Publishing – DigitalKoans

Paywall: “The Citation Catastrophe: Propagation of AI-Generated Counterfeit Citations in Scholarship”

[T]he authors of this paper document examples of “counterfeit citations”, almost certainly created by Large Language Models. . . . The authors track the propagation of these example counterfeit citations in the literature and discuss the damage they cause, means of measuring comparative value in affected citation databases, and potential remediation of this problem moving forward.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2025.103065

“ARL Supports Senator Wyden’s Call for FTC Action on Digital Ownership Rights”

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) joined a letter by Public Knowledge supporting US Senator Ron Wyden’s February 25, 2025, request for Federal Trade Commission (FTC) intervention to protect consumer rights in digital marketplaces. . . .

Senator Wyden highlighted a critical issue: consumers who “purchase” digital materials like ebooks are actually only acquiring temporary access licenses, often with significant usage restrictions. Libraries must accept these restrictions when licensing essential databases and digital resources for education and scholarship. For instance, in some cases publishers have retroactively banned AI research applications through impromptu contract addendums—even after the library and publisher signed license agreements.

ARL joins the American Library Association (ALA), Software Preservation Network (SPN), University Information Policy Offers (UIPO), Public Knowledge (PK), and other library and civil society groups in signing the letter supporting Senator Wyden’s request.

https://tinyurl.com/ywbambsx

“Guest Post: Eight Hypotheses Why Librarians Don’t Like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)”

Content providers are starting to silo their collections in order to restrict other RAG-based tools from accessing their content.

An example: in the case of Primo Research Assistant, collections from APA (and others such as Elsevier and JSTOR) are excluded from result generation. This would need to be explained to students and faculty using the tool, which adds considerably to the time and energy put into the communication needed to make these tools worth their licensing cost. It can reasonably be assumed that almost all content providers are going to invest in their own AI assistants or make licensing deals with existing ones. How many of these can and should we license and maintain? Librarians working on discovery layers should start making plans now for identifying the tools that best serve their community and how their workflows need to change.

https://tinyurl.com/2fe6hdnw

“Wiley and Perplexity Announce New AI Search Partnership”

This new collaboration will allow Perplexity users, including college students, educators and researchers at institutions that subscribe to Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro to access purchased Wiley educational collections and resources in areas such as nursing, business, and engineering. This includes streamlined access to specialized Wiley collections, giving users a new pathway to discover and interact with authoritative resources across many academic domains. Students will also gain tools for responsible AI usage, reinforcing Wiley’s commitment to supporting academic integrity. . . .

Perplexity provides live web access and Wiley collections content with sourced citations, ensuring users receive up-to-date information with proper attribution. Students, educators, and researchers can get answers sourced across Wiley and web sources, combining the authoritative nature of Wiley with the most recent developments from the web.

Among the pilot users of this new offering are Texas A&M and Texas State University, with several universities in the United Kingdom poised to start soon.

https://tinyurl.com/yc8xy5cf

“Duke University Press to Publish Open Access Monographs through MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D2O)”

The MIT Press is proud to announce that beginning in 2026, Duke University Press will join our Direct to Open (D2O) program. This collaboration marks the first such partnership with another university press for the D2O program, and reaffirms our shared commitment to open access publishing that is ethical, equitable, and sustainable. . . .

Duke University Press brings their distinguished catalog in the humanities and social sciences to Direct to Open, providing open access to 20 frontlist titles annually alongside the MIT Press’s 80 scholarly books each year. Their participation in the D2O program—which will also include free term access to a paywalled collection of 250 key backlist titles—enhances the range of openly available academic content for D2O’s library partners. . . .

