Category: Open Access

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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"Academic Social Networks and Open Access: French Researchers at the Crossroads"

Christine Okret-Manville has published "Academic Social Networks and Open Access: French Researchers at the Crossroads" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

For some years, researchers have been using new ways to communicate and share their work by using academic social networks. In an attempt to foster the development of Open Access in France, the French consortium COUPERIN (Unified Consortium of Higher Education and Research Organizations for Access to Numerical Publications) proposed that academic social networks could be used to convince researchers of becoming more involved in Open Access. To test this hypothesis, a nationwide survey was launched in 2014 to explore whether and how these academic social networks are used to share content, but also how they compare to other Open Access classic tools. Within a month (20 May to 20 June), 1,898 researchers answered this 28-question survey. It was fully completed by 1,698 of them.

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"Open Data in Global Environmental Research: The Belmont Forum’s Open Data Survey"

Birgit Schmidt, Birgit Gemeinholzer, and Andrew Treloar have published "Open Data in Global Environmental Research: The Belmont Forum's Open Data Survey" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper presents the findings of the Belmont Forum's survey on Open Data which targeted the global environmental research and data infrastructure community. It highlights users' perceptions of the term "open data", expectations of infrastructure functionalities, and barriers and enablers for the sharing of data. A wide range of good practice examples was pointed out by the respondents which demonstrates a substantial uptake of data sharing through e-infrastructures and a further need for enhancement and consolidation. Among all policy responses, funder policies seem to be the most important motivator. This supports the conclusion that stronger mandates will strengthen the case for data sharing.

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"Publishing as Pedagogy: Connecting Library Services and Technology"

Laurie Alexander et al. have published "Publishing as Pedagogy: Connecting Library Services and Technology" in EDUCAUSE Review.

Here's an excerpt:

In the following three case studies we profile three student publishing outputs (a journal, a book, and an exhibit) from the University of Michigan Library. Beyond describing the products themselves, we identify the opportunities that the librarians involved found to emphasize particular learning experiences during the creation process.

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"NIH Manuscript Collection Optimized for Text-Mining and More"

NIH has released "NIH Manuscript Collection Optimized for Text-Mining and More."

Here's an excerpt:

You can download the entire PMC collection of NIH-supported author manuscripts as a package in either XML or plain text formats. The collection will encompass all NIH manuscripts posted to PMC since July 2008. While the public can access the articles' full text and accompanying figures, tables, and multimedia on the PMC Web site, the newly available article packages include full text only, in a form that facilitates text-mining.

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"Text and Data Mining: Challenges and Solutions from the Publishers’ Perspective"

LIBER has released "Text and Data Mining: Challenges and Solutions from the Publishers' Perspective."

Here's an excerpt:

On 11 November, OpenMinTeD (a project in which LIBER participates) and Europeana organised a workshop titled 'Text and Data Mining in Europe: Challenges and Action'. The goal of the workshop was to bring together content providers (publishers, data centers, museums and libraries) who are open to making their data available for Text and Data Mining (TDM).

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"Open Access, Almost-OA, OA Policies, and Institutional Repositories"

Richard Poynder has published "Open Access, Almost-OA, OA Policies, and Institutional Repositories" in Open and Shut?. This is part one of a planned two-part post.

Here's an excerpt:

First, I want to discuss how many of the documents indexed in "open" repositories are in fact freely available, rather than on "dark deposit" or otherwise inaccessible

Second, I want to look at the so-called eprint request Button, a tool developed to allow readers to obtain copies of items held on dark deposit in repositories.

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"Opening the Black Box of Scholarly Communication Funding: A Public Data Infrastructure for Financial Flows in Academic Publishing"

Stuart Lawson et al. have self-archived "Opening the Black Box of Scholarly Communication Funding: A Public Data Infrastructure for Financial Flows in Academic Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper we present work to trace and reassemble a picture of financial flows around the publication of journals in the UK in the midst of a national shift towards open access. We contend that the current lack of financial transparency around scholarly communication is an obstacle to evidence-based policy-making—leaving researchers, decision-makers and institutions in the dark about the systemic implications of new financial models. We conclude that obtaining a more joined up picture of financial flows is vital as a means for researchers, institutions and others to understand and shape changes to the sociotechnical systems that underpin scholarly communication.

