Category: Open Access

European Commission’s OA Plan S: "Academic Freedom and Responsibility: Why Plan S Is Not Unethical"

Stephen Curry, has published "Academic Freedom and Responsibility: Why Plan S Is Not Unethical" in Reciprocal Space.

Here's an excerpt:

Since its announcement on 4th September the European Commission's plan to make a radical shift towards open access (OA) has caused quite a stir. Backed by eleven* national funding agencies, the plan aims to make the research that they support free to read as soon as it is published. This is a major challenge to the status quo, since the funders are effectively placing subscription journals off limits for their researchers, even if the journals allow green OA (publication of the author-accepted manuscript) after an embargo period; Plan S also specifically excludes hybrid open access except in cases where journals have an agreed schedule for flipping to OA. The plan has been welcomed as "admirably strong" by OA advocate Peter Suber, though he has also offered cautionary notes on some aspects. Others have been less enthusiastic. A central charge, from some publishers and some academics is that Plan S is an infringement of academic freedom to choose how and where your work is published and it therefore unethical.

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"APCs—Mirroring the Impact Factor or Legacy of the Subscription-Based Model?"

Nina Schönfelder has self-archived "APCs—Mirroring the Impact Factor or Legacy of the Subscription-Based Model."

Here's an excerpt:

With the ongoing open-access transformation, article processing charges (APCs) are gaining importance as the dominant business model for scientific open-access journals. This paper analyzes which factors determine the level of an APC by means of multivariate linear regression. With data from OpenAPC, APCs actually paid are explained by the following variables: (1) the "source normalized impact per paper" (SNIP), (2) whether the journal is open access or hybrid, (3) the publisher of the journal, (4) the subject area of the journal, and (5) the year. The results show that the journal's impact and the hybrid status are the most important factors for the level of APCs. However, the relationship between APC and SNIP is different for open-access journals and hybrid journals. The journal's impact is crucial for the level of APCs in open-access journals, whereas it little alters APCs for publications in hybrid-journals. This paper contributes to the emerging literature initiated by the "Pay It Forward"-study conducted at the University of California Libraries. It sets the foundations for the assessment whether the large-scale open-access transformation of scientific journals is a financially viable way for each research institution in general and universities in particular.

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"Monographs on the Move?: A View on ‘Decoupling’ and Other Prospects"

Andrew Lockett has published "Monographs on the Move?: A View on 'Decoupling' and Other Prospects" in Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

In the context of the recent debate about the movement towards a monographs mandate for the UK, this opinion piece considers the logic of ‘decoupling’ that underlies it. It also looks at the real opportunities to improve on the current extraordinarily durable high-price system for publishing long-form research. Thinking around decoupled monograph publishing has positioned academic authors as the individual consumers of diverse publishing services (a wide array of which are fast emerging) in the face of significant scholarly caution. Furthermore, a danger of renewed market dominance by price-makers in an open access environment remains, with the risk of inequitable outcomes that may mirror problems that have arisen in journals. Opportunities may also arise for new local initiatives, especially collective and community-based publishing, with academic libraries likely to be in the middle of a fast-changing and contested environment for publishing monographs.

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"The Open Access Citation Advantage: Does It Exist and What Does It Mean for Libraries?"

Colby Lil Lewis has published "The Open Access Citation Advantage: Does It Exist and What Does It Mean for Libraries?" in Information Technology and Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

The last literature review of research on the existence of an Open Access Citation Advantage (OACA) was published in 2011 by Philip M. Davis and William H. Walters. This paper reexamines the conclusions reached by Davis and Walters by providing a critical review of OACA literature that has been published 2011, and explores how increases in OA publication trends could serve as a leveraging tool for libraries against the high costs of journal subscriptions.

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"’Publication Favela’ or Bibliodiversity? Open Access Publishing Viewed from a European Perspective"

Pierre Mounier has published "'Publication Favela' or Bibliodiversity? Open Access Publishing Viewed from a European Perspective" in Learned Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

As a future infrastructure to support open scholarly communication across Europe, OPERAS aims to coordinate a range of publishers and service providers to offer researchers and societies a fully functional web of services to cover the entire research lifecycle.

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"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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