Open Access – Page 3 – DigitalKoans

"Is Open Access Disrupting the Journal Business? A Perspective from Comparing Full Adopters, Partial Adopters, and Non-adopters"

This study employs the concept of disruptive innovation to develop a more systematic perspective on the impact of OA. It compares the market power of full-OA adopters with that of partial adopters and non-adopters. Using Lerner’s definition of market power, a series of mean difference tests and regressions were conducted using Lerner’s definition of market power. The findings reveal that both full-OA adopters and partial adopters exhibit greater market power than non-adopters. However, full adopters do not have more market power than partial adopters, even when compared to the subscription options of hybrid journals. This suggests that OA disrupts the market power of both incumbents and traditional businesses. Nevertheless, the situation changes once incumbents integrate an OA option into their publishing repertoire and transition to a hybrid model.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2024.101574

"An Analysis of the Impact of Gold Open Access Publications in Computer Science"

There has been some concern about the impact of predatory publishers on scientific research for some time. Recently, publishers that might previously have been considered `predatory’ have established their bona fides, at least to the extent that they are included in citation impact scores such as the field-weighted citation impact (FWCI). These are sometimes called ‘grey’ publishers (MDPI, Frontiers, Hindawi). In this paper, we show that the citation landscape for these grey publications is significantly different from the mainstream landscape and that affording publications in these venues the same status as publications in mainstream journals may significantly distort metrics such as the FWCI.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10262

Paywall: "Research on the Generation Mechanism and Action Mechanism of Scientific Data Reuse Behavior"

Specifically, this study takes scientific data reuse attitudes as a breakthrough to discuss the factors that influence researchers’ scientific data reuse attitudes and the extent to which these factors influence scientific data reuse behaviors. It also further explores the impact of scientific data reuse behavior on research and innovation performance and the moderating effect of scientific data services on scientific data reuse behavior.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102921

"Determinants of Downloads as Demand for Hybrid Journals "

Although Big Deal contracts that provide access rights to all electronic journals published by the publisher initially gained favor with university libraries, some libraries have terminated these contracts owing to increased charges since the 2010s. Consequently, they are faced with the problem of selecting journals for purchase within their limited budgets. This study investigates the factors affecting the number of downloads, representing journal demand, to provide libraries with guidance on journal selection. The download equation for 1485 hybrid journals published by Springer Nature is formulated using ordinary least squares. The results found that 5% and 50% of the 1485 journals generated approximately 30% and 85% of the downloads in 2022, respectively. Downloads are concentrated in fewer journals, although the Pareto principle does not apply to hybrid journals. Demand concentration implies that libraries do not need to maintain access rights to all journals. Recently, a few leading publishers have provided access rights to almost all electronic journals based on transformative agreements aiming to promote open access. Therefore, this study’s findings raise the issue of the rationale for bundling electronic journals in transformative agreements, which is similar to Big Deal. Moreover, the results of the download estimation reveal that hybrid journals with more open access articles, larger citation scores, and longer histories acquire more downloads. These findings indicate that open access accelerates the dissemination of research.

https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.18689

"The PubPeer Conundrum: Administrative Challenges in Research Misconduct Proceedings"

The founders of PubPeer envisioned their website as an online form of a “journal club” that would facilitate post-publication peer review. Recently, PubPeer comments have led to a significant number of research misconduct proceedings – a development that could not have been anticipated when the current federal research misconduct regulations were developed two decades ago. Yet the number, frequency, and velocity of PubPeer comments identifying data integrity concerns, and institutional and government practices that treat all such comments as potential research misconduct allegations, have overwhelmed institutions and threaten to divert attention and resources away from other research integrity initiatives. Recent, high profile research misconduct cases accentuate the increasing public interest in research integrity and make it inevitable that the use of platforms such as PubPeer to challenge research findings will intensify. This article examines the origins of PubPeer and its central role in the modern era of online-based scouring of scientific publications for potential problems and outlines the challenges that institutions must manage in addressing issues identified on PubPeer. In conclusion, we discuss some potential enhancements to the investigatory process specified under federal regulations that could, if implemented, allow institutions to manage some of these challenges more efficiently.

https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2024.2390007

"Lawmakers Raise New Licensing Concerns over White House Open Access Mandate"

While Republican appropriators in the House have previously tried to entirely block the White House’s open access policy, now appropriators in both chambers of Congress have advanced legislation that would block federal agencies from limiting authors’ ability to choose how to license their work. . . .

