Open Access – Page 73

PLOS Releases Ambra Journal Publishing Software Under MIT License

PLOS has released its Ambra publishing journal software under the MIT License.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This isn’t the first time Ambra was available to those looking for a journal publishing platform. Under continuous development since 2009, Ambra was a monolithic Struts webapp offered as open source since its beginning. In 2012, PLOS began a project to re-architect Ambra as a service-oriented, multi-component stack. PLOS has been actively using, testing, and improving these new components in its journal platform since 2013, and in early 2016 we replaced the legacy Ambra webapp in its entirety. Having sorted through some minor license incompatibilities and put together documentation and quickstart guides, we’re proud to release Ambra under the MIT License

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"No Scholar Is an Island: The Impact of Sharing in the Work Life of Scholars"

Carol Tenopir et al. have published "No Scholar Is an Island: The Impact of Sharing in the Work Life of Scholars" in .

Here's an excerpt:

In an international survey of 1,000 published scholars, the Beyond Downloads project examined their sharing behaviours in order to gain a more contextualized and accurate picture of their usage beyond download patterns and citation counts. Scholars share published articles with others as a mode of content discovery and dissemination, particularly if they work in groups, and most expect to increase their sharing in the future.

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"What Does ‘Green’ Open Access Mean? Tracking Twelve Years of Changes to Journal Publisher Self-Archiving Policies"

Elizabeth Gadd and Denise Troll Covey have self-archived "What Does 'Green' Open Access Mean? Tracking Twelve Years of Changes to Journal Publisher Self-Archiving Policies."

Here's an excerpt:

Traces the 12-year self-archiving policy journey of the original 107 publishers listed on the SHERPA/RoMEO Publisher Policy Database in 2004, through to 2015. Maps the RoMEO colour codes 'green', 'blue', 'yellow' and 'white') and related restrictions and conditions over time. Finds that while the volume of publishers allowing some form of self-archiving (pre-print, post-print or both) has increased by 12% over the twelve years, the volume of restrictions around how, where, and when self-archiving may take place has increased 119%, 190% and 1000% respectively.

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"Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual"

Jill Cirasella and Polly Thistlethwaite have self-archived "Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual."

Here's an excerpt:

Now that dissertations are deposited and distributed electronically, students must perform yet another anxiety-inducing task: deciding whether they want to make their dissertations immediately open access (OA) or, at universities that require OA, coming to terms with openness. For some students, mostly in the humanities and some of the social sciences, who hope to transform their dissertations into books, OA has become a bogeyman, a supposed saboteur of book contracts and destroyer of careers.

This chapter examines the various access-related anxieties that plague graduate students. It is a kind of diagnostic and statistical manual of dissertation anxieties—a "Dissertation Anxiety Manual," if you will—describing anxieties surrounding book contracts, book sales, plagiarism, juvenilia, the ambiguity of the term online, and changes in scholarly research and production.

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"Updating the Agenda for Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communications"

Clifford Lynch has published "Updating the Agenda for Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communications" in College & Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

This issue of C&RL is focused on scholarly communication, and it seems appropriate, in this invited guest editorial, to step back and examine the broader agenda that academic and research libraries need to consider today in engaging with scholarly communications as a way of framing the issue. My view is that this agenda is ripe for re-thinking. The overall environment has changed significantly in the last few years, underscoring the growing irrelevance of some long-held ideas, and at the same time, clearly identifying new and urgent priorities. What I hope to do here is to summarize very succinctly my thoughts on the most pressing issues and the areas most needing reconsideration. Articles in this issue touch upon aspects of many of these topics; I hope that future authors may also find topical inspirations here.

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"An Empirical Study of Law Journal Copyright Practices"

Brian L. Frye, Christopher J. Ryan, Jr., and Franklin L. Runge have published "An Empirical Study of Law Journal Copyright Practices" in the Review of Intellectual Property Law.

Here's an excerpt:

This article presents an empirical study of the copyright practices of American law journals in relation to copyright ownership and fair use, based on a 24-question survey. It concludes that many American law journals have adopted copyright policies that are inconsistent with the expectations of legal scholars and the scope of copyright protection. Specifically, many law journals have adopted copyright policies that effectively preclude open-access publishing, and unnecessarily limit the fair use of copyrighted works. In addition, it appears that some law journals may not understand their own copyright policies. This article proposes the creation of a Code of Copyright Best Practices for Law Journals in order to encourage both open-access publishing and fair use.

