Category: Open Access

Walt Crawford: "Ethics and Access"

Walt Crawford has released "Ethics and Access."

Here's an excerpt:

The last ETHICS AND ACCESS piece appeared in December 2015—not only a whole-issue essay but a long one at that. This one will also make up a whole issue (partly because I'm spending more time investigating "gray OA") but be shorter. As before, it will cover a lot of ground and may seem somewhat random. But no exclamation points.

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Public Knowledge Project: Report to the Community 2015/2016

The Public Knowledge Project has released Report to the Community 2015/2016.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Highlights include:

  • New grant awards from MacArthur, CIRA, and MediaX
  • Continued progress on Open Journal Systems 3.0
  • The release of Open Monograph Press 1.2
  • The integration of user experience design into our development workflow
  • Ongoing development and improvement of our XML parsing stack’s accuracy
  • Initiating the open access publishing cooperative study
  • Launching the new PKP Index and PKP LOCKSS Network
  • The 5th PKP Conference in Vancouver

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"Hybrid Open Access—A Longitudinal Study"

Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björk have published "Hybrid Open Access—A Longitudinal Study" in the Journal of Informetrics.

Here's an excerpt:

This study estimates the development of hybrid open access (OA), i.e. articles published openly on the web within subscription-access journals. Included in the study are the five largest publishers of scholarly journals; Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, and Sage. Since no central indexing or standardized metadata exists for identifying hybrid OA an explorative bottom-up methodological approach was developed. The individual search and filtering features of each publisher website and a-priori availability of data were leveraged to the extent possible. The results indicate a strong sustained growth in the volume of articles published as hybrid OA during 2007 (666 articles) to 2013 (13 994 articles). The share of hybrid articles was at 3.8% of total published articles for the period of 2011-2013 for journals with at least one identified hybrid OA article. Journals within the Scopus discipline categorization of Health and Life Sciences, in particular the field of Medicine, were found to be among the most frequent publishers of hybrid OA content. The study surfaces the many methodological challenges involved in obtaining metrics regarding hybrid OA, a growing business for journal publishers as science policy pressures for reduced access barriers to research publications.

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Wellcome Trust: "Why We Have Set Publisher Requirements"

The Wellcome Trust has released "Why We Have Set Publisher Requirements."

Here's an excerpt:

An analysis of the 2014-15 Charity Open Access Fund (COAF), which includes Wellcome funding, revealed that 30% of Wellcome and COAF member articles for which an APC was paid didn't comply with our open access policies. . . .

To try to address this issue we're now setting out requirements stating what we expect from publishers when an APC is levied. Publishers that cannot commit to providing these services will not be eligible for funding from us to cover APCs for Wellcome-funded research.

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"Leading by Example? ALA Division Publications, Open Access, and Sustainability"

Nathan Hall et al. have published "Leading by Example? ALA Division Publications, Open Access, and Sustainability" in College & Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

This investigation explores scholarly communication business models in American Library Association (ALA) division peer-reviewed academic journals. . . . Through an analysis of documented procedures, policies, and finances of five ALA division journals, we compare business and access models. We conclude that some ALA divisions prioritize the costs associated with changing business models, including hard-to-estimate costs such as the labor of volunteers. For other divisions, the financial aspects are less important than maintaining core values, such as those defined in ALA's Core Values in Librarianship.

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"Supporting Scholarly Communication: Considerations for Library Leadership"

Irene M. H. Herold has published "Supporting Scholarly Communication: Considerations for Library Leadership" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Starting from the question of what library leaders can do, I approach the topic of supporting scholarly communication from three perspectives: mentorship, effective partnerships, and the leadership role. I reviewed past columns from a leadership perspective. I also asked some of my "thought leader" colleagues what they saw as important trends and considerations.

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"OJS 3 is Here!"

The Public Knowledge Project has released "OJS 3 is Here!." OJS stands for Open Journal Systems.

Here's an excerpt:

This is the most comprehensive software upgrade since we moved from OJS 1.0 to 2.0 way back in 2005. It incorporates a decade of feedback from our users on the community forum, through usability testing, and through thousands of conversations, feature requests, and helpful critiques.

As we approach the milestone of having 10,000 journals actively using OJS as their publishing platform, we believe this new release will significantly enhance their productivity and ease of use, and provide a modern foundation for innovation in online publishing.

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"FTC Charges Academic Journal Publisher OMICS Group Deceived Researchers"

The Federal Trade Commission has released "FTC Charges Academic Journal Publisher OMICS Group Deceived Researchers."

