Open Access – Page 9 – DigitalKoans

"Identifying the Most Important Facilitators of Open Research Data Sharing and Reuse in Epidemiology: A Mixed-Methods Study"

To understand how open research data sharing and reuse can be further improved in the field of Epidemiology, this study explores the facilitating role that infrastructural and institutional arrangements play in this research discipline. It addresses two research questions: 1) What influence do infrastructural and institutional arrangements have on open research data sharing and reuse practices in the field of Epidemiology? And 2) how could infrastructural and institutional instruments used in Epidemiology potentially be useful to other research disciplines? First, based on a systematic literature review, a conceptual framework of infrastructural and institutional instruments for open research data facilitation is developed. Second, the conceptual framework is applied in interviews with Epidemiology researchers. The interviews show that two infrastructural and institutional instruments have a very high influence on open research data sharing and reuse practices in the field of Epidemiology, namely (a) access to a powerful search engine that meets open data search needs and (b) support by data stewards and data managers. Third, infrastructural and institutional instruments with a medium, high, or very high influence were discussed in a research workshop involving data stewards and research data officers from different research fields. This workshop suggests that none of the influential instruments identified in the interviews are specific to Epidemiology. Some of our findings thus seem to apply to multiple other disciplines. This study contributes to Science by identifying field-specific facilitators and challenges for open research data in Epidemiology, while at the same time revealing that none of the identified influential infrastructural and institutional instruments were specific to this field. Practically, this implies that open data infrastructure developers, policymakers, and research funding organizations may apply certain infrastructural and institutional arrangements to multiple research disciplines to facilitate and enhance open research data sharing and reuse.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297969

"Additional Experiments Required: A Scoping Review of Recent Evidence on Key Aspects of Open Peer Review"

Diverse efforts are underway to reform the journal peer review system. Combined with growing interest in Open Science practices, Open Peer Review (OPR) has become of central concern to the scholarly community. However, what OPR is understood to encompass and how effective some of its elements are in meeting the expectations of diverse communities, are uncertain. This scoping review updates previous efforts to summarize research on OPR to May 2022. Following the PRISMA methodological framework, it addresses the question: "What evidence has been reported in the scientific literature from 2017 to May 2022 regarding uptake, attitudes, and efficacy of two key aspects of OPR (Open Identities and Open Reports)?" The review identifies, analyses and synthesizes 52 studies matching inclusion criteria, finding that OPR is growing, but still far from common practice. Our findings indicate positive attitudes towards Open Reports and more sceptical approaches to Open Identities. Changes in reviewer behaviour seem limited and no evidence for lower acceptance rates of review invitations or slower turnaround times is reported in those studies examining those issues. Concerns about power dynamics and potential backfiring on critical reviews are in need of further experimentation. We conclude with an overview of evidence gaps and suggestions for future research. Also, we discuss implications for policy and practice, both in the scholarly communications community and the research evaluation community more broadly.Diverse efforts are underway to reform the journal peer review system. Combined with growing interest in Open Science practices, Open Peer Review (OPR) has become of central concern to the scholarly community. However, what OPR is understood to encompass and how effective some of its elements are in meeting the expectations of diverse communities, are uncertain. This scoping review updates previous efforts to summarize research on OPR to May 2022. Following the PRISMA methodological framework, it addresses the question: "What evidence has been reported in the scientific literature from 2017 to May 2022 regarding uptake, attitudes, and efficacy of two key aspects of OPR (Open Identities and Open Reports)?" The review identifies, analyses and synthesizes 52 studies matching inclusion criteria, finding that OPR is growing, but still far from common practice. Our findings indicate positive attitudes towards Open Reports and more sceptical approaches to Open Identities. Changes in reviewer behaviour seem limited and no evidence for lower acceptance rates of review invitations or slower turnaround times is reported in those studies examining those issues. Concerns about power dynamics and potential backfiring on critical reviews are in need of further experimentation. We conclude with an overview of evidence gaps and suggestions for future research. Also, we discuss implications for policy and practice, both in the scholarly communications community and the research evaluation community more broadly.

https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvae004

"From Data Creator to Data Reuser: Distance Matters"

