Publishing – Page 12 – DigitalKoans

"A Critical Survey of Open-Access Policies in US Land Grants"

Introduction: Land-grant universities in the United States and the international open-access (OA) movement both purport to advance public access to knowledge and assert a public benefit to doing so. The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that land-grant universities would have a high rate of adoption of institutional OA policies. To date, no study has looked at OA approaches or policies across the land grants.

Methods: This study considers the critical literature on both land-grants and OA, surveys land-grant institutional OA policies, and analyzes relevant demographic and financial data.

Results: The study identified 15 mandates and 4 resolutions across the diverse institutional types and populations represented in the 112 land-grants. None of the 21 historically Black colleges and universities or 35 tribal colleges and universities among the land-grants have adopted OA policies.

Conclusion: Despite shared objectives, land-grant colleges and universities have not systematically embraced OA, and relatively few have adopted institutional OA policies. In the context of profound, institutionalized inequities among the land-grants, and attentive to the potential of OA to deepen existing inequities, this study considers the causes of and implications for low institutional OA policy adoption among land-grants.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15605

Current State and Future Directions for Open Repositories in Europe

In January 2023, OpenAIRE, LIBER, SPARC Europe, and COAR launched a joint strategy aimed at strengthening the European repository network. As a first step, a survey of the European repository landscape was undertaken in February-March 2023. The survey found that, collectively, European repositories acquire, preserve and provide open access to tens or possibly hundreds of millions of valuable research outputs and represent critical, not-for-profit infrastructure in the European open science landscape. They are used for sharing articles that may be pay-walled in published journals, but also for providing access to a large variety of other types of research outputs including research data, theses/dissertations, conference papers, preprints, code, and so on.

However, in order to ensure the European repository network is fit for purpose and able to support the evolving needs of the research community, the survey also identified three areas in particular that could be strengthened: maintaining up-to-date, highly functioning software platforms; applying consistent and comprehensive good practices in terms of metadata, preservation, and usage statistics; and gaining appropriate visibility in the scholarly ecosystem.

Despite the challenges, the current climate offers exciting opportunities for repositories. Many funders are actively promoting the repository route for articles because of their role in supporting equitable access to content (i.e. no fees to access or deposit). The value proposition for open science is growing and repositories are increasingly recognised as the main mechanism for collecting and providing access to a wide range of other research outputs. Add to this, the nascent, but growing, interest in the publish-review-curate model in which repositories have a central function, and it seems they are well placed to expand their current role in the ecosystem.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10255559

STM: "New White Paper Launch: Generative AI in Scholarly Communications"

The paper looks at the ethical, legal, and practical aspects of GenAI, highlighting its potential to transform scholarly communications, and covers a range of topics from intellectual property rights to the challenges of maintaining integrity in the digital age. The paper provides best-practice principles and recommendations for authors, editorial teams, reviewers, and vendors, ensuring a responsible and ethical approach to the use of GenAI tools.

https://tinyurl.com/4m6m8n9j

MIT: "New White Paper ‘Access to Science and Scholarship: Key Questions about the Future of Research Publishing’"

The project—including MIT Press’s Director and Publisher Amy Brand and Director of Journals and Open Access Nick Lindsay—examines the current state of the research enterprise and what might come next. . . .

To illustrate how researcher behavior, funder policies, and publisher business models and incentives interact, part 1 of this report presents an historical overview of open access publishing. Part 2 of the report provides a list of key questions for further investigation to understand, measure, and best prepare for the impact of new policies related to open access in research publishing, categorized into six general areas: access and business models, research data, preprint publishing, peer review, costs to researchers and universities, and infrastructure.

https://tinyurl.com/2s3fb7n8

Two Reports on Scientific Publishing from the International Science Council

The Council’s studies led to development of eight essential principles for modern scientific publication, which were endorsed by over 90% of the membership present at its 2021 General Assembly. The principles are listed in Paper One, The Key Principles for Scientific Publishing accompanied by an analysis of the extent to which they are observed operationally. . . .

