Category: Open Access

"Open Access Publishing in Higher Education: Charting the Challenging Course to Academic and Financial Sustainability"

Mark I. Greenberg has published "Open Access Publishing in Higher Education: Charting the Challenging Course to Academic and Financial Sustainability" in the Journal of Educational Controversy.

Here's an excerpt:

The benefits, pitfalls, and sustainability of open access publishing are hotly debated. Commercial publishers dominate the marketplace and oppose alternative publishing models that threaten their bottom line. Scholars' use of open access remains relatively limited due to awareness and perceived benefits to their professional goals. Readership of open access publications is generally strong, but some people disagree that more readers leads to increased citations and research impact. Libraries have grown their influence by supporting and promoting open access, but these efforts come with significant financial costs. Today, open access has flourished most significantly as a philosophy: the belief that the world's scholarship should be freely available to readers and that publicly funded research, in particular, should be accessible to the taxpayers who paid for it.

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"Researchers’ Adoption of an Institutional Central Fund for Open-Access Article-Processing Charges: A Case Study Using Innovation Diffusion Theory"

Stephen Pinfield and Christine Middleton have published "Researchers' Adoption of an Institutional Central Fund for Open-Access Article-Processing Charges: A Case Study Using Innovation Diffusion Theory" in SAGE Open.

Here's an excerpt:

This article analyzes researchers' adoption of an institutional central fund (or faculty publication fund) for open-access (OA) article-processing charges (APCs) to contribute to a wider understanding of take-up of OA journal publishing ("Gold" OA). Quantitative data, recording central fund usage at the University of Nottingham from 2006 to 2014, are analyzed alongside qualitative data from institutional documentation. The importance of the settings of U.K. national policy developments and international OA adoption trends are considered. Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) is used as an explanatory framework.

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Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences

The Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication has released a draft of Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences for comment.

Here's an excerpt:

This report identifies ways through which subscription-based scholarly journals have converted their publishing models to open access (OA). The major goal was to identify specific scenarios that have been used or proposed for transitioning subscription journals to OA so that these scenarios can provide options for others seeking to "flip" their journals to OA.

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"Creative Commons Licenses: Empowering Open Access"

Thomas Margoni and Diane M. Peters have self-archived "Creative Commons Licenses: Empowering Open Access."

Here's an excerpt:

Open access (OA) is a concept that in recent years has acquired popularity and widespread recognition. International statements and scholarly analysis converge on the following main characteristics of open access: free availability on the public Internet, permission for any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, and link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, and use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself. The only legal constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

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"Developing Infrastructure to Support Closer Collaboration of Aggregators with Open Repositories"

Nancy Pontika et al. have published "Developing Infrastructure to Support Closer Collaboration of Aggregators with Open Repositories" in Liber Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

The COnnecting REpositories (CORE) project has been dealing with these challenges by aggregating and enriching content from hundreds of open access repositories, increasing the discoverability and reusability of millions of open access manuscripts. As repository managers and library directors often wish to know the details of the content harvested from their repositories and keep a certain level of control over it, CORE is now facing the challenge of how to enable content providers to manage their content in the aggregation and control the harvesting process. In order to improve the quality and transparency of the aggregation process and create a two-way collaboration between the CORE project and the content providers, we propose the CORE Dashboard.

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"Making OA Monographs Happen: Library-Press Collaboration at the University of Ottawa, Canada"

Tony Horava has published "Making OA Monographs Happen: Library-Press Collaboration at the University of Ottawa, Canada" in Insights: The UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

At the University of Ottawa, Canada, the UO Press and the UO Library have developed a strategic partnership to publish and disseminate selected new monographs as gold open access (OA). Starting in 2013, the Library agreed to fund three books at C$10,000 per book (a total of C$30,000 per year) in order to remove barriers to accessing scholarship and to align with scholarly communication goals of the University. In 2015 this agreement was renewed for another three years and the funding was increased to cover four books (a total of C$40,000 per year). Ten titles have so far been published under this model. The data reveals that there have been 12,629 downloads as well as 16,584 page views of these titles, as of September 2015. There have been over 4,700 copies (print and EPUB) sold in spite of the free availability of the PDF version.

