The new platform will allow users to:
- Check if compliance with funder open access policies can be achieved with a particular journal
- Get a summary of publishers’ open access archiving conditions for individual journals and books
- To see funders’ conditions for open access publication
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The other aspect of textbooks that students found very important, at 31 percent (64) or extremely important, at 38 percent (78) was cost. Cost was particularly important for first-generation students. Fifty-nine percent (36) of first-generation students considered cost to be an extremely important factor, compared to twenty-nine percent (42) of continuing-generation students. Strikingly, not a single first-generation student considered cost to be unimportant. . . .
Although the OER sections of ENGL 104 were tagged in the University’s course marking system, a mere 2.9 percent of students (four) reported being aware that their course was an OER course when they registered. By contrast, 96% percent (131 students) reported learning that the textbook was available at no cost when classes were already starting (i.e., on the first day or when they received their syllabus). This delay in learning about textbook costs means that students who could most benefit from a no-cost textbook were unable to strategically select an OER section. . . .
Another important finding is that the primary method by which students accessed their OER textbook, electronic only access, does not align with the access method students stated they preferred. Respondents indicated that they wanted textbooks that they could highlight and make notes in; they wanted a textbook that they could hold in their hands and that didn’t strain their eyes. At the same time, respondents wanted textbooks that they could access from anywhere and that had searchable text. Finally, respondents strongly indicated a desire for a textbook that is not unwieldy and heavy to lug across campus. Print with an electronic copy, the format most popular with students, meets all of these criteria.
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As part of our project to investigate “reasonable costs” for public access to United States federally funded research and scientific data, we have developed a synthesis report focused on the multi-model scholarly publication ecosystem that facilitates public access as required by the Nelson Memo. This paper outlines the historical developments that have shaped the current landscape, the key financial (cost and payment) stakeholders in the system, and the models and approaches that have developed in the continued shift to public and open access.
This paper is a companion to the February 2024 report, The Cost and Price of Public Access to Research Data: A Synthesis.
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In this study, we investigate whether adopting one or more Open Science practices leads to significantly higher citations for an associated publication, which is one form of academic impact. We use a novel dataset known as Open Science Indicators, produced by PLOS and DataSeer, which includes all PLOS publications from 2018 to 2023 as well as a comparison group sampled from the PMC Open Access Subset. In total, we analyze circa 122’000 publications. We calculate publication and author-level citation indicators and use a broad set of control variables to isolate the effect of Open Science Indicators on received citations. We show that Open Science practices are adopted to different degrees across scientific disciplines. We find that the early release of a publication as a preprint correlates with a significant positive citation advantage of about 20.2% (±.7) on average. We also find that sharing data in an online repository correlates with a smaller yet still positive citation advantage of 4.3% (±.8) on average. However, we do not find a significant citation advantage for sharing code. Further research is needed on additional or alternative measures of impact beyond citations. Our results are likely to be of interest to researchers, as well as publishers, research funders, and policymakers.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0311493
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The European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) will hold its public launch on the 15 January 2025 in Madrid, Spain. . . .
The EDCH aims to strengthen the Diamond OA community in Europe by supporting European institutional, national and disciplinary capacity centres and Diamond publishers and service providers in their mission of Diamond OA scholarly publishing. The EDCH will provide these Diamond stakeholders with coordination, sustainability, training modules, technical tools, and services at scale. The EDCH thus answers the need for capacity building in the Diamond OA community that was expressed in the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access. . . .
The EDCH will be launched in conjunction with a public event on 14 January 2025 announcing the EU-funded ALMASI project. This three-year project with 15 partners from three continents will seek a better understanding of the situation of non-profit OA publishing in three world regions – Africa, Latin America, and Europe – co-designing and aligning measures for quality alignment, training materials, and institutional and national policy development.
