Category: Scholarly Journals

"The New Plugins—What Goals Are the Access Solutions Pursuing?"

Kent Anderson has published "The New Plugins—What Goals Are the Access Solutions Pursuing?" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

We now see some interesting positioning moves by entities with plugins designed to exploit Green OA or address access issues in a virtual, seemingly decentralized way—Unpaywall, Kopernio, and Anywhere Access.

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"The Rent’s Too High: Self-Archive for Fair Online Publication Costs"

Robert T. Thibault, Amanda MacPherson, Stevan Harnad, Amir Raza have self-archived "The Rent's Too High: Self-Archive for Fair Online Publication Costs."

Here's an excerpt:

The main contributors of scientific knowledge, researchers, generally aim to disseminate their findings far and wide. And yet, publishing companies have largely kept these findings behind a paywall. With digital publication technology markedly reducing cost, this enduring wall seems disproportionate and unjustified; moreover, it has sparked a topical exchange concerning how to modernize academic publishing. This discussion, however, seems to focus on how to compensate major publishers for providing open access through a "pay to publish" model, in turn transferring financial burdens from libraries to authors and their funders. Large publishing companies, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, PLoS, and Frontiers, continue to earn exorbitant revenues each year, hundreds of millions of dollars of which now come from processing charges for open-access articles. A less expensive and equally accessible alternative exists: widespread self-archiving of peer-reviewed articles. All we need is awareness of this alternative and the will to employ it

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"How Open Is Open Access Research in Library and Information Science?"

Wanyenda Leonard Chilimo and Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha have published "How Open Is Open Access Research in Library and Information Science?" in the South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science.

Here's an excerpt:

The study investigates Library and Information Science (LIS) journals that published research articles between 2003 and 2013, which were about open access (OA) and were indexed in LIS databases. The purpose was to investigate the journals’ OA policies, ascertain the degree to which these policies facilitate OA to publications, and investigate whether such texts are also available as OA. The results show that literature growth in the domain has been significant, with a total of 1,402 articles produced during the eleven years under study. The OA policies of the fifty-six journals that published the highest number of articles were analysed. The results show that most articles (404; 41%) were published in hybrid journals, whereas 272 (29.7%) appeared in OA journals. Some 143 (53%) of the articles published in hybrid journals were available as green OA copies. In total, 602 (66%) of all the articles published were available as OA. The results show that the adoption of OA for research articles on that very subject is somewhat higher than in other fields. The study calls on LIS professionals to be conversant with the OA policies of the various journals that may publish their research.

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"Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus: A Systematic Comparison of Citations in 252 Subject Categories"

Alberto Martín-Martín have self-archived "Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus: A Systematic Comparison of Citations in 252 Subject Categories."

Here's an excerpt:

Despite citation counts from Google Scholar (GS), Web of Science (WoS), and Scopus being widely consulted by researchers and sometimes used in research evaluations, there is no recent or systematic evidence about the differences between them. In response, this paper investigates 2,448,055 citations to 2,299 English-language highly-cited documents from 252 GS subject categories published in 2006, comparing GS, the WoS Core Collection, and Scopus. GS consistently found the largest percentage of citations across all areas (93%-96%), far ahead of Scopus (35%-77%) and WoS (27%-73%). GS found nearly all the WoS (95%) and Scopus (92%) citations. Most citations found only by GS were from non-journal sources (48%-65%), including theses, books, conference papers, and unpublished materials. Many were non-English (19%-38%).. . . The results suggest that in all areas GS citation data is essentially a superset of WoS and Scopus, with substantial extra coverage.

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Directory of Open Access Journals Under Attack

Clara Armengou, DOAJ Project and Communications Manager, reports on 8/12/2018 on Liblicense that:

After much investigation and active measures, we can state that the DOAJ is effectively under attack from an unknown third party.

We have deployed a number of counter-measures to halt this attack, but with limited success, and are therefore forced to take even more extreme measures to attempt to mitigate this. We hope that this will work but we cannot predict the outcome at this stage.

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European Commission: "Trends for Open Access to Publications"

The European Commission has released Trends for Open Access to Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

Data and case studies covering access to scientific publications. Bibliometric data as well as well as data on the policies of journals and funders are available. . . .

See also: Open Science Monitor Methodological Note.

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"Populating the Data Ark: An Attempt to Retrieve, Preserve, and Liberate Data from the Most Highly-Cited Psychology and Psychiatry Articles"

Tom E. Hardwicke and John P. A. Ioannidis have published "Populating the Data Ark: An Attempt to Retrieve, Preserve, and Liberate Data from the Most Highly-Cited Psychology and Psychiatry Articles" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

The vast majority of scientific articles published to-date have not been accompanied by concomitant publication of the underlying research data upon which they are based. This state of affairs precludes the routine re-use and re-analysis of research data, undermining the efficiency of the scientific enterprise, and compromising the credibility of claims that cannot be independently verified. It may be especially important to make data available for the most influential studies that have provided a foundation for subsequent research and theory development. Therefore, we launched an initiative—the Data Ark—to examine whether we could retrospectively enhance the preservation and accessibility of important scientific data. Here we report the outcome of our efforts to retrieve, preserve, and liberate data from 111 of the most highly-cited articles published in psychology and psychiatry between 2006–2011 (n = 48) and 2014–2016 (n = 63). Most data sets were not made available (76/111, 68%, 95% CI [60, 77]), some were only made available with restrictions (20/111, 18%, 95% CI [10, 27]), and few were made available in a completely unrestricted form (15/111, 14%, 95% CI [5, 22]). Where extant data sharing systems were in place, they usually (17/22, 77%, 95% CI [54, 91]) did not allow unrestricted access. Authors reported several barriers to data sharing, including issues related to data ownership and ethical concerns. The Data Ark initiative could help preserve and liberate important scientific data, surface barriers to data sharing, and advance community discussions on data stewardship.

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"Falling Prey to a Predatory OA Publisher: Individual Failure or Community Problem?"

Richard Poynder has published ""Falling Prey to a Predatory OA Publisher: Individual Failure or Community Problem?" in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

As it happens I discovered last year that in 2016 COPE published a case study exemplifying the kind of deceptive practices predatory publishers engage in, and in which it mooted a solution.

The COPE case study points out that because, as a rule, predatory publishers do not ask for copyright to be assigned to them, authors are able to demand that their paper is taken down. Once they have done that, the case study adds, they can then resubmit the paper to a "legitimate journal" with an editorial note explaining what had happened.

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Assessing The Open Access Effect for Hybrid Journals

Springer Nature has released Assessing The Open Access Effect for Hybrid Journals.

Here's an excerpt:

In partnership with Digital Science, we analysed a global sample of over 70,000 articles published in Springer Nature hybrid journals. Our new white paper, Assessing the open access effect for hybrid journals, examines the relationship between open access (OA) and impact, demonstrating the wider value hybrid journals bring to researchers, funders, institutions, and society more broadly.

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