Category: Open Access

Open Divide? Critical Studies on Open Access

Litwin Books has released Open Divide? Critical Studies on Open Access.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This book brings together seventeen short critical studies of scientists and librarians from different continents, all interested in open access, most of them supporting and accompanying the open access projects and initiatives since many years, each one with the motivation to better understand (and make understood) the ongoing transformation of scientific communication.

With the agreement of Litwin Books, some authors have made open access versions of their papers available.

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"Congress Will Finally Make Its Research Reports Public"

Joe Mullin has published "Congress Will Finally Make Its Research Reports Public" in DeepLinks.

Here's an excerpt:

Open access activists have long been asking for reports by the Congressional Research Service, or CRS, to be made publicly and easily available. . . .

Now, those reports will be published directly by Congress. If you dig down to page 1092 of the omnibus bill [PDF] passed last week, you'll find the provision requiring all CRS reports to be published on a public website. The law specifies that the reports must be "searchable, sortable, and downloadable, including downloadable in bulk." Finally, it notes that CRS reports "are not subject to copyright protection in the United States."

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"Push Versus Pull"

Sheldon H. Jacobson has published "Push Versus Pull" in Communications of the ACM.

Here's an excerpt:

The access subscription fee model represents a "Push Model" for financing publications, whereby publishers push access onto institutions, for an access subscription fee. An alternative "Pull Model" positions publishers to pull submissions to their journals. In such a model, no access subscription fees are paid, and hence, anyone can access research publications. What institutions would pay are submission subscription fees, an institution-wide fee that permits their entire faculty to submit papers to a particular journal or a publisher's portfolio of journals.

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"Predator in the Pool? A Quantitative Evaluation of Non-indexed Open Access Journals in Aquaculture Research"

Jeff C. Clements et al. have published "Predator in the Pool? A Quantitative Evaluation of Non-indexed Open Access Journals in Aquaculture Research" in Frontiers in Marine Science.

Here's an excerpt:

Predatory open access (OA) journals can be defined as non-indexed journals that exploit the gold OA model for profit, often spamming academics with questionable e-mails promising rapid OA publication for a fee. In aquaculture—a rapidly growing and highly scrutinized field—the issue of such journals remains undocumented. We employed a quantitative approach to determine whether attributes of scientific quality and rigor differed between OA aquaculture journals not indexed in reputable databases and well-established, indexed journals. Using a Google search, we identified several non-indexed OA journals, gathered data on attributes of these journals and articles therein, and compared these data to well-established aquaculture journals indexed in quality-controlled bibliometric databases. We then used these data to determine if non-indexed journals were likely predatory OA journals and if they pose a potential threat to aquaculture research. On average, non-indexed OA journals published significantly fewer papers per year, had cheaper fees, and were more recently established than indexed journals. Articles in non-indexed journals were, on average, shorter, had fewer authors and references, and spent significantly less time in peer review than their indexed counterparts; the proportion of articles employing rigorous statistical analyses was also lower for non-indexed journals. Additionally, articles in non-indexed journals were more likely to be published by scientists from developing nations. Worryingly, non-indexed journals were more likely to be found using a Google search, and their articles superficially resembled those in indexed journals. These results suggest that the non-indexed aquaculture journals identified herein are likely predatory OA journals and pose a threat to aquaculture research and the public education and perception of aquaculture. Several points of reference from this study, in combination, may help scientists and the public more easily identify these possibly predatory journals, as these journals were typically established after 2010, publishing <20 papers per year, had fees <$1,000, and published articles <80 days after submission. Subsequently checking reputable and quality-controlled databases such as the Directory of Open Access Journals, Web of Science, Scopus, and Thompson Reuters can aid in confirming the legitimacy of non-indexed OA journals and can facilitate avoidance of predatory OA aquaculture journals.

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"Understanding and Supporting Researchers’ Choices in Sharing Their Publications: The Launch of the FairShare Network and Shareable PDF"

Charlie Rapple has published "Understanding and Supporting Researchers' Choices in Sharing Their Publications: The Launch of the FairShare Network and Shareable PDF" in Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

Researchers have for many years had access to new platforms and channels for networking and sharing resources, but the pace of growth in their usage of these networks has substantially increased recently. This has led to full-text sharing on a scale that concerns publishers and libraries, because of the proportion of such sharing that infringes copyright. This article summarizes key findings of a 2017 survey that explored researchers’ awareness of and behaviours in relation to scholarly collaboration networks and other emerging mechanisms for discovering and gaining access to content, along with their views on copyright. The article also describes 'Shareable PDF', a new approach to PDF-based sharing that better enables such sharing to be measured and contextualized, and which has recently been successfully launched with authors and readers.

