Category: Open Access

"Supporting Public Access to Research Results"

P. Scott Lapinski, David Osterbur, Joshua Parker and Alexa T. McCray have published "Supporting Public Access to Research Results" in College & Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

We posed the question of what services an academic library can best provide to support the NIH Public Access Policy. We approached the answer to this question through education, collaboration, and tool-building. As a result, over the last four years we have engaged over 1,500 participants in discussions of public access to research results, forged alliances with dozens of partners, and built online tools to ease the process of complying with the NIH policy. We conclude that librarians working in collaboration with other key constituencies can have a positive impact on improving access to the results of scientific research.

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"Multidimensional Journal Evaluation of PLOS ONE"

Christel Fein has published "Multidimensional Journal Evaluation of PLOS ONE" in Libri: International Journal of Libraries and Information Services.

Here's an excerpt:

All 28,852 documents published in PLOS ONE during the 5-year-period between 2007 and 2011 have been extracted from Web of Science. This data provides the basis for the evaluation. The data concerning the conducted evaluation has been collected as well as analysed multidimensionally, to demonstrate more fully the complex structures and aspects of the impact, prestige and position of PLOS ONE, and to assess the information and data obtained as specifically as possible. Based on Juchem, Schlögl, and Stock (2006) and Haustein (2012), a framework of five dimensions of journal evaluation has been applied, in which each contains several metrics to analyse scientific periodicals from various perspectives, i.e. journal output,journal content, journal perception, journal citations, and journal management.

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SCOAP3 High-Energy Physics Open Access Publishing Initiative Launches on 1/1/2014

The SCOAP3 High-Energy Physics open access publishing initiative will launch on 1/1/2014.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

After intense preparations and consensus building, CERN1 has today confirmed that the SCOAP3 Open Access publishing initiative will start on 1 January 2014. With the support of partners in 24 countries2, a vast fraction of scientific articles in the field of High-Energy Physics will become Open Access at no cost for any author: everyone will be able to read them; authors will retain copyright; and generous licenses will enable wide re-use of this information.

Convened at CERN this is the largest scale global Open Access initiative ever built, involving an international collaboration of over one thousand libraries, library consortia and research organizations. SCOAP3 enjoys the support of funding agencies and has been established in co-operation with leading publishers. . . .

The objective of SCOAP3 is to grant unrestricted access to scientific articles appearing in scientific journals, which so far have only been available to scientists through certain university libraries, and generally unavailable to the wider public. Open dissemination of preliminary information, in the form of pre-peer-review articles known as preprints, has been the norm in High-Energy Physics and related disciplines for two decades. SCOAP3 sustainably extends this opportunity to high-quality peer-review service, making final version of articles available, within the Open Access tenets of free and unrestricted dissemination of science with intellectual property rights vested in the authors and wide re-use opportunities. In the SCOAP3 model, libraries and funding agencies pool resources currently used to subscribe to journals, in co-operation with publishers, and use them to support the peer-review system directly instead.

The SCOAP3 initiative looks forward to establishing further partnerships in the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, where scientists will enjoy the advantages of Open Access and many libraries and library consortia will benefit from reductions in their subscription costs. . . .

More information–publishers and scientific societies participating in SCOAP3:
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft
Elsevier
Hindawi
Institute of Physics Publishing
Jagellonian University
Oxford University Press
Physical Society of Japan
SISSA Medialab
Springer
Società Italiana di Fisica

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"Opening the Dissertation: Overcoming Cultural Calcification and Agoraphobia"

Denise Troll Covey has published "Opening the Dissertation: Overcoming Cultural Calcification and Agoraphobia" in tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society.

