Open Access – DigitalKoans

"cOAlition S Announces the Release of an Independent Study on the Impact of Plan S"

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.

https://tinyurl.com/2ecyu8ce

Report

"Market Sizing Update 2024: Has OA Hit a Peak?"

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/

"Supporting Data Discovery: Comparing Perspectives of Support Specialists and Researchers Authors"

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

"IOP Publishing Study Reveals Varied Adoption and Barriers in Open Data Sharing Among Physical Research Communities"

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.

https://tinyurl.com/2s3jjzft

"Leveraging Transformative Agreements for Research Integrity "

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.

https://tinyurl.com/4twzs2w

"When Researchers Pay to Publish: Results from a Survey on APCs in Four Countries"

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

"You Don’t Know What You’ve Got till It’s Gone: The Changing Landscape of UK Learned Society Publishing"

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

Forthcoming: Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons

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.

https://tinyurl.com/3wp4z5s5

"Implementing Free Persistent Identifiers in a Scientific Journal Management System Alternatively to DOI "

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.

https://tinyurl.com/2bsh2z6b

"Trapped in Transformative Agreements? A Multifaceted Analysis of >1,000 Contracts"

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

"Open Access and Transparency: EDP Sciences Releases 2024 Transparency Report for Mathematics Journals"

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.

https://tinyurl.com/yckm8fvz

"Taylor & Francis Announces Subscribe to Open Journals Pilot "

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).

https://tinyurl.com/245857eu

"The Paradox of Competition: How Funding Models Could Undermine the Uptake of Data Sharing Practices"

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

"Changes to Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Plan Progress Reporting and the Submission of Revised DMS Plans Are Coming on October 1"

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).

https://tinyurl.com/4mxwtn8k

"Enabling Preprint Discovery, Evaluation, and Analysis with Europe PMC"

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

"Knowledge Infrastructures are Growing Up: The Case for Institutional (Data) Repositories 10 Years After the Holdren Memo"

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

"The Benefits of Diamond Are Not Crystal Clear"

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.

https://tinyurl.com/2uw645dy

"Open Book Futures InfoHub Scoping Report"

One of the deliverables of Copim’s Open Book Futures project is to establish a ‘knowledge base’ (or equivalent) to provide comprehensive resources on alternative funding models and modes of publishing, acquiring and archiving open access books, alongside new training and guidance on archiving and preservation best practice. The deliverable states that we will (a) develop resources for stakeholders, (b) consolidate existing resources, (c) promote business models best practice, and (d) showcase project work on metadata, experimental publishing and archiving. By providing a comprehensive tool suite of resources we will accelerate outreach to libraries, publishers, academics and the wider public, to advocate for, advise on and encourage open access publishing and initiatives.

This scoping report is the first step in this process. Drawing on the myriad of resources we know exist (produced within and outside the OBF project), it presents an overview of existing assets and guidance for OA book publishing, a gap analysis, and our initial recommendations for the OBF working group to consider, all of which will be used to scope the direction and final format of the ‘knowledge base’.

https://tinyurl.com/2xv52u6b

OCLC Research: Improving Open Access Discovery for Academic Library Users

The research findings shared in this report analyze the efforts made by library staff to make OA publications discoverable and explore user behaviors at seven institutions in the Netherlands. The findings can serve as a catalyst for academic libraries worldwide to engage in meaningful conversations about enhancing OA discoverability given local contexts and user needs.

Key Contributions of the Report:

Provides valuable insights into the measures taken by library staff in the Netherlands to facilitate the discoverability of OA publications.

Highlights library staff’s successful efforts to support user needs and explores opportunities to improve.

Identifies key stakeholders in the OA landscape and provides actionable suggestions for them to maximize the impact of their contributions.

https://tinyurl.com/2m8638y5

"Research Assessment Systems and the Effects of Publication Language: Manifestations in the Directory of Open Access Books"

Research assessment is a major driver of research behavior. The current emphasis on journal citations in a limited number of journals with an English focus has multiple effects. The need to publish in English even when it is not the local language affects the type of research undertaken and further consolidates the Global North-centric view or scientific approach. The bibliometric databases on which assessments of universities and journals are based are owned by two large corporate organizations, and this concentration of the market has in turn concentrated the research environment. Open infrastructure offers an alternative option for the research endeavor. The OAPEN online open access library and the Directory of Open Access Books form part of this infrastructure and we consider the pattern of languages present in the directories over time.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.4847

"How Balanced Is Multilingualism in Scholarly Journals? A Global Analysis Using the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) Database"