This language used in the House report and Senate report regarding researcher choice is identical, though the House goes further by advising federal agencies not to “exert broad ‘federal purpose’ authority over peer reviewed articles” or “otherwise force use of an open license.”

House Republicans also propose that the White House be prohibited from using any funding to implement the policy, as they attempted in last year’s legislation.

https://tinyurl.com/46y42ecr

"Unfolding the Downloads of Datasets: A Multifaceted Exploration of Influencing Factors"

Scientific data are essential to advancing scientific knowledge and are increasingly valued as scholarly output. Understanding what drives dataset downloads is crucial for their effective dissemination and reuse. Our study, analysing 55,473 datasets from 69 data repositories, identifies key factors driving dataset downloads, focusing on interpretability, reliability, and accessibility. We find that while lengthy descriptive texts can deter users due to complexity and time requirements, readability boosts a dataset’s appeal. Reliability, evidenced by factors like institutional reputation and citation counts of related papers, also significantly increases a dataset’s attractiveness and usage. Additionally, our research shows that open access to datasets increases their downloads and amplifies the importance of interpretability and reliability. This indicates that easy access enhances the overall attractiveness and usage of datasets in the scholarly community. By emphasizing interpretability, reliability, and accessibility, this study offers a comprehensive framework for future research and guides data management practices toward ensuring clarity, credibility, and open access to maximize the impact of scientific datasets.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03591-8

"Infra Finder: a New Tool to Enhance Transparency, Discoverability and Trust in Open Infrastructure"

This paper describes Infra Finder, a new tool built by Invest in Open Infrastructure to help institutional budget holders and libraries make more informed decisions around adoption of and investment in open infrastructure. Through increased transparency and discoverability, we aim for this tool to foster trust in the decision-making process and to help build connections between services, users, and funders. The design of Infra Finder is intended to contribute to ongoing discussions and developments regarding trust and transparency in open scholarly infrastructure, as well as help level the playing field between organizations with limited resources to conduct extensive due diligence processes and those with their own analyst teams. In this work, we describe the landscape analysis that led to the creation of Infra Finder, the use cases for the tool, and the approach IOI is taking to create and foster use of Infra Finder in the open infrastructure environment. We also address some of the principles of trust in open source and open infrastructure that have informed and impacted the Infra Finder project and our work in creating this tool.

https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v18i1.927

"’Academic Publishing is a Business Interest’: Reconciling Faculty Serials Needs and Economic Realities at a Carnegie R2 University"

Introduction: This article explores faculty conceptions of academic publishers, their willingness to circumvent paywalls and share content, and their understanding of who holds the responsibility to pay for this body of scholarly work to which they all contribute.

Methods: The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 faculty at their Carnegie R2 university to explore scholars’ perspectives with respect to the costs of serials and the responsibilities of the University and library in support of scholarly publishing.

Results: Participants reported a broad spectrum of perspectives with respect to circumventing publisher paywalls and offered nuanced practices for interacting with paywalled content. They explained which library services work well and offered suggestions on how best to support faculty needs for serial literature. Although most participants agree that the University has the responsibility of making academic literature available to the community, they differ in their conceptions of academic publishers as good-faith partners in the knowledge enterprise.

Discussion: The results suggest a great deal of ambiguity and diversity of beliefs among faculty: some would support boycotting all commercial publishers; some understand academic publishers to be integral to the dissemination of their work, not to mention tenure and promotion processes; and many acknowledge a variety of tensions in what feels to them an exploitative and fraught relationship. These findings have implications for library services in acquisitions, collection management, scholarly communication, discovery, and access.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16232

"Toward Enhanced Reusability: A Comparative Analysis of Metadata for Machine Learning Objects and Their Characteristics in Generalist and Specialist Repositories"

Objective: The rapidly increasing prevalence and application of machine learning (ML) across disciplines creates a pressing need to establish guidance for data curation professionals. However, we must first understand the characteristics of ML-related objects shared in generalist and specialist repositories and the extent to which repository metadata fields enable findability and reuse of ML objects.

