Category: Open Access

"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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"Measuring the Degrees of Openness of Scholarly Journals with the Open Access Spectrum (OAS) Evaluation Tool"

Xiaotian Chen and Tom Olijhoek have published "Measuring the Degrees of Openness of Scholarly Journals with the Open Access Spectrum (OAS) Evaluation Tool" in Serials Review.

Here's an excerpt:

HowOpenIsIt is a guide created by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), PLOS (Public Library of Science), and OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association) to describe an array of policies a journal can have in the continuum between "Open" and "Closed." The OAS Evaluation Tool uses the HowOpenIsIt guide to measure the degree of openness of journals of all kinds with scores between 0 and 100. A total of 1,005 journal samples, both OA and non-OA journals in various languages and from various parts of the world, were evaluated and scored with the OAS Evaluation Tool by a team of information professionals in 2015 based on the policies posted on journals' websites. This article reports the findings of the OAS evaluation.

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"Scholarly Communication and the Dilemma of Collective Action: Why Academic Journals Cost Too Much"

College & Research Libraries has released an e-print of "Scholarly Communication and the Dilemma of Collective Action: Why Academic Journals Cost Too Much" by John Wenzler.

Here's an excerpt:

Why has the rise of the Internet—which drastically reduces the cost of distributing information—coincided with drastic increases in the prices that academic libraries pay for access to scholarly journals?This study argues that libraries are trapped in a collective action dilemma as defined by economist Mancur Olson in The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. To truly reduce their costs, librarians would have to build a shared online collection of scholarly resources jointly managed by the academic community as a whole, but individual academic institutions lack the private incentives necessary to invest in a shared collection. Thus, the management of online scholarly journals has been largely outsourced to publishers who have developed monopoly powers that allow them to increase subscription prices faster than the rate of inflation. Many librarians consider the Open Access Movement the best response to increased subscription costs, but the current strategies employed to achieve Open Access also are undermined by collective action dilemmas. In conclusion, some alternative strategies are proposed.

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Karger Publishers Agreement Allows Researchers at 9 UKB Members to Publish Up to 250 OA Articles per Year without APCs

Karger Publishers has reached an agreement with nine menders of the Dutch UKB consortium that allows affiliated authors to publish up to 250 open access articles per year without APCs.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The consortial agreement grants the participating UKB libraries and their clients full perpetual access to all Karger journal content of 2016 and 2017 as before. The novel part is that affiliated authors may publish up to 250 OA articles per year with Karger without having to pay the usual OA Article Processing Charges (APCs). Authors are free to submit to any of the 100 plus peer-reviewed hybrid and full OA Karger journals; however, they are asked to mention their affiliation with a participating institution during submission.

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Open Access: The Beast That No-One Could—or Should—Control?

Stephen Curry has self-archived "Open Access: The Beast That No-One Could—or Should—Control?"

Here's an excerpt:

To set the scene, I will begin with a brief description of the open access movement and recent policy initiatives before discussing their impact on the attitudes of scientists towards the broader open science agenda and public engagement. I will then consider the effects of open access (and allied moves) on the authority and independence of science—concepts that are perturbed by the increasingly blurred boundary between the academy and the public. Lastly, I will focus attention on the various publics that are actively seeking to engage with science and scientists, mainly through advocacy groups or the growing ranks of citizen scientists; here, while the impact of open access appears relatively modest, it has the capacity to spring surprises that point to future growth.

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"A Vision for Open Cyber-Scholarly Infrastructures"

Costantino Thanos has published "A Vision for Open Cyber-Scholarly Infrastructures" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

The characteristics of modern science, i.e., data-intensive, multidisciplinary, open, and heavily dependent on Internet technologies, entail the creation of a linked scholarly record that is online and open. Instrumental in making this vision happen is the development of the next generation of Open Cyber-Scholarly Infrastructures (OCIs), i.e., enablers of an open, evolvable, and extensible scholarly ecosystem. The paper delineates the evolving scenario of the modern scholarly record and describes the functionality of future OCIs as well as the radical changes in scholarly practices including new reading, learning, and information-seeking practices enabled by OCIs.

