Open Access – DigitalKoans

“Questioning the Predator of the Predatory Journals: How Fair Are Global Publishing Standards?”

What is concerning now is far from just publishing in predatory journals. It is the new emerging trend where academics and non-academics misuse the term ‘predatory’ by applying it to any lesser-known publishers or those publishers mentioned in blog lists of predatory journals. This oversimplification can blur the boundary between what is actually predatory and what is not. It prevents from having any possible scholarly discussions. It can delegitimise any legitimate emerging journal and even discourage researchers who lack funding from attaining any form of publication. Which means that this misuse of the term, even unintentionally, has the potential to marginalise academic communities. Considering this trend, it is vital to educate ourselves on the distinction between predatory journals and what is regarded as a new, lesser-known emerging journal.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1662

“Tracking Transformative Agreements through Open Metadata: Method and Validation Using Dutch Research Council NWO Funded Papers”

Transformative agreements have become an important strategy in the transition to open access, with almost 1,200 such agreements registered by 2025. Despite their prevalence, these agreements suffer from important transparency limitations, most notably article-level metadata indicating which articles are covered by these agreements. Typically, this data is available to libraries but not openly shared, making it difficult to study the impact of these agreements. In this paper, we present a novel, open, replicable method for analyzing transformative agreements using open metadata, specifically the Journal Checker tool provided by cOAlition S and OpenAlex. To demonstrate its potential, we apply our approach to a subset of publications funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and its health research counterpart ZonMw. In addition, the results of this open method are compared with the actual publisher data reported to the Dutch university library consortium UKB. This validation shows that this open method accurately identified 89% of the publications covered by transformative agreements, while the 11% false positives shed an interesting light on the limitations of this method. In the absence of hard, openly available article-level data on transformative agreements, we provide researchers and institutions with a powerful tool to critically track and evaluate the impact of these agreements.

https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/tz6be_v1

“Hurdles to Open Access Publishing Faced by Authors: A Scoping Literature Review from 2004 to 2023”

Over the past two decades, numerous widespread efforts and individual contributions to shift scientific publishing to open access (OA) faced a number of obstacles. Due to the complexity of knowledge production dimension and knowledge dissemination, the challenges encountered by researchers, publishers, and readers differ. While examples of such barriers exist across multiple parties, no attempt has been made to synthesize these for active researchers. Thus, this scoping review explores the barriers documented in the scientific literature that researchers encounter in their pursuit of publishing open access. After screening 1,280 relevant sources, 113 papers were included in the review. A total of 82 distinct barriers were identified and grouped into four subclusters: Practical Barriers, Lack of Competency, Sentiment, and Policy & Governance. The largest cluster in terms of barriers assigned was Sentiment, accounting for 51.2% (n=42) of all barriers identified, suggesting that perceived barriers are the strongest determinants of publishing OA, while the most frequently occurring barrier was “high article processing charges”, reported in 88 papers. Furthermore, burdens faced specifically due to the location of the researcher were identified. Understanding and acknowledging these barriers is essential for their effective elimination or mitigation.

https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/vzefj_v1

How Can We Achieve Sustainable Funding for Open Access Books?”

Is the biggest blocker to open access (OA) for books actually the economics of it all? Book processing charges (BPCs) do not scale but they remain a significant method of paying to produce OA monographs for many researchers and libraries. However, in the last few years, we have seen several new initiatives emerge that seek to solve the problem posed by funding via BPCs alone. There is a proliferation of collective funding models for OA books, including Opening the Future, Open Book Collective, MIT Press’s D2O, JSTOR’s Path to Open and others. They all work differently, but they all offer alternatives to BPCs. In this article we explore the theme of sustainable funding for OA monographs, presenting a range of new models, and suggest that their normalization is well overdue. We also present the work of the library at Lancaster University on their new strategy supporting open access. While this article takes a somewhat UK-centric path, what is happening in the UK may be replicated in other countries and contexts. With demand increasing for monographs to be open this is a timely topic. The authors welcome discussion from publishers, libraries and other stakeholders.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.673

