Open Access – Page 13

"Unpicking Subscribe to Open"

Tricia Miller and Andrea Lopez explain how the [Subscribe to Open] model benefits everyone in the scholarly community.. . .The way S2O works is that existing institutional customers continue to subscribe to the journals. With sufficient support, every new volume is immediately converted to OA under a Creative Commons license and is available for everyone to read and re-use. If support is insufficient, the paywall is retained. The ethos of the model is "equity": there are no fees to publish and no barriers to readership, and it can be applied by journals in any field of research.

https://bit.ly/41nGqjW

Open Science: A Practical Guide for Early-Career Researchers

Beginning researchers are an important link in the transition to Open Science, so this guide is aimed at PhD candidates, Research Master Students, and early-career researchers from all disciplines at Dutch universities and research institutes. [This guide will be very useful to non-Dutch researchers.] It is designed to accompany researchers in every step of their research, from the phase of preparing your research project and discovering relevant resources (chapter 2) to the phase of data collection and analysis (chapter 3), writing and publishing articles, data, and other research output (chapter 4), and outreach and assessment (chapter 5). Every chapter provides you with the best tools and practices to implement immediately.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7716152

"Open Access at a Crossroads: Library Publishing and Bibliodiversity"

The open access movement has gained momentum since the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) first launched twenty years ago. Notably, there has been a drastic increase in the number of open access articles. Concerns have been raised about equality and diversity issues, however, for researchers without an affiliation (e.g. independent, unemployed and retired researchers) and researchers on the "scientific periphery" who are excluded from the gold open access model. This article argues that the gold open access model is destructive to the knowledge production ecosystem by addressing the importance of bibliodiversity and the ways in which library publishing can contribute to sustainable and equitable knowledge production.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.613

"Open Access to Books — the Perspective of a Non-profit Infrastructure Provider"

This article describes the open access (OA) book platforms OAPEN Library and Directory of Open AccessBooks (DOAB), based on 1.the development and activities of OAPEN in the first ten years; 2. the underlying technical approach behind the platforms; 3. the current role of OAPEN and DOAB and future outlook.

OAPEN started out as a project funded by the European Commission, and become a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2011. It hosts, disseminates and preserves open access books. OA book publishing has been explored in several pilot projects. Its current collection contains over 24,000 documents. DOAB launched in 2012, inspired and supported by DOAJ. It became a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2019, owned by the OAPEN Foundationand OpenEdition. It’s current collection contains close to 60,000 titles.

The data model of both platforms is optimised for a multilingual collection and supports funding information. Ingesting books has been optimised to support a wide array of publishers and the dissemination of books takes into account search engines; libraries and aggregators and other organisations. The usage has grown in the last years, to 1 million downloads per month.

The future developments entail increased support of research funders with the establishment of a FunderForum and multi-year research into policy development. DOAB will invest more in bibliodiversity, by adding more emphasis on African and Asian countries. Also,DOAB will roll out its Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM).

OAPEN and DOAB will continue to work on developing reliable infrastructures, policy development and quality assurance around open access books.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3303

"The MIT Press Receives $10 Million Endowment Gift for Open Access to Knowledge"

The new fund will support the MIT Press’s ground-breaking efforts to publish open access books and journals in fields ranging from science and technology to the social sciences, arts, and humanities. It will also help the MIT Press continue to develop tools, models, and resources that make scholarship more accessible to researchers and other readers around the world. . . .

Arcadia is providing an outright endowment gift of $5 million, as well as a $5 million “challenge” gift to incentivize other funders by matching their support of MIT’s open publishing activities.

https://bit.ly/3B5SWKb

"EU Ready to Back Immediate Open Access without Author Fees"

The EU is ready to agree that immediate open access to papers reporting publicly funded research should become the norm, without authors having to pay fees, and that the bloc should support non-profit scholarly publishing models.

In a move that could send shockwaves through commercial scholarly publishing, the positions are due to be adopted by the Council of the EU member state governments later this month.

https://cutt.ly/x6yTrFW

"Springer Nature Doublespeak"

Let’s take a close look at what SN says in its advice on this matter to authors:

"Springer Nature only ever assesses manuscripts on their editorial merit. If primary research manuscripts contain Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) language, they will not be rejected on the grounds of its inclusion, and we will not remove that text before publication if it is included in a section that is a normal part of the published primary research article."

The information gets off to a good start. Assessing manuscripts on editorial merit alone is something any author would want to be reassured about. Equally, authors will be pleased to learn that, even if they include rights retention language, SN will not amend the author’s text by removing the RR statement that the author included in the text they created and provided at no charge to SN for publication. So far, so good. The information continues:

"Authors should note, however, that manuscripts containing statements about open licensing of accepted manuscripts (AMs) can only be published via the immediate gold open access (OA) route, to ensure that authors are not making conflicting licensing commitments, and can comply with any funder or institutional requirements for immediate OA."

