Category: Open Access

"Towards Open Access Self Archiving Policies: A Case Study of COAR"

Bijan Kumar Roy et al. have published "Towards Open Access Self Archiving Policies: A Case Study of COAR" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper examines Open Access (OA) self archiving policies of different Open Access Repositories (OARs) affiliated to COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) as partner institutes. The process of scrutiny includes three major activities—selection of databases to consult; comparison and evaluation of Open Access policies of repositories listed in the selected databases and attached to COAR group; and critical examination of available self archiving policies of these OA repositories against a set of selected criteria. The above steps lead to reporting the following results: key findings have been identified and highlighted; common practices have been analyzed in relation to the focus of this paper; and a best practice benchmark has been suggested for popularizing and strengthening OARs as national research systems. This paper may help administrators, funding agencies, policy makers and professional librarians in devising institute-specific self archiving policies for their own organizations.

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"Will Open Access Increase Journal CiteScores? An Empirical Investigation over Multiple Disciplines"

Yang Li et al. have published "Will Open Access Increase Journal CiteScores? An Empirical Investigation over Multiple Disciplines" in PLoS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper empirically studies the effect of Open Access on journal CiteScores. We have found that the general effect is positive but not uniform across different types of journals. In particular, we investigate two types of heterogeneous treatment effect: (1) the differential treatment effect among journals grouped by academic field, publisher, and tier; and (2) differential treatment effects of Open Access as a function of propensity to be treated. The results are robust to a number of sensitivity checks and falsification tests. Our findings shed new light on Open Access effect on journals and can help stakeholders of journals in the decision of adopting the Open Access policy.

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"In Passing A.B. 2192, California Leads the Country in Open Access"

EFF has released "In Passing A.B. 2192, California Leads the Country in Open Access."

Here's an excerpt:

Under A.B. 2192—which passed both houses unanimously—all peer-reviewed, scientific research funded by the state of California would be made available to the public no later than one year after publication. There’s a similar law on the books in California right now, but it only applies to research funded by the Department of Public Health, and it’s set to expire in 2020. A.B. 2192 would extend it indefinitely and expand it to cover research funded by any state agency.

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"IMLS Funds DuraSpace Fedora Investigation–Designing a Migration Path: Assessing Barriers of Upgrading to the Most Current Version of Fedora–No Collection Left Behind"

DuraSpace has released "IMLS Funds DuraSpace Fedora Investigation–Designing a Migration Path: Assessing Barriers of Upgrading to the Most Current Version of Fedora–No Collection Left Behind."

Here's an excerpt:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded DuraSpace a National Digital Platform Planning Grant for $49,279 to investigate barriers to upgrading hundreds of U.S.-based libraries and archives running unsupported versions of Fedora. In consultation with stakeholders this project will conduct an environmental scan of relevant community initiatives, and gather primary research data to inform recommendations to reduce barriers to upgrading to the most current version of Fedora.

There are approximately 240 U.S.-based libraries and archives identified as target beneficiaries of the deliverables of this project including universities, liberal arts colleges, and not-for-profit special libraries hosted by historical societies and small research institutes.

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"Towards a Culture of Open Science and Data Sharing in Health and Medical Research"

Anisa Rowhani-Farid has self-archived "Towards a Culture of Open Science and Data Sharing in Health and Medical Research."

Here's an excerpt:

This [Ph.D] thesis investigated the factors that contribute to the cultural shift towards open science and data sharing in health and medical research, with a focus on the role health and medical journals play. The findings of this research demonstrate that journal data sharing policies are not effective and that journals do not currently provide incentives for sharing. This study contributed to the movement towards more reproducible research by providing empirical evidence for the strengthening of journal data sharing policies and the adoption of an incentive for open research.

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"The New Plugins—What Goals Are the Access Solutions Pursuing?"

Kent Anderson has published "The New Plugins—What Goals Are the Access Solutions Pursuing?" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

We now see some interesting positioning moves by entities with plugins designed to exploit Green OA or address access issues in a virtual, seemingly decentralized way—Unpaywall, Kopernio, and Anywhere Access.

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Grant: "Arcadia Fund Supports Open Access Button to Improve Access to Research Without Subscriptions"

The Open Access Button has released "Arcadia Fund Supports Open Access Button to Improve Access to Research Without Subscriptions."

Here's an excerpt:

We're happy to announce that Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, has provided the Open Access Button with a two-year, $420,000 grant to accelerate our work to release content behind paywalls and improve researchers’ ability to do their work without expensive subscriptions. . . .

We hope to expand usage of the request system outside the Open Access Button, where it is currently in development, to include inside ILL, repositories and other services where users hit paywalls.

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"How Many Wikipedia References Are Available to Read? We Measured The Proportion of Open Access Sources Across Languages and Topics."

The Wikimedia Foundation has released How Many Wikipedia References Are Available to Read? We Measured The Proportion of Open Access Sources Across Languages and Topics..

Here's an excerpt:

We recently released a dataset of all citations with identifiers in Wikipedia. . . .

