Stephen Bosch and Kittie Henderson have published "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On | Periodicals Price Survey 2015" in Library Journal.
Here's an excerpt:
Open access (OA) continues to develop, but some financial analysts, such as Sami Kassab, executive director at investment firm Exane BNP Paribas, now believe that OA may no longer be a pressure point on commercial publishing. OA has not been the disruptive force on commercial publishing for which many had hoped.
With recent votes by Boston University and University of Delaware faculty, 50 universities or university units, such as schools, have now adopted open access policies by unanimous faculty votes.
Here's a list from Unanimous Faculty Votes. See the original document for omitted details, and see the recently revised (and praised) Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) for a complete list of over 670 open access policies.
- February 12, 2008. Harvard University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
- April 27, 2008. Macquarie University
- May 7, 2008, Harvard University, School of Law
- June 10, 2008, Stanford University, School of Education
- October 2008, University College London (UCL)
- February 11, 2009. Boston University
- March 6, 2009, Oregon State University, Library Faculty
- March 18, 2009, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- May 2009. University of Calgary, division of Library and Cultural Resources
- May 2009. University of Pretoria
- May 7, 2009, University of Oregon, Library Faculty
- May 14, 2009, University of Oregon, Department of Romance Languages
- May 14, 2009, Gustavus Adolphus College, Library Faculty
- October 1, 2009, York University, librarians and archivists
- October, 2009. Universidad de Oriente (Venezuela)
- November 18, 2009, Oberlin College
- December 2, 2009, University of Northern Colorado, Library Faculty
- February 1, 2010, Wake Forest University, Library faculty
- February 9, 2010, California Polytechnic State University
- February 12, 2010, Oregon State University College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences (COAS)
- February 24, 2010, University of Virginia
- February 25, 2010, Rollins College Faculty of Arts and Sciences
- March 18, 2010, Duke University
- March 24, 2010, University of Puerto Rico School of Law
- April 19, 2010, San Jose State University
- September 27, 2010, University of Northern Colorado
- October 2010, Trinity College Dublin
- December 22, 2010, Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
- March 15, 2011, Emory University
- May 11, 2011, University of Pennsylvania
- September 2011, Princeton University
- October 19, 2011, Florida State University
- December 8, 2011, Pacific University
- January 27, 2012, Bifröst University
- February 15, 2012, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto
- April 2012, Utah State University
- May 21, 2012, University of California, San Francisco
- February 6, 2013, Wellesley College
- March 4, 2013, College of Wooster
- March 5, 2013, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Library faculty
- March 21, 2013, University of Rhode Island
- April 2013, Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University
- June 13, 2013, Oregon State University
- December 2013, Télé-université (TELUQ), Université du Québec
- December 2, 2013, Columbia University, School of Social Work
- June 18, 2014, Harvard Medical School
- October 7, 2014, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
- October 9, 2014, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
- February 11, 2015, Boston University
- April 6, 2015, University of Delaware
A. Swan et al. have self-archived "Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness".
Here's an excerpt:
The PASTEUR4OA project analyses what makes an Open Access (OA) policy effective. The total number of institutional or funder OA policies worldwide is now 663 (March 2015), over half of them mandatory. ROARMAP, the policy registry, has been rebuilt to record more policy detail and provide more extensive search functionality. Deposit rates were measured for articles in institutions' repositories and compared to the total number of WoS-indexed articles published from those institutions. Average deposit rate was over four times as high for institutions with a mandatory policy. Six positive correlations were found between deposit rates and (1) Must-Deposit; (2) Cannot-Waive-Deposit; (3) Deposit-Linked-to-Research-Evaluation; (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention; (5) Must-Make-Deposit-OA (after allowable embargo) and (6) Can-Waive-OA. For deposit latency, there is a positive correlation between earlier deposit and (7) Must-Deposit-Immediately as well as with (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention and with mandate age. There are not yet enough OA policies to test whether still further policy conditions would contribute to mandate effectiveness but the present findings already suggest that it would be useful for current and future OA policies to adopt the seven positive conditions so as to accelerate and maximise the growth of OA.
SPARC has released "Next Up for Agency Public Access Plans: NOAA" by Heather Joseph.
Here's an excerpt:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its plan to create policies ensuring public access to articles and data resulting from its funded research, as required by the February 2013 White House directive. . . .
The NOAA plan calls for all agency-funded intramural and extramural researchers to deposit final, accepted manuscripts into the agency's repository upon acceptance in a peer-reviewed journal. Unlike many of the other agencies that have released plans to date, NOAA will also require its investigators to submit technical reports, data reports, and technical memoranda into the repository as well—significantly increasing the scope of the materials covered by the agency's policy.
NOAA will use the OSTP-suggested 12-month embargo period as its baseline. Like other agencies, it will provide stakeholders with a mechanism for petitioning the agency to change the embargo period. The plan indicates that requests must include evidence that outweighs the public benefit of having the embargo remain at one year. . . .
Currently, funded researchers are required to make data "visible and accessible" within two years. The new plan calls for this time frame to be shortened to just one year. It also indicates that data underlying the conclusions of peer-reviewed articles will most likely be required to be made available at the time of the article's publication, in appropriate repositories (presumably to be designated by NOAA).
