of our partner publishers now reporting to libraries, and many libraries now delving into publishing activities, MUSE seeks to create more connections between these two key constituencies. Kelley Squazzo has been appointed Director of Library & Publisher Partnerships, and will oversee both the current publisher relations and library sales teams at MUSE.

https://about.muse.jhu.edu/news/new-organization

"The Semantic Reader Project: Augmenting Scholarly Documents through AI-Powered Interactive Reading Interfaces"

Scholarly publications are key to the transfer of knowledge from scholars to others. However, research papers are information-dense, and as the volume of the scientific literature grows, the need for new technology to support the reading process grows. In contrast to the process of finding papers, which has been transformed by Internet technology, the experience of reading research papers has changed little in decades. The PDF format for sharing research papers is widely used due to its portability, but it has significant downsides including: static content, poor accessibility for low-vision readers, and difficulty reading on mobile devices. This paper explores the question "Can recent advances in AI and HCI power intelligent, interactive, and accessible reading interfaces — even for legacy PDFs?" We describe the Semantic Reader Project, a collaborative effort across multiple institutions to explore automatic creation of dynamic reading interfaces for research papers. Through this project, we’ve developed ten research prototype interfaces and conducted usability studies with more than 300 participants and real-world users showing improved reading experiences for scholars. We’ve also released a production reading interface for research papers that will incorporate the best features as they mature. We structure this paper around challenges scholars and the public face when reading research papers — Discovery, Efficiency, Comprehension, Synthesis, and Accessibility — and present an overview of our progress and remaining open challenges.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14334

How to Save ~ $2.5 Billion: "Saving Time and Money in Biomedical Publishing: The Case for Free-Format Submissions with Minimal Requirements"

By calculating average researcher salaries in the European Union and the USA, and the time spent on reformatting articles, we estimated that ~ 230 million USD were lost in 2021 alone due to reformatting articles. Should the current practice remain unchanged within this decade, we estimate ~ 2.5 billion USD could be lost between 2022 and 2030—solely due to reformatting articles after a first editorial desk rejection.

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-02882-y

"Unpicking Subscribe to Open"

Tricia Miller and Andrea Lopez explain how the [Subscribe to Open] model benefits everyone in the scholarly community.. . .The way S2O works is that existing institutional customers continue to subscribe to the journals. With sufficient support, every new volume is immediately converted to OA under a Creative Commons license and is available for everyone to read and re-use. If support is insufficient, the paywall is retained. The ethos of the model is "equity": there are no fees to publish and no barriers to readership, and it can be applied by journals in any field of research.

https://bit.ly/41nGqjW

Open Science: A Practical Guide for Early-Career Researchers

Beginning researchers are an important link in the transition to Open Science, so this guide is aimed at PhD candidates, Research Master Students, and early-career researchers from all disciplines at Dutch universities and research institutes. [This guide will be very useful to non-Dutch researchers.] It is designed to accompany researchers in every step of their research, from the phase of preparing your research project and discovering relevant resources (chapter 2) to the phase of data collection and analysis (chapter 3), writing and publishing articles, data, and other research output (chapter 4), and outreach and assessment (chapter 5). Every chapter provides you with the best tools and practices to implement immediately.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7716152

"Open Access at a Crossroads: Library Publishing and Bibliodiversity"

The open access movement has gained momentum since the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) first launched twenty years ago. Notably, there has been a drastic increase in the number of open access articles. Concerns have been raised about equality and diversity issues, however, for researchers without an affiliation (e.g. independent, unemployed and retired researchers) and researchers on the "scientific periphery" who are excluded from the gold open access model. This article argues that the gold open access model is destructive to the knowledge production ecosystem by addressing the importance of bibliodiversity and the ways in which library publishing can contribute to sustainable and equitable knowledge production.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.613

"Springer Nature Doublespeak"

Let’s take a close look at what SN says in its advice on this matter to authors:

"Springer Nature only ever assesses manuscripts on their editorial merit. If primary research manuscripts contain Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) language, they will not be rejected on the grounds of its inclusion, and we will not remove that text before publication if it is included in a section that is a normal part of the published primary research article."

The information gets off to a good start. Assessing manuscripts on editorial merit alone is something any author would want to be reassured about. Equally, authors will be pleased to learn that, even if they include rights retention language, SN will not amend the author’s text by removing the RR statement that the author included in the text they created and provided at no charge to SN for publication. So far, so good. The information continues:

"Authors should note, however, that manuscripts containing statements about open licensing of accepted manuscripts (AMs) can only be published via the immediate gold open access (OA) route, to ensure that authors are not making conflicting licensing commitments, and can comply with any funder or institutional requirements for immediate OA."