“From Data Creator to Data Reuser: Distance Matters”

Sharing research data is necessary, but not sufficient, for data reuse. Open science policies focus more heavily on data sharing than on reuse, yet both are complex, labor-intensive, expensive, and require infrastructure investments by multiple stakeholders. The value of data reuse lies in relationships between creators and reusers. By addressing knowledge exchange, rather than mere transactions between stakeholders, investments in data management and knowledge infrastructures can be made more wisely. Drawing upon empirical studies of data sharing and reuse, we develop the metaphor of distance between data creator and data reuser, identifying six dimensions of distance that influence the ability to transfer knowledge effectively: domain, methods, collaboration, curation, purposes, and time and temporality. We explore how social and socio-technical aspects of these dimensions may decrease – or increase – distances to be traversed between creators and reusers. Our theoretical framing of the distance between data creators and prospective reusers leads to recommendations to four categories of stakeholders on how to make data sharing and reuse more effective: data creators, data reusers, data archivists, and funding agencies. ‘It takes a village’ to share research data – and a village to reuse data. Our aim is to provoke new research questions, new research, and new investments in effective and efficient circulation of research data; and to identify criteria for investments at each stage of data and research life cycles.

https://tinyurl.com/3429p526

“Charting Open Science Landscapes: A Systematized Review of US Academic Libraries’ Engagement in Open Research Practices”

Open Science aims to make research publicly accessible, transparent, and reusable, promoting collaboration across disciplines and fostering relationships among government, academia, industry, and society. International and regional reviews have explored the roles of academic libraries in promoting open science on both global and local scales. However, practices within U.S. academic libraries have not been examined comprehensively. This study addresses this gap. We employ a systematized literature review methodology to map U.S. academic library engagement in key areas of open science (e.g., open access, open data, open educational resources) and overlap analysis is used to assess shifts from discrete initiatives (e.g., open access, research data management) to holistic, integrated services that span the research lifecycle. Using a comprehensive search strategy, we identified 3,752 publications for inclusion in the study. We find that U.S. academic libraries are actively engaged in open science practices, with the most extensive involvement in open access and the provision of infrastructure to support open science. However, engagement in activities related to citizen science remains limited. Through thematic overlap analysis, we find that ~50% of publications report activities across two or more themes of open science, suggesting a possible shift toward more comprehensive practices. A key challenge reported by libraries is the need for continuous professional development to address technical skills gaps. As research needs and corresponding librarian responsibilities continue to evolve, maintaining librarian professional development opportunities will remain crucial for equipping librarians with the skills necessary to continue supporting and advancing open science initiatives.

https://osf.io/pv7k2/

“Wiley Launches Pilot Pricing Framework to Support Equitable OA Publishing for Researchers in Latin America”

The pilot program, which began on January 21, 2025, supports authors across 33 countries in Latin America, including in Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean, to publish research in Wiley’s portfolio of nearly 600 gold open access journals. Discounts on Article Publication Charges (APCs) are applied in direct relationship to the Purchasing Power Index (PPI) value of each participating country, informed by data from the World Bank International Comparison Program. The anticipated timeline for the pilot is 12 months, with a mid-term review to inform future actions.

https://tinyurl.com/3t8kkyfv

“Towards the Interoperability of Scholarly Repository Registries”

The enactment of Open Science relies on scholarly repositories that make research products findable and accessible, while scholarly repository registries maintain authoritative metadata and persistent identifiers (PIDs) to help researchers and infrastructure providers discover and access needed repositories. However, the proliferation of repositories targeting different research products (e.g., publications, data, and software) or serving specific disciplines has led to the creation of multiple registries whose scope is not mutually exclusive. . . . While favouring the existence of a plurality of registries, this paper advocates for their interoperability, which is essential to eliminate the aforementioned barriers and enable their full, unambiguous utilisation. We analyse the data models of four prominent registries—FAIRsharing, re3data, OpenDOAR, and ROAR—and classify their properties and overlap. We provide a crosswalk between their data models and suggest a common data model shared across the examined registries to pave the way toward interoperability. As a means of validation, we include a coverage evaluation of the proposed data model.The paper adopts a pragmatic approach towards scholarly registry interoperability and suggests a common metadata model to foster the exchange of information across these platforms.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-025-00414-y