Methods: We used a combination of API queries and web scraping to retrieve metadata for ML objects in eight commonly used generalist and ML-specific data repositories. We assessed both metadata schema and characteristics of deposited ML objects, within the context of the widely adopted FAIR Principles. We also calculated summary statistics for properties of objects, including number of objects per year, dataset size, domains represented, and availability of related resources.

Results: Generalist repositories excelled at providing provenance metadata, specifically unique identifiers, unambiguous citations, clear licenses, and related resources, while specialist repositories emphasized ML-specific descriptive metadata, such as number of attributes and instances and task type. In terms of object content, we noted a wide range of file formats, as well as licenses, all of which impact reusability.

Conclusions: Generalist repositories will benefit from some of the practices adopted by specialists, and specialist repositories will benefit from adopting proven data curation practices of generalist repositories. A step forward for repositories will be to invest more into use of labels and persistent identifiers to improve workflow documentation, provenance, and related resource linking of ML objects, which will increase their findability, interoperability, and reusability.

https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.685

"Cost, Advocacy, and a Mechanism for Transformation: The Proposed Power of Open Access Funds"

As paid open access becomes a mainstream academic practice, stakeholders must evaluate their role in the system. While open access advocates develop new ways to support the publication process and funding structure, commercial publishers continue to pivot to maintain their profit, relevance, and power in the publication system. This article provides the details of Montana State University’s Open Access Author Fund as an evaluation of the service and its impact on the local publishing ecosystem. As stewards of publicly funded knowledge, it is essential to critically analyze each new publishing route before adopting and supporting it. Especially when models claim to transform the system, librarians need to understand how an action changes the system, for whom, and at what cost.

https://tinyurl.com/524sp3tz

"Back to Basics: Considering Categories of Data Services Consults"

Consultations are fundamental to data librarianship, serving as a vital means of one-on-one support for researchers. However, the topics and forms of support unique to data services consults are not always carefully considered. This commentary addresses five common services offered by data librarians—dataset reference, data management support, data analysis and software support, data curation, and data management (and sharing) plan writing—and considers strategies for successful patron support within the boundaries of a consultation.

https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.931

"Promoting Data Sharing: The Moral Obligations of Public Funding Agencies"

Sharing research data has great potential to benefit science and society. However, data sharing is still not common practice. Since public research funding agencies have a particular impact on research and researchers, the question arises: Are public funding agencies morally obligated to promote data sharing? We argue from a research ethics perspective that public funding agencies have several pro tanto obligations requiring them to promote data sharing. However, there are also pro tanto obligations that speak against promoting data sharing in general as well as with regard to particular instruments of such promotion. We examine and weigh these obligations and conclude that all things considered funders ought to promote the sharing of data. Even the instrument of mandatory data sharing policies can be justified under certain conditions.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-024-00491-3

Research Organization Registry: "Using ROR for Funder Identification"

Several widely used scholarly systems are using ROR IDs to identify and disambiguate funding organizations. In this post, we’ll give you a glimpse of how and why these systems use ROR IDs as funder identifiers. . . .

DataCite, the DOI registration agency that most data repositories use, has supported ROR identifiers in the fundingReferences element of its metadata schema since August of 2019. This early schema change encouraged data repositories to send ROR IDs to DataCite in DOI metadata. Note, too, that DataCite is now encouraging funders to register DOIs for awards, and ROR is DataCite’s recommended funder identifier in award metadata.

DataCite’s API shows that nearly one-third of DataCite DOIs with an identifier in the funding reference use ROR as the funder identifier. Out of a total of about 1.4 million DataCite DOIs with funding identifiers, over 432,000 of them include ROR IDs. . . .