The concept of balanced multilingualism aims to establish “instruments for documenting and measuring the use of language for all the different purposes in research, thereby providing the basis for the monitoring of further globalization of research in a more responsible direction” (Sivertsen, 2018, p. 2). However, an analysis of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the largest database of fully open access journals produced in 130 countries, does not show balanced multilingualism in the global landscape. The DOAJ promotes linguistic diversity by indexing journals in 80 languages, including dialectal variations, indigenous languages, and languages spoken by less than 50,000 speakers (eg, Aragonese). In this article, we present the main trends related to the languages in which journals publish their full-text contributions to respond to this unbalanced landscape. We conducted a descriptive analysis of the 17,564 journals listed in the DOAJ (July 2023). Our findings show that 65% (11,331) of the journals listed publish only in one language, and 35% (6,234) publish in two, three, and up to 16 languages. Our research also shows that 50% of the multilingual journals are based in Asia, Southern and Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.6448

"’Does It Feel like a Scientific Paper?’: A Qualitative Analysis of Preprint Servers’ Moderation and Quality Assurance Processes"

In recent years, preprints—i.e., scholarly manuscripts that have not been peer reviewed or published in a journal—have emerged as a major source of research communication and a critical component of open science. However, concerns have been raised about preprints’ potential to facilitate the spread of flawed or misleading research due to the lack of quality control performed by preprint servers. Yet, there is limited knowledge of how servers currently vet incoming content and how this impacts the openness and diversity of scholarly content. In this paper, we examine preprint servers’ moderation processes, the intentions underpinning them, and their potential effects through a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with 14 key preprint server personnel. We find a wide range of moderation processes, which vary depending on specific server contexts and needs and are motivated by a desire to prevent the spread of misinformation and protect trust in preprints and servers. Participants repeatedly emphasized the difference between their moderation processes and peer review, but in practice often applied similar criteria for delineating scientific from unscientific content. Moreover, moderation processes often relied on trust cues, such as article formats or author affiliations, as proxies for research quality, potentially introducing similar biases as have been found in traditional journal peer review. We discuss implications for the diversity of preprint content and authors, as well as the future of preprint servers within an evolving scholarly communication ecosystem.

https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/mp6ky

"New Open Access Agreement Between the University of California and Taylor & Francis"

The University of California (UC) and Taylor & Francis today announced a memorandum of understanding for a four-year read and publish agreement that will make it easier and more affordable for UC researchers to publish open access (OA) articles in nearly 2,500 Taylor & Francis journals. . . .

Under the agreement, the UC Libraries will automatically cover the OA fees in full for any UC corresponding author who chooses to publish OA in Taylor & Francis and Routledge journals. Authors of articles accepted for publication in a hybrid or full OA title will have the opportunity to choose OA at no cost to them. . . .

To maximize the number of UC researchers who can benefit from the newly signed agreement, authors of qualifying articles published since January 1, 2024, will be given the opportunity to retrospectively convert their article to open access, with the OA fees fully covered. Authors who have already published OA since January 1 will be offered refunds for OA fees already paid.

https://tinyurl.com/y8zutk9m

"We Need to Rethink the Way We Identify Diamond Open Access Journals in Quantitative Science Studies"

With the announcement of several new diamond open access (OA) related initiatives and the creation of the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, diamond OA is now at the forefront of the OA movement. However, while working on our recent Quantitative Science Studies publication and datasets, we noticed that temporarily waiving article processing charges (APCs) was a commonly used strategy by big publishers for some of their journals. In the absence of an index of diamond journals, most studies have operationalized the identification of diamond journals as a subset of gold journals that do not charge an APC. While this is a pragmatic approach, we fear that it could undermine the value of the research in understanding what we believe is more commonly understood by diamond OA. This letter discusses the need for bibliometric research to apply more nuance in how it operationalizes diamond OA beyond the absence of APCs. We call on the publishing sector to be more transparent in the costs of publishing. Ultimately, we argue that transparency and a long-term commitment to no-APC publishing are necessary for diamond OA to succeed, and that the research community needs to apply this standard when seeking to understand the model.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_c_00331

Plan S: "New Tool to Assess Equity in Scholarly Communication Models"

The tool [https://tinyurl.com/2crwwhes], which was inspired by the “How Open Is It?” framework, is targeted at institutions, library consortia, funders and publishers, i.e. the stakeholders either investing or receiving funds for publishing services. It offers users the opportunity to rate scholarly communication models and arrangements across seven criteria:

Access to Read

Publishing immediate Open Access

Maximizing participation

Re-use rights

Pricing and fee transparency

Promoting and encouraging open research practices: data and code

Promoting and encouraging open research practices: preprints and open peer review

https://tinyurl.com/ycwmp3nk