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Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015

It is available as a free PDF or a low-cost paperback.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This book reports on a comprehensive analysis of serious open access journals as of December 31, 2015: nearly 11,000 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals. For 10,324 of the journals, the study includes whether or not there's an article processing charge (APC), how much it is, and the number of articles in each year 2011 through 2015. The state of serious gold OA is described in terms of article volume, fees and revenue, subject segments, regions, type of publisher and other aspects. The book includes two chapters on the May 2016 "delisting" of 2,900-odd journals.

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"Amplifying the Impact of Open Access: Wikipedia and the Diffusion of Science"

Misha Teplitskiy, Grace Lu, and Eamon Duede have self-archived "Amplifying the Impact of Open Access: Wikipedia and the Diffusion of Science."

Here's an excerpt:

With the rise of Wikipedia as a first-stop source for scientific knowledge, it is important to compare its representation of that knowledge to that of the academic literature. Here we identify the 250 most heavily used journals in each of 26 research fields (4,721 journals, 19.4M articles in total) indexed by the Scopus database, and test whether topic, academic status, and accessibility make articles from these journals more or less likely to be referenced on Wikipedia. We find that a journal's academic status (impact factor) and accessibility (open access policy) both strongly increase the probability of it being referenced on Wikipedia. Controlling for field and impact factor, the odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to paywall journals. One of the implications of this study is that a major consequence of open access policies is to significantly amplify the diffusion of science, through an intermediary like Wikipedia, to a broad audience.

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"Breaking Down Pros and Cons of Preprints in Biomedicine"

Hilda Bastian has published "Breaking Down Pros and Cons of Preprints in Biomedicine" in Absolutely Maybe.

Here's an excerpt:

The pros and cons on this are arguably different for physics and biomedicine. It might be easier to copy or fold in someone else's insights into an experiment or paper and beat them to press, so the argument goes. Perhaps this is in part a concern about losing out on a citation in a higher impact journal if your work is no longer seen as exciting. If it's a common concern, then it's a serious hurdle for preprint acceptance.

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"Fifty Shades of Open"

Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peek have published "Fifty Shades of Open" in First Monday.

Here's an excerpt:

Open source. Open access. Open society. Open knowledge. Open government. Even open food. The word "open" has been applied to a wide variety of words to create new terms, some of which make sense, and some not so much. This essay disambiguates the many meanings of the word "open" as it is used in a wide range of contexts.

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"The Mystery of Creative Commons Licenses"

De Gruyter Open has released "The Mystery of Creative Commons Licenses" by Witold Kieńć.

Here's an excerpt:

While more than half of open access papers are published under the terms of a liberal Creative Commons Attribution Licence, the majority of authors of open access works seem not to accept the terms of either this or any other Creative Commons license.

Despite the fact that the majority of journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals use liberal Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence as a default, and that probably more than half of all articles published in open access serials are published under the terms of this licence, academic authors seem not to support liberal licensing. How is it possible? Are authors of more than 600 thousand CC-BY licensed works invisible in surveys? Or do they publish under the terms of this license against their will?

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"The Open Access Interviews: Sir Timothy Gowers, Mathematician"

Richard Poynder has published "The Open Access Interviews: Sir Timothy Gowers, Mathematician " in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

The idea of arXiv overlay journals was in the air for a long time. I think one impulse behind Discrete Analysis was the very hostile reaction from many people to the setting up of the open access journal Forum of Mathematics by Cambridge University Press, which (after a three-year free period) charges £750 per article.

It seems that a large proportion of mathematicians are implacably opposed to article processing charges, no matter what assurances are given that authors themselves will never be expected to pay out of their own pocket, and that ability to pay will not affect the choice of which articles to publish.