Here's an excerpt:

The Federal Trade Commission has charged the publisher of hundreds of purported online academic journals with deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars.

The FTC's complaint alleges that OMICS Group, Inc., along with two affiliated companies and their president and director, Srinubabu Gedela, claim that their journals follow rigorous peer-review practices and have editorial boards made up of prominent academics. In reality, many articles are published with little to no peer review and numerous individuals represented to be editors have not agreed to be affiliated with the journals.

According to the FTC's complaint, OMICS does not tell researchers that they must pay significant publishing fees until after it has accepted an article for publication, and often will not allow researchers to withdraw their articles from submission, thereby making the research ineligible for publication in another journal. Academic ethics standards generally forbid researchers from submitting the same research to more than one journal.

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The Countries of OAWorld 2011-2015: Supplement to Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015

Walt Crawford has published The Countries of OAWorld 2011-2015: Supplement to Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This supplement to Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015 looks at each country with journals fully analyzed in the report. Countries with ten or more journals (some 70 of them) get full writeups; others are summarized by region.

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"Substituting Article Processing Charges for Subscriptions: The Cure Is Worse than the Disease"

ARL has released "Substituting Article Processing Charges for Subscriptions: The Cure Is Worse than the Disease by David Shulenburger."

Here's an excerpt:

The likely result of flipping the market to APCs is that the collective cost of scholarly communications would rise above the level that would prevail under the subscription-financed regime.

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"Just as Open Competitor to Elsevier’s SSRN Launches, SSRN Accused of Copyright Crackdown"

Mike Masnick has published "Just as Open Competitor to Elsevier's SSRN Launches, SSRN Accused of Copyright Crackdown" in Techdirt.

Here's an excerpt:

And perhaps this [SocArXiv announcement]came just in time, because just as that happened, Stephen Henderson, a law professor, noted that SSRN took down his paper saying that they didn't think he retained the copyright to it.

See also: "SocArXiv Debuts, as SSRN acquisition Comes Under Scrutiny."

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"Write up! A Study of Copyright Information on Library-Published Journals"

Melanie Schlosser has published "Write up! A Study of Copyright Information on Library-Published Journals" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION Libraries have a mission to educate users about copyright, and library publishing staff are often involved in that work. This article investigates a concrete point of intersection between the two areas—copyright statements on library-published journals. METHODS Journals published by members of the Library Publishing Coalition were examined for open access status, type and placement of copyright information, copyright ownership, and open licensing. RESULTS Journals in the sample were overwhelmingly (93%) open access. 80% presented copyright information of some kind, but only 30% of those included it at both the journal and the article level. Open licensing was present in 38% of the journals, and the most common ownership scenario was the author retaining copyright while granting a nonexclusive license to the journal or publisher. 9% of the sample journals included two or more conflicting rights statements. DISCUSSION 76% of the journals did not consistently provide accurate, easily-accessible rights information, and numerous problems were found with the use of open licensing, including conflicting licenses, incomplete licenses, and licenses not appearing at the article level. CONCLUSION Recommendations include presenting full copyright and licensing information at both the journal and the article level, careful use of open licenses, and publicly-available author agreements. External Data or Supplements:

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"Deconstructing the Durham Statement: The Persistence of Print Prestige During the Age of Open Access"

Sarah Reis has self-archived "Deconstructing the Durham Statement: The Persistence of Print Prestige During the Age of Open Access."

Here's an excerpt:

In the seven years following the promulgation of the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, law journals have largely responded to the call to make articles available in open, electronic formats, but not to the call to stop print publication and publish only in electronic format. Nearly all of the flagship law reviews at ABA-accredited institutions still insist on publishing in print, despite the massive decline in print subscribers and economic and environmental waste. . . . The Durham Statement was drafted by law library directors from top law schools across the country. Law librarians today must assist in facilitating the transition if we ever expect to see a world of electronic-only publication of law journals. This paper argues that the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review must be the first law reviews to transition to electronic-only publication, after which other law journals will follow suit.

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"Open Access Archivangelist: The Last Interview?"

Otwartanauka.pl has released "Open Access Archivangelist: The Last Interview?."

Here's an excerpt:

It seems, however, that the long era of [Stevan] Harnad's 'Archivangelism' for Open Access is coming to an end. Earlier this year, 22 years after the 'Subversive Proposal', Harnad made it quite clear via Twitter that he is about to quit Open Access Advocacy.