Here's an excerpt:

This article places the struggle to open access to the dissertation in the context of the crisis in doctoral education and the transition from print to digital literacy. It explores the underlying cultural calcification and agoraphobia that deter engagement with openness. Solving the problems will require overhauling the curriculum and conventions of doctoral education. Opening access to dissertations is an important first step, but insufficient to end the crisis. Only opening other dimensions of the dissertation — the structure, media, notion of authorship, and methods of assessment — can foster the digital literacy needed to save PhD programs from extinction. If higher education institutions invested heavily in remedying obsolete practices, the remedies would reverberate throughout the academy, accelerate advancement in the disciplines, and revolutionize scholarly publishing. The article ends with a discussion of the significant role librarians could play in facilitating needed changes given appropriate institutional commitment.

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"Cultures of Access: Differences in Rhetoric around Open Access Repositories in Africa and the United States and Their Implications for the Open Access Movement"

Natalia T. Bowdoin has self-archived "Cultures of Access: Differences in Rhetoric around Open Access Repositories in Africa and the United States and Their Implications for the Open Access Movement."

Here's an excerpt:

For this study I examined the rhetoric used by OA institutional repositories and what this rhetoric may say about different "cultures of OA." I conducted textual analysis of 46 websites of OA repositories in the United States and 14 Sub-Saharan African nations. Analysis of the specific rhetoric used to present the OA repositories reveals differing views on the importance of OA in terms of cultural ideas about information control, access to information, and social capital.

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"American ETD Dissemination in the Age of Open Access: ProQuest, NoQuest, or Allowing Student Choice"

Gail P. Clement has published "American ETD Dissemination in the Age of Open Access: ProQuest, NoQuest, or Allowing Student Choice" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

A stark incongruity in the treatment of academic scholarship persists on many U.S. campuses today. Faculty authors are generally free to publish in whatever vehicle suits their needs and goals, while also expected (or mandated) to deposit their works in the open access university repository. By contrast, graduate students typically must send their scholarship to a single commercial publisher for toll-access, while also required to submit their works to the university repository.

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"PeerJ—A Case Study in Improving Research Collaboration at the Journal Level"

Peter Binfield has published "PeerJ—A Case Study in Improving Research Collaboration at the Journal Level" in the latest issue of Information Services & Use.

Here's an excerpt:

PeerJ Inc. is the Open Access publisher of PeerJ (a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal) and PeerJ PrePrints (an un-peer-reviewed or collaboratively reviewed preprint server), both serving the biological, medical and health sciences.

The Editorial Criteria of PeerJ (the journal) are similar to those of PLOS ONE in that all submissions are judged only on their scientic and methodological soundness (not on subjective determinations of impact, or degree of advance). PeerJ's peer-review process is managed by an Editorial Board of 800 and an Advisory Board of 20 (including 5 Nobel Laureates).

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"The Political Economy of Federally Sponsored Data"

Bart Ragon has published "The Political Economy of Federally Sponsored Data" in the latest issue of the Journal of eScience Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

Librarian involvement in the Open Access (OA) movement has traditionally focused on access to scholarly publications. Recent actions by the White House have focused attention on access on the data produced from federally sponsored research. Questions have emerged concerning access to the output of federally sponsored research and whether it is a public or private good. Understanding the political battle over access to federally funded research is closely tied to the ownership of the peer review process in higher education and associated revenue streams, and as a result, interest groups seeking to influence government regulation have politicized the issues. As a major funder of research in higher education, policies from the federal government are likely to drive change in research practices at higher education institutions and impact library services. The political economy of federally sponsored research data will shape research enterprises in higher education and inspire a number of new services distributed throughout the research life cycle.

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"Green Open Access Policies of Scholarly Journal Publishers: A Study of What, When, and Where Self-Archiving Is Allowed"

Bo-Christer Björk, et al. have self-archived "Green Open Access Policies of Scholarly Journal Publishers: A Study of What, When, and Where Self-Archiving Is Allowed."