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"The Open Access Big Deal: Back to the Future"

Richard Poynder has published "The Open Access Big Deal: Back to the Future" in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

One obvious problem with the OA Big Deal is that it allows large legacy publishers to lock their high prices into the new OA environment, while marginalising and excluding the new-entrants that were supposed to disrupt the market. Unless something changes, therefore, the affordability problem will only be perpetuated.

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"Data Availability, Reusability, and Analytic Reproducibility: Evaluating the Impact of a Mandatory Open Data Policy at the Journal Cognition"

Tom Hardwicke et al. have self-archived "Data Availability, Reusability, and Analytic Reproducibility: Evaluating the Impact of a Mandatory Open Data Policy at the Journal Cognition."

Here's an excerpt:

Access to research data is a critical feature of an efficient, progressive, and ultimately self-correcting scientific ecosystem. But the extent to which in-principle benefits of data sharing are realized in practice is unclear. Crucially, it is largely unknown whether published findings can be reproduced by repeating reported analyses upon shared data ("analytic reproducibility"). To investigate, we conducted an observational evaluation of a mandatory open data policy introduced at the journal Cognition. Interrupted time-series analyses indicated a substantial post-policy increase in data available statements (104/417, 25% pre-policy to 136/174, 78% post-policy), and data that were in-principle reusable (23/104, 22% pre-policy to 85/136, 62%, post-policy). However, for 35 articles with in-principle reusable data, the analytic reproducibility of target outcomes related to key findings was poor: 11 (31%) cases were reproducible without author assistance, 11 (31%) cases were reproducible only with author assistance, and 13 (37%) cases were not fully reproducible despite author assistance. Importantly, original conclusions did not appear to be seriously impacted. Mandatory open data policies can increase the frequency and quality of data sharing. However, suboptimal data curation, unclear analysis specification, and reporting errors can impede analytic reproducibility, undermining the utility of data sharing and the credibility of scientific findings.

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"Engaging and Supporting a University Press Scholarly Community"

Megan Taylor and Kathrine S. H. Jensen have published "Engaging and Supporting a University Press Scholarly Community" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper we explore how the development of The University of Huddersfield Press, a publisher of open access scholarly journals and monographs, has enabled the sharing of research with a wider online audience. We situate the development of the Press within a wider research environment and growing community of New University Presses (NUPs) where there is an increasing demand for demonstrating research impact, which drives the need for improved analysis and reporting of impact data, a task that often falls within the remit of library and academic support services. We detail the benefits of the University Press Manager role in terms of ensuring professional service that delivers consistency and sustainability. We go on to outline the experiences of engaging with different online spaces and detail the extensive support for student authors. We argue that in order for the Press to support building a strong and engaged scholarly community and provide new spaces for emerging research, continued investment in both platform development and infrastructure is required.

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"Releasing 1.8 Million Open Access Publications from Publisher Systems for Text and Data Mining"

Petr Knoth, Nancy Pontika and Lucas Anastasiou have published "Releasing 1.8 Million Open Access Publications from Publisher Systems for Text and Data Mining" in LSE Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

Text and data mining offers an opportunity to improve the way we access and analyse the outputs of academic research. But the technical infrastructure of the current scholarly communication system is not yet ready to support TDM to its full potential, even for open access outputs. To address this problem, Petr Knoth, Nancy Pontika and Lucas Anastasiou have developed the CORE Publisher Connector, a toolkit service designed to assist text miners in accessing content though a single machine interface. The Connector aims to solve the heterogeneity among publisher APIs and assist text miners with data collection, provide a centralised point of access to all openly available scientific publications, and provide a high-performance, constantly updated access interface.

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"Congress Funds $5 Million Open Textbook Grant Program in 2018 Spending Bil"

SPARC has released "Congress Funds $5 Million Open Textbook Grant Program in 2018 Spending Bil."

Here's an excerpt:

In a landmark victory for the Open Education movement, the U.S. Congress has included funding for a $5 million open textbook grant program in the Fiscal Year 2018 omnibus appropriations bill unveiled today. This marks the first major investment by Congress explicitly in open educational resources (OER) as a solution to the high cost of college textbooks, and underscores that course materials are a significant factor in making higher education affordable. The FY18 omnibus is expected to proceed swiftly to votes in the House and Senate and get signed into law this week.

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Pathways to Open Access

The University of California has released Pathways to Open Access.

