Category: Open Access

Walt Crawford Finds over 60 Malware Infested Gold OA Journals

As part of his GOAJ4 project, Walt Crawford has been identifying malware infested gold journals. To date, he has found over 60. Here are the relevant Walt at Random posts.

  1. "GOAJ4: Starting the Deep Dive"
  2. "Malware in Gold Open Access Journals 2018: Part 1, Indonesia"
  3. "Malware in Gold Open Access Journals 2018: Part 2, Malaysia"
  4. "Malware in Gold Open Access Journals 2018: Part 3, Romania"
  5. "Malware in Gold Open Access Journals, 2018–Part 4: Brazil"
  6. "OA and Malware: A Halfway Post"
  7. "GOAJ4: Malware and Other Issues, Part 2"
  8. "GOAJ4: Malware and Other Issues, Part 3 [Final]"

Here's his spreadsheet: "Gold Open Access Journal Malware, 2018, Others"

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"Open Access Journal Publishing in the Nordic Countries"

Bo-Christer Björk has published "Open Access Journal Publishing in the Nordic Countries" in Learned Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

The number of open access (OA) journals and their share of all scholarly journals are usually estimated based on indexing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). DOAJ's coverage of OA journals from different regions of the world is, however, far from complete, particularly of journals publishing in languages other than English. Using alternative data sources for identification and manual verification, 437 scholarly OA journals published in the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) were identified, and some key characteristics were studied. Of these, only 184 were indexed in DOAJ.

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MIT: "Open Access Task Force Releases Draft Recommendations"

The MIT News Office has released "Open Access Task Force Releases Draft Recommendations."

Here's an excerpt:

The Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT's Research has released a set of draft recommendations that aim to support and increase the open sharing of MIT publications, data, software, and educational materials. . . .

The recommendations include ratifying an Institute-wide set of principles for open science; broadening the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy to cover all MIT authors; adopting an open access (OA) policy for monographs; and asking department heads to develop discipline-specific plans to encourage and support open sharing from their faculty, students, and staff.

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"Much Library and Information Science Research on Open Access Is Available in Open Access, But There Is Still Room to Grow"

Rachel Elizabeth Scott has published "Much Library and Information Science Research on Open Access Is Available in Open Access, But There Is Still Room to Grow" in Evidence Based Library and Information Practice.

Here's an excerpt:

Of the 909 articles published in the top 56 journals, 602 were available in some form of OA. Of these, 431 were available as gold copies and 171 were available as green copies. Of the 56 journals evaluated for openness, 13 were considered OA, 3 delayed OA, 27 hybrid/unconditional post-print, 2 hybrid/conditional post-print, and 11 had unrecognized OA policies.

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Norway Update: "Elsevier’s response to The Directorate for ICT and Shared Services in Higher Education and Research (UNIT)’s Decision to Not Renew Their Agreement with Elsevier"

Tom Reller has posted "Elsevier's response to The Directorate for ICT and Shared Services in Higher Education and Research (UNIT)'s Decision to Not Renew Their Agreement with Elsevier" to LIBLICENSE-L.

Here's an excerpt:

While Elsevier is working hard to accommodate the desire of some for an author-pays-to-publish (open access) world, the reality is that current author choices mean that 85 percent of journal articles globally are published under the reader-pays (subscription) model, where authors publish for free. It’s possible to come up with a negotiated agreement at reasonable costs, and Elsevier offered Norway multiple low-cost options for a rapid transition to gold open access publishing, but open access is a service that has to be funded in some form. Norway is essentially asking to receive two services for the price of one.

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"Ten Myths Around Open Scholarly Publishing"

Jonathan P. Tennant et al. have self-archived "Ten Myths Around Open Scholarly Publishing".

Here's an excerpt:

The changing world of scholarly communication and the emergence of 'Open Science' or 'Open Research' has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly-debated topics. Yet, evidence-based rational debate is regularly drowned out by misinformed or exaggerated rhetoric, which does not benefit the evolving system of scholarly communication. The aim of this article is to provide a baseline evidence framework for ten of the most contested topics, in order to help frame and move forward discussions, practices and policies. We address preprints and scooping, the practice of copyright transfer, the function of peer review, and the legitimacy of 'global' databases. The presented facts and data will be a powerful tool against misinformation across wider academic research, policy and practice, and may be used to inform changes within the rapidly evolving scholarly publishing system.

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"Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual"

Jill Cirasella and Polly Thistlethwaite have self-archived "Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual. "

Here's an excerpt:

Now that dissertations are deposited and distributed electronically, students must perform yet another anxiety-inducing task: deciding whether they want to make their dissertations immediately open access (OA) or, at universities that require OA, coming to terms with openness. For some students, mostly in the humanities and some of the social sciences, who hope to transform their dissertations into books, OA has become a bogeyman, a supposed saboteur of book contracts and destroyer of careers.