With Duke University Press’s involvement in 2026, D2O will feature multiple package options, combining content from both the MIT Press and Duke University Press. Participating institutions will have the opportunity to support each press individually, providing flexibility for libraries while fostering collective impact.

https://tinyurl.com/46ecywyr

“Wiley Announces Collaboration With Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Integrate Scientific Content into Life Sciences AI Agents”

The new Wiley literature search agent is available as part of an open source toolkit for healthcare and life sciences agents that has been assembled by AWS. The toolkit offers a catalog of starter agents and an orchestration framework for organizations to build and customize their agentic systems, supporting use cases from biomarker discovery to clinical trial protocol generation. The new AI agent currently includes AI searchable access to articles under the creative commons license, such as Cancer Medicine, delivering reliable and cited insights in minutes rather than the current hours- to days-long manual process of discovering and perusing dozens of articles for relevant information.

https://tinyurl.com/mr6t8fu2

“Making the Connection: An Examination of Institutional Repositories and Scholarly Communication Crosslinking Practices”

Institutional repositories (IRs) remain a powerful tool for opening, sharing, and preserving scholarship. Scholarly communication (SC) services and resources are essential to promoting and supporting IRs. Linking SC services within an IR offers support to users at their point of need. This study investigates the prevalence of web linking between IR and SC services in 145 Association of Research Libraries and Carnegie R1 libraries. This quantitative analysis identifies gaps and offers practical recommendations for developing connections between SC and IR websites at academic libraries. . . .

[T]he authors expected a comparable number of SC pages at institutions that had IRs. However, over 30 percent of the study’s library websites did not feature a dedicated SC web page. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that between spring 2021 and spring 2022 there was a 10 percent decrease in the number of institutions that offer SC services information to their user community. . . .

It is reassuring that the number of IRs remained consistent. Another bright spot is the nearly 14 percent increase in links made from the IR to SC services between spring 2021 and spring 2022. . . .

The few IRs in the study that did crosslink back to SC pages (9.1% in spring 2021; 23.0% in spring 2022) often included the SC link directly on the repository’s homepage.

https://tinyurl.com/mrxdj59j

“Implementation of Transformative Agreements at the University of Chicago Library: A Case Study”

The University of Chicago Library created a working group, composed of librarians across the library, to engage in dedicated and focused work around transformative agreements, including understanding how they work and how the library should be engaging with them in a complex open access (OA) landscape. The working group was charged with specific tasks, including determining challenges and opportunities around transformative agreements, developing criteria for determining when to use the library’s OA fund to pursue an agreement, conducting ongoing assessments of the agreements, and developing a set of recommendations to communicate this out to our wider campus community. The group’s work included piloting several transformative agreements and establishing a rubric to evaluate these agreements. The creation of the group allowed the library to gain valuable knowledge and expertise, engage actively in new models for supporting OA, and start critical conversations on campus. The group continues the work, with the ultimate goal of affordable OA publishing and communicating the value of OA with researchers and campus partners, as well as positioning the library as a campus leader in OA.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18265

“Springer Nature Donates Its Unique AI Tool That Identifies Problematic Text to Publishing Community”

Following the successful rollout across its journals and books of its AI tool that detects cases of AI-generated nonsense text in research manuscripts, Springer Nature is now donating the tool to STM. It will be integrated into the STM Integrity Hub, an industry-wide initiative that supports publishers in ensuring the integrity of their published content, as part of its mission to develop and trial tools that publishers large and small can use to screen submissions for indicators of compromised content. . . .

The tool has already been responsible for identifying hundreds of fake papers soon after submission, preventing them from being published and taking up editors’ and peer reviewers’ valuable time. in addition, the tool provides a gateway to identifying a larger cohort of problematic submissions. Connections between the original papers and other content, for example as part of the same special issue, can be found, leading to the identification of papers that, at first sight, appear robust but, upon more rigorous analysis, are in fact problematic. Data from all these papers feed into Springer Nature’s wider investigations and help to keep out compromised content.

https://tinyurl.com/ye29nhfw

“Accelerating Access to Research Results: New Implementation Date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy”

I am excited to announce that one of my first actions as NIH Director is pushing the accelerator on policies to make NIH research findings freely and quickly available to the public. The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025.