“Open But Hidden: Open Access Gaps in the National Science Foundation Public Access Repository”

Introduction: In 2022, the U.S. government released new guidelines for making publicly funded research open and available. For the National Science Foundation (NSF), these policies reinforce requirements in place since 2016 for supported research to be submitted to the Public Access Repository (PAR).

Methods: To evaluate the public access compliance of research articles submitted to the NSF-PAR, this study searched for NSF-PAR records published between 2017 and 2021 from two research intensive institutions. Records were reviewed to determine whether the PAR held a deposited copy, as required by the 2016 policies, or provided a link out to publisher-held version(s).

Results: A total of 841 unique records were identified, all with publicly accessible versions. Yet only 42% had a deposited PDF version available in the repository as required by the NSF 2016 Public Access Policy. The remaining 58% directed instead to publisher-held versions. In total, only 55% of record links labeled “Full Text Available” directed users to a publicly accessible version with a single click.

Discussion: Records within PAR do not clearly direct users to the publicly accessible full text. In almost half of records, the most prominently displayed link directed users to a paywall version, even when a publicly available version existed. Records accessible only through the CHORUS (Clearing House for the Open Research of the United States) initiative were further obscured by requiring specialized navigation of publisher-owned sites.

Conclusion: Despite having a repository mandate since 2016, NSF compliance rates remain low. Additional support and/or oversight is needed to address the additional requirements introduced under the 2022 memo.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.17767

“Moving Open Repositories out of the Blind Spot of Initiatives to Correct the Scholarly Record”

Open repositories were created to enhance access and visibility of scholarly publications, driven by open science ideals emphasising transparency and accessibility. However, they lack mechanisms to update the status of corrected or retracted publications, posing a threat to the integrity of the scholarly record. To explore the scope of the problem, a manually verified corpus was examined: we extracted all the entries in the Crossref × Retraction Watch database for which the publication date of the corrected or retracted document ranged from 2013 to 2023. This corresponded to 24,430 entries with a DOI, which we use to query Unpaywall and identify their possible indexing in HAL, an open repository (second largest institutional repository worldwide). In most cases (91%), HAL does not mention corrections. While the study needs broader scope, it highlights the necessity of improving the role of open repositories in correction processes with better curation practices. We discuss how harvesting operations and the interoperability of platforms can maintain the integrity of the entire scholarly record. Not only will the open repositories avoid damaging its reliability through ambiguous reporting, but on the contrary, they will also strengthen it.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1655

OASPA: “Fully OA Journals Output Shrank in 2023, But Hybrid OA Made Up the Lost Ground”

The OASPA dataset shows that members collectively published almost 1.2m articles in 2023. But 2023 output grew by only 4% over 2022, which is one quarter of the previous year’s growth, and one tenth of the long-term average. . . .

Reported numbers of articles in fully OA journals [published by OASPA members] shrank for the first time in 2023. OA articles in hybrid journals continue to grow strongly, making up for the lost ground in fully OA and so total output grew overall. In 2023, the volume of articles in fully OA journals shrank by two thirds of a percent, compared with a growth of 14% the previous year. Hybrid OA articles grew by 22% in the same period, down slightly from 24% the previous year. Output grew by 4% overall, compared with 16% the previous year. . . .

In fully OA journals [published by OASPA members], the proportion of CC BY (just over 80% of output) and CC BY-NC-ND (around 10%) has been steady since 2018. CC BY fell back slightly in 2023, and that of CC BY-NC-ND grew slightly – but both by just 1 percentage point, so it’s too soon to tell if this represents a change to long-term trends. The proportion of CC BY-NC-ND licenses grew slightly: from 10% in 2021 and 2022 to 12% in 2023.