Sharing research data is complex, labor-intensive, expensive, and requires infrastructure investments by multiple stakeholders. Open science policies focus on data release rather than on data reuse, yet reuse is also difficult, expensive, and may never occur. Investments in data management could be made more wisely by considering who might reuse data, how, why, for what purposes, and when. Data creators cannot anticipate all possible reuses or reusers; our goal is to identify factors that may aid stakeholders in deciding how to invest in research data, how to identify potential reuses and reusers, and how to improve data exchange processes. Drawing upon empirical studies of data sharing and reuse, we develop the theoretical construct of distance between data creator and data reuser, identifying six distance dimensions that influence the ability to transfer knowledge effectively: domain, methods, collaboration, curation, purposes, and time and temporality. These dimensions are primarily social in character, with associated technical aspects that can decrease — or increase — distances between creators and reusers. We identify the order of expected influence on data reuse and ways in which the six dimensions are interdependent. Our theoretical framing of the distance between data creators and prospective reusers leads to recommendations to four categories of stakeholders on how to make data sharing and reuse more effective: data creators, data reusers, data archivists, and funding agencies.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07926

"Strategies for Negotiating and Signing Transformative Agreements in the Global South: The Colombia Consortium Experience"

The article presents the methodology used by the Colombia Consortium to negotiate the first transformative agreements (TAs) in Latin America. These TAs are a strategy to manage costs associated with Article Processing Charges (APCs), facilitate the transition to Open Access (OA) and increase the visibility of Colombian publications.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2023.2287945

Inteview with Stevan Harnad: "Open and Impactful Scholarly Communication"

We posed selected questions to Stevan Harnad thirty years after his "subversive proposal" to self-archive online scholarly articles in university-hosted or disciplinary repositories to make them openly available and thus maximize research impact. A combination of factors including unfounded scepticism concerning open access, and bureaucratic access to the few institutional repositories launched by universities chiefly drove this outcome. The conclusions of the study may further inform educational efforts on scholarly communication in the digital era aimed at undergraduate students and researchers alike.

http://tinyurl.com/383u7nfe

Open Scholarship in the Humanities

The book begins with the history of digital developments and their influence on the founding of international policies toward open scholarship. The concept of making research more freely available to the broader community, in practice, will require changes across every part of the system: government agencies, funders, university administrators, publishers, libraries, researchers and IT developers. To this end, the book sheds light on the urgent need for partnership and collaboration between diverse stakeholders to address multi-level barriers to both the policy and practical implementation of open scholarship. It also highlights the specific challenges confronted by the humanities which often makes their presentation in accessible open formats more costly and complex. Finally, the authors illustrate some promising international examples and ways forward for their implementation. The book ends by asking the reader to view their role as a researcher, university administrator, or member of government or philanthropic funding body, through new lenses. It highlights how, in our digital era, the frontiers through which knowledge is being advanced and shared can reshape the landscape for academic research to have the greatest impact for society.

http://tinyurl.com/2453s6du

The European Landscape of Institutional Publishing — A Synopsis of Results from the DIAMAS Survey

The Institutional Publishing Landscape Report is built on 685 survey responses from institutional publishers and publishing service providers across the European Research Area. The findings illustrate the state of institutional publishing in Europe and show that a large portion of these organisations are operating with a diamond OA model. The report also discusses how institutional publishers are run and sustained, what activities they are involved in, and which services are outsourced. While the surveyed group is not necessarily representative of all institutional publishers and service providers in Europe, the findings broadly demonstrate the current operations of institutional publishers, their challenges, and the opportunities for supporting them in the future.

https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10551709

"Is Gold Open Access Helpful for Academic Purification? A Causal Inference Analysis Based on Retracted Articles in Biochemistry"

The results showed that compared to non-OA, Gold OA is advantageous in reducing the retraction time of flawed articles, but does not demonstrate a significant advantage in reducing citations after retraction. This indicates that Gold OA may help expedite the detection and retraction of flawed articles, ultimately promoting the practice of responsible research.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2023.103640

"Do Disappearing Data Repositories Pose a Threat to Open Science and the Scholarly Record? "

Only little more than half of the research data repositories in the sample have detailed strategies they use to mitigate data loss. It is important to note that none of the strategies analysed offers a permanent solution; instead, infrastructure maintenance requires continuous efforts. The burden of infrastructure maintenance and data preservation is currently placed on individual repositories alone; preservation systems comparable to those for scholarly texts, such as CLOCKSS, are not widely spread and can be difficult to realise.

