Category: Open Access

"Better Sharing Through Licenses? Measuring the Influence of Creative Commons Licenses on the Usage of Open Access Monographs"

Ronald Snijder has published "Better Sharing Through Licenses? Measuring the Influence of Creative Commons Licenses on the Usage of Open Access Monographs" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

The application of open licenses to books does not, on its own, lead to more downloads. However, open licenses pave the way for intermediaries to offer new discovery and aggregation services. These services play an important role by amplifying the impacts of open access licensing in the case of scholarly books.

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"Beyond Beall’s List: Better Understanding Predatory Publishers"

Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella have published "Beyond Beall's List: Better Understanding Predatory Publishers" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

Although predatory publishers predate OA, their recent explosion was expedited by the emergence and success of fee-charging OA journals. No matter how strong our urge to support and defend OA, librarians cannot deny the profusion of predators in the OA arena; John Bohannon's recent "sting" made abundantly clear (despite methodological flaws) that there are many bad actors. Rather, we should seek to understand their methods, track their evolution, and communicate their characteristics to our patrons.

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"The OA Interviews: Alison Mudditt, Director, University of California Press"

Richard Poynder has published "The OA Interviews: Alison Mudditt, Director, University of California Press" in Open and Shut? in which Mudditt discusses the UC Press' Collabra and Luminos open access programs.

Here's an excerpt:

Collabra's model speaks to publishers, libraries, funders, and researchers who are seeking more cost transparency and greater recognition of the critical role that the academic and scientific community plays in journal publishing. In our model, the people who do the fundamental work of peer-review are recognized for this and are able to decide where to place that value.

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"Flipping, not Flopping: Converting Subscription Journals to Open Access"

Alice Meadows has published "Flipping, not Flopping: Converting Subscription Journals to Open Access" in The Scholarly Kitchen .

Here's an excerpt:

The question of whether—and, if so, when and how—to 'flip' a traditional, subscription-based journal to open access (OA) is one that comes up time and again in meetings with our society partners. It's also something that funders sometimes like to suggest as a quick route to a more open world—"Why not just convert all your journals to OA?" they ask.

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Canadian Tri-Agency Open Access Policy

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada have adopted a harmonized open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from the FAQ:

The Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications requires that peer-reviewed journal publications resulting from Tri-Agency (NSERC, SSHRC or CIHR) grants be freely accessible online within 12 months of publication.

Grant recipients may comply with the policy through one of the following routes:

  • Grant recipients archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscript in an online repository where it will be freely accessible within 12 months (e.g., institutional repository or discipline-based repository). It is the responsibility of the grant recipient to determine which publishers allow authors to retain copyright and/or allow authors to archive journal publications in accordance with funding agency policies.
  • Grant recipients can publish in a journal that offers open access or that offers open access on its website within 12 months.

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"The Economics of Open Access"

Walt Crawford as published "The Economics of Open Access" in Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt:

This essay is primarily about open access, but strays into journal publishing in general. As usual, it's a combination of resources (cites) and commentary (insights), divided into ten overlapping segments. I believe the mèlange will be informative and useful, although I'm certain it won't provide pat answers to most questions, because such answers don't exist.

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"AHRQ, NASA, USDA Release Plans for Public Access to Funded Research"

ARL has released AHRQ, NASA, USDA Release Plans for Public Access to Funded Research.

Here's an excerpt:

Three US Government agencies-the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)-recently released their plans for increasing public access to federally funded research in response to the 2013 White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) directive. The OSTP memorandum directed federal agencies with R&D budgets of $100 million or more to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication.

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Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Adopts Open Access Mandate

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, an agency within the United States Department of Health and Human Services, has adopted an open access mandate.

Here's an excerpt:

For scholarly publications, the AHRQ Public Access Policy will require that authors submit the final peer-reviewed accepted journal manuscripts to PubMed Central (PMC). In lieu of the final peer-reviewed manuscript, AHRQ will accept the final published article, provided the awardee can ensure AHRQ has the rights to make the published version public. AHRQ's Public Access Policy is subject to law; Agency mission; resource constraints; U.S. national, homeland, and economic security; and the objectives listed in the OSTP directive.

To the extent feasible and consistent with applicable law and policy; Agency mission; resource constraints; U.S. national, homeland, and economic security; and the objectives listed below, digitally formatted scientific data resulting from unclassified research supported wholly or in part by Federal funding should be stored and publicly accessible to search, retrieve, and analyze. For sharing of data in digital format, all AHRQ-funded researchers will be required to include a data management plan for sharing final research data in digital format, or state why data sharing is not possible.

Peter Suber has critiqued the mandate.