Licenses with some restrictions are significantly more prevalent in hybrid journals, although this trend is showing signs of reversing. Historically, more restrictive licenses were displacing the proportion of CC BY, which had fallen from around 75% of hybrid OA in 2014 to around 51% in 2019. However, in 2020 CC BY licenses recovered ground and now account for around 67% of Hybrid licenses (up from 62% the year before). CC BY appears to be displacing the other two Creative Commons licenses in hybrid OA. In 2023, the proportion of CC BY-NC-ND was down slightly to 23%, and CC BY-NC up slightly to 10%. CC BY now accounts for over two thirds of hybrid OA output, up from half in 2019.

https://tinyurl.com/55u5b8ue

Paywall: “Improved Open Access Support through a Popular Open Access Fund”

This paper describes results of a 2023 survey of authors who applied to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Open Article Fund between July 2018 and June 2022. The author sought the respondents’ opinions and experiences in regard to the fund’s impact, value, and award criteria . . . also asking authors about their opinions of funder mandates and their participation in open science practices.

https://tinyurl.com/mvh7hr8d

Paywall: “OA Journals in Subscription-Based Full-Text Databases in 2024: An Analysis of EBSCO’s Academic Search Complete”

Two sets of samples from all the 3,481 peer-reviewed non-embargoed full-text journals in ASC were examined. One set is 10% random samples, and the other set is journals from major publishers excluding gold OA publishers. Both sets have similar results that over 70% are OA journals.

https://tinyurl.com/4t8u25yy

Paywall: “OER Librarianship: Examining OER Librarian Work, Motivations, and Origin Stories”

This qualitative study examines the motivations of librarians for becoming involved in the burgeoning OER textbook movement. It explores how librarians found themselves in their roles, the work entailed by those roles, the motivations that drive their work, and the ways that those motivations have shifted over the course of their time in their positions.

https://tinyurl.com/ydreswz3

"Assessing Opt-In Rates for Transformative Agreements"

With increasing requirements for open access (OA) by funders, academic libraries have begun piloting so-called “transformative agreements” with publishers. One type of agreement gives researchers at an institution read access to all content while also allowing them to publish articles OA in hybrid (and sometimes gold) OA journals without payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC). Such models often give corresponding authors from an institution the ability to opt in or out of making their article OA for hybrid journals. This article provides an assessment of two pilot transformative agreements at one large research institution that participated as a member of a consortium. It provides insight into opt-in rates overall for each publisher as well as breakdowns by disciplinary affiliation and rank of the researchers, as well as the combined impact of the agreement and other mechanisms on the overall OA availability of research at these publishers with researchers at the institution regardless of corresponding author status. The discussion includes a review of lessons learned and the overall benefits and challenges of working with such agreements.

https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.69n1.8184

"A Decade of Open Access Policy at the Gates Foundation Based on Experimentation, Evidence and Evolution"

This article provides an in-depth look at the Gates Foundation’s open access (OA) policy journey as 2025 marks a decade of OA policy for the foundation. There have been two iterations of the policy – the original version that was launched in 2015 with a focus on gold OA, and which was then adapted in 2021 to reflect the Plan S principles, including limitations for publisher payments based on journal type and repository deposits. Now, in response to the ever-evolving needs of the scholarly ecosystem, the foundation is updating its policy again to strive for broader impact and to support practices that drive greater inclusion of scientists around the world, particularly those from low- and middle-income countries. This article will provide a deep dive into the decisions and data used to define a more equitable approach to dissemination of the research funded by the foundation.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.690

"Preparing Institutions for the Transition: Consortial Cost-Sharing Models in Transformative Agreements in Austria"

