Category: Scholarly Journals

"Open Access Policies of Leading Medical Journals: A Cross-Sectional Study"

Tim S. Ellison et al. have published "Open Access Policies of Leading Medical Journals: A Cross-Sectional Study" in BMJ Open (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Here's an excerpt:

Objectives Academical and not-for-profit research funders are increasingly requiring that the research they fund must be published open access, with some insisting on publishing with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to allow the broadest possible use. We aimed to clarify the open access variants provided by leading medical journals and record the availability of the CC BY licence for commercially funded research.

Methods We identified medical journals with a 2015 impact factor of =15.0 on 24 May 2017, then excluded from the analysis journals that only publish review articles. Between 29 June 2017 and 26 July 2017, we collected information about each journal's open access policies from their websites and/or by email contact. We contacted the journals by email again between 6 December 2017 and 2 January 2018 to confirm our findings.

Results Thirty-five medical journals publishing original research from 13 publishers were included in the analysis. All 35 journals offered some form of open access allowing articles to be free-to-read, either immediately on publication or after a delay of up to 12 months. Of these journals, 21 (60%) provided immediate open access with a CC BY licence under certain circumstances (eg, to specific research funders). Of these 21, 20 only offered a CC BY licence to authors funded by non-commercial organisations and one offered this option to any funder who required it.

Conclusions Most leading medical journals do not offer to authors reporting commercially funded research an open access licence that allows unrestricted sharing and adaptation of the published material. The journals' policies are therefore not aligned with open access declarations and guidelines. Commercial research funders lag behind academical funders in the development of mandatory open access policies, and it is time for them to work with publishers to advance the dissemination of the research they fund.

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"Assessing the Size of the Affordability Problem in Scholarly Publishing"

Alexander Grossmann and Björn Brembs have self-archived "Assessing the Size of the Affordability Problem in Scholarly Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

For many decades, the hyperinflation of subscription prices for scholarly journals have concerned scholarly institutions. After years of fruitless efforts to solve this "serials crisis", open access has been proposed as the latest potential solution. However, also the prices for open access publishing are high and are rising well beyond inflation. What has been missing from the public discussion so far is a quantitative approach to determine the actual costs of efficiently publishing a scholarly article using state-of-the-art technologies, such that informed decisions can be made as to appropriate price levels. Here we provide a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving. We find that these costs range from less than US$200 per article in modern, large scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review, to about US$1,000 per article in prestigious journals with rejection rates exceeding 90%. The publication costs for a representative scholarly article today come to lie at around US$400. We discuss the additional non-publication items that make up the difference between publication costs and final price.

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Louisiana State University Drops the Big Deal: "Elsevier Changes: Message from the Provost"

Louisiana State University has released "Elsevier Changes: Message from the Provost."

Here's an excerpt:

During the Faculty Senate's final meeting of the spring semester, senators approved a resolution recommending the cancellation of the subscription package of Elsevier journals. Going forward, the Libraries will subscribe to Elsevier journals on a title-by-title basis, retaining the most highly used journals by the LSU community. The resolution further called for the creation of expedited document delivery to provide fast, unmediated access to articles in journals not on subscription.

The LSU administration supports this course of action. Once the current contract with Elsevier expires at the end of 2019, LSU will break away from the package agreement, and expects to spend $1 million on Elsevier titles, subscribing to fewer journals and providing access to all previously available material through alternate sources.

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"Springer Nature Journals Unify Their Policy to Encourage Preprint Sharing"

Springer Nature has released "Springer Nature Journals Unify Their Policy to Encourage Preprint Sharing."

Here's an excerpt:

Recognizing these benefits, we are now pleased to announce an updated policy encouraging preprint sharing for Springer Nature journals. This intends to remove ambiguity on two important points. First, we now make it clear that authors may choose any licence for preprints, including Creative Commons licences. . . .

Second, the updated policy provides more information about our position on author engagement with the media in response to enquiries about preprints. . . .Finally, we stand by our policy supporting citation of preprints in reference lists of submitted and published manuscripts.

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