E-Prints – Page 2 – DigitalKoans

Paywall: "The Scientific Periphery and New Flows of Knowledge: The Case of Regional Preprint Servers"

It is unclear whether regional rather than global or discipline-focussed preprint platforms as an innovation in the communication of science are removing any of the barriers faced by researchers in the scientific periphery or whether they are increasing access to and visibility of science from the periphery. In response, this paper focusses on the uptake, visibility and academic impact of regional preprint publishing platforms in two peripheral regions (Africa and Latin America) to gain insights into the use and possible impact of regional preprint servers.

https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0153

"Promotion of Scientific Publications on ArXiv and X Is on the Rise and Impacts Citations"

Here, based on a large dataset of computer science publications, we study trends in the use of early preprint publications and revisions on ArXiv and the use of X (formerly Twitter) for promotion of such papers in the last 10 years. We find that early submission to ArXiv and promotion on X have soared in recent years. Estimating the effect that the use of each of these modern affordances has on the number of citations of scientific publications, we find that in the first 5 years from an initial publication peer-reviewed conference papers submitted early to ArXiv gain on average 21.1±17.4 more citations, revised on ArXiv gain 18.4±17.6 more citations, and promoted on X gain 44.4±8 more citations. Our results show that promoting one’s work on ArXiv or X has a large impact on the number of citations, as well as the number of influential citations computed by Semantic Scholar, and thereby on the career of researchers. We discuss the far-reaching implications of these findings for future scientific publishing systems and measures of scientific impact.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11116

"Self-Archiving Adoption in Legal Scholarly Communication: A Literature Review;"

This article explores the current Library and Information Science (LIS) literature on open access and self-archiving and related studies. . . It further investigates the open access and self-archiving practices in disciplinary . . . Finally, it examines self-archiving in law and concludes that the research gap and lack of literature on self-archiving in the discipline of law makes this study worthwhile.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13614576.2023.2279760

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Where Did the Open Access Movement Go Wrong?: An Interview with Richard Poynder"

Open access was intended to solve three problems that have long blighted scholarly communication — the problems of accessibility, affordability, and equity. 20+ years after the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) we can see that the movement has signally failed to solve the latter two problems. And with the geopolitical situation deteriorating solving the accessibility problem now also looks to be at risk. The OA dream of "universal open access" remains a dream and seems likely to remain one.

https://tinyurl.com/fcxj5ew2

How did the three foundational statements about open access (the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities) actually define it?

Current State and Future Directions for Open Repositories in Europe

In January 2023, OpenAIRE, LIBER, SPARC Europe, and COAR launched a joint strategy aimed at strengthening the European repository network. As a first step, a survey of the European repository landscape was undertaken in February-March 2023. The survey found that, collectively, European repositories acquire, preserve and provide open access to tens or possibly hundreds of millions of valuable research outputs and represent critical, not-for-profit infrastructure in the European open science landscape. They are used for sharing articles that may be pay-walled in published journals, but also for providing access to a large variety of other types of research outputs including research data, theses/dissertations, conference papers, preprints, code, and so on.

However, in order to ensure the European repository network is fit for purpose and able to support the evolving needs of the research community, the survey also identified three areas in particular that could be strengthened: maintaining up-to-date, highly functioning software platforms; applying consistent and comprehensive good practices in terms of metadata, preservation, and usage statistics; and gaining appropriate visibility in the scholarly ecosystem.

Despite the challenges, the current climate offers exciting opportunities for repositories. Many funders are actively promoting the repository route for articles because of their role in supporting equitable access to content (i.e. no fees to access or deposit). The value proposition for open science is growing and repositories are increasingly recognised as the main mechanism for collecting and providing access to a wide range of other research outputs. Add to this, the nascent, but growing, interest in the publish-review-curate model in which repositories have a central function, and it seems they are well placed to expand their current role in the ecosystem.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10255559

"US Repository Network Launches Pilot to Enhance Discoverability of Open Access Content in Repositories"

In November, the US Repository Network (USRN) will launch a pilot project aimed at improving the discoverability of articles in repositories. This pilot project involves the use of services from CORE, a not-for-profit aggregator based at Open University in the UK, to evaluate and improve local repository practices. Additional technical support will be provided by Antleaf Ltd.