Here's an excerpt:

Pursuant to the University of California (UC) Council of University Librarian’s (CoUL) 1 3 August 2017 charge, this Pathways to OA Working Group 2 has identified the current universe of Open Access (OA) approaches, and has analyzed the suite of strategies available for effectuating those approaches. Each approach described within this Pathways document offers unique and, in some cases, overlapping challenges, opportunities, and room for experimentation. The strategies examined here create space and freedom for the campuses to pursue both individualized and connected paths toward a large-scale transition to OA—though as we highlight below, collective action on implementing the strategies is likely to bear greater fruit.

See also: "Chart Summarizing OA Approaches and Strategies."

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"Evidence of Open Access of Scientific Publications in Google Scholar: A Large-Scale Analysis"

Alberto Martín et al. have self-archived "Evidence of Open Access of Scientific Publications in Google Scholar: A Large-Scale Analysis."

Here's an excerpt:

This article uses Google Scholar (GS) as a source of data to analyse Open Access (OA) levels across all countries and fields of research. All articles and reviews with a DOI and published in 2009 or 2014 and covered by the three main citation indexes in the Web of Science (2,269,022 documents) were selected for study. The links to freely available versions of these documents displayed in GS were collected. To differentiate between more reliable (sustainable and legal) forms of access and less reliable ones, the data extracted from GS was combined with information available in DOAJ, CrossRef, OpenDOAR, and ROAR. This allowed us to distinguish the percentage of documents in our sample that are made OA by the publisher (23.1%, including Gold, Hybrid, Delayed, and Bronze OA) from those available as Green OA (17.6%), and those available from other sources (40.6%, mainly due to ResearchGate). The data shows an overall free availability of 54.6%, with important differences at the country and subject category levels. The data extracted from GS yielded very similar results to those found by other studies that analysed similar samples of documents, but employed different methods to find evidence of OA, thus suggesting a relative consistency among methods.

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"Defining the Role of Libraries in the Open Science Landscape: A Reflection on Current European Practice"

Paul Ayris and Tiberius Ignat have self-archived "Defining the Role of Libraries in the Open Science Landscape: A Reflection on Current European Practice."

Here's an excerpt:

This collaborative paper looks at how libraries can engage with and offer leadership in the Open Science movement. It is based on case studies and the results of an EU-funded research project on Research Data Management taken from European research-led universities and their libraries. It begins by analysing three recent trends in Science, and then links component parts of the research process to aspects of Open Science. The paper then looks in detail at four areas and identifies roles for libraries: Open Access and Open Access publishing, Research Data Management, E-Infrastructures (especially the European Open Science Cloud), and Citizen Science. The paper ends in suggesting a model for how libraries, by using a 4-step test, can assess their engagement with Open Science. This 4-step test is based on lessons drawn from the case studies.

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"The Intellectual Properties of Learning: John Willinsky Discusses His New Book"

Richard Poynder has published "The Intellectual Properties of Learning: John Willinsky Discusses His New Book" in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

Willinsky sets out to place open access within the larger historical context of learning's traditions, values, and norms. And he does so by casting his eye all the way back to the rise of the monasteries, and then forward to the Statute of Anne (1710), which for the first time brought the regulation of copyright under the control of the government and courts, rather than private parties

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After 28 Years of Open Access Publishing, the Bryn Mawr Classical Review Needs Your Support

The Bryn Mawr Classical Review has released "A Request to Support BMCR."

Here's an excerpt:

However, BMCR also relies on a publishing platform that was designed and built in the 1990s. We now desperately need to update this platform, and we seek at the same time to modernize BMCR's extraordinary archive of data on the history of classical scholarship. We have already contracted for proposals to do this work—which was itself an expensive process!—and would be happy to discuss our plans with any interested parties.

In short, to see this process through, we urgently need $80,000. The expense is beyond the scale of our very limited resources. We cannot continue to operate with our current platform, nor can we update it on the basis of our modest endowment.

Donate here.

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"Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to the Internet Archive for Long Tail Journal Preservation"

The Internet Archive has released "Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to the Internet Archive for Long Tail Journal Preservation."

Here's an excerpt:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a research and development grant to the Internet Archive to address the critical need to preserve the "long tail" of open access scholarly communications. The project, Ensuring the Persistent Access of Long Tail Open Access Journal Literature, builds on prototype work identifying at-risk content held in web archives by using data provided by identifier services and registries. Furthermore, the project expands on work acquiring missing open access articles via customized web harvesting, improving discovery and access to this materials from within extant web archives, and developing machine learning approaches, training sets, and cost models for advancing and scaling this project’s work.

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"Data Sustainability and Reuse Pathways of Natural Resources and Environmental Scientists"

Yi Shen has self-archived "Data Sustainability and Reuse Pathways of Natural Resources and Environmental Scientists."