Here's an excerpt:

The degree to which scholarly journal articles published in subscription-based journals could be provided open access (OA) through publisher-permitted uploading to freely accessible web locations, so called green OA, is an underexplored area of research. This study combines article volume data originating from the Scopus bibliographic database with manually coded publisher policies of the 100 largest journal publishers measured by article output volume for the year 2010. Of the 1,1 million articles included in the analysis, 80.4% could be uploaded either as an accepted manuscript or publisher version to an institutional or subject repository after one year of publication. Publishers were found to be substantially more permissive with allowing accepted manuscripts on personal webpages (78.1% of articles) or in institutional repositories (79.9%) compared to subject repositories (32.8%). With previous studies suggesting realized green OA to be around 12% of total annual articles the results highlight the substantial unused potential for green OA.

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Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet Is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing

An open access, editable version of Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet Is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing is available.

Here's an excerpt:

This book will give researchers, scientists, decision makers, politicians, and stakeholders an overview on the basics, the tools, and the vision behind the current changes we see in the field of knowledge creation. It is meant as a starting point for readers to become an active part in the future of research and to become an informed party during the transition phase. This is pivotal, since research, as a sensitive, complex process with many facets and millions of participants, hierarchies, personal networks, and structures, needs informed participants.

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Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences Conference 1 and 2 July 2013, The British Library, London

JISC has released Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences Conference 1 and 2 July 2013, The British Library, London.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The conference report provides an overview of all the presentations and sessions and distils the key messages into four points:

  • Open access for monographs is not only possible but necessary if we want to be able to innovate, to communicate and disseminate humanities and social science research widely, and to build a sustainable future for the monograph.
  • Effective quality assurance is key to the successful adoption of OA publishing.
  • Collaboration throughout the supply chain and across national boundaries will be required
  • We must be flexible and willing to accommodate innovative models, not only to sustain the monograph, but for peer review, impact and reputation.

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"Open Access Publishing from the Legal Point of View. Why Freedom of Information Rules and Other Legal Principles Matter. Towards A New Fair Open Access Model."

Jiří Kolman and Petr Kolman have published "Open Access Publishing from the Legal Point of View. Why Freedom of Information Rules and Other Legal Principles Matter. Towards A New Fair Open Access Model." in tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society.

Here's an excerpt:

This article focuses on aspects that, as far as we know, have never been discussed in previous debates dealing with open access. The EU and national competition legal rules ensuring fair competition are a rather neglected aspect of open access. Another crucial topic is the unfairness of the current publication system. Why should commercial publishers be paid by publicly supported research such as EU or national research programmes? In the article a new publication model is suggested. The proposed model is trying to keep high research standards, to be fair to researchers and the public and to take into account the actual costs of the new open access model.

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"Identifying the Effect of Open Access on Citations Using a Panel of Science Journals"

Mark J. McCabe and Christopher M. Snyder have self-archived "Identifying the Effect of Open Access on Citations Using a Panel of Science Journals." in SSRN

Here's an excerpt:

An open-access journal allows free online access to its articles, obtaining revenue from fees charged to submitting authors or from institutional support. Using panel data on science journals, we are able to circumvent problems plaguing previous studies of the impact of open access on citations. In contrast to the huge effects found in these previous studies, we find a more modest effect: moving from paid to open access increases cites by 8% on average in our sample. The benefit is concentrated among top-ranked journals. In fact, open access causes a statistically significant reduction in cites to the bottom-ranked journals in our sample, leading us to conjecture that open access may intensify competition among articles for readers' attention, generating losers as well as winners.

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"Going for Gold: An Investigation into Financial Models of Open Access Publishing in Biology"

Lucy van Dorp has self-archived her master's thesis "Going for Gold: An Investigation into Financial Models of Open Access Publishing in Biology"

Here's an excerpt:

Using the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as an entry point, this study considers the numbers of OA journals in the life and biological sciences along with the proportion using an author-pays model. It considers how impact factor is related to business model, in particular author fees2, using data from the 2011 Journal Citation Reports (JCR, 2011) and SCImago Journal and Country Rank (SCImago); data for year 2011; retrieved in 2012. The most prominent publishing organisations are considered in depth looking explicitly at the income sources making up revenue. The study concludes with comments from three industry specialists on their views on the future of academic publishing, the place of subscription-based journals and what their own organisation is doing to allow sustainable, barrier-free literature dissemination.