http://tinyurl.com/3snrhxpk

Paywall: "The Scientific Periphery and New Flows of Knowledge: The Case of Regional Preprint Servers"

It is unclear whether regional rather than global or discipline-focussed preprint platforms as an innovation in the communication of science are removing any of the barriers faced by researchers in the scientific periphery or whether they are increasing access to and visibility of science from the periphery. In response, this paper focusses on the uptake, visibility and academic impact of regional preprint publishing platforms in two peripheral regions (Africa and Latin America) to gain insights into the use and possible impact of regional preprint servers.

https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0153

"DataCite Launches First Release of the Data Citation Corpus"

DataCite, in partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), is delighted to announce the first release of the Data Citation Corpus. A major milestone in the Make Data Count initiative, the release makes eight million data citations openly available and usable for the first time via an interactive dashboard and public data file.

https://makedatacount.org/first-release-of-the-open-global-data-citation-corpus/

"DIAMAS Results: Institutional Publishing Landscape Survey"

The publication of the survey results marks a significant milestone for DIAMAS and for Diamond Open Access. There is now a clear and intelligible picture of the European landscape of institutional publishing activities, with clear pathways to strengthen and support their operations. Our findings show how institutional publishers work, the scale of and nature of their operations, the ways finances and funding are managed, how open science practices are managed, and the nature of their challenges.

http://tinyurl.com/y3crvx8p

"Librarians as Agents of Change: New Sparc Europe Strategy for Open Education 2024-2026"

We are pleased to announce a new Open Education strategy for 2024-2026, Librarians as Agents of Change. We will support Higher Education policymakers, librarians, ambassadors and facilitators of OE in Europe to implement the UNESCO OER Recommendations using a targeted and action-oriented approach. With this strategy, we aim to make the many connections between Open Science policy and Open Education ever clearer to both policymakers and academic institutions.

http://tinyurl.com/mr45cv3f

Ithaka S+R: The Second Digital Transformation of Scholarly Publishing

Today, the scholarly publishing sector is undergoing its second digital transformation. The first digital transformation saw a massive shift from paper to digital, but otherwise publishing retained many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era. A variety of shared infrastructure was developed to serve the needs of this first digital transformation. In this current second digital transformation, many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era are being revamped in favor of new approaches that bring tremendous opportunities, and also non-trivial risks, to scholarly communication. The second digital transformation requires shared infrastructure that is fit for purpose. It is our objective with this paper to examine the needs for shared infrastructure that will support this second digital transformation.

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.320210

"Are Open Bibliometric Data Sources Better than Proprietary Ones?"

The authors concluded that the resulting data based on open bibliometric sources was more comprehensive and of better quality than the data based on sources provided by the commercial provider. In addition, the use of open source data allows scidecode to comply with the requirement set by cOAlition S to openly licence their results, which would not necessarily be the case if they had used a commercial provider.

http://tinyurl.com/2btc8a76

"Open-Access Papers Draw More Citations from a Broader Readership"

Now, after years of little conclusive evidence to support these assertions, researchers report that open-access papers have a greater reach than paywalled ones in two key ways: They attract more total citations, and those citations come from scholars in a wider range of locations, institutions, and fields of research. The study also reports a "citation diversity advantage" for a controversial type of open-access article, those deposited in "green" public repositories.

http://tinyurl.com/27p6pfje

"Science’s Fake-Paper Problem: High-Profile Effort Will Tackle Paper Mills"

A high-profile group of funders, academic publishers and research organizations has launched an effort to tackle one of the thorniest problems in scientific integrity: paper mills, businesses that churn out fake or poor-quality journal papers and sell authorships. In a statement released on 19 January, the group outlines how it will address the problem through measures such as closely studying paper mills, including their regional and topic specialties, and improving author-verification methods.

http://tinyurl.com/2nxt93h4

"Determinants of Manuscript Submissions to Fully Open Access Journals: Elasticity to Article Processing Charges"