To be clear, maximum transparency regarding the research we support is our default position. Since the release of NIH’s 2008 Public Access Policy, more than 1.5 million articles reporting on NIH-supported research have been made freely available to the public through PubMed Central. While the 2008 Policy allowed for an up to 12-month delay before such articles were required to be made publicly available, in 2024, NIH revised the Public Access Policy to remove the embargo period so that researchers, students, and members of the public have rapid access to these findings.

https://tinyurl.com/nudx2rej

“Effect of Perceived Preprint Effectiveness and Research Intensity on Posting Behaviour”

Open science is increasingly recognised worldwide, with preprint posting emerging as a key strategy. This study explores the factors influencing researchers’ adoption of preprint publication, particularly the perceived effectiveness of this practice and research intensity indicators such as publication and review frequency. Using open data from a comprehensive survey with 5,873 valid responses, we conducted regression analyses to control for demographic variables. Researchers’ productivity, particularly the number of journal articles and books published, greatly influences the frequency of preprint deposits. The perception of the effectiveness of preprints follows this. Preprints are viewed positively in terms of early access to new research, but negatively in terms of early feedback. Demographic variables, such as gender and the type of organisation conducting the research, do not have a significant impact on the production of preprints when other factors are controlled for. However, the researcher’s discipline, years of experience and geographical region generally have a moderate effect on the production of preprints. These findings highlight the motivations and barriers associated with preprint publication and provide insights into how researchers perceive the benefits and challenges of this practice within the broader context of open science.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18896

“Suspiciously Reliable: A Case Study of Students’ Perceptions of Open Access Searching”

This case study examines how undergraduate students perceive the search infrastructure involved in open access searching and the open access materials’ content. Thirty students across two semesters of a second-year library science course were given a research topic but asked to imagine themselves as lacking access to the university’s subscriptions—meaning they could only access open access content through search engines such as Google Scholar, repositories, and the Directory of Open Access Journals. They were then asked to complete a research log, an annotated bibliography, and a reflection paper. In reviewing their reflection papers, a dualistic theme of both valuing and distrusting open access research was identified. Most students felt it necessary to apply more rigorous evaluation to the content found through open access databases and even evaluated the databases themselves. Despite this and other reservations, many students commented on the value of open access, especially when it pertained to the free and open exchange of information. Based on this study, we have adapted the way we speak about open access in the classroom to preemptively address some of the concerns noted in the reflections. This case study can add to the body of literature that examines the value of introducing open access to students.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18273

“Towards Sustainable and Coordinated Methods for Estimating Open Access Costs at Canadian Higher Education Institutions”

Higher education institutions in Canada aim to provide access to knowledge through subscriptions and investments in OA publishing. As subscription and OA publication costs continue to increase, some institutions have established funds to support authors’ payment of publication fees. Others have adopted models such as read-and-publish deals or “transformative agreements”, where institutions pay publishers a lump sum for subscriptions and publishing fees for authors. As institutions continue to subscribe to journals, support authors with OA publishing, and negotiate agreements, accurately estimating institutional OA spending is imperative to determining the cost effectiveness of deals and necessary funding support for authors. Methods to estimate OA costs have largely developed in silos across the country. This commentary presents observations derived from work performed across Canada on the challenges accompanying OA estimation and calls for a more coordinated approach to establish standardized, sustainable methods. Calibrating efforts across institutions can support the development of reliable methodologies and streamline resources helpful for the more efficient performance of the often onerous task of estimating costs.

https://doi.org/10.5206/cjils-rcsib.v48i1.22390

“ProQuest – New Ebook Central AI Tool Helps Users Engage Deeper with Scholarly Ebooks”

The Ebook Central Research Assistant simplifies book exploration by identifying key concepts and providing contextual explanations to enhance understanding. With chapter-level insights and key term definitions drawn directly from the text, it keeps users engaged in their research. Powered by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), it ensures accuracy by sourcing insights directly from the book’s content. Additionally, it helps users discover related titles within their library’s Ebook Central collection, seamlessly expanding their research scope. Features at launch include:

Key Takeaways: Chapter-level insights help users assess content relevance efficiently

Concept Highlights: Identification and explanation of key terms, with one-click searches, deepen research

https://tinyurl.com/49kwvajd

“New STM Draft Report: Classifying AI Use in Manuscript Preparation”

While publishers have long offered guidance on disclosing human assistance—such as language editing—recent advances in generative AI have significantly expanded the ways in which machine tools can support manuscript preparation. From writing and editing to generating images and diagrams, the use of AI in scholarly publishing is evolving rapidly. . . .