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This study aims to compare the geographical and disciplinary coverage of OA journals in three databases: OpenAlex, Scopus and the WoS. We used the ROAD database, managed by the ISSN International Centre, as a reference database which indexes 62,701 OA active resources (as of May 2024). Among the 62,701 active resources indexed in the ROAD database, the Web of Science indexes 6,157 journals, while Scopus indexes 7,351, and OpenAlex indexes 34,217. A striking observation is the presence of 25,658 OA journals exclusively in OpenAlex, whereas only 182 journals are exclusively present in WoS and 373 in Scopus. The geographical analysis focusses on two levels: continents and countries. As for disciplinary comparison, we use the ten disciplinary levels of the ROAD database. Moreover, our findings reveal a striking similarity in OA journal coverage between WoS and Scopus. However, while OpenAlex offers better inclusivity and indexing, it is not without biases. WoS and Scopus predictably favor journals from Europe, North America and Oceania. Although OpenAlex presents a much more balanced indexing, certain regions and countries remain relatively underrepresented. Typically, Africa is proportionally as under-represented in OpenAlex as it is in WoS, and some emerging countries are proportionally less represented in OpenAlex than in WoS and Scopus. These results underscore a marked similarity in OA journal indexing between WoS and Scopus, while OpenAlex aligns more closely with the distribution observed in the ROAD database, although it also exhibits some representational biases.
https://cnrs.hal.science/hal-04745665v1
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The Summit for Academic Institutional Readiness in Data Sharing (STAIRS) was a multi-phased project that brought together a diverse group of representatives from academic institutions across the United States who support research data sharing efforts. Building off preliminary assessment work and a virtual learning series, this was a unique chance to discuss the opportunities and challenges in supporting researchers’ data sharing needs within and across institutions. This report captures the details of the project, including the preliminary assessment work as well as the summit. Following a description of the broad themes and overarching takeaways from this multi-phased effort, we conclude with next steps and future directions for the academic data services community.
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The Web of Science, a leading bibliometric indexing service, yesterday suspended the journal eLife from its listings because its novel publishing model adopted last year—which includes public peer review but no final decision on whether a manuscript is accepted or rejected—conflicts with the Web of Science’s standards for assuring quality.
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The authors of the study highlight that Plan S has opened new avenues for achieving full and immediate Open Access, successfully placing Open Access high on policymakers’ agendas and bringing publishers to the negotiating table with institutions. The study underscores the potentially game-changing effect of the rights retention strategy, which institutions have since expanded into their own Rights Retention Policies. It also notes the contribution to the current momentum around Diamond Open Access, and the role of cOAlition S in raising awareness of the inequities of article-based charges publishing models.
The authors note that it may be too early to fully assess Plan S’s quantitative impact, as many policies only took effect in 2021 or later, and they recommend revisiting the study in 5-10 years. However, observing significant progress in the push towards full and immediate Open Access since Plan S was first announced and the influential role of the alliance of research funders, they recommend continuing cOAlition S beyond 2025.
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The data suggest that OA’s share of output has likely peaked in 2023.
- Our earlier sneak peek at the market suggested it peaked at 49% of output in 2022, falling to 48% in 2023. Our latest data here suggests OA just peaked at 50% share in 2022-2023 and may fall a few percentage points in the coming years.
- Results from our survey and anecdotal feedback suggest more of the same for 2024: large OA-only publishers are likely to see continued declines, while established publishers will see continued growth.
- The market will consolidate further. Long-term OA growth is likely to be less that it has been – perhaps mid-to-high single digits – but with increasing shares going to the larger publishers.
https://deltathink.com/news-views-market-sizing-update-2024-has-oa-hit-a-peak/
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Purpose: Much of the research in data discovery is centered on the users’ viewpoint, frequently overlooking the perspective of those who develop and maintain the discovery infrastructure. Our goal is to conduct a comparative study on research data discovery, examining both support specialists’ and researchers’ views by merging new analysis with prior research insights.
Methods: This work summarizes the studies the authors have conducted over the last seven years investigating the data discovery practices of support specialists from different disciplines. Although support specialists were not the main target of some of these studies, data about their perspectives was collected. Our corpus comprises in-depth interviews with 6 social science support specialists, interviews with 19 researchers and 3 support specialists from multiple disciplines, a global survey with 1630 researchers and 47 support specialists, and a use case analysis of 25 support specialists. In the analysis section, we juxtapose the fresh insights on support specialists’ views with the already documented perspectives of researchers for a holistic understanding. The latter is primarily discussed in the literature review, with references made in the analysis section to draw comparisons.