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SciELO—15 Years of Open Access: An Analytic Study On Open Access And Scholarly Communication (Preliminary version)

SciELO has relaeased SciELO—15 Years of Open Access: An Analytic Study On Open Access And Scholarly Communication (Preliminary version).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The 15 year path taken by the SciELO Program in bringing about the improvement of the academic journals which it indexes and publishes in Open Access—a path which it continues to follow to this day—is examined from various perspectives such as the rationale and objectives of the program, its origin in Brazil and expansion to 15 other countries, the results it has achieved, its quality control and production system, the technological platform and the impact that has been made by the Program.

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"The Open Access Movement Grows Up: Taking Stock of a Revolution"

Heather Joseph has published "The Open Access Movement Grows Up: Taking Stock of a Revolution" in a special issue on open access of PLOS Biology.

Here's an excerpt:

Overall, the story of the OA movement over the past ten years has been one of demonstrable progress. To be sure, the road has not been a smooth one. There have been stumbles, wrong turns, false starts, and bruising battles, particularly in the policy arena. But if we weigh the indicators of progress made by the OA movement against the intensity and complexity of the obstacles it has faced in the first decade, there's reason for great optimism as we head into the next ten years.

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"Publishing Priorities of Biomedical Research Funders"

Ellen Collins has published "Publishing Priorities of Biomedical Research Funders" in BMJ Open.

Here's an excerpt:

Publicly funded and large biomedical research funders are committed to open access publishing and are pleased with recent developments which have stimulated growth in this area. Smaller charitable funders are supportive of the aims of open access, but are concerned about the practical implications for their budgets and their funded researchers. Across the board, biomedical research funders are turning their attention to other priorities for sharing research outputs, including data, protocols and negative results. Further work is required to understand how smaller funders, including charitable funders, can support open access.

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Open Access Clauses in Publishers’ Licenses: Current State and Lessons Learned

COAR has released Open Access Clauses in Publishers' Licenses: Current State and Lessons Learned.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

As Open Access (OA) policies and laws are being adopted world-wide, the scholarly community is shifting its efforts from advocacy towards practical implementation and support. One of the major routes for making articles open access is through OA repositories. However the variety and lack of clarity of publishers' policies regarding article deposit can be a significant barrier to author compliance of OA policies.

In order to overcome this barrier, some organizations have successfully negotiated authors' or deposit rights with publishers in the context of purchasing content licenses. This report documents the existing OA licensing language that has been implemented by organizations around the world and presents some suggestions for their successful adoption. The report concludes that OA clauses offer a feasible option for institutions to address some of the obstacles to article deposit into repositories.

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MedOANet Guidelines for Implementing Open Access Policies for Research Performing and Research Funding Organisations

The MedOANet project has released the MedOANet Guidelines for Implementing Open Access Policies for Research Performing and Research Funding Organisations.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The MedOANet Guidelines present the main concepts and issues with respect to open access, discuss the major steps that are necessary in the process of policy development and present the important components of an institutional and funder policy. The also provide model policies for research performing and research funding organisations and present best practices in policy development for research performing and research funding organisations.

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Library Publishing Directory

The Library Publishing Coalition has released the Library Publishing Directory.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Published in October 2013, the Library Publishing Directory provides a snapshot of the publishing activities of 115 academic and research libraries, including information about the number and types of publications they produce, the services they offer authors, how they are staffed and funded, and the future plans of institutions that are engaged in this growing field. . . .

Specifically it is hoped that this Directory will:

  • Introduce all readers to the emerging field of library publishing and help articulate its unique characteristics as a distinctive "publishing field."
  • Facilitate collaboration among library publishers and other publishing entities, especially the university presses and learned societies that share their values.
  • Alert authors of scholarly content to a range of potential publishing partners dedicated to supporting their experimentation with new forms of scholarly communication and open access business models.