This is where things start to get tricksy. Translation &mdash: if the author assigns a prior licence to their AAM and submits the manuscript to a SN subscription journal that also offers an Open Access (OA) option (sometimes known as a hybrid journal), then the publisher will only accept it if the author pays for OA publication (sometimes known as ‘gold’ OA). Mind you, SN is not rejecting the manuscript outright; it’s just that they will ONLY accept it if the author pays. So by extension, if they don’t pay, SN won’t publish the paper, which amounts to a rejection. However hard I try, I can’t seem to tally "only be published via the immediate gold open access (OA) route" with "only accepting manuscripts on their editorial merit." The wording is slippery here. Like those politicians, SN doesn’t ACTUALLY state that if you don’t, won’t or can’t pay, they will reject your paper. But in practice, that is exactly what they imply. This is pure smoke and mirrors.

https://bit.ly/44rWrbr

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

"Supporting Diamond Open Access Journals. Interest and Feasibility of Direct Funding Mechanisms"

More and more academics and governements consider that the open access model based on Article Processing Charges (APC) is problematic, not only due to the inequalities it generates and reinforces, but also because it has become unsustainable and even opposed to open access values. They consider that scientific publishing based on a model where both authors and readers do not pay, the so-called Diamond, or non-APC model, should be developed and supported. However, beyond the display of such a support on an international scale, the landscape of Diamond journals is rather in the form of loosely connected archipelagos, and not systematically funded. This article explores the practical conditions to implement a direct funding mechanism to such journals, that is reccurent money provided by a funder to support the publication process. Following several recommendations from institutional actors in the open access world, we consider the hypothesis that such a funding would be fostered by research funding organizations (RFOs), which have been essential to the expansion of the APC model, and now show interest in supporting other models. Based on a questionnaire survey sent to more than 1000 Diamond Open Access journals, this article analyzes their financial needs, as well as their capacity to interact with funders. It is structured around four issues regarding the implementation of a direct funding model: do Diamond journals really make use of money, and to what end? Do they need additional money? Are they able to engage monetary transactions? Are they able to meet RFOs visibility requirements? We show that a majority of OA Diamond journals could make use of a direct funding mechanism with certain adjustments. We conclude on the challenges that such a financial stream would spur.

https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.05.03.539231

"OA and the Academy: Evaluating an OA Fund with Authors’ Input"

The University Libraries at Virginia Tech established an Open Access Subvention Fund (OASF) in August 2012. Although it began as a two-year pilot project, the Fund has continued to the present. Anyone at Virginia Tech is eligible to apply for funding to offset the cost of an article processing charge to publish in an open access journal. To learn more about user perceptions of the OASF and open access in general, we surveyed everyone who had requested support. The survey, conducted during the fall of 2019, provided a means to gauge the needs of our users, seek feedback on the request and award process, and gather input on the fund guidelines. In this article, we review our findings in the hope that the lessons learned will be useful to other libraries in assessing similar open access subvention funds.

https://bit.ly/3nxjUHs

"Review of Research on Predatory Scientific Publications from Scopus Database between 2012 and 2022"

This study also reveals the complexity of issues and research trends around the topic of predatory scientific publications, including the review process for scientific journals, publication fees and article processing charges, open science and open-access publications, and the like and related topics such as the impact on scholars in developing countries and academic ethics. Finally, this article provides several recommendations, namely, the need for more efficient criteria to evaluate the quality of scientific journals, more public communication on the importance of ethics in research and publication, and a greater awareness among scholars and organizations of the implications of the "predator" issue in scientific publishing.

https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp-2022-0045

"Spain Adopts National Open Access Strategy"

Spain has approved a four-year national strategy for open science, under which all outputs of publicly financed research will made available free upon publication.

Under the strategy open access will become the default mode for all research funded directly or indirectly, with public funds. . . .

A budget of €23.8 million in 2023 will be maintained annually until 2027.

https://bit.ly/414w2gY

Paywall: "’Significant Reservations’ on UK’s Springer Nature Open-Access Deal"

These concerns centred on the high cost of publishing open access outside the agreement and limited transparency, particularly regarding how Springer Nature’s article-processing charges (APCs) are calculated, with gold open access for Nature priced at £8,490. Springer Nature was one of several major publishers — along with Elsevier — which opted in November not to participate in Plan S’ Journal Comparison Service, in which journals shared information about their costs and services.

https://bit.ly/44nG8wf

Academic Publishing and Open Access. What Does Economics Teach Us?