Results: We found that support specialists’ views on data discovery are not entirely different from those of the researchers. There are, however, some differences that we have identified, most notably the interconnection of data discovery with general web search, literature search, and social networks. . . .
We conclude by proposing recommendations for different types of support work to better support researchers’ data discovery practices.
https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2024-048
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Environmental scientists are the most open with their research data, yet legal constraints related to third-party ownership often limit their ability to follow the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR) principles. Physicists are also willing to share data but have concerns about the accessibility and understanding of the formats used. Engineering and materials scientists face the most significant barriers to sharing FAIR data due to concerns over confidentiality and sensitivity.
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Specifically, publishers could incorporate clauses that require the institution to identify a designated contact to handle research integrity investigations, just as they would for access-related matters like login issues or security breaches. Likewise, institutions may wish to negotiate for parallel requirements from publishers.
For example, in cases of suspected misconduct or ethical concerns related to publications, publishers could rely on designated university personnel to respond and engage with these issues directly. Additional contractual clauses could include agreed-upon investigatory procedures, such as a mutual commitment to follow COPE’s guideline on “Cooperation between research institutions and journals on research integrity and publication misconduct cases,” and penalties for failure to respond.
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This paper provides an empirical overview of the impact and practices of paying Article Processing Charges (APCs) by four nationally categorized groups of researchers in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa. The data was collected from 13,577 researchers through an online questionnaire. The analysis compares the practice of publishing in journals that charge APCs across different dimensions, including country, discipline, gender, and age of the researchers. The paper also focuses on the maximum amount APC paid and the methods and strategies researchers use to cover APC payments, such as waivers, research project funds, payment by coauthors, and the option to publish in closed access, where possible. Different tendencies were identified among the different disciplines and the national systems examined. Findings show that Argentine researchers apply for waivers most frequently and often use personal funds or international coauthors for APCs, with younger researchers less involved in APC payments. In contrast, Brazil, South Africa, and Mexico have more older researchers, yet younger researchers still publish more in APC journals. South African researchers lead in APC publications, likely due to better funding access and read and publish agreements. This study lays the groundwork for further analysis of gender asymmetries, funding access, and views on the commercial Open Access model of scientific dissemination.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12144
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This study draws on a longitudinal dataset of 277 UK learned societies covering the period 2015–2023 to provide evidence-based insights into the changing landscape of society publishing. It identifies a rapid decline in the number of self-published societies and an increasingly complex outsourcing landscape. New publishing partnerships are emerging with university presses and other not-for-profit entities rather than commercial publishers, while all but the largest UK societies have seen their publishing revenues decline in real terms since 2015. In general, UK learned society publishers are seeing their influence wane as market conditions favour publishing models focussed on quantity rather than quality. The decline of independent society publishers represents an unintended consequence of the transition to open access, but the trend towards increased outsourcing may be based on flawed assumptions. Analysis of financial data for a subset of 21 societies indicates that self-published societies have achieved sustained growth in their revenues from publishing while societies with publishing partners have seen a significant decline. For those societies with the means and the will to publish journals in their own right, this study bolsters the case for retaining, or even reclaiming, their independence.
https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.664
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Publishing Beyond the Market argues that the move to open access should focus less on the free accessibility of research outputs and more on who controls the publications and infrastructures for scholarly communication. . . . Through critical engagement with the open access landscape, the book reveals the shortcomings of market-centric and policy-based approaches to open access book and journal publishing, particularly their tendency to reinforce conservatism, commercialism, and private control of publishing. . . .
It suggests that developing a commons-based, scholar-led publishing landscape through a series of presses that are each managed by working academics could offer a productive counterpoint to marketised systems of open access and subscription publishing. . . . By illustrating how these projects build towards a commons-based publishing future, and how they may complement other approaches to publishing within university presses and libraries, the book culminates in an argument for the infrastructures, policies, and forms of governance needed to nurture such a collective vision.
Samuel A. Moore [the author] is the Scholarly Communication Specialist at Cambridge University Libraries and a College Research Associate at King’s College Cambridge.