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"Making Sense of Journal Research Data Policies"

Linda Naughton and David Kernohan have published "Making Sense of Journal Research Data Policies" in Insights: The UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

This article gives an overview of the findings from the first phase of the Jisc Journal Research Data Policy Registry pilot (JRDPR), which is currently under way. . . . The project undertook an analysis of 250 journal research data policies to assess the feasibility of developing a policy registry to assist researchers and support staff to comply with research data publication requirements. The evidence shows that the current research data policy ecosystem is in critical need of standardization and harmonization if such services are to be built and implemented. To this end, the article proposes the next steps for the project with the objective of ultimately moving towards a modern research infrastructure based on machine-readable policies that support a more open scholarly communications environment.

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"Beams of Particles and Papers. The Role of Preprint Archives in High Energy Physics"

Alessandro Delfanti has self-archived "Beams of Particles and Papers. The Role of Preprint Archives in High Energy Physics."

Here's an excerpt:

The role of preprint archives is also highlighted by the existence of viXra.org, arXiv's evil twin. This dissenting and independent archive, that mimics the appearance and functioning of the original one, is aimed at overcoming the forms of policing that keep undesired papers outside of arXiv. ViXra claims to be " truly open" and to serve "the whole scientific community." In fact, the review processes enforced by arXiv are seen as failing to meet the standards of openness preprint archives are supposed to live up to.

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Webinar Recording: "VIVO plus SHARE: Closing the Loop on Tracking Scholarly Activity"

DuraSpace has released "VIVO plus SHARE: Closing the Loop on Tracking Scholarly Activity."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

On February 24, 2016, Rick Johnson (Program Co-Director, Digital Initiatives and Scholarship Head, Data Curation and Digital Library Solutions Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame; Visiting Program Officer for SHARE at the Association of Research Libraries) and Mike Conlon (VIVO Project Director, DuraSpace; Professor Emeritus, University of Florida) presented, "VIVO plus SHARE: Closing the Loop on Tracking Scholarly Activity."

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"A Library-Publisher Partnership for Open Access: Building an Innovative Relationship between Scholarly Publishers and Academic Libraries"

Monica Ward and Joanie Lavoie have published "A Library-Publisher Partnership for Open Access: Building an Innovative Relationship between Scholarly Publishers and Academic Libraries" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

This article presents an overview of a strategic partnership undertaken by the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and the Érudit Consortium (Érudit) to support the move towards open access for Canadian francophone scholarly journals.

CRKN and Érudithave had a relationship through a traditional commercial subscription model since 2008. In 2014, the two organizations recognized the need for a new relationship that would address two major challenges: the fragility of the Canadian not-for-profit scholarly publishing environment and the increasing pressure from libraries and funding agencies for scholarly journals to move towards open access. Érudit and CRKN have worked collaboratively to create an innovative partnership, which provides a framework for a new relationship between publishers and libraries, and helps to provide financial support to Canadian publishers during the transition to a fully open access model.

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"Coupling Pre-Prints and Post-Publication Peer Review for Fast, Cheap, Fair, and Effective Science Publishing"

Michael Eisen and Leslie B. Vosshall have self-archived "Coupling Pre-Prints and Post-Publication Peer Review for Fast, Cheap, Fair, and Effective Science Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

Pre-prints will be not be embraced by biomedical scientists until we stop treating them as "pre" anything, which suggests that a better "real" version is yet to come. Instead, pre-prints need to be accepted as formally published works. This can only happen if we first create and embrace systems to evaluate the quality and impact of, and appropriate audience for, these already published works.

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"OA in the Library Collection: The Challenges of Identifying and Maintaining Open Access Resources"

Nathan Hosburgh and Chris Bulock have self-archived "OA in the Library Collection: The Challenges of Identifying and Maintaining Open Access Resources."

Here's an excerpt:

At this session, they [the authors] shared survey results, reflected on OA workflows at their own libraries, and updated audience members on relevant standards and initiatives. Survey respondents reported challenges related to hybrid OA, inaccurate metadata, and inconsistent communication along the serials supply chain. Recommended solutions included the creation of consistent, centralized article-level metadata and the development of OA collection development principles for libraries.