Paper Two, The case for reform of scientific publishing, identifies many of the failures to observe the principles in Paper One as lying within the commercial sector of scientific publication. It lies not only in so-called predatory publishing, where lax or non-existent editorial standards provide a low barrier to publication, but also in journals that, although they have far higher standards, compromise the essential global distribution of scientific knowledge by excessive prices and profit margins.

International Science Council members include 45 international scientific Unions and Associations, over 140 national and regional scientific organizations, and other organizations.

https://tinyurl.com/mnavvrxt

Richard Poynder Is "Signing Off from Reporting on Open Access"

On X, well-known independent journalist and blogger Richard Poynder said: "The movement has failed and is being rebranded in order to obscure the failure. Time to move on."

In a second post, he provided a further explanation (this is an JPEG file).

Richard Poynder has made 71,000 posts on X/Twitter.

"ResearchGate and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Announce New Journal Home Partnership for Science Partner Journals"

AAAS, a leading publisher of cutting-edge research renowned for its Science family of journals, launched its Science Partner Journal (SPJ) program in 2017. Consisting of 14 high-quality, fully open access journals produced in collaboration with international research institutions, foundations, funders, and societies, the SPJ program will now expand its reach through Journal Home on ResearchGate. . . .

ResearchGate will create dedicated journal profiles on the platform that will be prominently featured on all associated articles and touchpoints on ResearchGate, significantly boosting the visibility of these titles with highly relevant authors and readers.

Authors of articles in the SPJs will enjoy the added benefit of having their content automatically added to their profiles on ResearchGate.

https://tinyurl.com/53ehxhzu

Germany: "DEAL Consortium and Wiley Sign New 5-Year Open Access Agreement"

The DEAL Consortium and scholarly publisher Wiley today announced the signing of a new five-year agreement which will allow scientists from German academic institutions to publish their research open access (OA) within Wiley’s portfolio of scientific journals. Instituted by the Alliance of German Science Organizations the DEAL Consortium is open to more than 900 mostly publicly funded academic institutions in Germany. Signed by Wiley and MPDL Services gGmbH as the DEAL Operating Entity, the new agreement will begin in January 2024, offering further support for the needs of the scholarly community and accelerate the open access transformation.

https://tinyurl.com/3f3kn4zp

"’On the Ruins of Seriality’: The Scientific Journal and the Nature of the Scientific Life"

The serialization of scientific print began around 1800 as an effort to challenge elite science and to make knowledge accessible to broader publics. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the scientific journal developed into the central institution of knowledge legitimization, bound up with discourses of objectivity, vocational dedication, and communal virtue. Since the last few decades, however, the journal has been at the heart of crisis narratives that warn of the erosion of science’s moral basis and creative capacity. Competition, careerism, and perverse incentives—reflected in and produced by the serial format—have left the scientific self without a sense of calling, the "scientific community" without a sense of community, and the general public of science without a sense of trust. Twenty-first-century science finds itself "on the ruins of seriality" (Lerner, 2015, p. 132).

Yet there have hardly been any attempts to reimagine scholarly communication without the journal in a central position.²⁴ Notwithstanding vigorous debate on its (de)merits and intense experimentation with peer review and open publishing platforms, the scientific journal has proven to be a "sticky" institution. . . . And although in the digital world the journal’s constitutive nature as a serial format is becoming less and less relevant, it is still primarily the paper—as the base unit of scientific publication—that conditions the modalities of scientific research, writing, and reading, and orients conceptions of scholarly selfhood in both the scientific and the general culture.

The commercial publishers have also demonstrated their stickiness. The open access movement has posed a serious challenge, but all in all the publishing companies have been able to integrate demands for "openness" into their business models (just as the scientific societies were able to adapt to the rise of commercial publishing in the postwar period). . . . So, despite predictions that "networked brains" would revolutionize scientific communication and produce "an unprecedented public good" (Guédon, 2017), open access has essentially come to mean "pay to publish," that is, a return to the situation before the ascendancy of the subscription journal (see also Noel, 2020).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2023.100885

"Scientists Paid Large Publishers over $1 Billion in Four Years to Have Their Studies Published with Open Access"

Stefanie Haustein’s team from the University of Ottawa (Canada) has spent "years" collecting data from the period 2015-2018. According to their calculations, Springer Nature took the lion’s share, with $589.7 million, followed by Elsevier ($221.4 million), Wiley ($114.3 million), Taylor & Francis ($76.8 million), and Sage ($31.6 million). . . .