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The use and assignment of most persistent identifiers have an associated cost. Journals sometimes have difficulty covering this cost or transferring it to the authors of the articles, causing barriers to publishing scientific articles. This work aims to implement free persistent identifiers in a scientific journal management system. To accomplish this, software components for managing the persistent identifiers Archival Resource Key and Persistent Uniform Resource Locator are implemented for the Open Journal System. The results of implementing these persistent identifiers in a scientific journal are analyzed, as well as the implementation by the scientific community of 15 countries in 32 journals. Implementing free persistent identifiers in scientific journals allows for greater visibility and savings in publication costs.
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Transformative agreements between academic publishers and research institutions are ubiquitous. The ‘Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges’ (ESAC) Initiative lists more than 1,000 contracts in its database. We make use of this unique dataset by web-scraping the details of every contract to substantially expand the overview spreadsheet provided by the ESAC Initiative. Based on that hitherto unused data source, we combine qualitative and quantitative methods to conduct an in-depth analysis of the contract characteristics and the TA landscape. Our analysis demonstrates that research institutions seem to be ‘trapped’ in transformative agreements. Instead of being a bridge towards a fully Open Access world, academia is stuck in the hybrid system. This endows the legacy (non-Open Access) publishing houses with substantial market power. It raises entry barriers, lowers competition, and increases costs for libraries and universities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.20224
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EDP Sciences and SMAI (Société de Mathématiques Appliquées et Industrielles) have just published their latest transparency report for 2024, marking the fourth consecutive year of open access (OA) publication under the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model – and the fourth transparency report. . . .
The 2024 report highlights several key achievements and ongoing developments:
- Sustained Open Access: All six journals remain open access in 2024. . .
- Moderate subscription price increases: Subscription prices for the journals increased by 2% in 2023 and 2024, a modest adjustment reflecting inflation while maintaining affordability.
- Stable article output and usage: In 2023, the six journals published 449 articles, comparable to the previous year, with full-text downloads remaining steady at 436,655. . . .
- Financial sustainability: The number of subscriptions continued to increase. Revenue from traditional subscriptions covered 51% of the publication costs in 2023, with additional funding from institutions and supporters. The average publication cost across the journals is €950 per article, and a concerted effort to reduce costs is ongoing. . . .
- Impact of national agreements, partnerships, and additional funding: The French National Open Access Agreement, in place until 2026, alongside a renewed partnership with Knowledge Unlatched, continues to provide crucial financial support. Further backing from the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Fonds National pour la Science Ouverte (FNSO) has played an essential role in securing the transition to open access.
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Taylor & Francis has today announced its first Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot, one of several innovative options it is trialing to accelerate open access (OA) publishing. S2O enables a journal’s subscribers to support its conversion to OA, making new articles available to readers everywhere.
Taylor & Francis is inviting existing subscribers of the participating journals to renew their subscriptions for next year by March. If enough institutions support S2O in this way, all articles published in the 2025 volume will be open access. This process can then be repeated, one volume at a time, for the following years. If the required level of support is not achieved for any of the pilot titles, they will remain as subscription journals (with a hybrid OA option).
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Although beneficial to scientific development, data sharing is still uncommon in many research areas. Various organisations, including funding agencies that endorse open science, aim to increase its uptake. However, estimating the large-scale implications of different policy interventions on data sharing by funding agencies, especially in the context of intense competition among academics, is difficult empirically. Here, we built an agent-based model to simulate the effect of different funding schemes (i.e., highly competitive large grants vs. distributive small grants), and varying intensity of incentives for data sharing on the uptake of data sharing by academic teams strategically adapting to the context. Our results show that more competitive funding schemes may lead to higher rates of data sharing in the short term, but lower rates in the long-term, because the uncertainty associated with competitive funding negatively affects the cost/benefit ratio of data sharing. At the same time, more distributive grants do not allow academic teams to cover the costs and time required for data sharing, limiting uptake. Our findings suggest that without support services and infrastructure to minimise the costs of data sharing and other ancillary conditions (e.g., university policy support, reputational rewards and benefits of data sharing for academic teams), it is unlikely that funding agencies alone can play a leading role for the uptake of data sharing. Therefore, any attempt to reform reward and recognition systems towards open science principles should carefully consider the potential impact of their proposed policies and their long-term side effects.