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"Evaluating an Open Access Publishing Fund at a Comprehensive University"

Sarah Beaubien, Julie Garrison, and Doug Way have published "Evaluating an Open Access Publishing Fund at a Comprehensive University" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

Wanting to learn how faculty have benefitted from an open access publishing fund, Grand Valley State University Libraries surveyed recipients of the fund. The survey asked authors why they chose an open access publishing option and whether the fund influenced this decision. Authors were also asked whether they perceived that selecting an open access option broadened exposure to their work and about their likelihood of choosing open access in the future.

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"An Interview with Jeffrey Beall"

Joseph Esposito has published "An Interview with Jeffrey Beall" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

[Beall] In the scholarly open access segment of the scholarly publishing industry, we are seeing that the most prosperous publishers are the larger ones, those able to offshore their production work. Hindawi (in Egypt) and MDPI (with most of its work done in China) are two examples. I think the industry will continue to select for publishers like these, meaning many production-related jobs in North America and Europe will move to South Asia and East Asia.

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Association of Universities in the Netherlands and John Wiley Announce Open Access Agreement

The Association of Universities in the Netherlands and John Wiley and Sons, Inc. have announced an open access agreement.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The negotiations between VSNU and Wiley resulted in an unprecedented agreement covering 2016 – 2019. It provides students and researchers at Dutch universities affiliated to the VSNU with access to all Wiley subscription journal content and enables authors at Dutch universities affiliated to the VSNU to enjoy unlimited open access publication in Wiley's hybrid journals (c.1400), with no publishing charge levied at the article level.

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"Are ‘Predatory’ Journals Completely Negative, or Also a Sign of Something Positive?"

Jan Velterop has published "Are 'Predatory' Journals Completely Negative, or Also a Sign of Something Positive?" in SciELO in Perspective.

Here's an excerpt:

Yet, even with the drawback of being polluted by predatory journals, a functioning market is preferable to a quasi-market, completely dominated by monopolies or monopoly-like players. A system of subscriptions, in which the party who pays—the institutional library—has practically no meaningful choice of what to buy, differs from one of article processing charges (APCs, which make open access possible), in that the party who pays—the author—is the party who does have a meaningful choice of where to submit and publish. So 'flipping' the system from subscriptions to APCs does deliver something much more akin to a functioning market, and 'caveat emptor', 'buyer beware', applies to all markets.

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"CHORUS Signs Agreement with US Department of Defense to Advance Public Access to Research"

CHORUS has released "CHORUS Signs Agreement with US Department of Defense to Advance Public Access to Research."

Here's an excerpt:

DTIC will employ CHORUS' services to build on open standards, distributed networks and established infrastructure to advance access to scholarly articles reporting on DoD-funded research, as well as enable agency indexing and long-term preservation of those articles. The DoD system will dovetail with the interoperable CHORUS framework, along with Crossref's Open Funder Registry, to provide an article submission workflow for DoD-funded researchers and facilitate public access to all articles that report on DoD-funded research. The agreement enables readers searching DTIC's Public Access Search to follow links that point to publicly available articles/accepted manuscripts in context of the journal where they were published.

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Rachel Burley Named as Publishing Director, BioMed Central and SpringerOpen

Springer Nature has named Rachel Burley as Publishing Director, BioMed Central and SpringerOpen.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Burley was previously with John Wiley & Sons, where she was Vice President and Director of Open Access and Business Development. There, she led the strategic planning and development of Wiley's open access initiatives and was instrumental in identifying and implementing strategic partnerships. Prior to that, Burley was Vice President and Publisher of Life Sciences at Wiley, and spent seven years at Nature Publishing Group.

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"Open Access 2015: A Year Access Negotiators Edged Closer to the Brink"

Hilda Bastian has published "Open Access 2015: A Year Access Negotiators Edged Closer to the Brink " in Absolutely Maybe.

Here's an excerpt:

It's the year many negotiators got seriously tough on double dipping—charging for both the ability to read (via subscriptions) and for publishing (author processing charges, or APCs).

Last year it was France getting tough on the toughest negotiator: Elsevier. This year, the Netherlands took it right to the brink of cutting Elsevier loose. It was summed up by a January headline: "Dutch universities dig in for long fight over open access".