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"CHORUS Gets a Boost from Federal Agencies—But Will New Approaches Make It Harder to Implement?"

Angela Cochran has published "CHORUS Gets a Boost from Federal Agencies—But Will New Approaches Make It Harder to Implement?" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Today, CHORUS and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced an agreement to use CHORUS for facilitating the discovery of NSF funded works. . . .

With the NSF on board, CHORUS has been given a big boost. However, it seems many publishers, whose membership dues are the only source of financial support for CHORUS, have been hanging back to see which agencies will participate.

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Using Open Educational Resources, UGA Saves Students $2 Million

From 2013-2016, the University of Georgia estimates that it has saved students $2 million .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The University of Georgia is actively engaging in the promotion and adoption of OERs by providing faculty members, especially those who teach large enrollment courses, such as those included on the University System of Georgia Top-100 Undergraduate Enrollment list, with resources and assistance to transition away from expensive textbooks to open education resources. Since the OER initiative began in 2013, OERs will have saved UGA student $2 million in textbook costs by the end of 2015-2016.

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"Criteria for Open Access and Publishing"

ScienceOpen has released an e-print of "Criteria for Open Access and Publishing" by Tom Olijhoek, Lars Bjørnshauge, and Dominic Mitchell .

Here's an excerpt:

This article gives an overview of the history and current status of the DOAJ. After a brief historical overview, DOAJ policies regarding open access, intellectual property rights and questionable publishers are explained in detail. The larger part of this article is a much requested explanation on how DOAJ uses its new set of criteria for the evaluation of open access journals and the rationale behind choosing the seven extra criteria that qualify for the DOAJ Seal. A final section is devoted to the extended possibilities that DOAJ will be offering shortly to scholars and publishers for searching the database and for uploading metadata. The result is a renewed DOAJ that offers a more robust platform, a more stable database and enhanced services to allow the upload and collection of metadata.

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"Four PLOS Authors Receive 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences"

PLOS has released "Four PLOS Authors Receive 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences."

Here's an excerpt:

This year, four of the five scientists awarded a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences chose to publish some of their work in Open Access journals over the course of their careers. In so doing, Edward S. Boyden, Karl Deisseroth, John Hardy and Svante Pääbo ensure their research is available for distribution, discovery and reuse, introducing opportunities for all scientists to build on their discoveries.

Collectively, the four PLOS authors and Breakthrough Prize winners have published 55 articles in PLOS journals: 35 articles in PLOS ONE, nine articles in PLOS Genetics, eight articles in PLOS Biology and three articles in PLOS Computational Biology. They've also rocked out to the tunes of Pharrell Williams in an Oscar-style ceremony.

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"Considering Non-Open Access Publication Charges in the ‘Total Cost of Publication’"

Andrew Gray has published "Considering Non-Open Access Publication Charges in the 'Total Cost of Publication'" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

Recent research has tried to calculate the "total cost of publication" in the British academic sector, bringing together the costs of journal subscriptions, the article processing charges (APCs) paid to publish open-access content, and the indirect costs of handling open-access mandates. This study adds an estimate for the other publication charges (predominantly page and colour charges) currently paid by research institutions, a significant element which has been neglected by recent studies. When these charges are included in the calculation, the total cost to institutions as of 2013/14 is around 18.5% over and above the cost of journal subscriptions—11% from APCs, 5.5% from indirect costs, and 2% from other publication charges.

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"Campus Open-Access Policy Implementation Models and Implications for IR Services"

EllenFinnie Duranceau and Sue Kriegsman. have self-archived "Campus Open-Access Policy Implementation Models and Implications for IR Services."