Haustein’s study reveals that two scientific journals, Scientific Reports and Nature Communications, accounted for this income, with $105.1 million and $71.1 million, respectively.

"AI for Academia: Digital Science Acquires Writefull to Empower Researchers and Publishers"

Writefull’s AI language models are trained on billions of sentences taken from millions of journal articles. Matched with a firm commitment to data privacy, this means its models offer unparalleled assistance to users in academic writing, paraphrasing, copy editing and revisions. . . .

Writefull’s language services are now used by students and researchers at more than 1,500 institutions, and are integrated into the workflows of top publishers and copy editors, such as at the American Chemical Society (ACS), Hindawi, the British Ecological Society, Sage, and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). Writefull’s APIs are also integrated with Digital Science’s collaborative LaTeX editor Overleaf.

https://tinyurl.com/ywyap23p

"Editorial: Pay to Criticise? Rebuttal Articles in Open-Access Journals Should Be Published for Free"

A review of the publication policies of some major open-access publishers (e.g. Elsevier, https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing, last access: 14 August 2023; Wiley, https://authorservices.wiley.com/open-research/open-access/for-authors/publication-charges.html, last access: 14 August 2023; Springer Nature https://support.springer.com/en/support/solutions/articles/6000211135-article-processing-charges-apc-, last access: 14 August 2023) shows no explicit waivers for any type of comments, replies, or rebuttals, and fee waiving is discretionary, except for some scientists based on a specific list of less affluent countries. Some other publishers have lower fees for all types of comments. For instance, "Frontiers" journals charge USD 490 (less than half of the regular APC) to publish General Commentary articles that “provide critical comments on a previous publication at Frontiers” (https://www.frontiersin.org/about/fee-policy, last access: 14 August 2023). Overall, we could not find any mention of automatic waivers for contributions that identify fundamental flaws in published research (i.e. rebuttals) or for any other type of critical comment.

https://doi.org/10.5194/we-23-131-2023

"Open Access Movement in the Scholarly World: Pathways for Libraries in Developing Countries"

Open access is a scholarly publishing model that has emerged as an alternative to traditional subscription-based journal publishing. This study explores the adoption of the open access movement worldwide and the role that libraries can play in addressing those factors which are slowing its progress within developing countries. The study has drawn upon both qualitative data from a focused literature review and quantitative data from major open access platforms. The results indicate that while the open access movement is steadily gaining acceptance worldwide, the progress in developing countries within geographical areas such as Africa, Asia and Oceania is quite a bit slower. Two significant factors are the cost of publishing fees and the lack of institutional open access mandates and policies to encourage uptake. The study provides suggested strategies for academic libraries to help overcome current challenges.

https://doi.org/10.1177/01655515231202758

"Stanford University Press and Public Knowledge Project to Collaborate on Open Access Journal Publishing Program"

This initiative, developed in consultation with the Office of Scholarly Communications at the Stanford Libraries, is a response to the rapidly increasing burdens imposed on commercial publishers’ journal editors and their boards in the form of higher article processing charges (APCs) and increased publication rates. This is a partnership of two long-established university organizations. It utilizes the strengths and resources of each to provide journals with an experienced publisher and platform developer that will offer journals both subscribe-to-open and reasonably priced APC paths, increasing access for authors and readers.

https://sup.org/oajournals/

"US Repository Network Launches Pilot to Enhance Discoverability of Open Access Content in Repositories"

In November, the US Repository Network (USRN) will launch a pilot project aimed at improving the discoverability of articles in repositories. This pilot project involves the use of services from CORE, a not-for-profit aggregator based at Open University in the UK, to evaluate and improve local repository practices. Additional technical support will be provided by Antleaf Ltd.

