Category: Open Access

Corina J Logan has published "We Can Shift Academic Culture through Publishing Choices" (Version 2) in F1000Research.

Here's an excerpt:

Researchers give papers for free (and often actually pay) to exploitative publishers who make millions off of our articles by locking them behind paywalls. This discriminates not only against the public (who are usually the ones that paid for the research in the first place), but also against the academics from institutions that cannot afford to pay for journal subscriptions and the ‘scholarly poor’. I explain exploitative and ethical publishing practices, highlighting choices researchers can make right now to stop exploiting ourselves and discriminating against others.

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Martin Paul Eve and Ernesto Priego have published "Who is Actually Harmed by Predatory Publishers?" in tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique.

Here's an excerpt:

Predatory publishing refers to conditions under which gold open access academic publishers claim to conduct peer review and charge for their publishing services but do not, in fact, actually perform such reviews. Most prominently exposed in recent years by Jeffrey Beall, the phenomenon garners much media attention. In this article, we acknowledge that such practices are deceptive but then examine, across a variety of stakeholder groups, what the harm is from such actions to each group of actors. We find that established publishers have a strong motivation to hype claims of predation as damaging to the scholarly and scientific endeavour while noting that, in fact, systems of peer review are themselves already acknowledged as deeply flawed.

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Teresa Auch Schultz has self-archived "Practicing What You Preach: Evaluating Access of Open Access Research."

Here's an excerpt:

The open access movement seeks to encourage all researchers to make their works openly available and free of paywalls so more people can access their knowledge. Yet some researchers who study open access (OA) continue to publish their work in paywalled journals and fail to make it open. This project set out to study just how many published research articles about OA fall into this category, how many are being made open (whether by being published in a gold OA or hybrid journal or through open deposit), and how library and information science authors compare to other disciplines researching this field. Because of the growth of tools available to help researchers find open versions of articles, this study also sought to compare how these new tools compare to Google Scholar in their ability to disseminating OA research. From a sample collected from Web of Science of articles published since 2010, the study found that although a majority of research articles about OA are open in some form, a little more than a quarter are not. A smaller rate of library science researchers made their work open compared to non-library science researchers. In looking at the copyright of these articles published in hybrid and open journals, authors were more likely to retain copyright ownership if they printed in an open journal compared to authors in hybrid journals. Articles were more likely to be published with a Creative Commons license if published in an open journal compared to those published in hybrid journals.

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Richard Poynder has published "On Sponsorship, Transparency, Scholarly Publishing, and Open Access" in Open & Shut?

Here's an excerpt:

Sponsorship and lobbying (which often amount to the same thing), for instance, have assisted legacy publishers to co-opt open access. This has seen the triumph of the pay-to-publish model, which has been introduced in a way that has enabled publishers to adapt OA to their needs, and to ringfence and port their excessive profits to the new OA environment. Those researchers who do not have the wherewithal to pay article-process charges (APCs), however, are finding themselves increasingly disenfranchised.

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eLife has released "Availability of Open Reference Data Nears 50% as Major Societies and Influential Publishers Endorse the Initiative for Open Citations."

Here's an excerpt:

Among the 20 publishers who contribute the largest amount of citation data, those who are making their citation data freely available now include: AIP Publishing, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Physical Society, De Gruyter, Emerald, and SciELO. They join Wiley, SAGE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and many others who made their reference data available prior to, or as part of, the launch of I4OC. Out of the 20 largest contributors, 13 publishers have now moved their reference data into the public domain, and discussions are ongoing with several other publishers.

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