Heather Morrison has published "Dramatic Growth of Open Access 2015 First Quarter" in The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics.
Here's an excerpt:
OpenDOAR added 129 repositories for a total of 2,857. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine added close to 3 million documents for a total of over 71 million documents. Another 7,690 authors joined the Social Sciences Research Network for a total of over 275,000 authors.
SPARC has released "NIST Releases Public Access Plan: Agency will Partner with NIH to use PMC Platform" by Heather Joseph.
Here's an excerpt:
NIST's plan calls for the agency to partner with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to use PubMed Central (PMC) as the repository for articles. The plan indicated that NIST selected this option in order to "leverage the well-established search, archival, and dissemination features of PMC."
All NIST-funded researchers will be required to deposit their final peer-reviewed manuscripts into PMC upon acceptance in a peer-reviewed journal and make them available to the public with no longer than a 12-month embargo period. NIST will also accept final published articles where allowed and will follow the NIH's current format requirements. As with the other agencies, NIST will provide stakeholders with a mechanism for petitioning the agency to "shorten or extend the allowable embargo period." NIST envisions that this process would take place through a public petition process run through the Federal Register. . . .
NIST's plan for providing public access to data consists of three components: requiring data management plans (DMPs), creating an Enterprise Data Inventory (EDI), and establishing a Common Access Platform providing a public access infrastructure.
Carl Lagoze, et al. have published "Should I Stay or Should I Go? Alternative Infrastructures in Scholarly Publishing" in the International Journal of Communication.
Here's an excerpt:
For more than three-and-a-half centuries, the scholarly infrastructure—composed of commercial publishers, learned societies, libraries, and the scholars themselves—has provided the foundation functions of certification, registration, access, preservation, and reward. However, over the last two decades, the stability of this infrastructure has been disrupted by profound changes in the technological, economic, cultural, and political climate. We examine the actions of scholars in response to this infrastructure instability through the lens of Hirschman's "exit, voice, and loyalty" framework. We describe the motivations and actions by scholars, especially those with tenure, who have chosen exit from the mainstream scholarly communication infrastructure to a proliferation of newly available alternative infrastructures. However, this option is not practical for all scholars due to the "enforced loyalty" imposed by reward systems based on metrics that are intricately tied to the traditional infrastructure. We examine the alternative of voice exercised by these scholars, combined with the threat of exit that has changed policies that are the source of dissatisfaction with the system.
CHORUS has released the CHORUS Progress Report, April 2015.
Here's an excerpt:
As of this month, CHORUS is providing access to and information about tens of thousands of articles reporting on federally funded research. CHORUS was also named by the US Department of Energy as part of its public-access solution. The significant progress we've made in the eight months since we moved into full production mode is a great foundation for CHORUS to build on for the benefit of the scholarly community. This report is a summary of our achievements during this pivotal period.
Cogent OA has launched an experimental Freedom APCs Program.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
Through Cogent OA's Freedom APC model, authors are requested to explore all avenues for funding the publication of their article, such as their funding agency, institution or company and to select a fee from a range of options based on their circumstances and how much they can afford to pay. The final decision rests with the author.
Further information: Article Publishing Charges (APCs).
The Department of Defense has released a draft Plan to Establish Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research .
Here's an excerpt from the SPARC announcement:
It calls for all DoD-funded researchers to deposit final peer-reviewed manuscripts into the Department's "Defense Technical Information Center" (DTIC) repository. All articles will be made available to the public with no longer than a 12 embargo period. . . .
The DoD draft plan doesn't elaborate on reuse rights for articles in the DTIC database, other than to note that articles will be subject to copyright and related license terms. Articles authored by DoD employees, however, will carry a full government use license. . . .
One significant place where the DoD's draft plan differs from others released to date is in the area of compliance. The Department indicates that it plans to develop its own "compliance monitor," that will issue "certification tokens" to authors who submit articles and datasets to the DoD under the new policies. The current document doesn't provide any additional details, but the concept of tokens is an intriguing one.
Alberto Accomazzi et al. have self-archived "ADS: The Next Generation Search Platform."
Here's an excerpt:
Starting in 2011, the ADS started to systematically collect, parse and index full-text documents for all the major publications in Physics and Astronomy as well as many smaller Astronomy journals and arXiv e-prints, for a total of over 3.5 million papers. Our citation coverage has doubled since 2010 and now consists of over 70 million citations. We are normalizing the affiliation information in our records and, in collaboration with the CfA library and NASA, we have started collecting and linking funding sources with papers in our system. . . . We have rolled out and are now enhancing a new high-performance search engine capable of performing full-text as well as metadata searches using an intuitive query language which supports fielded, unfielded and functional searches. We are currently able to index acknowledgments, affiliations, citations, funding sources, and to the extent that these metadata are available to us they are now searchable under our new platform. The ADS private library system is being enhanced to support reading groups, collaborative editing of lists of papers, tagging, and a variety of privacy settings when managing one's paper collection.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