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"ACRL Issues Policy Statement on Open Access to Scholarship by Academic Librarians"

Kara Malenfant has published "ACRL Issues Policy Statement on Open Access to Scholarship by Academic Librarians" in ACRL Insider.

Here's an excerpt:

In support of broad and timely dissemination of library and information science scholarship, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) encourages academic librarians to publish in open access journals. When academic librarians choose to publish in subscription-based journals, ACRL recommends a standard practice of depositing the final accepted manuscript in a repository to make that version openly accessible.

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"A Two-Sided Academic Landscape: Portrait of Highly-Cited Documents in Google Scholar (1950-2013)"

Alberto Martin-Martin et al. have self-archived "A Two-Sided Academic Landscape: Portrait of Highly-Cited Documents in Google Scholar (1950-2013)."

Here's an excerpt:

Since the existence of a full-text link does not guarantee the disposal of the full-text (some links actually refer to publisher's abstracts), the results (40% of the documents had a free full-text link) might be somewhat overestimated. In any case, these values are consistent with those published by Archambault et al. (2013), who found that over 40% of the articles from their sample were freely accessible; higher than those by Khabsa and Giles (2014) and Björk et al. (2010), who found only a 24% and 20.4% of open access documents respectively; and much lower than Jamali and Nabavi (2015) and Pitol and De Groote (2014), who found 61.1% and 70% respectively.

The different nature of the samples makes it difficult to draw comparisons among these studies. Nonetheless, the sample used in this study (64,000 documents) is the largest ever used to date.

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"Developing SocArXiv—A New Open Archive of the Social Sciences to Challenge the Outdated Journal System"

Philip Cohen has published "Developing SocArXiv—A New Open Archive of the Social Sciences to Challenge the Outdated Journal System" in LSE Impact.

Here's an excerpt:

But there remains a need for a new general, open-access, open-source, paper server for the social sciences, one that encourages linking and sharing data and code, that serves its research to an open metadata system, and that provides the foundation for a post-publication review system. I hope that SocArXiv will enable us to save research from the journal system. Once it's built, anyone will be able to use it to organize their own peer-review community, to select and publish papers (though not exclusively), to review and comment on each other's work – and to discover, cite, value, and share research unimpeded. We will be able to do this because of a partnership with the Center for Open Science (which is already developing a new preprint server) and SHARE ("a free, open, data set about research and scholarly activities across their life cycle"). We are also supported by the University of Maryland, which hosts the initiative.

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"Rewarding Open Access Scholarship in Promotion And Tenure: Driving Institutional Change"

Jere Odell, Heather Coates, and Kristi Palmer have published "Rewarding Open Access Scholarship in Promotion And Tenure: Driving Institutional Change" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

Here we describe the efforts of one institution, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), to reward OA scholarship in the P&T process. With librarians as advocates, participants, and change agents, IUPUI has become one of the first to include OA as a value in its P&T guidelines.

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"Measuring the Impact of Digitized Theses: A Case Study from the London School of Economics"

Linda Bennett and Dimity Flanagan have published "Measuring the Impact of Digitized Theses: A Case Study from the London School of Economics" in Insights: the UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

This study tests the assertion that the online dissemination of theses has a positive impact on the research profile of the institution and sets out to gain a greater understanding of how digital theses fit into the scholarly resources landscape. The year-long study combined primary and secondary research and was undertaken with the London School of Economics, based on its programme of theses digitization. The paper outlines the types of metrics an institution may use to measure the impact of its corpus of digitized dissertations and examines how these metrics may be generated. Findings included: a higher volume of theses attracts more traffic; Google's strong indexing capabilities make it the most frequently used tool for discovery of digital theses; primary conclusions are that there is little correlation between downloads and citations of digitized theses; having a digital thesis collection enhances the reputation of the institution; although they recognize that digital theses are a valuable research tool, postgraduates and academics widely believe that making them available affects future publication opportunities; building and maintaining a digital thesis collection makes considerable 'hidden' work for librarians in terms of training about copyright and permissions. Some conclusions: better statistics are needed, especially of citations; institutions need to promote digital thesis collections better; more work needs to be done on whether digitizing theses impairs authors' chances of traditional publication and on how digital theses affect and are affected by the open access movement.