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Creative Commons Releases CC Search Beta

The Creative Commons has released CC Search Beta.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Our goal is to cover the whole commons, but we wanted to develop something people could test and react to that would be useful at launch. To build our beta, we settled on a goal to represent one percent of the known Commons, or about 10 million works, and we chose a vertical slice of images only, to fully explore a purpose-built interface that represented one type but many providers. . . .

After a detailed review of potential sources, the available APIs, and the quality of their datasets, we selected the Rijksmuseum, Flickr, 500px, the New York Public Library as our initial sources. Later, after discussions with the Metropolitan Museum of Art regarding their collection of public domain works, which were released under CC0 on February 7, 2017, we incorporated their 200,000 CC0 images as well. . . .

The prototype of this tool focuses on photos as its first media and uses open APIs in order to index the available works. The search filters allow users to search by license type, title, creator, tags, collection, and type of institution.

CC Search Beta also provides social features, allowing users to create and share lists as well as add tags and favorites to the objects in the commons, and save their searches. Finally, it incorporates one-click attribution, giving users pre-formatted copy for easy attribution.

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Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts Images of Public Domain Artworks under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) License

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put images of public domain artworks under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) License.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This morning, we announced a major update to the Museum's policy governing the use and reuse of images in our collection: all images of public-domain artworks in the Museum's collection are now available for free and unrestricted use under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). This updated policy, known as Open Access, enables everyone to utilize more than 375,000 images of public-domain artworks in The Met's collection in any media without permission or fee.

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"Pay What You Want as a Pricing Model for Open Access Publishing?"

Lucas Stich. Martin Spann. and Klaus M. Schmidt have self-archived "Pay What You Want as a Pricing Model for Open Access Publishing?"

Here's an excerpt:

We analyze "Pay What You Want" as a business model for Open Access publishing by discussing motives leading authors to make voluntary contributions, potential benefits for publishers and present results from a field experiment at one publisher. Data from the field experiment indicate authors’ willingness to voluntarily contribute.

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Moving Open Access Implementation Forward: A Handbook for Open Access Good Practice Based on Experiences of UK Higher Education Institutions

Jisc has released Moving Open Access Implementation Forward: A Handbook for Open Access Good Practice Based on Experiences of UK Higher Education Institutions .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Following the completion of the Open Access Good Practice (OAGP) initiative, we have produced a new handbook based on the experiences of the nine pathfinder projects. It is aimed at staff involved in supporting open access implementation at institutions in the UK.OAGP Handbook Cover

The handbook summarises the lessons learned by the projects and points towards key tools and resources.

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PLOS: Response to NIH RFI—Strategies for NIH Data Management, Sharing, and Citation

PLOS has released Response to NIH RFI—Strategies for NIH Data Management, Sharing, and Citation.

Here's an excerpt:

We write to express the views of the Public Library of Science, a fully Open Access Publisher of seven Research Journals, in response to your RFI on Data Sharing, Management, and Citation. Open access to Research Articles is just the first step in what we consider should be the end state for all publicly funded research, and we support broader efforts towards open science. We are developing our own policies to help establish a new norm in which upon publication of a journal article, if not before, all of the underlying data (where ethically appropriate) is openly available to access and reuse without restriction according to the FAIR principles for data management to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable.

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"Novel Processes and Metrics for a Scientific Evaluation Rooted in the Principles of Science—Version 1"

Michaël Bon, Michael Taylor, and Gary S. McDowell have self-archived "Novel Processes and Metrics for a Scientific Evaluation Rooted in the Principles of Science—Version 1."

Here's an excerpt:

Scientific evaluation is a determinant of how scientists, institutions and funders behave, and as such is a key element in the making of science. In this article, we propose an alternative to the current norm of evaluating research with journal rank. Following a well-defined notion of scientific value, we introduce qualitative processes that can also be quantified and give rise to meaningful and easy-to-use article-level metrics. In our approach, the goal of a scientist is transformed from convincing an editorial board through a vertical process to convincing peers through an horizontal one. We argue that such an evaluation system naturally provides the incentives and logic needed to constantly promote quality, reproducibility, openness and collaboration in science. The system is legally and technically feasible and can gradually lead to the self-organized reappropriation of the scientific process by the scholarly community and its institutions. We propose an implementation of our evaluation system with the platform "the Self-Journals of Science" (www.sjscience.org).