Another factor that has driven early adoption of ROR for funder identification in repository systems is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI), whose primary aim is to develop “a common set of cohesive and consistent capabilities, services, metrics, and social infrastructure across generalist repositories” so that NIH-funded researchers can more easily discover and share their research data. Seven generalist repository systems are participating: Dataverse, Dryad, Figshare, Mendeley Data, the Open Science Framework (OSF), and Vivli. All seven have agreed to implement ROR for author affiliations, and some have also taken the opportunity to implement ROR for funder identification sooner rather than later. . . .

See the full list of ROR Integrations to see more systems that are using or planning to use ROR for all kinds of purposes beyond funder identification — author affiliations, Open Access deal management, publisher identification, internal statistics, and more.

https://tinyurl.com/yva66cy4

Germany: "Achievements of the First DEAL Agreement Phase"

In a new publication, the German-wide DEAL consortium presents the key achievements of its first contract phase with the publishers Wiley and Springer Nature. The newly published infographic brochure provides a comprehensive insight into the background, objectives and results of the DEAL initiative. . . .

A particular focus is on the enormous increase in Open Access publications. Between 2019 and 2023, more than 105,000 publications from German scientific institutions were published under the DEAL agreements, 97 percent of which are Open Access. This remarkable success means that two-thirds of all research output from Germany is now freely accessible worldwide — a significant increase from the 30% before the DEAL initiative began.

https://tinyurl.com/mu99w2kz

“The First DEAL Agreements 2019-2023: Setting the Path for Open Access and Transparency“

"The State of Open Infrastructure Funding: A Recap of IOI’s Community Conversation "

In July, IOI hosted its second State of Open Infrastructure Community Conversation — this time, exploring the state of open infrastructure grant funding.

To set the stage,, IOI’s senior researcher Gail Steinhart provided an overview of the methods that were used to gather over $415M USD in grant funding data for open infrastructures (OIs) and broke down some of the key findings from the analysis. To dive further into the topic of funding data, IOI Executive Director Kaitlin Thaney facilitated a panel conversation that featured Steinhart, collaborators Cameron Neylon and Karl Huang from the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), and John Mohr, CIO of Information Technology for theMacArthur Foundation and co-founder of the Philanthropy Data Commons. With their extensive experience in grant funding from diverse perspectives of the scholarly ecosystem, the panel shed light on the trends, impact, and limitations of grant funding for OIs. . . . .

Across the grants the team mapped for the 36 open infrastructures represented in this dataset, awards were categorized to reflect whether they provide direct support to an OI, indirect support (meaning the OI is referenced in the award title or abstract, but the funding does not directly support the OI though it may provide some indication of on OI’s broader impact), adoption support (funding that supports the implementation of an instance of an OI at a local or community scale), and grants we were unable to classify (unknown). While a significant amount (42%) of funding goes to direct support, the majority of the funding (52%) goes to indirect support.

https://tinyurl.com/ye2yfzsr

Video

Dataset

"The OpenCitations Index"

This article presents the OpenCitations Index, a collection of open citation data maintained by OpenCitations, an independent, not-for-profit infrastructure organisation for open scholarship dedicated to publishing open bibliographic and citation data using Semantic Web and Linked Open Data technologies. The collection involves citation data harvested from multiple sources. To address the possibility of different sources providing citation data for bibliographic entities represented with different identifiers, therefore potentially representing same citation, a deduplication mechanism has been implemented. This ensures that citations integrated into OpenCitations Index are accurately identified uniquely, even when different identifiers are used. This mechanism follows a specific workflow, which encompasses a preprocessing of the original source data, a management of the provided bibliographic metadata, and the generation of new citation data to be integrated into the OpenCitations Index. The process relies on another data collection: OpenCitations Meta, and on the use of a new globally persistent identifier, namely OMID (OpenCitations Meta Identifier). As of July 2024, OpenCitations Index stores over 2 billion unique citation links, harvest from Crossref, the National Institute of Heath Open Citation Collection (NIH-OCC), DataCite, OpenAIRE, and the Japan Link Center (JaLC). OpenCitations Index can be systematically accessed and queried through several services, including SPARQL endpoint, REST APIs, and web interfaces. Additionally, dataset dumps are available for free download and reuse (under CC0 waiver) in various formats (CSV, N-Triples, and Scholix), including provenance and change tracking information.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02321

