Publishing – Page 10 – DigitalKoans

"The State of the Field: An Excerpt From the 2023 Library Publishing Directory"

The most common material types reported in 2023 were journals (89%), conference papers and proceedings (80%), theses and dissertations (75%), educational resources (66%), and monographs (60%). Under half of respondents (46%) reported publishing datasets. Other material types reported include gray literature, newsletters, multimedia, expansive digital publications, and databases. . . . Over 80% of respondents provide copyright support and DOI assignment. Over half provide metadata services (71%), author advisory services (66%), training (66%), ISSN registry (64%), hosting of supplemental content (60%), cataloging (56%), and analytics (55%). The decline in the number of library publishers providing digitization services holds steady with 49% of respondents in 2023 identifying it as one of their services.

https://tinyurl.com/yhwp4pph

Access the entire directory.

"Bibliometrics Methods in Detecting Citations to Questionable Journals"

This paper intends to analyse whether journals that had been removed from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in 2018 due to suspected misconduct were cited within journals indexed in the Scopus database. Our analysis showed that Scopus contained over 15 thousand references to the removed journals identified.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102749

"The Role of Author Identities in Peer Review"

There is widespread debate on whether to anonymize author identities in peer review. The key argument for anonymization is to mitigate bias, whereas arguments against anonymization posit various uses of author identities in the review process. The Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) 2023 conference adopted a middle ground by initially anonymizing the author identities from reviewers, revealing them after the reviewer had submitted their initial reviews, and allowing the reviewer to change their review subsequently. We present an analysis of the reviews pertaining to the identification and use of author identities. Our key findings are: (I) A majority of reviewers self-report not knowing and being unable to guess the authors’ identities for the papers they were reviewing. (II) After the initial submission of reviews, 7.1% of reviews changed their overall merit score and 3.8% changed their self-reported reviewer expertise. (III) There is a very weak and statistically insignificant correlation of the rank of authors’ affiliations with the change in overall merit; there is a weak but statistically significant correlation with respect to change in reviewer expertise. We also conducted an anonymous survey to obtain opinions from reviewers and authors. The main findings from the 200 survey responses are: (i) A vast majority of participants favor anonymizing author identities in some form. (ii) The “middle-ground” initiative of ITCS 2023 was appreciated. (iii) Detecting conflicts of interest is a challenge that needs to be addressed if author identities are anonymized. Overall, these findings support anonymization of author identities in some form (e.g., as was done in ITCS 2023), as long as there is a robust and efficient way to check conflicts of interest.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286206

Requires Registration: "Clarivate Report Urges Shift from Single Metrics to Visual Research Profiles"

The report focuses on four key areas:

Individuals and their publications: The issue of excessive self-citation in research publications is addressed, with identification of outliers following examination of the distinctive patterns of self-citation observed among Highly Cited Researchers, while considering variations in citation rates between fields.

Future research trends: Research Fronts identifies current areas of research attention by analyzing frequently cited, recent papers that cluster together, providing valuable insights for research planning, resource management and policy decisions.

Journals and their characteristics: The profile and value of a journal in the Web of Science is more than its Journal Impact Factor. We explore how the indicator of national orientation (INO) offers new perspectives on journals, helping researchers choose the best venues for their papers.

Influence of international collaboration: Simple metrics mask the influence of well-cited, internationally co-authored papers, so cannot be properly used to assess them. Collaborative Citation Impact (Collab-CNCI) allows deconstruction of impact, enabling better evaluation of domestic and international activity.

https://tinyurl.com/4vetr6px

Plan S: "Transformative Journals: Analysis from the 2022 Reports"

However, despite these positive developments, it is clearly disappointing that over two thirds (68%) of the journals in the TJ programme failed to meet their OA growth targets. And, as made clear last year, titles which do not meet their targets will be removed from the TJ programme. . . .Looking at the performance of individual publishers, the data shows that some 77% (1329) of titles published by Springer Nature — by far the largest publisher in the programme with some 1721 TJ titles — failed to meet their TJ targets. For Elsevier and the America Chemical Society (ACS) the figures were 63% (115 titles) and 56% (36 titles), respectively.

https://tinyurl.com/yh8rhyex

"Diamonds in the Rough: Societies Shine under Pressure"

Overall, 18% of fully open journals appear to be sponsored [diamond], but their proportion and number have been decreasing. . . . Among society-run journals, sponsored titles account for more than double the market average, for non-society (commercial) journals they account for just under half. Societies’ greater proportion of sponsored titles and their not-for-profit status could therefore place them in a stronger position than their commercial competitors if we see a large scale move by funders to require publication in journals without publisher fees and — as some noises from European funders suggest — which are not for profit.

https://tinyurl.com/yc4k2j9m

"Significant Acceleration of Humanities and Social Sciences Open Access through Taylor & Francis and Jisc Transformative Agreement"

A wealth of additional detail about open access articles supported by the Jisc agreement is presented in the report, including:

432% increase in OA articles between 2020 and 2022.

