Category: Open Access

Knowledge Exchange Consensus on Monitoring Open Access Publications and Cost Data

The Knowledge Exchange has released Knowledge Exchange Consensus on Monitoring Open Access Publications and Cost Data .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The report gives a great deal of detail on the presentations from the different countries, as well as the keynote address from Stuart Lawson on the true costs of publishing, which coincides significantly with the excellent work he and Katie Shamash have done with the Total Cost of Ownership project in Jisc Collections. In addition, Kai Geschuhn from the Max Planck Digital Library spoke about the idea of moving from offsetting deals to pay-as-you-publish; Rachel Lammey discussed CrossREF and open access meta-data; and Graham Stone, from Jisc, focused on collecting information on APC cost data.

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"From the Ground Up: A Group Editorial on the Most Pressing Issues in Scholarly Communication"

Nicky Agate et. al have published "From the Ground Up: A Group Editorial on the Most Pressing Issues in Scholarly Communication" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately about the future of scholarly communication in libraries (for an example, see Clifford Lynch's guest editorial in the February issue of C&RL), and we wanted to give our board a chance to weigh in. They were asked to share their take on the most pressing issues in scholarly communication today, in their capacity as Editorial Board members (rather than as representatives of their respective institutions), and the following six short pieces are the result.

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A System That Prioritises Publications Means Early Career Researchers’ Scholarly Attitudes and Behaviours Remain Conservative

Dave Nicholas has published "A System That Prioritises Publications Means Early Career Researchers' Scholarly Attitudes and Behaviours Remain Conservative" in the LSE Impact Blog.

Here's an excerpt:

Reporting the first-year findings of a longitudinal study of an international panel of ECRs, Dave Nicholas reveals that many remain conservative in their scholarly attitudes and practices. ECRs are concerned by "risky" open peer review, regard archiving their work in repositories as a non-priority, and display little interest in open science or altmetrics. Many ECRs see opportunities for change, but do not feel able to grasp them as they are shackled to a reputational system that promotes publication record and citation scores above all else.

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"The Influence of Journal Submission Guidelines on Author’s Reporting of Statistics and Use of Open Research Practices"

David Giofrè et al. have published "The Influence of Journal Submission Guidelines on Author's Reporting of Statistics and Use of Open Research Practices" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

From January 2014, Psychological Science introduced new submission guidelines that encouraged the use of effect sizes, estimation, and meta-analysis (the "new statistics"), required extra detail of methods, and offered badges for use of open science practices. We investigated the use of these practices in empirical articles published by Psychological Science and, for comparison, by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, during the period of January 2013 to December 2015. The use of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) was extremely high at all times and in both journals. In Psychological Science, the use of confidence intervals increased markedly overall, from 28% of articles in 2013 to 70% in 2015, as did the availability of open data (3 to 39%) and open materials (7 to 31%). The other journal showed smaller or much smaller changes. Our findings suggest that journal-specific submission guidelines may encourage desirable changes in authors’ practices.

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"New World, Same Model: Periodicals Price Survey 2017"

Stephen Bosch and Kittie Henderson have published "New World, Same Model: Periodicals Price Survey 2017" in Library Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Since e-journal package prices are often based on custom publisher quotes, we analyzed the 2017 price increases of more than 6,300 e-journal packages handled by EBSCO and found that the average inflationary increase for 2017 was in the 4.5%–4.9% range. Reflecting the percentage of library orders dedicated to electronic format, approximately 78% of the 2017 orders placed by EBSCO on behalf of academic libraries were for either e-only or print plus online combinations.

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"The Stars Are Aligning for Preprints"

Judy Luther has published "The Stars Are Aligning for Preprints" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Significant events have occurred in rapid succession in the last year signaling that preprints, the author’s original manuscript before submission to a journal, will play a much larger role in the landscape. Developments with DOIs, changes in funder expectations, and the launch of new services indicate that preprints will no longer be limited to the hard sciences and social sciences.

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University of Hawai’i Awarded $90,000 Humanities Open Book Program Grant

The University of Hawai'i has received a $90,000 Humanities Open Book Program grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the University of Hawai‘i a $90,000 grant to digitize 100 out-of-print University of Hawai‘i Press books for open access.

The project is part of the Humanities Open Book Program, a joint initiative between the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). . . .

Beginning in 2018, the digitized titles will be hosted on a custom open-access portal where readers will be able to download them in EPUB and PDF formats. A print-on-demand option will also be offered for select titles.

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"Ready for the Future? A Survey on Open Access with Scientists from the French National Research Center"

Joachim Schöpfel et al. have self-archived "Ready for the Future? A Survey on Open Access with Scientists from the French National Research Center."

Here's an excerpt:

The CNRS senior research managers (laboratory directors) globally share the positive opinion towards OA revealed by other studies with researchers from the UK, Germany, the USA and other countries. However, they are more supportive of open repositories (green road) than of OA journal publishing (gold). The response patterns reveal a gap between generally positive opinions about OA and less supportive behaviours, principally publishing articles with article processing charges (APCs). A small group of senior research managers does not seem to be interested in green or gold OA and reluctant to self-archiving and OA publishing.