As part of the project, CORE will aggregate the metadata and full text of articles from a subset of US repositories, allowing them to be findable through a centralized discovery service with prominent links back to the original full text of the repository. At the same time, the project will assess current practices related to metadata quality, the tracking of Open Access deposits, the use of PIDs, technical support for OAI-PMH, and the adoption of more recent protocols, such as FAIR Signposting. At the level of the centralized aggregation, CORE will enrich the existing US metadata with information from its larger international aggregation. A Dashboard service for participating institutions will be provided, enabling them to assess, validate and monitor their practices.

https://tinyurl.com/2utfpvj3

"The State of Green Open Access in Canadian Universities"

This study investigates the use of institutional repositories for self-archiving peer-reviewed work in the U15 (an association of fifteen Canadian research-intensive universities). It relates usage with university open access (OA) policy types and publisher policy embargoes. We show that of all articles found in OpenAlex attributed to U15 researchers, 45.1 to 56.6% are available as Gold or Green OA, yet only 0.5 to 10.7% (mean 4.2%) of these can be found on their respective U15 IRs. Our investigation shows a lack of OA policies from most institutions, journal policies with embargoes exceeding 12 months, and incomplete policy information.

https://doi.org/10.5206/cjils-rcsib.v46i2.15358

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"FAIR EVA: Bringing Institutional Multidisciplinary Repositories into the FAIR Picture"

The FAIR Principles are a set of good practices to improve the reproducibility and quality of data in an Open Science context. Different sets of indicators have been proposed to evaluate the FAIRness of digital objects, including datasets that are usually stored in repositories or data portals. However, indicators like those proposed by the Research Data Alliance are provided from a high-level perspective that can be interpreted and they are not always realistic to particular environments like multidisciplinary repositories. This paper describes FAIR EVA, a new tool developed within the European Open Science Cloud context that is oriented to particular data management systems like open repositories, which can be customized to a specific case in a scalable and automatic environment. It aims to be adaptive enough to work for different environments, repository software and disciplines, taking into account the flexibility of the FAIR Principles. As an example, we present DIGITAL.CSIC repository as the first target of the tool, gathering the particular needs of a multidisciplinary institution as well as its institutional repository.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02652-8

Zenodo Mandates Document Submission to a Community and Peer Review

What’s more, content submitted to Zenodo would be published automatically within the repository before and whether or not it was accepted into a community. Now, when a researcher goes to publish their outputs, they must select their community and submit their work for peer review, before it is made public. Community curators will then review the content to see if it fits within the community even have the capability to improve and correct the metadata to ensure that it meets quality standards. Once the metadata is approved, it will then be published in Zenodo and, consequently, integrated into the OpenAIRE Graph.

https://tinyurl.com/5y79y2nb

Paywall: "FAST Headings in MODS: Michigan State University Libraries Digital Repository Case Study"

Since 2016, the [MSUL] digital repository has been using Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) subject headings as its primary subject vocabulary. . . The MSUL FAST use case presents some challenges that are not addressed by existing MARC-focused FAST tools. This paper will outline the MSUL digital repository team’s justification for including FAST headings in the digital repository as well as workflows for adding FAST headings to Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) metadata, their maintenance, and utilization for discovery.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2023.2213708

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$2,500 Fee: "COAR’s response to the American Chemical Society’s New Fee or Repository Deposit"

COAR strongly objects to this charge for the following reasons:

Authors own their manuscripts and should retain their rights. Authors typically hold the copyright to their research, but too often transfer those rights to publishers when publishing their manuscript. When authors retain the copyright to their manuscript, they have the right to disseminate and use their own manuscript as they choose. If authors’ rights are retained, publishers do not own an article accepted manuscript (AAM) and researchers should not be duped into paying a fee to exercise a right they already have.

This fee is in direct contravention with the ethos of open science and scholarship and equity. . .

ACS is charging $2,500 while providing no added value. There is not a fee for an extra service offered. It requires no extra work on the side of the publisher, but rather is an attempt to develop a new revenue stream, while at the same time they will be receiving funds from subscriptions and pay-to-access for this same article.