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"Laying Tracks as the Train Approaches: Innovative Open Access Book Publishing at Heidelberg University from the Editors’ Point of View"

Andrea Hacker and Elizabeth Corrao have published "Laying Tracks as the Train Approaches: Innovative Open Access Book Publishing at Heidelberg University from the Editors' Point of View" in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

In April 2016, Heidelberg University's newly founded open access publisher heiUP launched the first volume of the new book series Heidelberg Studies in Transculturality. This article reports on the challenges, accomplishments, and setbacks that informed the entire editorial production process, not only of the first volume but also of the series and the publishing enterprise overall.

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"On the Origin of Nonequivalent States: How We Can Talk about Preprints"

Cameron Neylon et al. have self-archived "On the Origin of Nonequivalent States: How We Can Talk about Preprints."

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper, we argue that these discussions often conflate two separate issues, the history of the manuscript and the status granted it by different communities. In this paper, we propose a new model that distinguishes the characteristics of the object, its "state", from the subjective "standing" granted to it by different communities. This provides a way to discuss the difference in practices between communities, which will deliver more productive conversations and facilitate negotiation on how to collectively improve the process of scholarly communications not only for preprints but other forms of scholarly contributions.

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"Altmetrics and Grey Literature: Perspectives and Challenges"

Joachim Schöpfel and Hêlêne Prost have self-archived "Altmetrics and Grey Literature: Perspectives and Challenges."

Here's an excerpt:

The topic of our paper is the connection between altmetrics and grey literature. Do altmetrics offer new opportunities for the development and impact of grey literature? In particular, the paper explores how altmetrics could add value to grey literature, in particular how reference managers, repositories, academic search engines and social networks can produce altmetrics of dissertations, reports, conference papers etc. We explore, too, how new altmetric tools incorporate grey literature as source for impact assessment, and if they do. The discussion analyses the potential but also the limits of the actual application of altmetrics to grey literatures and highlights the importance of unique identifiers, above all the DOI.

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"Scholarly Management Publication and Open Access Funding Mandates: A Review of Publisher Policies"

Jessica Lange has published "Scholarly Management Publication and Open Access Funding Mandates: A Review of Publisher Policies" in Ticker: The Academic Business Librarianship Review.

Here's an excerpt:

This article will compare publishing policies from top management journals to funding agencies' open access requirements in order to determine which journals meet these conditions. . . . Results show that 80% of journals in the sample set are compatible with open access funding mandates. Of the journals which are compatible, 48% require an APC and 52% permit self-archiving in an acceptable time-frame.

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"Does Online Access Promote Research in Developing Countries? Empirical Evidence from Article-Level Data"

Frank Mueller-Langer et al. have self-archived "Does Online Access Promote Research in Developing Countries? Empirical Evidence from Article-Level Data."

Here's an excerpt:

Universities in developing countries have rarely been able to subscribe to academic journals in the past. The "Online Access to Research in the Environment" initiative (OARE) provides institutions in developing countries with free online access to more than 5,700 environmental science journals. Here we analyze the effect of OARE registration on scientific output by research institutions in five developing countries. We apply a difference-in-difference estimation method using panel data for 18,955 journal articles from 798 research institutions. We find that online access via OARE increases publication output by at least 43% while lower-ranked institutions located in remote areas benefit less.

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"Funding Article Processing Charges, SPEC Kit 353, Published by ARL"

ARL has released "Funding Article Processing Charges, SPEC Kit 353, Published by ARL."

Here's an excerpt:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released Funding Article Processing Charges (APCs), SPEC Kit 353, an exploration of the strategies that ARL member institutions are using to address APCs. This SPEC Kit covers how the funds are established and how they are handled (e.g., policies, applications, budgets, administration, outreach activities, etc.), sources of funding, and whether and under what circumstances libraries are partnering with other units (or other libraries) to fund this aspect of open access. . . .

Read/download SPEC Kit 353.

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Virginia Steel on Open Access 2020 and the Pay-It-Forward Study: "An Open Letter to the Academic Community"

Virginia Steel, UCLA University Librarian, has released "An Open Letter to the Academic Community."