While the gold regime seems the most natural way to achieve open access, a generalized switch to open access may also have undesired consequences: projections indeed suggest that a massive move towards the gold regime would generate an explosion in the amount of APC unless there are controls to limit market power. Beside the sharp increase in APC, the shift to gold open access may create conflicts of interest for publishers given that their income comes from authors and may alter the quality of publications. The green regime, by introducing competition between the journal’s version of an article and a free public version, seems an efficient way to reduce market power while expanding access.

https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04080573

"What Can I Do with This? Indicators of Usage Rights in the User Interface "

With the continued push towards open access (OA) and the complicated nature of copyright law, users are often left wondering what they can do with the scholarly articles they find. Creative Commons (CC) licenses are the predominant mechanism for communicating usage rights; however, finding the CC license information — or being confident that there is not any — can be a challenge. Today we report on a project to investigate how publisher platforms represent CC licenses for OA and non-OA journal articles. We looked at how publishing platforms indicate usage rights for articles in results displays as well as in full-text formats.

https://bit.ly/3HwTZq1

"Wiley Removes Goodin as Editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy (Updated)"

[Comments by Anna Stilz, Princeton] Wiley has recently signed a number of major open-access agreements: this means that increasingly, they get their revenue through author fees for each article they publish (often covered now by public grant agencies), rather than library subscriptions. Their current company-wide strategy for maximizing revenue is to force the journals they own to publish as many articles as possible to generate maximum author fees. . . .

Wiley is not asking that we consider publishing a few more pieces that fall at the borderline and are tough judgment calls. They are asking that we increase the number of articles we publish by a factor of 10, and that we continue increasing that number year after year.

https://bit.ly/42co3zq

"To Preprint or Not to Preprint: Experience and Attitudes of Researchers Worldwide"

The pandemic has underlined the significance of open science and spurred further growth of preprinting. Nevertheless, preprinting has been adopted at varying rates across different countries/regions. To investigate researchers’ experience with and attitudes toward preprinting, we conducted a survey of authors of research papers published in 2021 or 2022. We find that respondents in the US and Europe had a higher level of familiarity with and adoption of preprinting than those in China and the rest of the world. Respondents in China were most worried about the lack of recognition for preprinting and the risk of getting scooped. US respondents were very concerned about premature media coverage of preprints, the reliability and credibility of preprints, and public sharing of information before peer review. Respondents identified integration of preprinting in journal submission processes as the most important way to promote preprinting.

https://doi.org/10.55835/6442f782b2b5580ba561406b

"The Scholarly Fingerprinting Industry"

Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, Wiley, and SAGE: Many researchers know that the five giant firms publish most of the world’s scholarship. Fifty years of acquisitions and journal launches have yielded a stunningly profitable oligopoly, built up from academics’ unpaid writing-and-editing labor. Their business is a form of IP rentiership—collections of title-by-title prestige monopolies that, in the case of Nature or The Lancet, underwrite a stable of spinoff journals on the logic of the Hollywood franchise. Less well-known is that Elsevier and its peers are layering a second business on top of their legacy publishing operations, fueled by data extraction. They are packaging researcher behavior, gleaned from their digital platforms, into prediction products, which they sell back to universities and other clients. Their raw material is scholars’ citations, abstracts, downloads, and reading habits, repurposed into dashboard services that, for example, track researcher productivity. Elsevier and the other oligopolist firms are fast becoming, in other words, surveillance publishers. And they are using the windfall profits from their existing APC-and-subscription business to finance their moves into predictive analytics.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/yu34t

"Open Access and International Co-authorship: A Longitudinal Study of the United Arab Emirates Research Output"

This study investigates the interplay between open access (OA), co-authorship, and international research collaboration. While previous research has dealt with these factors separately, there is a knowledge gap in how these interact within a single dataset. The data includes all Scopus-indexed journal articles published over 11 years (2009–2019) where at least one of the authors has an affiliation to a United Arab Emirates (UAE) institution (30 400 articles in total). For assessment of OA status of articles, the study utilized Unpaywall data for articles with a digital object identifier, and manual web searches for articles without. There was consistently strong growth in publication volume counts as well as shares of OA articles across the years. The analysis provides statistically significant results supporting a positive relationship between a higher number of co-authors, in particular international, and OA status of articles.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00256

"Missing a Golden Opportunity? An Analysis of Publication Trends by Income Level in the Directory of Open Access Journals 1987–2020"

This study examines publication trends in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) journals by countries’ income level from 1987 to 2020. By combining article metadata from journals listed in the DOAJ with World Bank country income data, this analysis examines the trends visible in plots of historical open access publication data. In 2020, the number of articles published in DOAJ journals by authors affiliated with high-income countries exceeds the sum of the other income categories. Article processing charge waivers seem to have more impact on high- and low-income countries than middle-income countries. The results show that the gold open access model has not been able to improve the extremely low number of open access articles from low-income regions. In addition, authors in middle-income countries publish in gold open access DOAJ journals at lower rates than authors based in other economic regions.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1543