This is where things start to get tricksy. Translation &mdash: if the author assigns a prior licence to their AAM and submits the manuscript to a SN subscription journal that also offers an Open Access (OA) option (sometimes known as a hybrid journal), then the publisher will only accept it if the author pays for OA publication (sometimes known as ‘gold’ OA). Mind you, SN is not rejecting the manuscript outright; it’s just that they will ONLY accept it if the author pays. So by extension, if they don’t pay, SN won’t publish the paper, which amounts to a rejection. However hard I try, I can’t seem to tally "only be published via the immediate gold open access (OA) route" with "only accepting manuscripts on their editorial merit." The wording is slippery here. Like those politicians, SN doesn’t ACTUALLY state that if you don’t, won’t or can’t pay, they will reject your paper. But in practice, that is exactly what they imply. This is pure smoke and mirrors.

https://bit.ly/44rWrbr

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

"Supporting Diamond Open Access Journals. Interest and Feasibility of Direct Funding Mechanisms"

More and more academics and governements consider that the open access model based on Article Processing Charges (APC) is problematic, not only due to the inequalities it generates and reinforces, but also because it has become unsustainable and even opposed to open access values. They consider that scientific publishing based on a model where both authors and readers do not pay, the so-called Diamond, or non-APC model, should be developed and supported. However, beyond the display of such a support on an international scale, the landscape of Diamond journals is rather in the form of loosely connected archipelagos, and not systematically funded. This article explores the practical conditions to implement a direct funding mechanism to such journals, that is reccurent money provided by a funder to support the publication process. Following several recommendations from institutional actors in the open access world, we consider the hypothesis that such a funding would be fostered by research funding organizations (RFOs), which have been essential to the expansion of the APC model, and now show interest in supporting other models. Based on a questionnaire survey sent to more than 1000 Diamond Open Access journals, this article analyzes their financial needs, as well as their capacity to interact with funders. It is structured around four issues regarding the implementation of a direct funding model: do Diamond journals really make use of money, and to what end? Do they need additional money? Are they able to engage monetary transactions? Are they able to meet RFOs visibility requirements? We show that a majority of OA Diamond journals could make use of a direct funding mechanism with certain adjustments. We conclude on the challenges that such a financial stream would spur.

https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.05.03.539231

"OA and the Academy: Evaluating an OA Fund with Authors’ Input"

The University Libraries at Virginia Tech established an Open Access Subvention Fund (OASF) in August 2012. Although it began as a two-year pilot project, the Fund has continued to the present. Anyone at Virginia Tech is eligible to apply for funding to offset the cost of an article processing charge to publish in an open access journal. To learn more about user perceptions of the OASF and open access in general, we surveyed everyone who had requested support. The survey, conducted during the fall of 2019, provided a means to gauge the needs of our users, seek feedback on the request and award process, and gather input on the fund guidelines. In this article, we review our findings in the hope that the lessons learned will be useful to other libraries in assessing similar open access subvention funds.

https://bit.ly/3nxjUHs

"Review of Research on Predatory Scientific Publications from Scopus Database between 2012 and 2022"

This study also reveals the complexity of issues and research trends around the topic of predatory scientific publications, including the review process for scientific journals, publication fees and article processing charges, open science and open-access publications, and the like and related topics such as the impact on scholars in developing countries and academic ethics. Finally, this article provides several recommendations, namely, the need for more efficient criteria to evaluate the quality of scientific journals, more public communication on the importance of ethics in research and publication, and a greater awareness among scholars and organizations of the implications of the "predator" issue in scientific publishing.

https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp-2022-0045

"Spain Adopts National Open Access Strategy"

Spain has approved a four-year national strategy for open science, under which all outputs of publicly financed research will made available free upon publication.

Under the strategy open access will become the default mode for all research funded directly or indirectly, with public funds. . . .

A budget of €23.8 million in 2023 will be maintained annually until 2027.

https://bit.ly/414w2gY

"LSU Libraries Announces New Government Publications and Open Scholarship Department"

In the latter half of 2022, the Government Documents and Open Scholarship & Affordable Learning departments combined into a new LSU Libraries department named Open Scholarship & Government Publications. This new department aims to combine the uncopyrighted materials in Government Publications with openly licensed resources available via Open Scholarship to provide students and faculty with free access to research materials.