ACS is creating a false impression about compliance with funder policies. . . . A fee is only required if you want to publish in an ACS journal and sign over your rights.

See ACS’ "Open Access Pricing for Authors: The Power of Choice" for more fee details.

https://tinyurl.com/4u4dfxsk

"Preprint Review Services: Disrupting the Scholarly Communication Landscape?"

The most important tension that we identified relates to anonymisation of reviewers and authors. In line with the ideas of the Democracy & Transparency school, preprint review services promote more open forms of peer review in which authors and reviewers participate on a more equal basis. However, from the perspective of the Equity & Inclusion school, this raises concerns. To make peer review processes more equitable and inclusiv e, this school emphasises the importance of enabling anonymisation of reviewers and possibly also authors, which is in tension with the focus on openness and transparency of preprint review services.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/8c6xm

Access to Science and Scholarship: Key Questions about the Future of Research Publishing

The health of the research enterprise is closely tied to the effectiveness of the scientific and scholarly publishing ecosystem. Policy-, technology-, and market-driven changes in publishing models over the last two decades have triggered a number of disruptions within this ecosystem:

Ongoing increases in the cost of journal publishing, with dominant open access models shifting costs from subscribers to authors

Significant consolidation and vertical (supply chain) integration in the publishing industry, and a decline in society-owned subscription journals that have long subsidized scientific and scholarly societies

A dramatic increase in the number of "predatory" journals with substandard peer review

Decline in the purchasing power of academic libraries relative to the quantity and cost of published research

To illustrate how researcher behavior, funder policies, and publisher business models and incentives interact, this report presents an historical overview of open access publishing. The report also provides a list of key questions for further investigation to understand, measure, and best prepare for the impact of new policies related to open access in research publishing, categorized into six general areas: access and business models, research data, preprint publishing, peer review, costs to researchers and universities, and infrastructure.

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/152414

"Disappearing Repositories — Taking an Infrastructure Perspective on the Long-Term Availability of Research Data"

Currently, there is limited research investigating the phenomenon of research data repositories being shut down, and the impact this has on the long-term availability of data. This paper takes an infrastructure perspective on the preservation of research data by using a registry to identify 191 research data repositories that have been closed and presenting information on the shutdown process. The results show that 6.2 % of research data repositories indexed in the registry were shut down. The risks resulting in repository shutdown are varied. The median age of a repository when shutting down is 12 years. Strategies to prevent data loss at the infrastructure level are pursued to varying extent. 44 % of the repositories in the sample migrated data to another repository, and 12 % maintain limited access to their data collection. However, both strategies are not permanent solutions. Finally, the general lack of information on repository shutdown events as well as the effect on the findability of data and the permanence of the scholarly record are discussed.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06712

"Preprints Are Now Searchable on Scopus!"

In total, we have 1.8M preprint records in Scopus (as of June 2023) from the following seven preprint servers:

arXiv

ChemRxiv

bioRxiv

medRxiv

SSRN

TechRxiv

Research Square

https://tinyurl.com/4jp2nayv

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

The book consists of three parts. Part I offers definitions of scholarly communication and scholarly communication librarianship and provides an introduction to the social, economic, technological, and policy/legal pressures that underpin and shape scholarly communication work in libraries. These pressures, which have framed ACRL’s understanding of scholarly communication for the better part of the past two decades, have unsettled many foundational assumptions and practices in the field, removing core pillars of scholarly communication as it was practiced in the twentieth century. These pressures have also cleared fresh ground, and scholarly communication practitioners have begun to seed the space with values and practices designed to renew and often improve the field. Part II begins with an introduction to "open," the core response to the pressures described in part I. This part offers a general overview of the idea of openness in scholarly communication followed by chapters on different permutations and practices of open, each edited by a recognized expert of these areas with authors of their selection. Amy Buckland edited chapter 2.1, "Open Access." Brianna Marshall edited chapter 2.2, "Open Data." Lillian Hogendoorn edited chapter 2.3, "Open Education." Micah Vandegrift edited chapter 2.4, "Open Science and Infrastructure." Each of them brought on incredible expertise through contributors whom they identified, through both original contributions and repurposing existing openly licensed work, which is something we want to model where possible. Part III consists of twenty-four concise perspectives, intersections, and case studies from practicing librarians and closely related stakeholders, which we hope will stimulate discussion and reflection on theory and implications for practice. In every single case, we’re really excited by the editors and authors and the ideas they bring to the whole. Each contribution features light pedagogical apparatuses like suggested further reading, discussion or reflection prompts, and potential activities. It’s all available for free and openly licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) license, so anyone is encouraged to grab whatever parts are useful and to adapt and repurpose and improve them to meet specific course goals and student needs within the confines of the license.