This lack of consistent standards risks undermining trust in scholarly communication. To support the integrity of the academic record, the draft classification offers a clear framework to help publishers define, evaluate, and guide the transparent use of AI in manuscript preparation in the context of their individual editorial processes.

https://tinyurl.com/2druekkw

“Understanding ORCID Adoption Among Academic Researchers”

Just over a decade ago, the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier) was created to provide a unique digital identifier for researchers around the world. The ORCID has proven essential in identifying individual researchers and their publications, both for bibliometric research analyses and for universities and other organizations tracking the research productivity and impact of their personnel. Yet widespread adoption of the ORCID by individual researchers has proved elusive, with previous studies finding adoption rates ranging from 3% to 42%. Using a national survey of U.S. academic researchers at 31 research universities, we investigate why some researchers adopt an ORCID and some do not. We found an overall adoption rate of 72%, with adoptions rates ranging between academic disciplines from a low of 17% in the visual and performing arts to a high of 93% in biological and biomedical sciences. Many academic journals require an ORCID to submit a manuscript, and this is the main reason why researchers adopt an ORCID. The top three reasons for not having an ORCID are not seeing the benefits, being far enough in the academic career to not need it, and working in an academic discipline where it is not needed.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-025-05300-7

“Where There’s a Will There’s a Way: ChatGPT Is Used More for Science in Countries Where It Is Prohibited”

Regulating AI is a key societal challenge, but effective methods remain unclear. This study evaluates geographic restrictions on AI services, focusing on ChatGPT, which OpenAI blocks in several countries, including China and Russia. If restrictions were effective, ChatGPT usage in these countries should be minimal. We measured usage with a classifier trained to detect distinctive word choices (e.g., “delve”) typical of early ChatGPT outputs. The classifier, trained on pre- and post-ChatGPT “polished” abstracts, outperformed GPTZero and ZeroGPT on validation sets, including papers with self-reported AI use. Applying our classifier to preprints from Arxiv, BioRxiv, and MedRxiv revealed ChatGPT use in approximately 12.6% of preprints by August 2023, with usage 7.7% higher in restricted countries. This gap emerged before China’s first major domestic LLM became widely available. To address whether high demand could have driven even greater use without restrictions, we compared Asian countries with high expected demand (where English is not an official language) and found higher usage in countries with restrictions. ChatGPT use correlated with increased views and downloads but not with citations or journal placement. Overall, geographic restrictions on ChatGPT appear ineffective in science and potentially other domains, likely due to widespread workarounds.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00368

“Learning from the Past | Periodicals Price Survey 2025 ”

Since 1960, Library Journal has published an annual article covering the ups and downs of periodicals pricing. . . . The article, however, is not just about numbers. It also touches on new and emerging pricing and sales models, discusses trends in the serials marketplace, and considers the issues collections librarians deal with when working with a finite budget. This year, we cast both a look back to see what can be learned from the past, and a look forward to consider what might be heading our way in the coming years.

https://tinyurl.com/bpkpf27a

DigitalKoans and Digital Scholarship Have Been Published for 20 Years

Established on May 20, 2005, DigitalKoans and Digital Scholarship are now 20 years old.

Digital Scholarship was established by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. (ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8453-4402), who has been an open access publisher since 1989 when he launched The Public-Access Computer Systems Review—one of the first peer-reviewed diamond open access journals on the Internet. Digital Scholarship's digital publications are open access and are licensed under variations of the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Since inception, DigitalKoans has published over 17,200 posts, including over 6,100 job ads, and Digital Scholarship has had over 16.2 million nonunique visitors (excluding spiders).

