Open Access – Page 14

"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

"Science Journals Integrate Dryad to Simplify Data Deposition and Strengthen Scientific Reproducibility"

The Science family journals have announced a partnership with the nonprofit data repository Dryad that simplifies the process by which authors deposit data underlying new work — a critical step to facilitating data’s routine reuse. The partnership is yet another step taken by the Science journals to ensure data the scientific community requires to verify, replicate and reanalyze new research is openly available. . . .

Because the partnership with Dryad integrates Dryad’s platform with the Science family journal’s submission process, authors will have the option to deposit data at Dryad directly from the submission site of any Science family journal. As authors submit research to the journals, they will be prompted about data availability and welcome to deposit their data to any suitable disciplinary repository. But, if data do not yet have a home, authors will have the opportunity to upload their data to Dryad. . . .

To ensure that this service is widely available, the Science journals will cover costs of Dryad data publication for accepted papers.

http://bit.ly/43wtVoD

Paywall: "Going for Gold, Deep in the Red"

Having survived the budget uncertainties following the Great Recession and during the COVID-19 pandemic, libraries are no strangers to the hard work, patience, and luck needed when it comes to budget planning and pushing publishers toward OA. But will libraries ever achieve the ultimate feat of bagging gold OA for all titles in all disciplines? Open access comes at a price; a gold sweep may not be possible as many institutions continue to struggle financially with the after-effects of the pandemic and lower enrollment figures.

http://bit.ly/3MHU5yy

"University of California Agreement with Wiley Expands to All 10 UC Campuses: New Agreement Quadruples the Number of UC Articles Eligible for Free and Open Access in Wiley Journals"

The University of California, which generates nearly 10 percent of U.S. research output, and Wiley, one of the world’s largest publishers, announced today an expansion of their open access agreement. Researchers at all 10 UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) will now receive funding support to publish open access, making significantly more UC research freely available to people around the world.

http://bit.ly/3GYDW4n

"The Politics of Rights Retention"

This article presents a commentary on the recent resurgence of interest in the practice of rights retention in scholarly publishing. Led in part by the evolving European policy landscape, rights retention seeks to ensure immediate access to accepted manuscripts uploaded to repositories. The article identifies a trajectory in the development of rights retention from something that publishers could previously ignore to a practice they are now forced to confront. Despite being couched in the neoliberal logic of market-centric policymaking, I argue that rights retention represents a more combative approach to publisher power by institutions and funders that could yield significant benefits for a more equitable system of open access publishing.

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:52287

"Open Access without Open Access Values: The State of Free and Open Access to Law Reviews"

This study examines 648 currently published student-run journals as of June 2019, to determine the extent of freely available journal issues and whether those journals have adopted open access behaviors including use of Creative Commons licenses, publicly available reuse policies and model agreements, and publication agreements that maximize author rights.

https://bit.ly/3zNbiiE

"The Engagement of Academic Libraries in Open Science: A Systematic Review"

Using a systematic review and meta-synthesis approach, this study analyses 65 literature related to the engagement of academic libraries in open science. The results show that the existing research mainly focuses on four aspects of open science: open access, research data management, open educational resources, and citizen science. Based on these themes, academic libraries have implemented a range of practical activities, playing the roles of open science service providers, advocates or educators, policy makers, publishers or knowledge producers, etc. At the same time, however, academic libraries are facing a number of challenges caused by inadequate security of internal resources and insufficient support from the external environment.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102711

"Do Open Access Mandates Work? A Systematized Review of the Literature on Open Access Publishing Rates"

To encourage the sharing of research, various entities—including public and private funders, universities, and academic journals—have enacted open access (OA) mandates or data sharing policies. It is unclear, however, whether these OA mandates and policies increase the rate of OA publishing and data sharing within the research communities impacted by them. A team of librarians conducted a systematized review of the literature to answer this question. A comprehensive search of several scholarly databases and grey literature sources resulted in 4,689 unique citations. However, only five articles met the inclusion criteria and were deemed as having an acceptable risk of bias. This sample showed that although the majority of the mandates described in the literature were correlated with a subsequent increase in OA publishing or data sharing, the presence of various confounders and the differing methods of collecting and analyzing the data used by the studies’ authors made it impossible to establish a causative relationship.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15444

Essential Reading: Walt Crawford’s Books on Open Access

For over a decade, Walt Crawford been writing books about open access. With one exception published by ALA, they are all freely available as PDF files. What makes Crawford’s books stand apart is his in-depth, incisive investigation of key global open access trends. Some of the recent books were sponsored by SPARC. These books belong in every academic library’s cataloged collection.