https://bit.ly/SCLAOK

Reviewed Preprints Published Change: "eLife New Model at Six Months: An ICOR analysis"

Submissions are steady, and the proportion of papers sent for review is similar in the two models.

Reviewed Preprints are visible earlier than traditionally peer-reviewed articles, which provides a middle ground between unreviewed preprints and published VORs.

Author demographics have not changed significantly with regard to discipline or geography.

Authors, Senior Editors, and Reviewing Editors are reporting largely favorable experiences with the new model, with some concerns about quality and suggestions regarding process being voiced.

https://tinyurl.com/3u9w46fe

"Transforming Scholarly Communications: The Part Played by the Pandemic and the Contribution of Early Career Researchers"

Investigates whether junior researchers believe that the scholarly communication system is changing in a significant way, whether they have contributed to the changes they envisaged, whether the pandemic has fast-forwarded change and what they thought a transformed system might look like. The data are drawn from the Harbingers-2 project, which investigated the impact of the pandemic on the scholarly communications attitudes and behaviours of early career researchers (ECRs). . . . A majority of ECRs thought that there had been significant changes in the scholarly system, and a large minority thought that the pandemic was responsible. Most of them wanted a system that was more open in terms of open access and open data, with a third taking personal action to bring about change.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1576

"The State of Scientific PDF Accessibility in Repositories: A Survey in Switzerland"

This survey analyzes the quality of the portable document format (PDF) documents in online repositories in Switzerland, examining their accessibility for people with visual impairments. Two minimal accessibility features were analysed: the PDFs had to have tags and a hierarchical heading structure. The survey also includes interviews with the managers or heads of multiple Swiss universities’ repositories . . . An analysis of interviewee responses indicates an overall lack of awareness of PDF accessibility, and shows that online repositories currently have no concrete plans to address the issue. This paper concludes by presenting a set of recommendations for online repositories to improve the accessibility of their PDF documents.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1581

"PreprintResolver: Improving Citation Quality by Resolving Published Versions of ArXiv Preprints using Literature Databases"

The growing impact of preprint servers enables the rapid sharing of time-sensitive research. Likewise, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish high-quality, peer-reviewed research from preprints. Although preprints are often later published in peer-reviewed journals, this information is often missing from preprint servers. To overcome this problem, the PreprintResolver was developed, which uses four literature databases (DBLP, SemanticScholar, OpenAlex, and CrossRef / CrossCite) to identify preprint-publication pairs for the arXiv preprint server. . . . Experiments were performed on a sample of 1,000 arXiv-preprints from the research field of computer science and without any publication information. . . . The results show that the PreprintResolver was able to resolve 603 out of 1,000 (60.3 %) arXiv-preprints from the research field of computer science and without any publication information. . . . In conclusion the PreprintResolver is suitable for individual, manually reviewed requests, but less suitable for bulk requests. The PreprintResolver tool (this https URL, Available from 2023-08-01) and source code (this https URL, Accessed: 2023-07-19) is available online.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01373

"The Experiences of COVID-19 Preprint Authors: A Survey of Researchers about Publishing and Receiving Feedback on Their Work during the Pandemic"

