Category: Open Access

"ScholarlyHub: A Progress Report at Six Months"

Guy Geltner and John Willinsky have self-archived "ScholarlyHub: A Progress Report at Six Months."

Here's an excerpt:

ScholarlyHub (SH) was launched in November 2017 as a portal to fund and create a social network for scholarship-using individuals and communities that is supported and directed from the bottom up and not beholden to venture capitalists on the one hand and governments on the other. As an inclusive, member-run portal, it hopes to connect rather than replace numerous non-profit and open-source OA initiatives, which tend to lack a visible and attractive front end, and which may not currently be interoperable. If its goals can be realized, SH may offer one solution to the full workflow platforms that for-profit conglomerates are on the cusp of achieving. This practitioner’s paper presents the key characteristics of SH and offers an early progress report.

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"Collecting Inclusive Usage Metrics for Open Access Publications: the HIRMEOS Project"

Javier Arias has self-archived "Collecting Inclusive Usage Metrics for Open Access Publications: the HIRMEOS Project."

Here's an excerpt:

Open Access has matured for journals, but its uptake in the book market is still delayed, despite the fact that books continue to be the leading publishing format for social sciences and humanities. The 30-months EU-funded project HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure) tackles the main obstacles of the full integration of five important digital platforms supporting open access monographs. The content of participating platforms will be enriched with tools that enable identification, authentication and interoperability (via DOI, ORCID, Fundref), and tools that enrich information and entity extraction (INRIA (N)ERD), the ability to annotate monographs (Hypothes.is), and gather usage and alternative metric data. This paper focuses on the development and implementation of Open Source Metrics Services that enable the collection of OA Metrics and Altmetrics from third-party platforms, and how the architecture of these tools will allow implementation in any external platform, particularly in start-up Open Access publishers.

Read more about it: "Shared Infrastructure for Next- Generation Books: HIRMEOS."

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"How Green Is Our Valley?: Five-Year Study of Selected LIS Journals from Taylor & Francis for Green Deposit of Articles"

Jill Emery has published "How Green Is Our Valley?: Five-Year Study of Selected LIS Journals from Taylor & Francis for Green Deposit of Articles" in Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

This study reviews content from five different library and information science journals: Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian, Collection Management, College & Undergraduate Libraries, Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship and Journal of Library Administration over a five-year period from 2012–2016 to investigate the green deposit rate. Starting in 2011, Taylor & Francis, the publisher of these journals, waived the green deposit embargo for library and information science, heritage and archival content, which allows for immediate deposit of articles in these fields. The review looks at research articles and standing columns over the five years from these five journals to see if any articles were retrieved using the OA Button or through institutional repositories. Results indicate that less than a quarter of writers have chosen to make a green deposit of their articles in local or subject repositories. The discussion outlines some best practices to be undertaken by librarians, editors and Taylor & Francis to make this program more successful.

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"Open Science Support as a Portfolio of Services and Projects: From Awareness to Engagement"

Birgit Schmidt et al. have published "Open Science Support as a Portfolio of Services and Projects: From Awareness to Engagement" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

Together with many other universities worldwide, the University of Göttingen has aimed to unlock the full potential of networked digital scientific communication by strengthening open access as early as the late 1990s. Open science policies at the institutional level consequently followed and have been with us for over a decade. However, for several reasons, their adoption often is still far from complete when it comes to the practices of researchers or research groups. To improve this situation at our university, there is dedicated support at the infrastructural level: the university library collaborates with several campus units in developing and running services, activities and projects in support of open access and open science. This article outlines our main activity areas and aligns them with the overall rationale to reach higher uptake and acceptance of open science practice at the university. The mentioned examples of our activities highlight how we seek to advance open science along the needs and perspectives of diverse audiences and by running it as a multi-stakeholder endeavor. Therefore, our activities involve library colleagues with diverse backgrounds, faculty and early career researchers, research managers, as well as project and infrastructure staff. We conclude with a summary of achievements and challenges to be faced.

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"An Expertise Recommender System Based on Data from an Institutional Repository (DiVA)"

Milena Angelova et al. have self-archived "An Expertise Recommender System Based on Data from an Institutional Repository (DiVA)."