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"Open Access Article Processing Charges: DOAJ Survey May 2014"

Heather Morrison et al. have published "Open Access Article Processing Charges: DOAJ Survey May 2014" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

As of May 2014, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed close to ten thousand fully open access, peer reviewed, scholarly journals. Most of these journals do not charge article processing charges (APCs). This article reports the results of a survey of the 2567 journals, or 26% of journals listed in DOAJ, that do have APCs based on a sample of 1432 of these journals. Results indicate a volatile sector that would make future APCs difficult to predict for budgeting purposes. DOAJ and publisher title lists often did not closely match. A number of journals were found on examination not to have APCs. A wide range of publication costs was found for every publisher type. The average (mean) APC of $964 contrasts with a mode of $0. At least 61% of publishers using APCs are commercial in nature, while many publishers are of unknown types. The vast majority of journals charging APCs (80%) were found to offer one or more variations on pricing, such as discounts for authors from mid to low income countries, differential pricing based on article type, institutional or society membership, and/or optional charges for extras such as English language editing services or fast track of articles. The complexity and volatility of this publishing landscape is discussed.

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COAR Roadmap: Future Directions for Repository Interoperability

COAR has released COAR Roadmap: Future Directions for Repository Interoperability.

Here's an excerpt:

Scholarly communication is undergoing fundamental changes, in particular with new requirements for open access to research outputs, new forms of peer-review, and alternative methods for measuring impact. In parallel, technical developments, especially in communication and interface technologies facilitate bi-directional data exchange across related applications and systems. The aim of this roadmap is to identify important trends and their associated action points in order for the repository community to determine priorities for further investments in interoperability.

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Managing Open Access Publication: A System Specification

JISC Monitor has released Managing Open Access Publication: A System Specification.

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this document is to provide a specification for a system to help UK HE institutions manage administrative data in relation to the publication of open access Academic Outputs. The document is intended to:

  • Describe the scope of such a system and the workflows it should support
  • Describe an appropriate data model given the scope and workflows
  • Provide illustrative wireframes for a user interface (UI) to such a system

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"One More Chunk of DOAJ"

Walt Crawford has published "One More Chunk of DOAJ" in Cites & Insights Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt:

Because there will be a published concise version of all this stuff—out this summer from ALA's Library Technology Reports, working title "Idealism and Opportunism: The State of Open Access Journals"—I went through 2,200-odd additional DOAJ journals with English as one of the language options (but not the first one), and was able to add 1,507 more entries to my DOAJ master spreadsheet, which now includes 6,490 journals qualifying for full analysis and 811 that don't. This essay offers some summary information on the 1,507 added journals and some overall notes on the full DOAJ set-including some new and replacement tables (there may be errors in tables 2.66 b and c and 2.67 b and c in earlier issues).

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"Who Should We Trust?"

Kevin Smith has published "Who Should We Trust?" in Scholarly Communications @ Duke.

Here's an excerpt:

It is not that we exactly trust commercial publishers, nor do we exactly distrust them. We may recognize that the values and goals of the commercial publishing business are different from, and even in conflict with, the best interests of scholarly authors and of scholarship itself. Perfectly nice people, working to advance their own interests as best they can, come in to conflict as the conditions for research and teaching change. And a real ambivalence is created because of how interwoven the parts of the academic enterprise are. More than just inertia is a work; important aspects of the academic enterprise remain interlocked with traditional forms of publication.

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"PeerJ—A PLOS ONE Contender in 2015?"

Phil Davis has published "PeerJ—A PLOS ONE Contender in 2015?" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

In my last post, I reported that PeerJ was growing, publishing more papers and attracting more authors, although it was not clear whether the company was moving toward financial stability. In a crowded market of multidisciplinary open access journals, I argued that the success (or failure) of PeerJ would be determined when it received its first Impact Factor, which will be announced in mid-June with the publication of Thomson Reuters' Journal Citation Report. The purpose of this post is to estimate PeerJ's first Impact Factor and discuss its implications.

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"Ask The Chefs: What Do You Think Will Have the Biggest Impact on Scholarly Publishing In 2015?"

Ann Michael has published "Ask the Chefs: What Do You Think Will Have The Biggest Impact on Scholarly Publishing In 2015" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

According to the Chefs, we're looking at a year of mergers and acquisitions, the continuing growth of open access both in number of opportunities and in scale, the publication of data and objects (like multimedia, application code, etc.), and more start-ups.

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Bibliometric Study on Dutch Open Access

The Government of the Netherlands has released Bibliometric Study on Dutch Open Access.

Here's an excerpt:

In this text we will primarily focus on the way Open Access (OA from now on) publications are represented in the Web of Science database. We have collected data for this analysis in two different ways, which leads to different perspectives on OA publishing in the Netherlands. We focus on the output of three smaller scientific nations in Europe, next to the Netherlands we focus on Denmark and Switzerland, as these countries do contest the scientific runner up positions globally after the USA, and are more or less of comparable volume in economic terms.

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SciELO: 15 Years of Open Access

SciELO has released SciELO: 15 Years of Open Access.