cOAlition S: "Pricing Framework to Foster Global Equity in Scholarly Publishing"

cOAlition S is pleased to announce the release of a new pricing framework designed to foster global equity in scholarly publishing. Developed by Information Power following consultation with the funder, library/consortium, and publisher communities, the framework is introduced to enable discussion, promote greater transparency and inspire publishers and other service providers to implement more equitable pricing across different economies. To support this, the framework provides users with guiding principles, data, information, and tools. The approach is adaptable, allowing publishers to implement changes gradually and in line with their specific circumstances. It can be applied to various pricing models, including article processing charges (APCs), subscriptions, and transformative agreements.

Global differentiated pricing that fosters equity is:

Part of a broader commitment to equity, inclusion, diversity, and belonging.

Aligned ideally with a single consistent approach developed in meaningful, open, and transparent consultation with the research community.

Relative to the context of each country, including income and purchasing power.

Communicated clearly, easy to understand, and transparent to all.

Transparently based on independent, open datasets that are regularly updated and that can be accessed, validated, and reused by everyone.

Based on shared risk. Customers and publishers should share currency risks.

Key features of the framework include:

Open, Transparent Data: Utilizing World Bank International Comparison Program data, reflecting each country’s income and ability to pay.

Banding: Grouping countries into bands eases administration.

Excel-Based Tool: Allowing publishers to explore and set their own bands and differential prices using the same transparent data.

Local Currencies: Issuing invoices in local currencies where possible.

Comprehensive Appendices: Detailed guidance on data sources, downloading World Bank datasets, and changes in country indices from 2017 to 2021.

The full report on the Pricing Framework to Foster Global Equity in Scholarly Publishing is available for download at https://zenodo.org/uploads/12784905, along with the More Equitable Pricing Tool and a set of frequently asked questions.

https://tinyurl.com/2jf7z43v

"Reproducible and Attributable Materials Science Curation Practices: A Case Study"

While small labs produce much of the fundamental experimental research in Material Science and Engineering (MSE), little is known about their data management and sharing practices and the extent to which they promote trust in and transparency of the published research. In this research, a case study is conducted on a leading MSE research lab [at MIT] to characterize the limits of current data management and sharing practices concerning reproducibility and attribution. The workflows are systematically reconstructed, underpinning four research projects by combining interviews, document review, and digital forensics. Then, information graph analysis and computer-assisted retrospective auditing are applied to identify where critical research information is unavailable orat risk.

Data management and sharing practices in this leading lab protect against computer and disk failure; however, they are insufficient to ensure reproducibility or correct attribution of work,especiallywhen a group member withdraws before the project completion.Therefore, recommendations for adjustments in MSE data management and sharing practices are proposed to promote trustworthiness and transparency by adding lightweight automated file-level auditing and automated data transfer processes.

https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v18i1.940

Paywall: "What Is Research Data ‘Misuse’? And How Can It Be Prevented or Mitigated?"

In the article, we emphasize the challenge of defining misuse broadly and identify various forms that misuse can take, including methodological mistakes, unauthorized reuse, and intentional misrepresentation. We pay particular attention to underscoring the complexity of defining misuse, considering different epistemological perspectives and the evolving nature of scientific methodologies. We propose a theoretical framework grounded in the critical analysis of interdisciplinary literature on the topic of misusing research data, identifying similarities and differences in how data misuse is defined across a variety of fields, and propose a working definition of what it means to "misuse" research data. Finally, we speculate about possible curatorial interventions that data intermediaries can adopt to prevent or respond to instances of misuse.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24944

"Training to Act FAIR: A Pre-Post Study on Teaching FAIR Guiding Principles to (Future) Researchers in Higher Education"