16.2 million article downloads, including 3.5 million in the US.

Articles published OA via the agreement received an average of 2.18 scholarly citations, whereas non-OA articles by researchers at the same institutions had 1.33 citations.

https://tinyurl.com/39urswyj

What Direct Support Is Available for Open-Access Diamond Journals? Funding Models and Arrangements For Implementation

The author-pays model for open-access journals is increasingly criticised because of the inequalities it generates and its unsustainability due to a lack of cost control. In this context, our study examines the funding models for Diamond journals — academic journals which are published with no direct payment made by the readers (unlike the subscription model) nor by the authors (author pays model). The aim of this work is to test the feasibility, as well as the desirability of a direct or explicit funding model for Diamond journals, something which is almost non-existent at present. We have two objectives here: on one hand, to understand the current Diamond journal funding arrangements and constraints, and on the other hand to propose specific arrangements for funding Diamond journals by research funders.

https://hal.science/hal-04133000v1

"The Value of a Diamond: Understanding Global Coverage of Diamond Open Access Journals in Web of Science, Scopus, and OpenAlex to Support an Open Future"

Diamond OA journals present a publishing model that is free for both authors and readers, but their lack of indexing in major bibliographic databases such as Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus presents challenges in assessing the usage of these journals. This paper provides a global picture of the coverage of diamond OA journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in three data sources. Results show their low coverage in WoS and Scopus and higher coverage in OpenAlex, as well as the generally smaller and local scope of diamond OA journals.

https://tinyurl.com/2mt9sydd

"Open(ing) Access: Top Health Publication Availability to Researchers in Low- and Middle-Income Countries"

Introduction: Improving access to information for health professionals and researchers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is under-prioritized. This study examines publication policies that affect authors and readers from LMICs.

Methods: We used the SHERPA RoMEO database and publicly available publishing protocols to evaluate open access (OA) policies, article processing charges (APCs), subscription costs, and availability of health literature relevant to authors and readers in LMICs. Categorical variables were summarized using frequencies with percentages. Continuous variables were reported with median and interquartile range (IQR). Hypothesis testing procedures were performed using Wilcoxon rank sum tests, Wilcoxon rank sum exact tests, and Kruskal-Wallis test.

Results: A total of 55 journals were included; 6 (11%) were Gold OA (access to readers and large charge for authors), 2 (3.6%) were subscription (charge for readers and small/no charge for authors), 4 (7.3%) were delayed OA (reader access with no charge after embargo), and 43 (78%) were hybrid (author’s choice). There was no significant difference between median APC for life sciences, medical, and surgical journals ($4,850 [$3,500–$8,900] vs. $4,592 [$3,500–$5,000] vs. $3,550 [$3,200–$3,860]; p = 0.054). The median US individual subscription costs (USD/Year) were significantly different for life sciences, medical, and surgical journals ($259 [$209–$282] vs. $365 [$212–$744] vs. $455 [$365–$573]; p = 0.038), and similar for international readers. A total of seventeen journals (42%) had a subscription price that was higher for international readers than for US readers.

Conclusions: Most journals offer hybrid access services. Authors may be forced to choose between high cost with greater reach through OA and low cost with less reach publishing under the subscription model under current policies. International readers face higher costs. Such hindrances may be mitigated by a greater awareness and liberal utilization of OA policies.

https://doi.org/10.5334/aogh.3904

Japanese Preprint Server: "Guest Post — A Year of Jxiv — Warming the Preprints Stone"

However, this anomaly was corrected with the launch in March 2022 of Jxiv — the first fully-fledged Japanese-born preprint server — by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), one of the largest public funders of research in the country that sits under the administrative and policy behemoth, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). . . . JST also manages J-STAGE, the national online platform for Japanese journals launched in 1999, which hosts more than 3,500 journals containing almost 5.38 million articles, as well as J-STAGE Data launched in 2020.

https://tinyurl.com/388vd3y3

"The Platformisation of Scholarly Information and How to Fight It"