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"Comparing Published Scientific Journal Articles to Their Pre-print Versions"

Martin Klein et al. have self-archived "Comparing Published Scientific Journal Articles to Their Pre-print Versions."

Here's an excerpt:

Academic publishers claim that they add value to scholarly communications by coordinating reviews and contributing and enhancing text during publication. . . . We have investigated the publishers' value proposition by conducting a comparative study of pre-print papers and their final published counterparts. This comparison had two working assumptions: 1) if the publishers' argument is valid, the text of a pre-print paper should vary measurably from its corresponding final published version, and 2) by applying standard similarity measures, we should be able to detect and quantify such differences. Our analysis revealed that the text contents of the scientific papers generally changed very little from their pre-print to final published versions.

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"Congress Wants to Turn Obama’s Open Data Actions into Law"

Representative Derek Kilmer has released "Congress Wants to Turn Obama's Open Data Actions into Law."

Here's an excerpt:

A new bill introduced Thursday would give a legislative basis to a number of open data initiatives already underway in the federal government under executive order.

The Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act, introduced by Reps. Derek Kilmer, D-Wash., and Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, would build upon a number open data policies from the Obama administration that push federal agencies to make as much data as possible free for the public to use.

A Senate version of the bill will also soon be introduced by Sens. Brian Schatz, D-HI, and Ben Sasse, R-Neb.

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"The Academic, Economic and Societal Impacts of Open Access: An Evidence-Based Review"

Jonathan P. Tennant et al. have published an e-print for review of "The Academic, Economic and Societal Impacts of Open Access: An Evidence-Based Review" in F1000 Research.

Here's an excerpt:

This review presents published evidence of the impact of Open Access on the academy, economy and society. Overall, the evidence points to a favorable impact of OA on the scholarly literature through increased dissemination and reuse. OA has the potential to be a sustainable business venture for new and established publishers, and can provide substantial benefits to research- and development-intensive businesses, including health organisations, volunteer sectors, and technology. OA is a global issue, highlighted by inequalities beset at all levels between developing and developed nations, and largely fueled by financial inequality. Current levels of access in the developing world are insufficient and unstable, and only OA has the potential to foster the development of stable research ecosystems. While predatory publishing remains an ongoing issue, particularly in the developing world, increasing public engagement, development of OA policies, and discussion of sustainable and ethical publishing practices can remove this potential threat to OA.

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"Dramatic Growth of Open Access March 31, 2016"

Heather Morrison has published "Dramatic Growth of Open Access March 31, 2016 " in The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics.

Here's an excerpt:

There are now 150 publishers of peer-reviewed open access books listed in the Directory of Open Access Books, publishing more than 4,400 open access books. 620 books were published in this quarter alone, a 16% increase in just this quarter. The Directory of Open Access Journals has been adding titles at a net rate of 6 titles per day, 540 journals added this quarter for a total of over 11,000 journals.

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Springer Will Automatically Deposit MIT-Authored Papers in DSpace@MIT

Springer and MIT have reached an agreement that will result in Springer automatically depositing MIT-authored papers in DSpace@MIT nine months after publication.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, one of the first initiatives of its kind in the United States, made a bold commitment to disseminate the results of MIT research and scholarship as widely and openly as possible. Recently, the MIT Libraries affirmed this commitment by signing an innovative agreement with Springer, one of the world's largest scholarly publishers. Springer will send manuscripts of MIT-authored scholarly papers directly to the Open Access Articles Collection of DSpace@MIT, the Institute's open access repository.

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"A Spiritual Successor to Aaron Swartz Is Angering Publishers All Over Again"

David Kravets has published "A Spiritual Successor to Aaron Swartz Is Angering Publishers All Over Again" in Ars Technica.

Here's an excerpt:

Meet Alexandra Elbakyan, the developer of Sci-Hub, a Pirate Bay-like site for the science nerd. It's a portal that offers free and searchable access "to most publishers, especially well-known ones."

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