Here's an excerpt:

Finding experts in academics is an important practical problem, e.g. recruiting reviewers for reviewing conference, journal or project submissions, partner matching for research proposals, finding relevant M. Sc. or Ph. D. supervisors etc. In this work, we discuss an expertise recommender system that is built on data extracted from the Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) instance of the institutional repository system DiVA. The developed prototype system is evaluated and validated on information extracted from the BTH DiVA installation, concerning thesis supervision of researchers affiliated with BTH. The extracted DiVA classification terms are used to build an ontology that conceptualizes the thesis domain supported by the university. The supervisor profiles of the tutors affiliated with the BTH are constructed based on the extracted DiVA data. These profiles can further be used to identify and recommend relevant subject thesis supervisors.

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"The Public Knowledge Project: Reflections and Directions After Its First Two Decades"

Juan Alperin, John Willinsky, Brian Owen et al. have self-archived "The Public Knowledge Project: Reflections and Directions After Its First Two Decades."

Here's an excerpt:

As the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) enters its third decade, it faces the responsibilities of supporting the more than 10,000 journals using its software and are dependent on PKP continuing to develop the code. In the fall of 2017, PKP, with the support of the Arnold Foundation, contracted the consulting services of BlueSky to Blueprint, with its principal Nancy Maron embarking on an exploration of PKP's standing and prospects among a sample of those involved in scholarly publishing, including current, former, and potential users of its software (Maron 2018). This paper presents BlueSky's findings and PKP's responses in what may serve as a lesson on the maturing of, and challenges faced by, an open source software project seeking to sustain in-creased global access to research and scholarship.

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"Global OA APCs (APC) 2010–2017: Major Trends"

Heather Morrison has self-archived "Global OA APCs (APC) 2010–2017: Major Trends ."

Here's an excerpt:

The open access (OA) article processing charges (APC) project is a longitudinal study of the minority of fully OA journals (27% in 2016) that have APCs. The global average APC shows little change; in USD, 906 in 2010, 964 in 2016, 974 in 2017. The average masks currency differences and the impact of a growing market; new APC journals often start with an APC of 0. Traditional commercial scholarly publishers are entering the OA market: the largest OA journal publishers’ portfolios in 2017 were Springer, De Gruyter, Elsevier, and Wolters Kluwer Medknow. However, these are a small portion of OA journal publishing which is still marked by a very long tail and extensive involvement by very small, often university or society publishers. APC pricing shows a wide range and variability. The APC market can be described as volatile.

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"MIT and Royal Society of Chemistry Sign First North American ‘Read and Publish’ Agreement for Scholarly Articles"

The MIT Libraries have released "MIT and Royal Society of Chemistry Sign First North American 'Read and Publish' Agreement for Scholarly Articles."

Here's an excerpt:

The MIT Libraries and the Royal Society of Chemistry have signed a groundbreaking license agreement that incorporates elements of a traditional subscription purchase and open access to scholarly articles. The experimental two-year agreement is seen as an important step on the path toward making more research freely and openly available to the world.. . .

The agreement, known as "read and publish," will run through 2019. Through the agreement, articles published in Royal Society of Chemistry journals by MIT corresponding authors during this period will be made openly available at the time of publication at no cost to the author. The aim of the offsetting agreement is that, over time, as more universities adopt this type of contract, the proportion of paywalled articles will decline and funding will shift to supporting open access to research.

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"Unbundling Open Access Dimensions: A Conceptual Discussion to Reduce Terminology Inconsistencies"

Alberto Martín-Martín et al. have self-archived "Unbundling Open Access Dimensions: A Conceptual Discussion to Reduce Terminology Inconsistencies."

Here's an excerpt:

he current ways in which documents are made freely accessible in the Web no longer adhere to the models established Budapest/Bethesda/Berlin (BBB) definitions of Open Access (OA). Since those definitions were established, OA-related terminology has expanded, trying to keep up with all the variants of OA publishing that are out there. However, the inconsistent and arbitrary terminology that is being used to refer to these variants are complicating communication about OA-related issues. This study intends to initiate a discussion on this issue, by proposing a conceptual model of OA. Our model features six different dimensions (authoritativeness, user rights, stability, immediacy, peer-review, and cost). Each dimension allows for a range of different options. We believe that by combining the options in these six dimensions, we can arrive at all the current variants of OA, while avoiding ambiguous and/or arbitrary terminology.