As part of the project, CORE will aggregate the metadata and full text of articles from a subset of US repositories, allowing them to be findable through a centralized discovery service with prominent links back to the original full text of the repository. At the same time, the project will assess current practices related to metadata quality, the tracking of Open Access deposits, the use of PIDs, technical support for OAI-PMH, and the adoption of more recent protocols, such as FAIR Signposting. At the level of the centralized aggregation, CORE will enrich the existing US metadata with information from its larger international aggregation. A Dashboard service for participating institutions will be provided, enabling them to assess, validate and monitor their practices.

https://tinyurl.com/2utfpvj3

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is an open textbook and practitioner’s guide that collects theory, practice, and case studies from nearly 80 experts in scholarly communication and open education. Divided into three parts:

What is Scholarly Communication?

Scholarly Communication and Open Culture

Voices from the Field: Perspectives, Intersections, and Case Studies

The book delves into the economic, social, policy, and legal aspects of scholarly communication as well as open access, open data, open education, and open science and infrastructure. Practitioners provide insight into the relationship between university presses and academic libraries, defining collection development as operational scholarly communication, and promotion and tenure and the challenge for open access.

https://bit.ly/SCLAOK

"Approaching Artificial Intelligence and Open Research in Sync: Opportunities and Challenges"

AI can generate more complete and disambiguated metadata to enhance discovery and move search from the traditional keyword-based model to semantic and conversation-based searches.

AI can also help publishers improve accessibility, to make content available to a broader audience.

AI as a reader and consumer will become as important a consideration as the human reader and consumer. Publications should consider machines as consumer and provide machine readable and consumable formats.

AI can create personalized recommendations and news feeds, simultaneously helping researchers find the answers they need and allowing publishers to target specific audiences for specific publications.

Even better, AI can perform reverse engineering to measure the contribution of each source to the final answers. And publishers can charge based on the contribution. This could be new business model in the future. Many AI researchers are currently working on enabling explainable and transparent AI, but this research will take time.

https://tinyurl.com/uu4dhs9y

"The State of Green Open Access in Canadian Universities"

This study investigates the use of institutional repositories for self-archiving peer-reviewed work in the U15 (an association of fifteen Canadian research-intensive universities). It relates usage with university open access (OA) policy types and publisher policy embargoes. We show that of all articles found in OpenAlex attributed to U15 researchers, 45.1 to 56.6% are available as Gold or Green OA, yet only 0.5 to 10.7% (mean 4.2%) of these can be found on their respective U15 IRs. Our investigation shows a lack of OA policies from most institutions, journal policies with embargoes exceeding 12 months, and incomplete policy information.

https://doi.org/10.5206/cjils-rcsib.v46i2.15358

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

Walt Crawford: "Cites & Insights: Use It or Lose It?"

During its peak years, C&I had quite a substantial readership–as many as 55,000 downloads for one particular essay. There were more than 600,000 downloads from 2013 through 2015 and (maybe) 800,000 downloads from 2016 through 2019. But only about 38,000 in 2019. I had sponsorship for five years, and never charged for access.

I always hoped that a few people or institutions would find C&I worth preserving—and the annual print volumes even had indexes (of a sort). No print volume has ever sold more than four copies. Four have sold none at all.

But I would like to trim my Lulu catalog. (To see the list, just go to lulu.com and search for "walt crawford." I see 51 results.) So here’s the deal: The Lulu (trade paperback) versions of any C&I volumes that have no sales between now and November 12, 2024 will be deleted.

Also see: "Essential Reading: Walt Crawford’s Books on Open Access."

https://tinyurl.com/2et9ajuh

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

Paywall: "Analyzing the Relationship between Citation-Based Impact Metrics and Electronic Journal Usage: A Case Study"

We focus on the impact of major JIFs on local e-journal usage and propose an alternative approach to conventional methods for collection selectors. By treating journal usage patterns as panel data and employing fixed-effects regression models, we find that journal popularity has the greatest influence on local e-journal usage and the effects of impact factors on academic article usage can vary across different disciplines.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2023.2230166

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

"IGI Global Releases Annual OA Survey Results on Researcher Perceptions Surrounding Open Access Publishing Support"

The survey was sent to over 200,000 worldwide researchers of all ages, experiences, fields, ethnicities, etc. . . .