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"Open Data, [Open] Access: Linking Data Sharing and Article Sharing in the Earth Sciences"

Samantha Teplitzky has published "Open Data, [Open] Access: Linking Data Sharing and Article Sharing in the Earth Science" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION The norms of a research community influence practice, and norms of openness and sharing can be shaped to encourage researchers who share in one aspect of their research cycle to share in another. Different sets of mandates have evolved to require that research data be made public, but not necessarily articles resulting from that collected data. In this paper, I ask to what extent publications in the Earth Sciences are more likely to be open access (in all of its definitions) when researchers open their data through the Pangaea repository. METHODS Citations from Pangaea data sets were studied to determine the level of open access for each article. RESULTS This study finds that the proportion of gold open access articles linked to the repository increased 25% from 2010 to 2015 and 75% of articles were available from multiple open sources.

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"Transitioning from a Conventional to a’‘Mega’ Journal: A Bibliometric Case Study of the Journal Medicine"

Simon Wakeling et al. have published "Transitioning from a Conventional to a'‘Mega' Journal: A Bibliometric Case Study of the Journal Medicine" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

This study compares the bibliometric profile of the journal Medicine before and after its transition to the OAMJ model. Three standard modes of bibliometric analysis are employed, based on data from Web of Science: journal output volume, author characteristics, and citation analysis. The journal’s article output is seen to have grown hugely since its conversion to an OAMJ, a rise driven in large part by authors from China. Articles published since 2015 have fewer citations, and are cited by lower impact journals than articles published before the OAMJ transition.

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Open Data: The Researcher Perspective

Elsevier and the Centre for Science and Technology Studies have released Open Data: The Researcher Perspective .

Here's an excerpt:

Combining information from a bibliometric analysis, a survey and case studies, this report examines how researchers share data, the attitudes of researchers toward sharing data, and why researchers might be reticent to share data.

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"Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) Launches with Early Success"

ARL has released "Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) Launches with Early Success."

Here's an excerpt:

Six organizations today announced the establishment of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC): OpenCitations, the Wikimedia Foundation, PLOS, eLife, DataCite, and the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University. The Association of Research Libraries is among 33 stakeholder projects and organizations—including the California Digital Library, the Center for Open Science, the Internet Archive, Mozilla, and the Wellcome Trust—that have formally put their names behind I4OC in support of openly accessible citations.

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"Openness as Social Praxis"

Matthew Longshore Smith and Ruhiya Seward have published "Openness as Social Praxis" in First Monday.

Here's an excerpt:

The paper "Fifty shades of open" by Pomerantz and Peek (2016) highlighted the increasing ambiguity and even confusion surrounding this term. This article builds on Pomerantz and Peek’s attempt to disambiguate the term by offering an alternative understanding to openness —that of social praxis. More specifically, our framing can be broken down into three social processes: open production, open distribution, and open consumption. Each process shares two traits that make them open: you don’t have to pay (free price), and anyone can participate (non-discrimination) in these processes.

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"Organization and Delivery of Scholarly Communications Services by Academic and Research Libraries in the United Kingdom: Observations from Across the Pond"

Christine Fruin has published "Organization and Delivery of Scholarly Communications Services by Academic and Research Libraries in the United Kingdom: Observations from Across the Pond" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

There are three primary takeaways from the experience of U.K. scholarly communication practitioners for U.S. librarians: increase collaboration with offices of research, reconsider current organization and delegation of scholarly communication services, and increase involvement in legislative and policy-making activity in the U.S. with respect to access to research.

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"European Commission Considering Leap into Open-Access Publishing"

Martin Enserink has published "European Commission Considering Leap into Open-Access Publishing" in Science.

Here's an excerpt:

The European Commission, which spends more than £10 billion annually on research, may follow two other big league funders, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and set up a “publishing platform” for the scientists it funds, in an attempt to accelerate the transition to open-access publishing in Europe.

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Towards a Competitive and Sustainable Open Access Publishing Market in Europe

OpenAIRE has released Towards a Competitive and Sustainable Open Access Publishing Market in Europe.

Here's an excerpt:

Without intervention, immediate OA to just half of Europe's scientific publications will not be achieved until 2025 or later. Readers in academia have greater access, to more content, than ever before. Despite this, the majority of publications arising from public investments in research remain in accessible to the public, and the growth of OA appears to be slowing.

This study considers the economic factors contributing to the current state of the open access publishing market, and evaluates the potential for European policymakers to enhance market competition and sustainability in parallel to increasing access.

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PubMed Launches LinkOut to Institutional Repository Full-Text Publications and Other Resources

PubMed has launched LinkOut.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

PubMed users can now see the icon that links to the full text deposited at an institutional repository (IR) using LinkOut. The LinkOut service allows you to link to full text, library holdings, and other relevant external resources from PubMed and other NCBI databases.

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"An Exploration of Faculty Experiences with Open Access Journal Publishing at Two Canadian Comprehensive Universities"

has published "An Exploration of Faculty Experiences with Open Access Journal Publishing at Two Canadian Comprehensive Universities" in Partnership The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research.