Open Scholarship & amp;Affordable Learning saved students and their families more than $4.1 million in the 2022 fiscal year through LSU Libraries’ e-Textbook Initiative, which provides free access to library-licensed eBooks that are used in courses. Since its inception in 2014, it has saved more than $11.6 million.

https://bit.ly/3nrhLwZ

Paywall: "’Significant Reservations’ on UK’s Springer Nature Open-Access Deal"

These concerns centred on the high cost of publishing open access outside the agreement and limited transparency, particularly regarding how Springer Nature’s article-processing charges (APCs) are calculated, with gold open access for Nature priced at £8,490. Springer Nature was one of several major publishers — along with Elsevier — which opted in November not to participate in Plan S’ Journal Comparison Service, in which journals shared information about their costs and services.

https://bit.ly/44nG8wf

Academic Publishing and Open Access. What Does Economics Teach Us?

While the gold regime seems the most natural way to achieve open access, a generalized switch to open access may also have undesired consequences: projections indeed suggest that a massive move towards the gold regime would generate an explosion in the amount of APC unless there are controls to limit market power. Beside the sharp increase in APC, the shift to gold open access may create conflicts of interest for publishers given that their income comes from authors and may alter the quality of publications. The green regime, by introducing competition between the journal’s version of an article and a free public version, seems an efficient way to reduce market power while expanding access.

https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04080573

"What Can I Do with This? Indicators of Usage Rights in the User Interface "

With the continued push towards open access (OA) and the complicated nature of copyright law, users are often left wondering what they can do with the scholarly articles they find. Creative Commons (CC) licenses are the predominant mechanism for communicating usage rights; however, finding the CC license information — or being confident that there is not any — can be a challenge. Today we report on a project to investigate how publisher platforms represent CC licenses for OA and non-OA journal articles. We looked at how publishing platforms indicate usage rights for articles in results displays as well as in full-text formats.

https://bit.ly/3HwTZq1

"Wiley Removes Goodin as Editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy (Updated)"

[Comments by Anna Stilz, Princeton] Wiley has recently signed a number of major open-access agreements: this means that increasingly, they get their revenue through author fees for each article they publish (often covered now by public grant agencies), rather than library subscriptions. Their current company-wide strategy for maximizing revenue is to force the journals they own to publish as many articles as possible to generate maximum author fees. . . .

Wiley is not asking that we consider publishing a few more pieces that fall at the borderline and are tough judgment calls. They are asking that we increase the number of articles we publish by a factor of 10, and that we continue increasing that number year after year.

https://bit.ly/42co3zq

"To Preprint or Not to Preprint: Experience and Attitudes of Researchers Worldwide"

The pandemic has underlined the significance of open science and spurred further growth of preprinting. Nevertheless, preprinting has been adopted at varying rates across different countries/regions. To investigate researchers’ experience with and attitudes toward preprinting, we conducted a survey of authors of research papers published in 2021 or 2022. We find that respondents in the US and Europe had a higher level of familiarity with and adoption of preprinting than those in China and the rest of the world. Respondents in China were most worried about the lack of recognition for preprinting and the risk of getting scooped. US respondents were very concerned about premature media coverage of preprints, the reliability and credibility of preprints, and public sharing of information before peer review. Respondents identified integration of preprinting in journal submission processes as the most important way to promote preprinting.

https://doi.org/10.55835/6442f782b2b5580ba561406b

"Plan E for Education: Open Access to Educational Materials Created in Publicly Funded Universities"

Plan E for Education is my proposal that a proportion of the educational resources generated in publicly funded universities be made freely available for sharing and use by others. Thus, high quality education, produced through public funding, could be made available to other universities and individual autodidacts and for the development of innovative educational delivery methods. This would be the educational equivalent of initiatives that require publicly funded research to be published in open access journals or platforms. Available educational resources would involve whole or sections of courses including assessments, not just isolated resources.

Plan E would require the establishment and curation of open repositories and might consider a peer review system for educational materials to mirror that already used for research publications. Academic credit could then flow to those who publish and review educational resources and extend to other academic input such as updating the work and creating instructional materials.

There is considerable expertise and enthusiasm for, as well as successful examples of, open access education globally, but this is unevenly spread, and its adoption is hindered by factors at institutional and individual educator levels. Most university-generated educational material is still kept behind institutional paywalls. If we accept the need for change so that, as for research outputs, educational resources become open to access, Plan E might provide the global impetus for such change and make a contribution to reducing inequality in access to higher education.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.607

"Open Access and International Co-authorship: A Longitudinal Study of the United Arab Emirates Research Output"

This study investigates the interplay between open access (OA), co-authorship, and international research collaboration. While previous research has dealt with these factors separately, there is a knowledge gap in how these interact within a single dataset. The data includes all Scopus-indexed journal articles published over 11 years (2009–2019) where at least one of the authors has an affiliation to a United Arab Emirates (UAE) institution (30 400 articles in total). For assessment of OA status of articles, the study utilized Unpaywall data for articles with a digital object identifier, and manual web searches for articles without. There was consistently strong growth in publication volume counts as well as shares of OA articles across the years. The analysis provides statistically significant results supporting a positive relationship between a higher number of co-authors, in particular international, and OA status of articles.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00256