The commercial control of academic publishing and research infrastructure by a few oligopolistic companies has crippled the development of open access movement and interfered with the ethical principles of information access and privacy. In recent years, vertical integration of publishers and other service providers throughout the research cycle has led to platformisation, characterized by datafication and commodification similar to practices on social media platforms. Scholarly publications are treated as user-generated contents for data tracking and surveillance, resulting in profitable data products and services for research assessment, benchmarking and reporting. Meanwhile, the bibliodiversity and equal open access are denied by the dominant gold open access model and the privacy of researchers is being compromised by spyware embedded in research infrastructure. This article proposes four actions to fight the platformisation of scholarly information after a brief overview of the market of academic journals and research assessments and their implications for bibliodiversity, information access, and privacy: (1) Educate researchers about commercial publishers and APCs; (2) Allocate library budget to support scholar-led and library publishing; (3) Engage in the development of public research infrastructures and copyright reform; and (4) Advocate for research assessment reforms.

https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.13561

"Open Access Books through Open Data Sources: Assessing Prevalence, Providers, and Preservation"

In total, 396,995 unique records were identified from the OA book bibliometric sources, of which 19% were found to be included in at least one of the preservation services. The results suggest reason for concern for the long tail of OA books distributed at thousands of different web domains as these include volatile cloud storage or sometimes no longer contained the files at all.

https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2023-0016

Paywall: "Toward a Potential Solution of the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing: An Academic Research Community Alliance Model"

The academic research community alliance model suggested is based on the scholarly community taking on the responsibilities of peer review, article production, and knowledge dissemination while acting in an altruistic way of doing so. The proposed approach is described in detail, and both challenges and potential solutions to the impediments to implementing this model are explored. Finally, the authors report on initial efforts to build support for the proposed model, which suggests that meaningful progress on this difficult problem is possible.

https://tinyurl.com/4dznxau6

Videos from the Library Publishing Coalition’s 2023 Library Publishing Forum

The Library Publishing Forum is an annual conference bringing together representatives from libraries engaged in (or considering) publishing initiatives to define and address major questions and challenges; to identify and document collaborative opportunities; and to strengthen and promote this community of practice. The Forum includes representatives from a broad, international spectrum of academic library backgrounds, as well as groups that collaborate with libraries to publish scholarly works, including publishing vendors, university presses, and scholars.

https://tinyurl.com/mresrts7

"New UVM Press Breaks Down Barriers to Scholarly Publishing"

The University of Vermont has launched an open-access academic press aimed at removing the financial barrier between peer-reviewed research and audiences worldwide. Fully funded by the university and overseen by UVM Libraries, the UVM Press operates under a "diamond open access model"— meaning that authors pay no fees to publish with the press, and readers pay no fees to access the press’s published materials. . . .

Bryn Geffert, UVM’s dean of libraries, has experience with open-access publishing having launched the Amherst College Press in 2013. Geffert also led a consortium of libraries in establishing the open-access Lever Press in 2016. Geffert believes that the role of a library is to connect patrons to information, making UVM Libraries a logical partner for managing the UVM Press.

https://tinyurl.com/bdfa8msf

"Transformative Agreements and Their Practical Impact: A Librarian Perspective"

This case study aims at describing how transformative agreements (TAs) have affected our profession with new tasks and workflows at two university libraries in Sweden, namely Karolinska Institutet University Library and Södertörn University Library. TAs are one of the mechanisms by which scientific publications are made open access; they involve moving libraries’ contracts with publishers from payment to read toward payment to publish. We will summarize the status and progress of open access in Sweden, in particular the significant growth of TAs over a short time span. We will then focus on describing how TAs have affected our everyday work and what new tasks they have imposed. We will share our experiences and point out things we find challenging, for example, we will explore questions about eligibility, the verification process, publication types and title changes during the contract period. We will also give some recommendations on how we would prefer the workflows surrounding the TAs to be. Finally, we will share our conclusions and comments about the impact of TAs on the publishing landscape and speculate about what will happen next.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.612

"Can Open Access Increase LIS Research’s Policy Impact? Using Regression Analysis and Causal Inference"

The relationship between open access and academic impact (usually measured as citations received from academic publications) has been extensively studied but remains a very controversial topic. However, the effect of open access on policy impact (measured as citations received from policy documents) is still unknown. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of open access on the policy impact, which might initiate a new controversial topic. . . . Linear regression models, logit regression models, four other matching methods, open access status provided by different databases, and different sizes of data samples were used to check the robustness of the main results. This study revealed that open access had significant and positive effects on the policy impact.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04750-1

"Mastodon over Mammon — Towards Publicly Owned Scholarly Knowledge"

Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record — encompassing text, data and code — to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7643817

"AI Is about to Turn Book Publishing Upside-down"

The latest generation of AI is a game changer. Not incremental change—something gentle, something gradual: this AI changes everything, fast. Scary fast.