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"Gathering the Needles: Evaluating the Impact of Gold Open Access Content with Traditional Subscription Journals"

Alison Bobal and Jill Emery have published "Gathering the Needles: Evaluating the Impact of Gold Open Access Content with Traditional Subscription Journals" in Insights: the UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Utilizing the Project COUNTER Release 4 JR1-GOA report, two librarians explore these data in comparison to journal package subscriptions represented via the JR1 reports. This paper outlines the methodology and study undertaken at the Portland State University Library and the University of Nebraska Medical Center Library using these reports for the first time. The initial outcomes of the study are provided in various Tables for 2014 and 2015. The intent of the study was to provide both institutions with a baseline from which to do further study. In addition, some ideas are given for how these reports can be used in vendor negotiations going forward.

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Libraries as Publishers in the Early 1990s

In recent years, there has been an upsurge in interest in academic and other types libraries acting as publishers and considerable discussion about how this will transform them.

What is sometimes lost in the excitement over the library publishing movement is historical context: this trend started over a quarter century ago at the dawn of the Internet age. While most e-journals published in the early 1990s were produced by scholars acting as digital publishers, at least two academic libraries established formal digital publishing programs in this period: the University of Houston Libraries and the Virginia Tech Libraries.

In August 1989, the Director of the University of Houston Libraries, Robin N. Downes, authorized the establishment and announcement of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review), the first open access journal in the field of library and information science. The journal began publication in January 1990, became refereed in November 1991, and ceased publication in August 2000. Authors retained the copyright to PACS Review articles. Unrestricted copying of PACS Review articles was permitted for educational, noncommercial use by academic computer centers, individual scholars, and libraries.

Only partial use statistics are available for the journal. It was initially distributed using the LISTSERV software, and LISTSERV use statistics were not tallied. From 1994 through 1996, the journal received over 81,000 Gopher requests. From March 1995 through 2005, the journal received over 3.5 file requests via the Web.

In October 1996, Robin N. Downes authorized the establishment of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, an open access, updated electronic book that provided references to new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Between October 1996 and October 2006, 64 versions of the e-book were published by the University of Houston Libraries. There were over six million file requests for it during this period.

In the fall of 1989, Virginia Tech's Vice President for Information Systems, Dr. Robert Heterick, established the Scholarly Communications Project. The project was subsequently moved to the University Libraries, and it was directed by Lon Savage until December 1993, when Gail McMillan took over.

Since 1990, the Virginia Tech Libraries have published a number of e-journals, some of which were previously published by other entities prior to being migrated to the Libraries. Notably, the Scholarly Communications Project published the first issue of The Journal of the International Academy of Hospitality Research in November 1990. The journal was published in cooperation with Virginia Tech's Department of Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Management. It ceased publication in 1998. It is described in "The Journal of the International Academy of Hospitality Research."

The Virginia Tech Libraries' Scholarly Communication department currently publishes e-journals, conference proceedings, and open educational resources.

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"Open Access, Innovation, and Research Infrastructure"

Benedikt Fecher and Gert G. Wagner have published "Open Access, Innovation, and Research Infrastructure" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

In this article we argue that the current endeavors to achieve open access in scientific literature require a discussion about innovation in scholarly publishing and research infrastructure. Drawing on path dependence theory and addressing different open access (OA) models and recent political endeavors, we argue that academia is once again running the risk of outsourcing the organization of its content.

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"The Vienna Principles: A Vision for Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century"

Open Access Network Austria has released "The Vienna Principles: A Vision for Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century ."

Here's an excerpt:

Currently, there is a strong push to address the apparent deficits of the scholarly communication system. Open Science has the potential to change the production and dissemination of scholarly knowledge for the better, but there is no commonly shared vision that describes the system that we want to create.

Between April 2015 and June 2016, members of the Open Access Network Austria (OANA) working group "Open Access and Scholarly Communication" met in Vienna to discuss this matter. The main outcome of our considerations is a set of twelve principles that represent the cornerstones of the future scholarly communication system. They are designed to provide a coherent frame of reference for the debate on how to improve the current system. With this document, we are hoping to inspire a widespread discussion towards a shared vision for scholarly communication in the 21st century.

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Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015: A Subject Approach

Walt Crawford has released Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015: A Subject Approach as a free PDF or a low-cost paperback.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This book is a supplement to Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015. It adds a chapter for each of 28 subjects and slightly expands the three subject-segment chapters from the other book.

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"Open Access Publishing Trend Analysis: Statistics Beyond the Perception"

Elisabetta Poltronieri et al. have published "Open Access Publishing Trend Analysis: Statistics Beyond the Perception" in Information Research.

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this analysis was twofold: to track the number of open access journals acquiring impact factor, and to investigate the distribution of subject categories pertaining to these journals. As a case study, journals in which the researchers of the National Institute of Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanità) in Italy have published were surveyed.

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