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a rise in preprinting, triggered by the need for open and rapid dissemination of research outputs. We surveyed authors of COVID-19 preprints to learn about their experiences with preprinting their work and also with publishing their work in a peer-reviewed journal. Our research had the following objectives: 1. to learn about authors’ experiences with preprinting, their motivations, and future intentions; 2. to consider preprints in terms of their effectiveness in enabling authors to receive feedback on their work; 3. to compare the impact of feedback on preprints with the impact of comments of editors and reviewers on papers submitted to journals. In our survey, 78% of the new adopters of preprinting reported the intention to also preprint their future work. The boost in preprinting may therefore have a structural effect that will last after the pandemic, although future developments will also depend on other factors, including the broader growth in the adoption of open science practices. A total of 53% of the respondents reported that they had received feedback on their preprints. However, more than half of the feedback was received through "closed" channels–privately to the authors. This means that preprinting was a useful way to receive feedback on research, but the value of feedback could be increased further by facilitating and promoting "open" channels for preprint feedback. Almost a quarter of the feedback received by respondents consisted of detailed comments, showing the potential of preprint feedback to provide valuable comments on research. Respondents also reported that, compared to preprint feedback, journal peer review was more likely to lead to major changes to their work, suggesting that journal peer review provides significant added value compared to feedback received on preprints.

https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.15864

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Paywall: "Proactive Institutional Repository Collection Development Techniques: Archiving Gold Open Access Articles and Metadata Retrieved with Web Scraping"

This article describes a method for copying open access articles and corresponding descriptive metadata from open repositories for archiving in an institutional repository using Beautiful Soup and Selenium as web scraping tools. This method quickly added hundreds of articles to an IR without relying on faculty participation or consulting publisher policies, increasing repository downloads and usage.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2023.2240190

"The Emergence of Preprints: Comparing Publishing Behaviour in the Global South and the Global North"

Purpose: The recent proliferation of preprints could be a way for researchers worldwide to increase the availability and visibility of their research findings. Against the background of rising publication costs caused by the increasing prevalence of article processing fees, the search for other ways to publish research results besides traditional journal publication may increase. This could be especially true for lower-income countries. Design/methodology/approach: Therefore, we are interested in the experiences and attitudes towards posting and using preprints in the Global South as opposed to the Global North. To explore whether motivations and concerns about posting preprints differ, we adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining a quantitative survey of researchers with focus group interviews. Findings: We found that respondents from the Global South were more likely to agree to adhere to policies and to emphasise that mandates could change publishing behaviour towards open access. They were also more likely to agree posting preprints has a positive impact. Respondents from the Global South and the Global North emphasised the importance of peer-reviewed research for career advancement. Originality: The study has identified a wide range of experiences with and attitudes towards posting preprints among researchers in the Global South and the Global North. To our knowledge, this has hardly been studied before, which is also because preprints only have emerged lately in many disciplines and countries.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04186

"How Many Preprints Have Actually Been Printed and Why: A Case Study of Computer Science Preprints on arXiv"

In this paper, a case study of computer science preprints submitted to arXiv from 2008 to 2017 is conducted to quantify how many preprints have eventually been printed in peer-reviewed venues. Among those published manuscripts, some are published under different titles and without an update to their preprints on arXiv. In the case of these manuscripts, the traditional fuzzy matching method is incapable of mapping the preprint to the final published version. In view of this issue, we introduce a semantics-based mapping method with the employment of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). With this new mapping method and a plurality of data sources, we find that 66% of all sampled preprints are published under unchanged titles and 11% are published under different titles and with other modifications. A further analysis was then performed to investigate why these preprints but not others were accepted for publication. Our comparison reveals that in the field of computer science, published preprints feature adequate revisions, multiple authorship, detailed abstract and introduction, extensive and authoritative references and available source code.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01899

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"The Future of Academic Publishing"

Ultimately, we might be forced to rethink publication. If scientific research is mostly read by machines, the question arises of whether it is relevant to package it into a single coherent narrative that is adapted to the limitations of human cognition. This seems like a lot of busywork for scientists. We could unbundle scientific research from the constraints of journal formatting, as suggested by Neuromatch Open Publishing. In this view, research will be a living compendium of code, datasets, graphs and narrative content remixable and always up to date. Open and freely accessible research will be more valuable and influential because it will be seen by LLMs.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01637-2