I believe that every function in trade book publishing today can be automated with the help of generative AI. And, if this is true, then the trade book publishing industry as we know it will soon be obsolete. We will need to move on.

https://tinyurl.com/2p9z6pr6

"Beyond BPCs: Reimagining and Re-infrastructuring the Funding of Open Access Books"

A major issue is that the sheer cost of BPCs [Book Processing Charges] makes them an extremely expensive way of funding Open Access books. For large commercial publishers, BPCs of £11,000 and more for a conventional academic book are typical. Given very few academics would themselves have the capacity to easily cover these kinds of costs, BPCs are usually paid by universities or funders — sometimes from a specific fund set aside to cover the costs of Open Access publishing, sometimes from a general unallocated part of a university/department budget, sometimes from the budget of a research grant.

As Open Book Collective colleagues have argued again and again, in line with the aims and mission of the COPIM project, as well as arguments made by other project colleagues, a BPC-based Open Access publishing model is fundamentally unsustainable and unscalable. Any requirement for the higher education sector to pay BPCs on a broadscale basis would require an unparalleled national and global injection of funding. . . .

The Open Book Collective’s online presence " its "platform" serves many functions, including providing information about our aims, governance, model and values, as well resources about Open Access. However, a key part of the platform is the area where publishers and publishing "service providers," as we call them (the organisations that provide the crucial infrastructures for Open Access book publishing) make available ‘Offers’ that universities and other organisations can potentially subscribe to. . . .

In the Open Book Collective model, we give publisher/service provider members substantial — but not total — control over how their individual Offers are priced. Each initiative proposes a "tiered" costing Offer to us (tiered pricing involves varying subscription prices by university’s size and/or national context), which we assess to determine whether it is fair and reasonable. If so, and our Membership Committee agrees that the initiative meets our broader membership criteria, then it is eligible to become a member of the Open Book Collective, with its Offer potentially hosted on our platform.

https://bit.ly/45yZsXQ

A Guide for Social Science Journal Editors on Easing into Open Science (FULL GUIDE)

Journal editors have a large amount of power to advance open science in their respective fields by incentivising and mandating open policies and practices at their journals. The Data PASS Journal Editors Discussion Interface (JEDI, an online community for social science journal editors: www.dpjedi.org) has collated several resources on open science in journal editing (www.dpjedi.org/resources). However, it can be overwhelming as a new editor to know where to start. For this reason, we have created a guide for journal editors on how to get started with open science. The guide outlines steps that editors can take to implement open policies and practices at their journal, and goes through the what, why, how, and worries of each policy/practice.

https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/hstcx

"Wiley Inks 22 Open Access Agreements across North America"

These agreements, which all begin in 2023, span individual universities, research labs, and academic consortia across 18 U.S. states and Mexico. They allow participating institutions access to all of Wiley’s hybrid and subscription journals and grant researchers the ability to publish accepted articles open access across Wiley’s extensive publishing portfolio. . . .

A full list of participating partners includes:

Individual Institutions: University of Alabama at Birmingham, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon University, Colorado State University, Montana State University, Princeton University, Southern Methodist University, Syracuse University, UMass Lowell, West Virginia University, Texas Tech University Health Services Center, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Portland State University, Northeastern University, Texas A&M University, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN (CINVESTAV), University of North Texas Health Science Center, Washington State University, and Texas Christian University.

Consortia: The Carolina Consortium, and the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC).

https://bit.ly/3ORnyqT

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a License"

This column describes how one library seeks to mitigate harms or to optimize protections and advantages resulting from journal licenses. Progress toward improved licensing outcomes is described with examples or with qualitative data, from a comprehensive overview of one library’s journal licenses. Discussion includes so-called transformative agreements, a variety of rights, non-disclosure and data privacy clauses, term and termination, and transfer obligations.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102737

"Giant in Isolation: Online Journal Publishing in Nigeria"

The wider a research result is communicated the higher its impact and benefits. Online journals are today the most effective means of communicating research result. However, majority of the Nigerian journals are still in print. Thus, this paper collected data from the Nigerian universities as the leading journal publishers in the country in order to bring out the situation of online journal publishing in the country. A semi-structured questionnaire was sent to all the universities; 28 responses were found to be valid for the analysis. In addition, the researcher analysed the content of Ajol and Doaj to discover the evidences for online journal publishing from Nigeria. And finally search for literature on the use of OJS in Nigeria was conducted. Consequently, it is discovered that majority of the university-based journals in Nigeria are in print only. The journals don’t leverage on the supporting services from Ajol programme. Thus, it is recommended that individual researchers, universities, journal publishers and research funders in Nigeria should recognise the importance and make use of online journal publishing platforms. It is also recommended that major commercial publishers should devise means of penetrating the journal publishing market in Nigeria.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.2640