https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/gb4v2
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On October 1, NIH is adding several new Data Management and Sharing (DMS) questions to Research Performance Progress Reports (RPPRs) and updating the process for submitting revised DMS Plans to NIH for review. In brief:
- As mentioned in a May 2024 Guide Notice, NIH is including several new questions about DMS activities in RPPRs submitted on or after October 1, 2024 (See Guide Notice NOT-OD-24-175). For awards for which the NIH DMS Policy applies, recipients will now be asked:
- Whether data has been generated or shared to date
- What repositories any data was shared to and under what unique digital identifier
- If data has not been generated and/or shared per the award’s DMS Plan, why and what corrective actions have or will be taken to comply with the plan
- If significant changes to the DMS Plan are anticipated in the coming year, recipients will be asked to explain them and provide a revised DMS Plan for approval.
- NIH is updating the processes for submitting requests to revise a DMS Plan through the Just in Time (JIT) Module, the Prior Approval Module, and the RPPR Module in eRA Commons (See Guide Notice NOT-OD-24-176).
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Preprints provide an indispensable tool for rapid and open communication of early research findings. Preprints can also be revised and improved based on scientific commentary uncoupled from journal-organised peer review. The uptake of preprints in the life sciences has increased significantly in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when immediate access to research findings became crucial to address the global health emergency. With ongoing expansion of new preprint servers, improving discoverability of preprints is a necessary step to facilitate wider sharing of the science reported in preprints. To address the challenges of preprint visibility and reuse, Europe PMC, an open database of life science literature, began indexing preprint abstracts and metadata from several platforms in July 2018. Since then, Europe PMC has continued to increase coverage through addition of new servers, and expanded its preprint initiative to include the full text of preprints related to COVID-19 in July 2020 and then the full text of preprints supported by the Europe PMC funder consortium in April 2022. The preprint collection can be searched via the website and programmatically, with abstracts and the open access full text of COVID-19 and Europe PMC funder preprint subsets available for bulk download in a standard machine-readable JATS XML format. This enables automated information extraction for large-scale analyses of the preprint corpus, accelerating scientific research of the preprint literature itself. This publication describes steps taken to build trust, improve discoverability, and support reuse of life science preprints in Europe PMC. Here we discuss the benefits of indexing preprints alongside peer-reviewed publications, and challenges associated with this process.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303005
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Institutional data repositories are uniquely positioned to support researchers in sharing scholarly outputs. As funding agencies develop and institute policies for research data access and sharing, institutional data repositories have emerged as a critical feature in ecosystems for data stewardship and sharing. We show that institutional data repositories can meet and exceed the requirements and recommendations of federal data policy, thereby maximizing the benefits of data sharing. We present results of a mixed-method study which explores the adoption and usage of institutional repositories to share data from 2017 to 2023. Data from two previous studies were combined with data collected in 2023 on the data sharing solutions of Association of Research Libraries member institutions in the United States and Canada. The analysis of the aggregated data indicates that data stewardship has increased in both institutional repositories and institutional data repositories with an increase in complementary infrastructure to support data sharing. We then conduct an “infrastructural inversion” (Bowker & Star, 1999) to ‘surface invisible work’ of making data repositories function well, and demonstrate that institutional data repositories have advantages for providing sustainable stewardship, curation, and sharing of research data. Finally, we show that institutional data repositories may produce additional benefits through established infrastructure, local interoperability, and control.
https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2024-046
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One misunderstanding seems to be that these costs are the same for commercial and non-profit publishers, and that commercial firms chisel out a profit on top of these allegedly equal costs. . . .
And diamond, non-profit publishing projects will likely face higher costs than commercial publishing houses, particularly given they will struggle to replicate large companies’ synergies and economies of scale. . . .
But this [market power] could be weakened by higher competition between publishers rather than embarking on the vast task of internalising the entire production process into university libraries. . . ..
Finally, even though seeing non-profit open access as inherently good is a valid position, it is equally valid to question the appetite for diamond journals, especially newly founded ones, among their clientele of academics.
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