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"Cultural, Ideological and Practical Barriers to Open Access Adoption within the UK Academy: An Ethnographically Framed Examination"

Gareth J. Johnson has published "Cultural, Ideological and Practical Barriers to Open Access Adoption within the UK Academy: An Ethnographically Framed Examination" in Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

This article presents the results of part of an ethnographic study which examined the perceptions, development and conceptions of open access (OA) practice across the UK higher education environment. It details a qualitative semi-structured interview data capture approach with many institutionally based OA practitioners, which provided a narrative picture of academic and institutional responses to emerging OA dissemination paradigms. Through an analytical process incorporating qualitative content analysis and ideological critique, it focuses on practitioner perceptions of the types and configuration of barriers between scholars and a greater cultural adoption of OA practices. While the greatest problems perceived relate to academic intellectual disengagement or indifference to publishing praxis change, no singular cause of resistance was identified. The study reveals practitioners' perceptions of a multiplicity of operational, technological and ideological barriers blocking progress, and consequently a picture of academic engagement remaining disappointingly patchy. Moreover, moves to increase scholarly compliance through allying it to modalities of fiscal income and metrics, while potentially enhancing practical compliance, appear to risk distorting any revolutionary configuration of OA practices.

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"The Changing Influence of Journal Data Sharing Policies on Local RDM Practices "

Dylanne Dearborn et al. have published "The Changing Influence of Journal Data Sharing Policies on Local RDM Practices" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this study was to examine changes in research data deposit policies of highly ranked journals in the physical and applied sciences between 2014 and 2016, as well as to develop an approach to examining the institutional impact of deposit requirements. Policies from the top ten journals (ranked by impact factor from the Journal Citation Reports) were examined in 2014 and again in 2016 in order to determine if data deposits were required or recommended, and which methods of deposit were listed as options. For all 2016 journals with a required data deposit policy, publication information (2009-2015) for the University of Toronto was pulled from Scopus and departmental affiliation was determined for each article. The results showed that the number of high-impact journals in the physical and applied sciences requiring data deposit is growing. In 2014, 71.2% of journals had no policy, 14.7% had a recommended policy, and 13.9% had a required policy (n=836). In contrast, in 2016, there were 58.5% with no policy, 19.4% with a recommended policy, and 22.0% with a required policy (n=880). It was also evident that U of T chemistry researchers are by far the most heavily affected by these journal data deposit requirements, having published 543 publications, representing 32.7% of all publications in the titles requiring data deposit in 2016. The Python scripts used to retrieve institutional publications based on a list of ISSNs have been released on GitHub so that other institutions can conduct similar research.

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"Collections as Data: Implications for Enclosure"

Thomas G. Padilla has published "Collections as Data: Implications for Enclosure" in .

Here's an excerpt:

In recent years a growing amount of interest has been dedicated to collections as data. A collections as data paradigm seeks to foster an expanded set of research, pedagogical, and artistic potential predicated on the computational use of cultural heritage collections. Collections as data raises the question of what it might mean to treat digitized and born digital collections as data rather than simple surrogates of physical objects or static representations of digital experience.

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"Announcing LSE Press—A New Open Access Publishing Platform for the Social Sciences"

Kieran Booluck has published "Announcing LSE Press—A New Open Access Publishing Platform for the Social Sciences" in LSE Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

In addition to journals, LSE Press intends to publish a range of book publications, including more traditional research monographs, short-form monographs, and even textbooks. Again, offering authors viable open access routes to publication is of increased importance here, in response to a changing policy environment and the announcement by HEFCE—now Research England—that future Research Excellence Framework assessments will extend open access requirements to include books as well as journals.

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Open Access and Monographs: Where Are We Now?

The British Academy has released Open Access and Monographs: Where Are We Now?.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Academy argues that any future model for open access monograph publication needs to be properly funded with additional money. And a generous list of exceptions will need to be defined—for example 'crossover' books which merit submission to the REF but which also make an important contribution to the UK’s 'trade' publishing industry.

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"Conflicting Academic Attitudes to Copyright Are Slowing the Move to Open Access"

Francis Dodds has published "Conflicting Academic Attitudes to Copyright Are Slowing the Move to Open Access" in LSE Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

Moreover, many researchers are concerned to protect the integrity of their work by restricting its potential use by others. Some studies suggest that many academics across both the sciences and humanities are opposed to commercial reuse, adaptations or inclusion of their work in anthologies (a particular aspect of humanities publishing), whilst there are mixed views about allowing data mining of their work. An example of these contrasting views is the bioRxiv site which hosts preprint papers in biology. A study of the site by Lindsay McKenzie (2017) found that over a third of authors had selected the most restrictive Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which bars commercial use and “derivative” works, including translations and annotations. Another 29% had not selected any license which, by default, reserved all rights in the work, requiring permission from the author for copying and reuse. It is noticeable that the Scholarly Communications License has been criticised by both publishers and academics as being too inflexible.

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