Here's an excerpt:

This exploratory study was intended to shed light on Canadian academics’ participation in, knowledge of and attitudes towards Open Access (OA) journal publishing. The primary aim of the study was to inform the authors’ schools’ educational and outreach efforts to faculty regarding OA publishing. The survey was conducted at two Canadian comprehensive universities: Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario) and Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario) in 2014.

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"Who Support Open Access Publishing? Gender, Discipline, Seniority and Other Factors Associated with Academics’ OA Practice"

Yimei Zhu has published "Who Support Open Access Publishing? Gender, Discipline, Seniority and Other Factors Associated with Academics' OA Practice" in Scientometrics.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper presents the findings from a survey study of UK academics and their publishing behaviour. . . . The results are based on a survey study of academics at 12 Russell Group universities, and reflect responses from over 1800 researchers. . . . The results suggest that there were differences in the extent of OA practice between different universities, academic disciplines, age and seniorities. Academics’ use in OA publishing was also related to their awareness of OA policy and OA repositories, their attitudes towards the importance of OA publishing and their belief in OA citation advantage.

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AAU, ARL, and AAUP Will Launch Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative

AAU, ARL, and AAUP will launch the Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative this spring.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The universities and colleges directly participating in this initiative will incorporate three components into their digital monograph publishing projects: provide a baseline university publishing grant of $15,000 to support the publication of an open access, digital monograph of 90,000 words or less (with additional funding for works of greater length or complexity to be negotiated by the author, institution, and publisher); set a target of awarding at least three publishing grants per year; and commit to participating in this initiative for five years.

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"Open Access to Scientific Information in Emerging Countries"

Joachim Schöpfel has published "Open Access to Scientific Information in Emerging Countries" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

Access to information plays a critical role in supporting development. Open access to scientific information is one solution. Up to now, the open access movement has been most successful in the Western hemisphere. The demand for open access is great in the developing world as it can contribute to solving problems related to access gaps. Five emerging countries, called BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — play a specific and leading role with a significant influence on regional and global affairs because of their large and fast-growing national economies, their demography and geographic situation. In order to better understand open access in each of the five countries, in this paper we take a look at specific conditions in each country, relying on data from information professionals and scientists from BRICS, with an empirical approach focused on country-specific characteristics and challenges. The paper is an updated and enriched synthesis of a recent work on open access in the BRICS countries published by Litwin, Sacramento CA.

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"’Just Google It’—The Scope of Freely Available Information Sources for Doctoral Thesis Writing"

Vincas Grigas et al. have published "'Just Google It'—The Scope of Freely Available Information Sources for Doctoral Thesis Writing" in Information Research.

Here's an excerpt:

Library collections and subscribed databases could cover up to 80 per cent of all information resources used in doctoral theses. Among the most significant findings to emerge from this study is the fact that on average more than half (57 per cent) of all utilised information resources were freely available or were accessed without library support. We may presume that the library as a direct intermediator for information users is potentially important and irreplaceable only in four out of ten attempts of PhD students to seek information.

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"Open-Access Mega-Journals: The Future of Scholarly Communication or Academic Dumping Ground? A Review"

Valerie Spezi, et al. have published "Open-Access Mega-Journals: The Future of Scholarly Communication or Academic Dumping Ground? A Review" in the Journal of Documentation.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper represents the first comprehensive review of the mega-journal phenomenon, drawing not only on the published academic literature, but also grey, professional and informal sources. The paper advances a number of ways in which the role of OAMJs in the scholarly communication environment can be conceptualised.

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"Copyright Compliance and Infringement in ResearchGate Full-Text Journal Articles"

Hamid R. Jamali has self-archived "Copyright Compliance and Infringement in ResearchGate Full-Text Journal Articles."

Here's an excerpt:

This study aims to investigate the extent to which ResearchGate members as authors of journal articles comply with publishers' copyright policies when they self-archive full-text of their articles on ResearchGate. . . . The key finding was that 201 (51.3%) out of 392 non-OA articles infringed the copyright and were non-compliant with publishers' policy. While 88.3% of journals allowed some form of self-archiving (SHERPA/RoMEO green, blue or yellow journals), the majority of non-compliant cases (97.5%) occurred when authors self-archived publishers' PDF files (final published version).

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"Public Funding and Open Access to Research: A Review of Canadian Multiple Sclerosis Research"

Caitlin Bakker et al. have published "Public Funding and Open Access to Research: A Review of Canadian Multiple Sclerosis Research" in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

Here's an excerpt:

Objective: The goal of the study was to determine the open access (OA) cost implications and repository policies of journals frequently used by a sample of MS researchers. This study benchmarked current publishing preferences by MS Society of Canada researchers by examining the OA full-text availability of journal articles written by researchers funded between 2009 and 2014. . . .

Results: There were 758 articles analyzed in this study, of which 288 (38.0%) were OA articles. The majority of authors were still relying on journal policies for deposit in PubMed Central or availability on publisher websites for OA. Gold OA journals accounted for 10.2% of the journals in this study and were associated with significantly lower APCs (US $1900) than in hybrid journals (US $3000). Review of the journal self-archiving options highlighted the complexity of stipulations that authors would have to navigate to legally deposit a version of their article.

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