Gold Open Access by Country 2016-2021: The Long Tail

This book looks at the long tail of gold OA—for 2021, the 13,714 DOAJ-listed journals that are not published by one of what I call the Big Eleven: eleven publishers or publishing groups, including two university presses and one society, that dominate fee-based OA. You could think of them as Corporate OA, except for the society and universities, and the fact that several traditional publishers such as De Gruyter are included in the long tail.

Chapter 6 of Gold Open Access 2016-2021: Articles in Journals (GOA7) discusses the Big Eleven and the Long Tail; the Big Eleven are named on page 45. The group publishes 17% of the serious journals, but 55% of the 2021 articles and 89% of potential fee (APC) revenues.

Gold Open Access by Country 2015-2020

Gold Open Access by Country 2014-2019

Gold Open Access Journals by Country 2012-2017

Gold Open Access 2016-2021: Articles In Journals (GOA7)

Gold OA continues to grow: by around 1,500 active journals, 170,000 articles, and nearly half a billion dollars in fees in 2021. This study attempts to answer questions about the state of serious gold OA publishing in 2021 (and how it’s changed over the past few years).

The overall picture in 2021:

1,275,212 articles, up from 1,104,179 in 2020 (for the current set of journals), an increase of 15.5%. My estimate is that around 2,200 journals were added to DOAJ during 2021 and around 700 were deleted during the year.

16,620 fully-analyzed journals, of which 15,643 published articles in 2021, for an average of 82 articles per journal (up from 75 in last year’s report).

The usual articles-vs.-journals split continues: 68% of active journals are no-fee, but 69% of articles appeared in fee journals The average cost per article was $1,374 in 2021, up around $170 from 2020.

The rest of this book provides more detail and ways of looking at gold OA. The book is patterned after previous editions.

While some discussions and tables involve the full 16,620 journals, most—where 2021 article counts are fundamental—address only 15,643, ignoring 977 journals with no 2021 articles when checked.

Gold Open Access 2015-2020: Articles in Journals (GOA6)

Gold Open Access 2014-2019: Articles in Journals (GOA5)

Gold Open Access 2013-2018: Articles in Journals (GOA4)

Gold Open Access Journals 2012-2017 (GOA3)

Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2016 (GOAJ2)

Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015

Gray OA 2012-2016: Open Access Journals Beyond DOAJ

Open Access: What You Need to Know Now

Governing Scholar-Led OA Book Publishers: Values, Practices, Barriers

This report develops and focuses on some of the issues we have previously explored within COPIM with regard to community governance, such as the challenges of governing a collective and the relationship of governance to common resources, to explore how these apply in practice to the publication of books by small-to-medium Open Access publishers, as well as what barriers they have faced in implementing their governance models. It presents and discusses the results of six interviews with the small and medium Open Access publishers which make up the ScholarLed consortium. It then offers some recommendations and insights into how other small and medium Open Access publishers might set up and/or improve their governance practices, including how the Open Book Collective might support them in doing so.

https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.e6fcb523

"Guest Post — Why Interoperability Matters for Open Research — And More Than Ever"

The question remains, why have we not achieved more in delivering connectivity across the research system? While funding for this kind of underpinning infrastructure is notable in its absence (or where it is available it is often too temporary in nature), the other major challenge is in securing adoption among the service providers (funders, publishers, and institutions among the key players) that would maximize the use and potential of building those connections. It is notoriously hard for organisations to tweak or adapt existing workflows and legacy systems and to demonstrate the benefits (and hence prioritise the work) at an individual organisation level that may seem obvious at a system level.

https://cutt.ly/K7hxFQz

"What’s Missing? The Role of Community Colleges in Building a More Inclusive Institutional Repository Landscape"

The precise number of community college communities with access to an IR is unknown and certainly higher than ten, but uptake is low. As a result, the rich intellectual outputs generated at these institutions are not openly shared. Repositories provide community college communities with the ability to read content they would not otherwise have access to, but to fulfill the original purposes of open access to "share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich," it’s imperative that the faculty and students at community colleges are recognized as contributors to the scholarly communications landscape and empowered to disseminate their works, via repositories, to the larger knowledge ecosystem

https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.84.4.173

"What Does Open Peer Review Bring to Scientific Articles? Evidence from PLOS Journals"

This study examined the impact of open peer review (OPR) on the usage and citations of scientific articles using a dataset of 6441 articles published in six Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals in 2020–2021. We compared OPR articles with their non-OPR counterparts in the same journal to determine whether OPR increased the visibility and citations of the articles. Our results demonstrated a positive association between OPR and higher article page views, saving, sharing, and a greater HTML to PDF conversion rate. However, we also found that OPR articles had a lower PDF to citations conversion rate compared to non-OPR articles.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04683-9

Digital Scholarship Releases New PDF Versions of Its Bibliographies

This spring, Digital Scholarship’s bibliographies in the HTML format were reformatted as single page files with internal navigation. This included all bibliographies that were in HTML format only as well as the HTML versions of paperback books. These new PDFs are in a 12 point font and are designed for printing; however, they also have live links for immediate access. There were no content changes. For a list of all Digital Scholarship publications, see the site map.

Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, v. 3

Altmetrics Bibliography

Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography, v. 2

Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works

Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement

Digital Curation Resource Guide

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, v.7

E-science and Academic Libraries Bibliography

Google Books Bibliography, v. 7

Institutional Repository Bibliography, v. 4

Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals

Open Access Journals Bibliography

Open Access Webliography

Research Data Curation Bibliography, v. 10

Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography

Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, v. 80

Transforming Peer Review Bibliography

Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography

"What Constitutes Equitable Data Sharing in Global Health Research? A Scoping Review of the Literature on Low-Income and Middle-Income Country Stakeholders’ Perspectives"

Introduction: Despite growing consensus on the need for equitable data sharing, there has been very limited discussion about what this should entail in practice. As a matter of procedural fairness and epistemic justice, the perspectives of low-income and middle-income country (LMIC) stakeholders must inform concepts of equitable health research data sharing. This paper investigates published perspectives in relation to how equitable data sharing in global health research should be understood.

Methods: We undertook a scoping review (2015 onwards) of the literature on LMIC stakeholders’ experiences and perspectives of data sharing in global health research and thematically analysed the 26 articles included in the review.

Results: We report LMIC stakeholders’ published views on how current data sharing mandates may exacerbate inequities, what structural changes are required in order to create an environment conducive to equitable data sharing and what should comprise equitable data sharing in global health research.

Conclusions: In light of our findings, we conclude that data sharing under existing mandates to share data (with minimal restrictions) risks perpetuating a neocolonial dynamic. To achieve equitable data sharing, adopting best practices in data sharing is necessary but insufficient. Structural inequalities in global health research must also be addressed. It is thus imperative that the structural changes needed to ensure equitable data sharing are incorporated into the broader dialogue on global health research.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2022-010157

With Open Source Software: "How to Build a Publishers’ Catalogue"

As a consortium of six open access presses, ScholarLed had a use case for a publishers’ catalogue that would present all their recent book publications in one catalogue. . . . Fortunately all the presses have included the metadata for their monograph publications in Thoth, the open metadata management and dissemination platform that has been produced as another COPIM [Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs] output. This made it possible to easily conceive of a catalogue published as both a website and a PDF that pulls in and arranges the bibliographic metadata automatically and that can be updated on a regular basis without manual intervention. . . .

Our computational publishing model and workflow allowed us to put together this catalogue prototype very easily using only a few pieces of readily-available open source software: Quarto, Jupyter Notebook, and Git. This provided us an instant framework for web publication that didn’t require editing any HTML or CSS. . . .

Our ScholarLed publishers’ catalogue offers a working prototype of an automatically-updated book that retrieves the data for its content directly from an API. It does so with readily available open source software that can be installed with relative ease by anyone who wants to use this model to create a publication with computational elements.

http://bit.ly/3m1exzz

Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2022: Navigating the New Normal

Many library deans and directors are grappling with talent management and recruitment challenges. Nearly a fifth of respondents anticipate reducing staff in access services and technical services, metadata, and cataloging within the next five years. Furthermore, deans and directors are currently struggling to recruit personnel for roles in technology and programing, DEIA, cataloging and metadata, and indicate they are most likely to consider outsourcing cataloging and metadata and technology and programming skills.

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.318642

"Congress Introduces Bill to Tackle College Textbook Costs"

SPARC, a non-profit advocacy organization working to make education and research open and equitable, today applauded the reintroduction of the Affordable College Textbook Act in the U.S. Congress. The bill would address a key but often overlooked factor in the cost of higher education—the cost of textbooks—by establishing a grant program for the creation and use of free, openly licensed textbooks, while also strengthening federal price disclosure requirements for textbook publishers and institutions. If passed, the program would build on the success of the Open Textbook Pilot which is already projected to save students an estimated $250 million since its creation in 2018.

http://bit.ly/40sNVX2

"Fast-Growing Open-Access Journals Stripped of Coveted Impact Factors"

Nearly two dozen journals from two of the fastest growing open-access publishers, including one of the world’s largest journals by volume, will no longer receive a key scholarly imprimatur. On 20 March, the Web of Science database said it delisted the journals along with dozens of others, stripping them of an impact factor, the citation-based measure of quality that, although controversial, carries weight with authors and institutions. . . . Clarivate initially did not name any of the delisted journals or provide specific reasons. But it confirmed to Science the identities of 19 Hindawi journals and two MDPI titles after reports circulated about their removals.

https://bit.ly/3Kjx1ET