Article processing charges that authors and research institutions pay to make articles open access are increasing. If manuscript submission is price elastic, then rising charges will cause a significant reduction in submissions, leading to decreased revenues under constant acceptance rates. Therefore, the elasticity of manuscript submission to article processing charge is one of the determinants of publishers’ charges. However, several studies that investigated the determinants of article processing charges did not consider this elasticity. This study investigated the determinants of submissions, including the elasticity to article processing charge, by formulating the number of manuscript submissions to fully open access journals published by Hindawi and Elsevier in 2022. Moreover, this study formulated manuscript submissions using both list prices and charges paid to Elsevier that OpenAPC collected to compare the results. The estimation results reveal that the two publishers increase their revenues by raising the article processing charges due to the inelasticity. Moreover, these conclusions do not depend on the data set used, although the number of observations sourced from OpenAPC is small.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04934-3

"Promotion of Scientific Publications on ArXiv and X Is on the Rise and Impacts Citations"

Here, based on a large dataset of computer science publications, we study trends in the use of early preprint publications and revisions on ArXiv and the use of X (formerly Twitter) for promotion of such papers in the last 10 years. We find that early submission to ArXiv and promotion on X have soared in recent years. Estimating the effect that the use of each of these modern affordances has on the number of citations of scientific publications, we find that in the first 5 years from an initial publication peer-reviewed conference papers submitted early to ArXiv gain on average 21.1±17.4 more citations, revised on ArXiv gain 18.4±17.6 more citations, and promoted on X gain 44.4±8 more citations. Our results show that promoting one’s work on ArXiv or X has a large impact on the number of citations, as well as the number of influential citations computed by Semantic Scholar, and thereby on the career of researchers. We discuss the far-reaching implications of these findings for future scientific publishing systems and measures of scientific impact.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11116

"MIT Press’s Direct to Open Reaches Annual Funding Goal, Opens Access to Full List of 2024 Monographs"

Now in its third year of operation, Direct to Open (D2O) is proud to announce that it has reached its full funding goal in 2024 and will open access to 79 new monographs and edited book collections this year. What makes this year noteworthy is that this is the first year in which D2O has been fully funded by its November 30 deadline and will not require an extension through the end of the fiscal year.

http://tinyurl.com/4phkat8x

Paywall: "Can ChatGPT Identify Predatory Biomedical and Dental Journals? A Cross-Sectional Content Analysis"

ChatGPT may effectively distinguish between predatory and legitimate journals, with accuracy rates of 92.5% and 71%, respectively. The potential utility of large-scale language models in exposing predatory publications is worthy of further consideration.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdent.2024.104840

"Applying Librarian Created Evaluation Tools to Determine Quality and Credibility of Open Access Library Science Journals"

The researchers investigate quality and credibility attributes of fortyeight peer-reviewed library science journals with open access components using two evaluative tools developed and published by librarians. . . . Overall, the results show that while library science journals do not fall prey to the same concerning characteristics that librarians use to caution other researchers, there are several areas in which publishers can improve the quality and credibility of their journals.

https://tinyurl.com/4yydkckw

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Self-Archiving Adoption in Legal Scholarly Communication: A Literature Review;"

This article explores the current Library and Information Science (LIS) literature on open access and self-archiving and related studies. . . It further investigates the open access and self-archiving practices in disciplinary . . . Finally, it examines self-archiving in law and concludes that the research gap and lack of literature on self-archiving in the discipline of law makes this study worthwhile.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13614576.2023.2279760

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"The Nelson Memorandum: How Two HELIOS Members Are Responding"

The fall 2023 Texas Open Science Summit (TOSS)9 raised awareness about the importance of the Nelson Memorandum and continued UT’s discussions about open scholarship and public access compliance, incentives, and good practices. This forum offered a publicly visible opportunity for scholars and open access advocates in the region and state of Texas to learn more about the federal Year of Open Science and support structures at UT. . . .

Building on a long history of open access support, the CSU Libraries has since created the Advanced Research and Scholarship Support group,10 providing resources for data management planning and openly sharing research outputs. The working group hosted the Opentober Event, highlighting initiatives and support services for furthering open scholarship and public access compliance at CSU.

https://tinyurl.com/4dtdjfjw

"Where Did the Open Access Movement Go Wrong?: An Interview with Richard Poynder"

Open access was intended to solve three problems that have long blighted scholarly communication — the problems of accessibility, affordability, and equity. 20+ years after the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) we can see that the movement has signally failed to solve the latter two problems. And with the geopolitical situation deteriorating solving the accessibility problem now also looks to be at risk. The OA dream of "universal open access" remains a dream and seems likely to remain one.

https://tinyurl.com/fcxj5ew2

How did the three foundational statements about open access (the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities) actually define it?