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OAPEN-NL: A Project Exploring Open Access Monograph Publishing in the Netherlands

SURF has released OAPEN-NL: A Project Exploring Open Access Monograph Publishing in the Netherlands.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Between June 2011 and November 2012, fifty Open Access monographs in various subject areas were published in Open Access by nine participating publishers. For every Open Access title, the publishers provided a similar title that was published in the conventional way. Data were collected about usage, sales and costs, to study the effect of Open Access on monographs. OAPEN-NL consisted of a quantitative and a qualitative research component, measuring the effects of Open Access publishing and the perceptions and expectations of publishers and authors.

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"Open-Access Repositories Worldwide, 2005-2012: Past Growth, Current Characteristics and Future Possibilities"

Stephen Pinfield et al. have self-archived "Open-Access Repositories Worldwide, 2005-2012: Past Growth, Current Characteristics and Future Possibilities" in White Rose Research Online.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper reviews the worldwide growth of open-access (OA) repositories, December 2005 to December 2012, using data collected by the OpenDOAR project. It shows that initial repository development was focused on North America, Western Europe and Australasia, particularly the USA, UK, Germany and Australia. Soon after, Japan increased its repository numbers. Since 2010, other geographical areas and countries have seen repository growth, including East Asia (especially Taiwan), South America (especially Brazil) and Eastern Europe (especially Poland). During the whole period, countries such as France, Italy and Spain have maintained steady growth, whereas countries such as China and Russia have experienced relatively low levels of growth. Globally, repositories are predominantly institutional, multidisciplinary and English-language-based. They typically use open-source OAI-compliant repository software but remain immature in terms of explicit licensing arrangements. Whilst the size of repositories is difficult to assess accurately, the available data indicate that a small number of large repositories and a large number of small repositories make up the repository landscape. These trends and characteristics are analyzed using Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) building on previous studies. IDT is shown to provide a useful explanatory framework for understanding repository adoption at various levels: global, national, organizational and individual. Major factors affecting both the initial development of repositories and their take up by users are identified, including IT infrastructure, language, cultural factors, policy initiatives, awareness-raising activity and usage mandates. It is argued that mandates in particular are likely to play a crucial role in determining future repository development.

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"The Open Access Divide"

Jingfeng Xia has published "The Open Access Divide" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper is an attempt to review various aspects of the open access divide regarding the difference between those academics who support free sharing of data and scholarly output and those academics who do not. It provides a structured description by adopting the Ws doctrines emphasizing such questions as who, what, when, where and why for information-gathering. Using measurable variables to define a common expression of the open access divide, this study collects aggregated data from existing open access as well as non-open access publications including journal articles and extensive reports. The definition of the open access divide is integrated into the discussion of scholarship on a larger scale.

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"Mandates and the Contributions of Open Genomic Data"

Jingfeng Xia has published "Mandates and the Contributions of Open Genomic Data" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

This research attempts to seek changing patterns of raw data availability and their correlations with implementations of open mandate policies. With a list of 13,785 journal articles whose authors archived datasets in a popular biomedical data repository after these articles were published in journals, this research uses regression analysis to test the correlations between data contributions and mandate implementations. It finds that both funder-based and publisher-based mandates have a strong impact on scholars' likelihood to contribute to open data repositories. Evidence also suggests that like policies have changed the habit of authors in selecting publishing venues: open access journals have been apparently preferred by those authors whose projects are sponsored by the federal government agencies, and these journals are also highly ranked in the biomedical fields. Various stakeholders, particularly institutional administrators and open access professionals, may find the findings of this research helpful for adjusting data management policies to increase the number of quality free datasets and enhance data usability.

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"The Seer of Science Publishing"

Tania Rabesandratana has published "The Seer of Science Publishing" in a special issue of Science on "Communication in Science: Pressures and Predators".

Here's an excerpt:

"Nobody reads journals," says science publisher Vitek Tracz, who has made a fortune from journals. "People read papers." Tracz sees a grim future for what has been the mainstay of scientific communication, the peer-reviewed print journal.

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