Over the past ten years, the member institutions of the Austrian Academic Library Consortium (KEMÖ) have gradually opened up their researchers’ publications to the world, one publisher at a time. By pulling their resources together, KEMÖ members have successfully converted their subscription-only agreements, for the most part, to read and publish deals in a cost-neutral manner, which include an article allocation comfortably covering the consortium’s publishing needs. However, the new business models disrupted the pre-transition status quo: the existing distribution of costs, based predominantly on institutional subscription spending, differed from the emerging institutional-level output and potential associated costs. While moving to fully article-based pricing was felt premature, the consortium decided to explore ways to make the internal cost distribution more equitable. This article presents the various cost-sharing models reviewed and the process leading to the models ultimately introduced for several transformative agreements.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.671

"Trends and Changes in Academic Libraries’ Data Management Functions: A Topic Modeling Analysis of Job Advertisements"

This study aims to (i) track trends in academic library data management positions, (ii) identify key themes in job advertisements related to data management, and (iii) examine how these themes have evolved. Using text mining techniques, this study applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and TF-IDF vectorization to systematically analyze 803 job advertisements related to data management posted on the IFLA LIBJOBS platform from 1996 to 2023. The findings reveal that the development of these positions has undergone three phases: exploration, growth, and adjustment. Four core themes in data management functions emerged: “Cataloging and Metadata Management,” “Data Services and Support,” “Research Data Management,” and “Systems Management and Maintenance.” Over time, these themes have evolved from distinct roles to a more balanced distribution.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2025.103017

NIH Plan to Increase Findability and Transparency of Research Results Through the Use of Metadata and Persistent Identifiers

In this Plan, NIH presents a combination of efforts that are already underway and planned efforts that will increase the findability of research outputs and promote transparency in the research process, ultimately bolstering the impact of NIH’s research while fostering trust in the research that NIH supports. This Plan also addresses expectations from the fourth section of the 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) Memorandum on Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research (the 2022 OSTP Memo) and is an update to section IV, “Mechanisms to Increase Findability and Transparency of Research” of the NIH Plan to Enhance Public Access to the Results of NIH-Supported Research. Specifically, NIH is outlining how researchers and institutions should use metadata to consistently identify themselves and their research outputs, as well as requirements for NIH-supported (i.e., both NIH-funded and NIH-managed) repositories to collect and make relevant metadata publicly available and searchable. These efforts are informed by NIH’s experience in managing and hosting repositories and are intended to increase the findability and usability of all NIH research.

https://tinyurl.com/3xbrpw2r

"How Has the Field Changed in the Last 10 Years? An Excerpt from the 2024 Library Publishing Directory"

In this year’s edition of the Directory, we received responses from 179 publishers in 18 countries, and 167 long-form responses are featured in the Directory. The number of respondents has grown gradually since the first Library Publishing Directory in 2014, when 116 library publishers completed the survey. We also see a much higher number in the unique institutions that have participated in the last decade: in the Directory‘s lifetime 383 library programs have responded to the call for entries. Most respondents (92%) represent academic libraries, which is consistent with previous years. Of the remaining respondents, 5% identified their institution type as consortia, 1% as member organizations, and 2% as other.

https://tinyurl.com/kf8w3fp5

2024 NIH Public Access Policy

This document is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on 12/18/2024 and available online at https://federalregister.gov/d/2024-29929, and on https://govinfo.gov. . . .

The Policy includes relevant language about NIH’s rights to make Author Accepted Manuscripts available in PubMed Central without embargo upon the Official Date of Publication. NIH reiterates that this does not mean that NIH has rights to the Final Published Article, as defined in the Policy, but only to the Author Accepted Manuscript, as defined in the Policy.

The Policy also requires that those depositing Author Accepted Manuscripts in PubMed Central agree to a revised Manuscript Submission Statement reiterating NIH’s right to post such Author Accepted Manuscripts without embargo upon the Official Date of Publication. The language for this statement, as included in the Guidance on Government Use License and Rights, has been modified from the Draft Public Access Policy to remove the phrase “create derivative works.” Because NIH had not intended the language to convey what comments suggested regarding the potential to compromise scientific integrity, NIH has removed the phrase. NIH will, however, continue using features, existing or to-be-developed, that ensure accessibility and usability. NIH also reserves the right to, in the future, reasonably interpret statutory and/or regulatory language to permit uses of content that are consistent with copyright law, that provide value to users, and that are considered to be in line with practices of the time.