Here's an excerpt:

Here, in attempt to build that needed roadmap, we provide a snapshot of the open-access policy implementation landscape by evaluating data from a survey of Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI) and characterizing each library's OA policy implementation models for its campus.

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"The History and Future of Academic Library Collecting in Eleven Pictures"

David W. Lewis has self-archived "The History and Future of Academic Library Collecting in Eleven Pictures."

Here's an excerpt:

In the digital world and using the strategy I have outlined what we have is more like an open checkbook that will purchase the books an articles any library user wants. It is the difference between a public park and giving citizens free ticket s to Disney Land whenever they need recreation. Or, like the difference between a soup kitchen and food stamps.

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"Reminiscing About 15 Years of Interoperability Efforts"

Herbert Van de Sompel and Michael L. Nelson have published "Reminiscing About 15 Years of Interoperability Efforts" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

Over the past fifteen years, our perspective on tackling information interoperability problems for web-based scholarship has evolved significantly. In this opinion piece, we look back at three efforts that we have been involved in that aptly illustrate this evolution: OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, and Memento. Understanding that no interoperability specification is neutral, we attempt to characterize the perspectives and technical toolkits that provided the basis for these endeavors. With that regard, we consider repository-centric and web-centric interoperability perspectives, and the use of a Linked Data or a REST/HATEAOS technology stack, respectively. We also lament the lack of interoperability across nodes that play a role in web-based scholarship, but end on a constructive note with some ideas regarding a possible path forward.

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"Examining the Impact of the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy on the Citation Rates of Journal Articles"

Sandra L. De Groote et al. have published "Examining the Impact of the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy on the Citation Rates of Journal Articles" in PLoS One.

Here's an excerpt:

Purpose

To examine whether National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded articles that were archived in PubMed Central (PMC) after the release of the 2008 NIH Public Access Policy show greater scholarly impact than comparable articles not archived in PMC. . . .

Results

A total of 45,716 articles were examined, including 7,960 with NIH-funding. An analysis of the number of times these articles were cited found that NIH-funded 2006 articles in PMC were not cited significantly more than NIH-funded non-PMC articles. However, 2009 NIH funded articles in PMC were cited 26% more than 2009 NIH funded articles not in PMC, 5 years after publication. This result is highly significant even after controlling for journal (as a proxy of article quality and topic).

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The Future of the Monograph in the Digital Era: A Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Michael Elliott has self-archived The Future of the Monograph in the Digital Era: A Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Here's an excerpt:

Over the course of six months, our working group endeavored to consider whether a model of university-funded monograph publication could improve the publishing landscape for scholars in the humanities and facilitate the "digital transition" that Berkery foresees. Under such a model, a university would bear a high percentage of the publication costs through an initial contract. The university press would produce a high quality, open-access digital publication, as well as make the book available in print form—possibly through print-on-demand.

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"ARL, Higher Education Groups Support Lingua Editors, Open Access"

ARL has released ""ARL, Higher Education Groups Support Lingua Editors, Open Access."

Here's an excerpt:

Following in the footsteps of other editors and authors, the six editors and thirty-one editorial board members of the Elsevier journal Lingua resigned on October 27, 2015, in protest of Elsevier's practices. The Lingua editors argued that the journal's price has steadily increased year after year, far outpacing the cost of production. The editors also cited Elsevier's refusal to transition the journal to a "fair open access" model that would charge low and transparent article processing fees for authors, while allowing authors to retain copyright to their articles.

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"The Institution as E-Textbook Publisher"

Andrew Barker has published "The Institution as E-Textbook Publisher" in Insights: the UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Providing students with sufficient copies of core textbooks is an increasing challenge in an age of ever higher fees, economic realities and heightened student expectations regarding provision of library resources. This article outlines the partnership between the University of Liverpool Library and Liverpool University Press (LUP), which has progressed from the creation of a library advisory board to the co-creation of two bespoke and open access (OA) e-textbooks as part of a Jisc-funded project. It tells the story of why we have gone down this route at Liverpool and what we hope to gain from the creation of these e-textbooks.

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