Digital Scholarship primarily publishes scholarly works on these topics:

Paywall: “Perceptions of Open Access Publishing: A Comparative Study of Gold and Diamond Models Among Global Researchers”

Respondents from developed countries favored gold OA for its visibility and citation potential, but concerns over APC affordability and institutional support were evident, especially among those from developing regions. Diamond OA was perceived as more equitable and inclusive due to its no-fee structure, although sustainability concerns persisted. Institutional support for OA publishing was limited, with few institutions offering financial backing or APC subsidies.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09557490251335952

Paywall: “Trans-Substantive Instructors: Scholarly Communication Librarians Facilitating Communities of Practice”

While many studies examine graduate students’ understanding of the ethical implications of copyright, there is still a lack of robust literature exploring students’ awareness of ownership over the material they create and their own copyright ownership rights. To address this need, this research focuses on STEM graduate students’ understanding of copyright in various scenarios and prepares a foundation for continued investigation. In this study, researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with graduate students in STEM fields at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign institution, including those in professional programs such as Medical School or Veterinary Medicine.

https://tinyurl.com/3v4f88x2

Paywall: “Does the Open Science Environment Enhance the Impact of Academic Papers? An Analysis of Indicator Relationships Using Causal Inference”

It is found that there is a causal relationship between the open science environment and academic paper impact, significantly enhancing both the societal and academic impact of academic papers. Specifically, in the case of OA, the open science environment on average increases academic paper mentions by 3.50 times on News platforms, 89.82 times on X, 42.53 readings on Mendeley and 28.74 citations on Dimensions.

https://doi.org/10.1108/GKMC-07-2024-0414

Small Encyclopedia of Open Science

The small encyclopedia of open science provides ten encyclopedic articles on ten key topics of Open Science. Each encyclopedic article was cross-published on Wikipedia, as a contribution to the world’s largest collaborative encyclopaedia. The Wikipedia version might evolve in line with the collaborative encyclopedia’s collective contribution system.

https://tinyurl.com/5n7zbjn6

“Navigating the Introduction of Rights Retention: Lessons From Leeds Beckett University”

We, as many other institutions did, expected backlash. This has included:

Refusal to accept our prior notification as a blanket declaration and an expectation that we will inform them every time we submit something which falls under rights retention.

A publisher stating that papers with rights retention language won’t be rejected. However, no author manuscripts may be placed under a Creative Commons license, according to the terms of their journal policies. Any authors who wish to do so can only publish under the immediate gold open access route. Authors are asked to agree to this when signing their standard subscription licensing terms.

Another publisher asks authors to agree, as part of their author contract, that their publishing terms take precedence over any other terms authors assert during the publishing process. Authors must also sign that they haven’t assigned rights to any other third party for the article or content that will conflict with rights granted in the publishing terms.

One publisher has gone even further: due to the widespread adoption of rights retention in the UK, they now require all papers authored by someone from a UK institution to be published open access.

https://tinyurl.com/yau3x6te

“Geographical and Disciplinary Coverage of Open Access Journals: OpenAlex, Scopus, and WoS”

This study aims to compare the geographical and disciplinary coverage of OA journals in three databases: OpenAlex, Scopus and the Web of Science (WoS). We used the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD), provided by the ISSN International Centre, as a reference to identify OA active journals (as of May 2024). Among the 62,701 active OA journals listed in ROAD, the WoS indexes 6,157 journals, Scopus indexes 7,351, while OpenAlex indexes 34,217. A striking observation is the presence of 24,976 OA journals exclusively in OpenAlex, whereas only 182 journals are exclusively present in the WoS and 373 in Scopus. The geographical analysis focuses on two levels: continents and countries. As for disciplinary comparison, we use the ten disciplinary levels of the ROAD database. Moreover, our findings reveal a similarity in OA journal coverage between the WoS and Scopus. However, while OpenAlex offers better inclusivity and indexing, it is not without biases. The WoS and Scopus predictably favor journals from Europe, North America and Oceania. Although OpenAlex presents a much more balanced indexing, certain regions and countries remain relatively underrepresented. Typically, Africa is proportionally as under-represented in OpenAlex as it is in Scopus, and some emerging countries are proportionally less represented in OpenAlex than in the WoS and Scopus. These results underscore a marked similarity in OA journal indexing between WoS and Scopus, while OpenAlex aligns more closely with the distribution observed in the ROAD database, although it also exhibits some representational biases.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320347