Here's an excerpt:

The creation of SciELO 15 years ago and its further development were driven by two innovative and pioneering approaches: first, the indexing of national quality journals to complement international indexes and the publication of the full texts with free access on the Web in the modality known today as the "Golden Road", which took place about four years before the launch of the Budapest Declaration that is internationally agreed to as the beginning of the Open Access movement; and, second, the cooperative convergence of independent publishers, editors and national research agencies around a common objective to increase the visibility and quality of journals (Packer 1998; Meneghini, 2003; Packer 2009). During this development, SciELO became a standard of quality for the journals it indexes. As of June 2013, the SciELO network covers 15 Ibero-American countries plus South Africa, with each country publishing a national collection of journals in the network. There are also two multinational thematic collections in the network. Together these countries index about one thousand journal titles that publish more than 40 thousand articles per year. To date, the network has published a total of more than 400 thousand open access articles that receive a daily average of over 1.5 million article downloads, 65% as PDF files and 35% as HTML files.

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"The Open Access Citation Advantage"

SPARC Europe has released "The Open Access Citation Advantage."

Here's an excerpt:

The OpCit project has for many years kept up to date a list of studies on whether or not there is a citation advantage for Open Access articles. That project has now completed and the list is no longer being managed. SPARC Europe is pleased to maintain the list henceforth and has brought it up to date.

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Monographs and Open Access: A Report to HEFCE

The HEFCE has released Monographs and Open Access: A Report to HEFCE.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

  • Monographs are a vitally important and distinctive vehicle for research communication, and must be sustained in any moves to open access. The availability of printed books alongside the open-access versions will be essential.
  • Contrary to many perceptions, it would not be appropriate to talk of a crisis of the monograph; this does not mean that monographs are not facing challenges, but the arguments for open access would appear to be for broader and more positive reasons than solving some supposed crisis.
  • Open access offers both short- and long-term advantages for monograph publication and use; many of these are bound up with a transition to digital publishing that has not been at the same speed as that for journals.
  • There is no single dominant emerging business model for supporting open-access publishing of monographs; a range of approaches will coexist for some time and it is unlikely that any single model will emerge as dominant. Policies will therefore need to be flexible.

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Policy Recommendations for Open Access to Research Data

The RECODE project has released Policy Recommendations for Open Access to Research Data.

Here's an excerpt:

These policy recommendations are targeted at key stakeholders in the scholarly communication ecosystem, namely research funders, research institutions, data managers, and publishers. They will assist each of the stakeholders in furthering the goals of open access to research data by providing both over-arching and stakeholder-specific recommendations. These function, as suggestions to address and attend to central issues that RECODE identified through the research work.

The current report thus comprises:

  • summary of project findings
  • overarching recommendations
  • targeted policy recommendations for funders, research institutions, data managers, and publishers
  • practical guides for developing policies for funders, research institutions, data managers, and publishers
  • resources to expedite the process of policy development and implementation among stakeholders

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Making Open Access Work for Authors, Institutions and Publishers

The Copyright Clearance Center has released Making Open Access Work for Authors, Institutions and Publishers.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), a global licensing and content solutions organization, recently brought together institutions from the UK and publishers from both the US and UK for an Open Access roundtable discussion to explore the implications of managing Open Access fees on a large scale. During this meeting, held at University College in London, the attendees examined a number of issues related to fragmentation, approach and processes, including ways vendors can play an expanded role in addressing the challenges. CCC published the group's findings in a report written by Rob Johnson, Founder and Director of Research Consulting.

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2014 Open Data Index

Open Knowledge has published the 2014 Open Data Index.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels.

The UK topped the 2014 Index retaining its pole position with an overall score of 96%, closely followed by Denmark and then France at number 3 up from 12th last year. Finland comes in 4th while Australia and New Zealand share the 5th place. Impressive results were seen from India at #10 (up from #27) and Latin American countries like Colombia and Uruguay who came in joint 12th.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Towards a UK Digital Public Space—A Blueprint Report

The Strategic Content Alliance has released Towards a UK Digital Public Space—A Blueprint Report.

Here's an excerpt:

"Imagine … that much of the UK's publicly held cultural and heritage media assets could be found in a unified online space … connected together, searchable, open, accessible, visible and usable … in a way that allows individuals, institutions and machines to add additional material, meaning and context to each other's media, indexed and tagged to the highest level of detail … This emerging vision of a free-to-everyone, open access environment for learning and creative endeavour has been referred to as a digital public space."

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Fedora 4 Production Release

The international Fedora repository community and DuraSpace have released the Fedora 4 production release.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This significant release signals the effectiveness of an international and complex community source project in delivering a modern repository platform with features that meet or exceed current use cases in the management of institutional digital assets. Fedora 4 features include vast improvements in scalability, linked data capabilities, research data support, modularity, ease of use and more.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

DOAJ Journal Analysis: "Intersections: The Third Half"

Walt Crawford has published "Intersections: The Third Half" in Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Most of this essay (pp. 7-19) is the "Third Half" of the two-part Journals and "Journals" examination in the October/November and December 2014 issues-adding another 1,200-odd bio/med journals from DOAJ and looking at overall patterns. The essay also includes four briefer discussions related to DOAJ and gold OA journals.

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