Here's an excerpt:

I fully support the laudable goals of all members of the open access movement and am proud to count myself among them . However, I feel quite strongly that the mechanism OA2020 proposes to achieve those goals [article processing charges] would not be workable across the broad international spectrum of research institutions, funding bodies, and publishers. Based on the limited amount of research that has been done to date, the model appears likely to cost more in both the short and longer term, making it as financially unsustainable as the current system.

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"Ingenta Launches New Open Access Platform"

Ingenta has released "Ingenta Launches New Open Access Platform."

Here's an excerpt:

The platform hosts content from all scholarly disciplines and caters for multiple formats, including whole books, chapters, monographs, single articles and entire journals. It will eventually provide access to millions of Open Access articles, whether they are hosted on the platform itself, indexed via third party services such as DOAJ & OAPEN.

Ingenta Open provides users with access without any registration requirements, while offering a clean and responsive design, a simple interface and an easy-to-use search function.

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"On the Cost of Knowledge: Evaluating the Boycott against Elsevier"

Tom Heyman Pieter Moors, and Gert Storms have published "On the Cost of Knowledge: Evaluating the Boycott against Elsevier" in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics.

Here's an excerpt:

To get an idea about the success rate of the "won't publish" resolution, we checked signatories' publication history after they signed the petition. Using ResearchGate, Google Scholar, Academia.edu, LinkedIn, ScienceDirect, and lab or personal websites, we were able to compile a bibliography for a large sample of "won't publish" signatories. Due to the time-consuming nature of this research, we limited ourselves to two subject areas, Chemistry and Psychology, each with approximately 500 signatories.

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"New University Presses in the UK: Accessing a Mission"

Andrew Lockett and Lara Speicher have published "New University Presses in the UK: Accessing a Mission" in Learned Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

In the space of just a year, five new university presses were launched in the UK. Although very different in size and stages of development, all but one were launched first and foremost as open access presses, based in or supported by their university's library. Why should there have been such a significant flurry of activity in such a short space of time, and what can the stated objectives and activities of these presses tell us about the current UK scholarly publishing environment? To answer some of those questions, this article looks back to the original mission of the founding university presses, examines the policy and funding environments in which the new presses are operating, looks at overseas developments in recent years for comparison, and concludes with a review of the challenges these young presses face as well as the benefits all university presses, but particularly open access ones, can confer to their institutions.

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"Why Marriage Matters: A North American Perspective on Press/Library Partnerships"

Charles Watkinson has published "Why Marriage Matters: A North American Perspective on Press/Library Partnerships" in Learned Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

Key points

Around 30% of campus-based members of the Association of American University Presses now report to libraries, more than double the number 5 years ago.

Beyond reporting relationships, physical collocation and joint strategic planning characterize the most integrated press/library partnerships.

The main mutual advantages of deep press/library collaboration are economic efficiency, greater relevance to parent institutions, and an increased capacity to engage with the changing needs of authors in the digital age.

There is emerging interest in collaboration at scale among libraries and presses that may extend the impact of press/library collaboration beyond single institutions.

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Investigating OA Monograph Services: Final Report

Jisc has released Investigating OA Monograph Services: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Overall, the project 'Investigating OA monographs services' has produced some extremely valuable guides in areas where no information (specifically for OA monographs) existed and identified some very strong areas where collaboration and experimentation could simultaneously bring real value to OA monograph publishers and the authors and readers of monographs.

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"Undercounting File Downloads from Institutional Repositories"

Patrick Obrien et al. have published "Undercounting File Downloads from Institutional Repositories" in the Journal of Library Administration.

Here's an excerpt:

A primary impact metric for institutional repositories (IR) is the number of file downloads, which are commonly measured through third-party Web analytics software. Google Analytics, a free service used by most academic libraries, relies on HTML page tagging to log visitor activity on Google's servers. However, Web aggregators such as Google Scholar link directly to high value content (usually PDF files), bypassing the HTML page and failing to register these direct access events. This article presents evidence of a study of four institutions demonstrating that the majority of IR activity is not counted by page tagging Web analytics software, and proposes a practical solution for significantly improving the reporting relevancy and accuracy of IR performance metrics using Google Analytics.

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