"Missing a Golden Opportunity? An Analysis of Publication Trends by Income Level in the Directory of Open Access Journals 1987–2020"

This study examines publication trends in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) journals by countries’ income level from 1987 to 2020. By combining article metadata from journals listed in the DOAJ with World Bank country income data, this analysis examines the trends visible in plots of historical open access publication data. In 2020, the number of articles published in DOAJ journals by authors affiliated with high-income countries exceeds the sum of the other income categories. Article processing charge waivers seem to have more impact on high- and low-income countries than middle-income countries. The results show that the gold open access model has not been able to improve the extremely low number of open access articles from low-income regions. In addition, authors in middle-income countries publish in gold open access DOAJ journals at lower rates than authors based in other economic regions.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1543

"Data Sharing in the Context of Community-Engaged Research Partnerships"

Over the past 20 years, the National Institutes for Health (NIH) has implemented several policies designed to improve sharing of research data, such as the NIH public access policy for publications, NIH genomic data sharing policy, and National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Moonshot public access and data sharing policy. . . . Important questions that we must consider as data sharing is expanded are to whom do benefits of data sharing accrue and to whom do benefits not accrue? In an era of growing efforts to engage diverse communities in research, we must consider the impact of data sharing for all research participants and the communities that they represent.

We examine the issue of data sharing through a community-engaged research lens, informed by a long-standing partnership between community-engaged researchers and a key community health organization (Kruse et al., 2022). We contend that without effective community engagement and rich contextual knowledge, biases resulting from data sharing can remain unchecked. We provide several recommendations that would allow better community engagement related to data sharing to ensure both community and researcher understanding of the issues involved and move toward shared benefits. By identifying good models for evaluating the impact of data sharing on communities that contribute data, and then using those models systematically, we will advance the consideration of the community perspective and increase the likelihood of benefits for all.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115895

"Which Factors are Associated with Open Access Publishing? A Springer Nature Case Study"

Open Access (OA) facilitates access to articles. But, authors or funders often must pay the publishing costs preventing authors who do not receive financial support from participating in OA publishing and citation advantage for OA articles. OA may exacerbate existing inequalities in the publication system rather than overcome them. To investigate this, we studied 522,411 articles published by Springer Nature. Employing correlation and regression analyses, we describe the relationship between authors affiliated with countries from different income levels, their choice of publishing model, and the citation impact of their papers. A machine learning classification method helped us to explore the importance of different features in predicting the publishing model. The results show that authors eligible for APC waivers publish more in gold-OA journals than other authors. In contrast, authors eligible for an APC discount have the lowest ratio of OA publications, leading to the assumption that this discount insufficiently motivates authors to publish in gold-OA journals. We found a strong correlation between the journal rank and the publishing model in gold-OA journals, whereas the OA option is mostly avoided in hybrid journals. Also, results show the countries’ income level, seniority, and experience with OA publications as the most predictive factors for OA publishing in hybrid journals.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00253

"Rights and Retention Strategy: a Primer from UKRN"

One of the largest publishers, Springer Nature, noted in April 2021 that in some cases they will effectively ignore rights retention language in manuscripts and require a transfer of copyright. This could create a conflict for the publisher once the manuscript has been editorially accepted. However, having already asserted and documented a CC-BY licence, you have the rights you need to reuse the manuscript. If concerned, you could seek confirmation from the editor that you can retain your rights before submitting your manuscript.

https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/2ajsg

"Is the Library Responsible for Open Access Compliance?"

In this scenario, the research office would be responsible for complying with the new open access mandates — just as it is for all other research funder obligations. Perhaps the research office would arrange Green deposits. Perhaps it would ensure that grant submissions to federal agencies include funds to cover APCs. Perhaps it would negotiate publishing services agreements with preferred vendors. Perhaps it would take a lax approach, assuming that there are few likely consequences to uneven compliance with this mandate.

https://bit.ly/3KMZ92e

The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities: "Europe’s Academic Publishing System Must Become Sustainable and Equitable"

The Guild expresses its concerns over the current financial unsustainability of the academic publishing system in Europe. The rise of open-access models requiring article-processing charges (APCs) has worsened the issue, contributing to inequalities and dissuading researchers from publishing their work in the most appropriate outlets.

In response, The Guild strongly supports the draft of the Council conclusions on scholarly publishing in its calls to support non-APC-based open-access models, have APC commensurate to publication services provided, and to ensure academic publishing remains aimed at research excellence and integrity. We fully endorse the Council’s recognition of the increasing costs of paywalls for access to scientific publications as well as scholarly publishing. Therefore, The Guild calls for the development of alternative models that do not charge fees to authors or readers.

https://bit.ly/40gV3os