With a pre-post test design, the study evaluates the short-term effectiveness of FAIR training on students’ scientific suggestions and justifications in line with FAIR’s guiding principles. The study also assesses the influence of university legal frameworks on students’ inclination towards FAIR training. Before FAIR training, 81.1% of students suggested that scientific actions were not in line with the FAIR guiding principles. However, there is a 3.75-fold increase in suggestions that adhere to these principles after the training. Interestingly, the training does not significantly impact how students justify FAIR actions. The study observes a positive correlation between the presence of university legal frameworks on FAIR guiding principles and students’ inclination towards FAIR training.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-024-09547-2

"The Promotion and Implementation of Open Science Measures among High-Performing Journals from Brazil, Mexico, Portugal, and Spain"

This study empirically examined the promotion and implementation of open science measures among high-performing journals of Brazil, Mexico, Portugal, and Spain. Journal policy related to data sharing, materials sharing, preregistration, open peer review, and consideration of preprints and replication studies was gathered from the websites of the journals. . . . Analyses found a higher promotion of open science measures among Brazilian journals than their Portuguese counterparts, and higher promotion of open science measures among international journals than their domestic counterparts. Analyses found higher implementation of open science measures among Brazilian journals than their Portuguese and Mexican counterparts. One journal out of 40 encouraged preregistration of studies; none encouraged replication studies and none had implemented open peer review.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1616

"Big Ten Academic Alliance + Next Generation Library Publishing Announce the Launch of a Pilot Project"

The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) is excited to announce a partnership with the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project. This collaboration aims to test and enhance infrastructure solutions for academy-owned scholarly publishing programs that are open source, community-led, and rooted in academic values. The pilot project will create a unified discovery layer for the diverse publishing platforms of participating libraries, presenting them as a single, shared collection of open access materials.

Through this BTAA-funded initiative, Penn State University Libraries and Indiana University Libraries will work with the NGLP team to implement the Meru display layer, enhancing infrastructure and service models specifically for the BTAA. The project will involve migrating select content from the partners’ catalogs into the NGLP ecosystem, improving interface design, and expanding the types of content displayed. The goal is to support and strengthen academy-owned scholarly publishers with scalable solutions.

https://tinyurl.com/ychk5hc2

"Estimating Global Article Processing Charges Paid to Six Publishers for Open Access Between 2019 and 20"

This study presents estimates of the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. APCs are fees charged for publishing in some fully open access journals (gold) and in subscription journals to make individual articles open access (hybrid). There is currently no way to systematically track institutional, national or global expenses for open access publishing due to a lack of transparency in APC prices, what articles they are paid for, or who pays them. We therefore curated and used an open dataset of annual APC list prices from Elsevier, Frontiers, MDPI, PLOS, Springer Nature, and Wiley in combination with the number of open access articles from these publishers indexed by OpenAlex to estimate that, globally, a total of $8.349 billion ($8.968 billion in 2023 US dollars) were spent on APCs between 2019 and 2023. We estimate that in 2023 MDPI ($681.6 million), Elsevier ($582.8 million) and Springer Nature ($546.6) generated the most revenue with APCs. After adjusting for inflation, we also show that annual spending almost tripled from $910.3 million in 2019 to $2.538 billion in 2023, that hybrid exceed gold fees, and that the median APCs paid are higher than the median listed fees for both gold and hybrid. Our approach addresses major limitations in previous efforts to estimate APCs paid and offers much needed insight into an otherwise opaque aspect of the business of scholarly publishing. We call upon publishers to be more transparent about OA fees.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.16551

"On the Modification and Revocation of Open Source Licences"

Historically, open source commitments have been deemed irrevocable once materials are released under open source licenses. In this paper, the authors argue for the creation of a subset of rights that allows open source contributors to force users to (i) update to the most recent version of a model, (ii) accept new use case restrictions, or even (iii) cease using the software entirely. While this would be a departure from the traditional open source approach, the legal, reputational and moral risks related to open-sourcing AI models could justify contributors having more control over downstream uses. Recent legislative changes have also opened the door to liability of open source contributors in certain cases. The authors believe that contributors would welcome the ability to ensure that downstream users are implementing updates that address issues like bias, guardrail workarounds or adversarial attacks on their contributions. Finally, this paper addresses how this license category would interplay with RAIL licenses, and how it should be operationalized and adopted by key stakeholders such as OSS platforms and scanning tools.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13064