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"Opening Up Open Access Institutional Repositories to Demonstrate Value: Two Universities’ Pilots on Including Metadata-Only Records"

Karen Bjork, Rebel Cummings-Sauls, and Ryan Otto have published "Opening Up Open Access Institutional Repositories to Demonstrate Value: Two Universities' Pilots on Including Metadata-Only Records" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION Institutional repository managers are continuously looking for new ways to demonstrate the value of their repositories. One way to do this is to create a more inclusive repository that provides reliable information about the research output produced by faculty affiliated with the institution. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM This article details two pilot projects that evaluated how their repositories could track faculty research output through the inclusion of metadata-only (no full-text) records. The purpose of each pilot project was to determine the feasibility and provide an assessment of the long-term impact on the repository's mission statement, staffing, and collection development policies. NEXT STEPS This article shares the results of the pilot project and explores the impact for faculty and end users as well as the implications for repositories.

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"Do Open Educational Resources Improve Student Learning? Implications of the Access Hypothesis"

Phillip J. Grimaldi et al. have published "Do Open Educational Resources Improve Student Learning? Implications of the Access Hypothesis" in PLoS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

Open Educational Resources (OER) have been lauded for their ability to reduce student costs and improve equity in higher education. Research examining whether OER provides learning benefits have produced mixed results, with most studies showing null effects. We argue that the common methods used to examine OER efficacy are unlikely to detect positive effects based on predictions of the access hypothesis. The access hypothesis states that OER benefits learning by providing access to critical course materials, and therefore predicts that OER should only benefit students who would not otherwise have access to the materials. Through the use of simulation analysis, we demonstrate that even if there is a learning benefit of OER, standard research methods are unlikely to detect it.

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"How to Fight Fair Use Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt: The Experience of One Open Educational Resource"

Lindsey Weeramuni has published "How to Fight Fair Use Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt: The Experience of One Open Educational Resource" in The Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

At the launch of one of the early online open educational resources (OER) in 2002, the approach to addressing copyright was uncertain. Did the university or the faculty own their material? How would the third-party material be handled? Was all of its use considered fair use under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act (Title 17, United States Code) because of its educational purpose? Or was permission-seeking necessary for this project to succeed and protect the integrity of faculty and university? For many years, this OER was conservative in its approach to third-party material, avoiding making fair use claims on the theory that it was too risky and difficult to prove in the face of an infringement claim. Additionally, being one of the early projects of its kind, there was fear of becoming a target for ambitious copyright holders wanting to make headlines (and perhaps win lawsuits). It was not until 2009 that the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare was written by a community of practitioners who believed that if fair use worked for documentary film makers, video creators, and others (including big media), it worked in open education as well. Once this Code was adopted, universities and institutions were able to offer more rich and complete course content to their users than before. This paper explains how it happened at this early open educational resource offering.

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"From Finch to Plan S: and You May Ask Yourself, Well How Did I Get Here?"

Frank Manista and Graham Stone have edited "From Finch to Plan S: and You May Ask Yourself, Well How Did I Get Here?" in Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

We have gone through the catalogue of previously published articles to give an interesting overview of what has been happening at the coalface since the Finch report. Post Finch, Sykes suggested that 'there is nothing inevitable about the triumph of open access'. The bigger picture that emerges from the articles is certainly that a great deal of effort and compromise have brought us to a place much closer to the end-game than we were back in 2012. However, as the various articles show, there is a great diversity of thought on how to get to where we think we ought to be. There is a value in healthy debate, particularly when there is the benefit that OA can bring. In the days leading up to the Plan S announcement, articles in Insights signalled a more urgent tone (Earney, 2018; Lundén, Smith and Wideberg, 2018) as things were not moving fast enough in navigating the bumpy golden road towards OA (Otegem, Wennström and Hormia-Poutanen, 2018). This is something that cOAlition-S explicitly targeted. Finally, Johnson (2019) brings the special collection to a close with a round-up of the immediate aftermath post Plan S. Like you, we await the next chapter.

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More Coverage of the University of California’s Cancellation of Its Elsevier Subscriptions

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"University of California Academic Council Statement on the University’s Negotiations with Elsevier Publishing"

The Academic Council of the Academic Senate of the University of California has released "University of California Academic Council Statement on the University's Negotiations with Elsevier Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

The Academic Council of the Academic Senate of the University of California (UC), hereby signals its collective and resolute commitment to support UC's negotiating position with Elsevier in order to advance UC's mission as a public institution, make the products of our research and scholarship as freely and widely available as possible, and ensure that UC spends taxpayer money in the most ethically, morally, and socially-responsible way when entering into agreements with commercial publishers. . . .

At the present time, UC and Elsevier have reached an impasse in their negotiations and our contract has lapsed. Nonetheless, the Academic Council of the Academic Senate stands firm in its conviction that a comprehensive transformative agreement that covers all Elsevier titles is required to achieve the aspirations embodied in the Academic Senate's Open Access Policy, and articulated by the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC) in its Declaration of Rights and Principles, and by the Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Committee (SLASIAC) in its Call to Action. We support the unified strategies of the UC libraries to ameliorate the negative effects of the impasse on faculty, researchers, and students, and applaud their efforts to closely monitor alternative access along with the impacts it may have on research and teaching. . . .

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