Regarding comments that proposed NIH should provide the public with full reuse rights through explicit language about reuse of the work for any purpose with attribution, NIH notes that such language is akin to authors providing NIH with a particular license. As stated in the NIH Draft Public Access Policy, NIH does not believe that a particular license is needed to achieve the Policy’s goals.

Finally, NIH clarifies that the Policy does not prevent authors from depositing their Author Accepted Manuscripts into institutional repositories, as long as Author Accepted Manuscripts are also deposited in PubMed Central per the Policy.

https://tinyurl.com/5948sv6n

"What Have We Learned from Subscribe to Open?"

As we enter the 2025 renewal season, which marks the sixth year since the first S2O journals were launched, we come together here as two early S2O publishers to share our different applications of and experiences with the model: In 2020, Berghahn, of which Vivian is managing director, followed in Annual Reviews’ footsteps to become the second publisher to implement the Subscribe to Open model with their Berghahn Open Anthro initiative. EDP Sciences, of which Charlotte is director of marketing and communications, was another early adopter of the model in 2021 for several of their journals across astronomy, mathematics, and radioprotection. . . .

As of 2024, thanks to the Subscribe to Open model, over 180 journals have been able to publish entire volumes in open access, which would never have been possible otherwise because of the shortcomings of the APC models for these journals and their respective disciplines. The S2O model continues to grow, with more publishers set to launch their S2O offerings in 2025. The model is supported by a thriving cross-stakeholder S2O Community of Practice (CoP) that was formed in August 2020 by Annual Reviews and some of the earliest S2O publishers (including Berghahn and EDP Sciences), supporting libraries, funders, subscription agents, and other interested stakeholders. The CoP now has nearly 100 members (individuals and organizations alike) and meets on a monthly basis to discuss experiences, achievements, and concerns, share advice, and pool feedback.

https://tinyurl.com/mvavvvw3

"How Librarians are Advancing Open Book Publishing at the Lever Press"

At an October 2010 meeting of the Oberlin Group, a consortium of over 80 liberal arts college libraries in the United States, one of us (BG) made an audacious proposal: that the Oberlin Group establish an open access press, devoted to the production of peer-reviewed books, rigorously edited and distributed in electronic form without fees. . . .

Fourteen years later, the Lever Press is thriving as the publisher of digital-first diamond open-access monographs on topics of interest to the liberal arts. Lever presents a unique model for how libraries, especially those from smaller institutions, can help transform the open-access landscape.

https://tinyurl.com/9hwpa2bp

"Harvard Is Releasing a Massive Free AI Training Dataset Funded by OpenAI and Microsoft"

Harvard University announced Thursday it’s releasing a high-quality dataset of nearly 1 million public-domain books that could be used by anyone to train large language models and other AI tools. The dataset was created by Harvard’s newly formed Institutional Data Initiative with funding from both Microsoft and OpenAI. It contains books scanned as part of the Google Books project that are no longer protected by copyright.

https://tinyurl.com/ymen65js

"The Open Monograph Distribution and Acquisitions Gap: A Look at TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) Titles"

The Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) network of universities, and the open access (OA) monographs that have been funded and published through this program, provide a unique opportunity to study the work done by university presses and academic libraries to distribute and acquire this content. TOME is a program that supports university presses’ publication of OA monographs through locally funded subventions. Though the works have been published by universities, and the subvention programs that make them OA have largely involved the funding institution libraries in the process, the resulting OA works are not easily discoverable or accessible through library systems. Because it is so highly distributed across many academic institutions, the TOME collection of OA monograph titles offers the opportunity for libraries and publishers to more closely examine the process of creating OA content and provides the chance to study how we collectively make these works discoverable and accessible to our communities and more broadly in the world as well. The analysis presented in this paper offers insights into developing and refining procedures and management strategies at libraries participating in TOME. These recommendations provide insights into discovery of and access to OA monographs in general.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15492