Here's an excerpt:

This paper presents a multifarious examination of natural resources and environmental scientists' adventures navigating the policy change towards open access and cultural shift in data management, sharing, and reuse. Situated in the institutional context of Virginia Tech, a focus group and multiple individual interviews were conducted exploring the domain scientists' all-around experiences, performances, and perspectives on their collection, adoption, integration, preservation, and management of data. . . . Based on these findings, this study provides suggestions on data modeling and knowledge representation strategies to support the long-term viability, stewardship, accessibility, and sustainability of scientific data.

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"Collectivity and Collaboration: Imagining New Forms of Communality to Create Resilience in Scholar-Led Publishing"

Janneke Adema and Samuel A. Moore have self-archived "Collectivity and Collaboration: Imagining New Forms of Communality to Create Resilience in Scholar-Led Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

The Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access (OA) projects. The collective promotes a progressive vision for open access based on mutual alliances between the 45+ member presses and projects seeking to offer an alternative to commercial and legacy models of publishing. This article presents a case study of the collective, highlighting how it harnesses the strengths and organizational structures of not-for-profit, independent and scholar-led publishing communities by 1) further facilitating collective efforts through horizontal alliances, and by 2) enabling vertical forms of collaboration with other agencies and organizations within scholarly publishing. It provides a background to the origins of the ROAC, its members, its publishing models on display and its future plans, and highlights the importance of experimenting with and promoting new forms of communality in not-for-profit OA publishing.

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"Effective Practices and Strategies for Open Access Outreach: A Qualitative Study"

Diane (DeDe) Dawson has published "Effective Practices and Strategies for Open Access Outreach: A Qualitative Study" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION There are many compelling reasons to make research open access (OA), but raising the awareness of faculty and administrators about OA is a struggle. Now that more and more funders are introducing OA policies, it is increasingly important that researchers understand OA and how to comply with these policies. U.K. researchers and their institutions have operated within a complex OA policy environment for many years, and academic libraries have been at the forefront of providing services and outreach to support them. This article discusses the results of a qualitative study that investigated effective practices and strategies of OA outreach in the United Kingdom. METHODS Semistructured interviews were conducted with 14 individuals at seven universities in the United Kingdom in late 2015. Transcripts of these interviews were analyzed for dominant themes using an inductive method of coding. RESULTS Themes were collected under the major headings of "The Message"; "Key Contacts and Relationships"; "Qualities of the OA Practitioner"; and "Advocacy versus Compliance." DISCUSSION Results indicate that messages about OA need to be clear, concise, and jargon free. They need to be delivered repeatedly and creatively adapted to specific audiences. Identifying and building relationships with influencers and informers is key to the uptake of the message, and OA practitioners must have deep expertise to be credible as the messengers. CONCLUSION This timely research has immediate relevance to North American libraries as they contend with pressures to ramp up their own OA outreach and support services to assist researchers in complying with new federal funding policies.

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"Funding Community Controlled Open Infrastructure for Scholarly Communication: The 2.5% Commitment Initiative"

David W. Lewis, Lori Goetsch, Diane Graves, and Mike Roy have published "Funding Community Controlled Open Infrastructure for Scholarly Communication: The 2.5% Commitment Initiative" in College and Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

In August 2017, a short paper, "The 2.5% Commitment," was distributed on several email lists. The paper proposed that every academic library should commit to invest 2.5% of its total budget to support the common infrastructure needed to create the open scholarly commons. Somewhat to our surprise, the paper and the ideas it contained have generated widespread discussions and interest.

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"Converting the Literature of a Scientific Field to Open Access Through Global Collaboration: the Experience of SCOAP3 in Particle Physics"

Alexander Kohls and Salvatore Mele have self-archived "Converting the Literature of a Scientific Field to Open Access Through Global Collaboration: the Experience of SCOAP3 in Particle Physics."

Here's an excerpt:

The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) started operation in 2014 and has since supported the publication of 19,000 Open Access articles in the field of particle physics, at no direct cost, nor burden, for individual authors worldwide. SCOAP3 is made possible by a 3,000-institute strong partnership, where libraries re-direct funds previously used for subscriptions to 'flip' articles to 'gold Open Access'. With its recent expansion, the initiative now covers about 90% of the journal literature of the field. This article describes the economic principles of SCOAP3, the collaborative approach of the partnership, and finally summarizes financial results after four years of successful operation.

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"Open Access: EUA 2016-2017 Survey Results Released, New Survey Launched"

The European University Association has released "Open Access: EUA 2016-2017 Survey Results Released, New Survey Launched."

Here's an excerpt:

EUA has published its Open Access Survey Report 2016-2017. It tracks European universities' progress towards Open Access by looking at the degree to which they have implemented institutional policies and practices in the field. At the same time, EUA is launching its 2017-2018 Open Access Survey.

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