To create this dataset, we cross-referenced our existing data with data provided by Unpaywall, a database gathering accessibility information of more than 19 million articles, and we associated each scholarly publication’s digital object identifier (DOI) cited in Wikipedia with an accessibility label: "Open" if the publisher (source) provides a free copy, "Closed" if it is a paywalled publication, or "Available" if the official version is paywalled but there exists an open copy available elsewhere on the web (e.g., legally deposited by the author in a university repository). In total, we gathered accessibility values for around 450,000 scholarly publications cited across 300 Wikipedia languages.[2]

We find that less than half of the official versions of scholarly publications cited with an identifier in Wikipedia are freely available on the web: 29% are free-to-read at the source, while an additional 10% have a free-to-read version available elsewhere.[3]

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"The Rent’s Too High: Self-Archive for Fair Online Publication Costs"

Robert T. Thibault, Amanda MacPherson, Stevan Harnad, Amir Raza have self-archived "The Rent's Too High: Self-Archive for Fair Online Publication Costs."

Here's an excerpt:

The main contributors of scientific knowledge, researchers, generally aim to disseminate their findings far and wide. And yet, publishing companies have largely kept these findings behind a paywall. With digital publication technology markedly reducing cost, this enduring wall seems disproportionate and unjustified; moreover, it has sparked a topical exchange concerning how to modernize academic publishing. This discussion, however, seems to focus on how to compensate major publishers for providing open access through a "pay to publish" model, in turn transferring financial burdens from libraries to authors and their funders. Large publishing companies, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, PLoS, and Frontiers, continue to earn exorbitant revenues each year, hundreds of millions of dollars of which now come from processing charges for open-access articles. A less expensive and equally accessible alternative exists: widespread self-archiving of peer-reviewed articles. All we need is awareness of this alternative and the will to employ it

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"HydraDAM2: Extending Fedora 4 and Hydra for Media Preservation"

Jon W. Dunn et al. have self-archived "HydraDAM2: Extending Fedora 4 and Hydra for Media Preservation."

Here's an excerpt:

The overarching goal of the HydraDAM2 project, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access Research and Development program, was to extend the existing HydraDAM digital asset management system, developed with prior NEH support, to be able to serve as a digital preservation repository for time-based media collections implementable at a wide range of institutions using multiple digital storage strategies. The new open source digital preservation repository system developed as part of the project by partners Indiana University (IU) and WGBH, known as Phydo, is based on the Fedora 4.x digital repository system and Samvera (formerly Hydra) repository application development framework and is intended to support storage and long-term preservation management of audio and video files and their accompanying metadata. This white paper describes the work of the HydraDAM2 project to develop the Phydo system, along with future plans.

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"How Open Is Open Access Research in Library and Information Science?"

Wanyenda Leonard Chilimo and Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha have published "How Open Is Open Access Research in Library and Information Science?" in the South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science.

Here's an excerpt:

The study investigates Library and Information Science (LIS) journals that published research articles between 2003 and 2013, which were about open access (OA) and were indexed in LIS databases. The purpose was to investigate the journals’ OA policies, ascertain the degree to which these policies facilitate OA to publications, and investigate whether such texts are also available as OA. The results show that literature growth in the domain has been significant, with a total of 1,402 articles produced during the eleven years under study. The OA policies of the fifty-six journals that published the highest number of articles were analysed. The results show that most articles (404; 41%) were published in hybrid journals, whereas 272 (29.7%) appeared in OA journals. Some 143 (53%) of the articles published in hybrid journals were available as green OA copies. In total, 602 (66%) of all the articles published were available as OA. The results show that the adoption of OA for research articles on that very subject is somewhat higher than in other fields. The study calls on LIS professionals to be conversant with the OA policies of the various journals that may publish their research.

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Science as an Open Enterprise

The Royal Society has released Science as an Open Enterprise.

Here's an excerpt:

This report analyses the impact of new and emerging technologies that are transforming the conduct and communication of research. The recommendations are designed to improve the conduct of science, respond to changing public expectations and political culture and enable researchers to maximise the impact of their research. They are designed to ensure that reproducibility and self-correction are maintained in an era of massive data volumes. They aim to stimulate the communication and collaboration where these are needed to maximise the value of data-intensive approaches to science.

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Horizon Report 2018 Higher Education Edition

EDUCAUSE has released the Horizon Report 2018 Higher Education Edition.

Here's an excerpt:

The Horizon Report highlights six trends, six challenges, and six developments relating to educational technology and practices that are likely to enter mainstream use within their focus sectors over the next five years (2018–22).

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Directory of Open Access Journals Under Attack

Clara Armengou, DOAJ Project and Communications Manager, reports on 8/12/2018 on Liblicense that:

After much investigation and active measures, we can state that the DOAJ is effectively under attack from an unknown third party.

We have deployed a number of counter-measures to halt this attack, but with limited success, and are therefore forced to take even more extreme measures to attempt to mitigate this. We hope that this will work but we cannot predict the outcome at this stage.

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