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OAPEN-UK Final Report: A Five-Year Study into Open Access Monograph Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences

OAPEN-UK has released OAPEN-UK Final Report: A Five-Year Study into Open Access Monograph Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Examining the attitudes and perceptions of funders, researchers, publishers, learned societies, universities and libraries, our study reiterated the deep strength of feeling and connectedness that each group has with the monograph, especially in terms of identity and reputation. It also found that while many think open access is a good idea in principle, there is uncertainty about how easy it would be to implement the necessary policies and systems to support OA monographs.

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"Bibliometric and Benchmark Analysis of Gold Open Access in Spain: Big Output and Little Impact"

Daniel Torres-Salinas et al. have published "Bibliometric and Benchmark Analysis of Gold Open Access in Spain: Big Output and Little Impact" in El Profesional de la Información.

Here's an excerpt:

This bibliometric study analyzes the research output produced by Spain during the 2005-2014 time period in Open Access (OA) journals indexed in Web of Science.. . . . Spain is the second highest ranking European country with gold OA publication output and the fourth highest in Open Access output (9%). . . . Spain's normalized citation impact in Open access (0.72) is lower than the world average and that of the main European countries.

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"Peer Review in Megajournals Compared with Traditional Scholarly Journals: Does It Make a Difference?"

Bo-Christer Björk and Paul Catani have published "Peer Review in Megajournals Compared with Traditional Scholarly Journals: Does It Make a Difference?" in Learned Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

We report on a small pilot study in which we looked at the citation distributions for articles in megajournals compared with journals with traditional peer review, which also evaluate articles for contribution and novelty. We found that elite journals with very low acceptance rates have far fewer articles with no or few citations, but that the long tail of articles with two citations or less was actually bigger in a sample of selective traditional journals in comparison with megajournals.

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Open Science, Open Data, Open Access

UKeiG has released Open Science, Open Data, Open Access for non-members.

Here's an excerpt:

Open Science is shown to be moving centre-stage, with a rationale of improving efficiency in science; increasing transparency and quality in the research validation process; speeding the transfer of knowledge; increasing knowledge spill-overs to the economy; addressing global challenges more effectively; and promoting citizens' engagement in science and research.

Open Data is shown to have undergone a surge in practical development, mirroring the well established repositories for research outputs. The development and application of model policies and of principles is also discussed.

The current major developments in Open Access are discussed in detail, including the identification and mirroring of success factors in funders' and institutions' policies and mandates for driving Open Access deposits and the growth in Gold Open Access.

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"Tracing Digital Footprints to Academic Articles: An Investigation of PeerJ Publication Referral Data"

Xianwen Wang, Shenmeng Xu, and Zhichao Fang have self-archived "Tracing Digital Footprints to Academic Articles: An Investigation of PeerJ Publication Referral Data."

Here's an excerpt:

In this study, we propose a novel way to explore the patterns of people's visits to academic articles. About 3.4 million links to referral source of visitors of 1432 papers published in the journal of PeerJ are collected and analyzed. We find that at least 57% visits are from external referral sources, among which General Search Engine, Social Network, and News & Blog are the top three categories of referrals. Academic Resource, including academic search engines and academic publishers' sites, is the fourth largest category of referral sources. In addition, our results show that Google contributes significantly the most in directing people to scholarly articles. . . . Correlation analysis and regression analysis indicates that papers with more mentions are expected to have more visitors, and Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are the most commonly used social networking tools that refer people to PeerJ.

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Putting Down Roots: Securing the Future of Open Access Policies

Knowledge Exchange has released Putting Down Roots: Securing the Future of Open Access Policies.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The summary report; 'Putting down roots: Securing the future of open access policies' includes an analysis of a wide range of OA services and policies currently in use and presents:

  • an analysis of the common elements found in the current OA policies adopted by research funders and institutions
  • a set of case studies that illustrate the direct or indirect dependency of OA policies on key services
  • the views of stakeholders on the key services that enable compliance with OA policies
  • use cases, presented in accessible formats and language for a non-technical audience
  • a set of priorities for action if OA policies are to be successfully implemented

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