Respondents were asked "What funding resources have you used for OA publishing?" and they had the ability to choose all resources that they have used.

As IGI Global had expected, the majority of respondents indicated they were "self-funded" at 48%, 8% stated "national funding body," 5% answered "international funding body," 18% indicated "my Institution/library/entity affiliated to my institution," 4.5% stated "non-profit institutions," 2% claimed they received funding through "private donors," 5% indicated "associations/societies," 2.5% indicated "business enterprise," 3.5% stated "foundations," 1% claimed "crowdfunding," 14% claimed they received a "publisher waiver," and 2% indicated they received funding from a "platinum open access publication" where the APC is waived by the publication. A large portion, 34% of respondents, had not used an OA funding resource.

https://tinyurl.com/mv4ty6hf

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

"The Oligopoly’s Shift to Open Access. How the Big Five Academic Publishers Profit from Article Processing Charges"

This study aims to estimate the total amount of article processing charges (APCs) paid to publish open access (OA) in journals controlled by the five large commercial publishers Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley between 2015 and 2018. Using publication data from WoS, OA status from Unpaywall and annual APC prices from open datasets and historical fees retrieved via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, we estimate that globally authors paid $1.06 billion in publication fees to these publishers from 2015–2018. Revenue from gold OA amounted to $612.5 million, while $448.3 million was obtained for publishing OA in hybrid journals. Among the five publishers, Springer-Nature made the most revenue from OA ($589.7 million), followed by Elsevier ($221.4 million), Wiley ($114.3 million), Taylor & Francis ($76.8 million) and Sage ($31.6 million). With Elsevier and Wiley making most of APC revenue from hybrid fees and others focusing on gold, different OA strategies could be observed between publishers.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00272

"Dissemination Effect of Data Papers on Scientific Datasets"

This study aims to investigate the citation practices associated with data papers and to explore the role of data papers in disseminating scientific datasets. . . . The findings indicate a consistent growth in the number of biomedical data journals published in recent years, with data papers gaining attention and recognition as both publications and data sources. Although the use of data papers as citation sources for data remains relatively rare, there has been a steady increase in data paper citations for data utilization through formal data citations.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24843

Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect

Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect documents a variety of data privacy practices that directly conflict with library privacy standards, and raises important questions regarding the potential for personal data collected from academic products to be used in the data brokering and surveillance products of RELX’s LexisNexis subsidiary. By analyzing the privacy practices of the world’s largest publisher, the report describes how user tracking that would be unthinkable in a physical library setting now happens routinely through publisher platforms. The analysis underlines the concerns this tracking should raise, particularly when the same company is involved in surveillance and data brokering activities. Elsevier is a subsidiary of RELX, a leading data broker and provider of "risk" products that offer expansive databases of personal information to corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies.

https://zenodo.org/records/10078610

"Reclaiming (Parts of) Scholarly Communication"

Regardless of these differences, "scholar-led" and "community-driven" publishing projects are an integral part of a diverse publishing ecosystem and fulfill two main functions within academia. First, they contribute to a culture of experimental, collaborative, and community-owned approaches to disseminating knowledge. This culture facilitates, for example, the creation of new output formats that lie beyond the standardized peer-reviewed article and make the research process more transparent and participatory (Steiner, 2022b). They also take part in the ongoing publishing movement of developing and implementing more inclusive processes of quality control, paradigmatically displayed by the idea of either or both open and collaborative peer review systems (Knöchelmann, 2019). With these new forms of research assessment, it seems possible to become aware of biases while making the review process more instructive and helpful. Much of this extends to editorial work in general, with workflows digitized to meet the needs of remote work and diverse editorial teams, such as by using open-source editorial management software and collaborative editing tools. Of course, these developments are inherently connected to advancements in electronic publishing in general and are not limited to the community-driven publishing segment.

Second, community-driven publishing projects have a protective function in the sense that they enable self-determined and autonomous decision-making at a time and in an age where the "digital sovereignty" of consumers and researchers is at stake (see Pohle & Thiel, 2020). Because many such projects use open-source software and applications (see Open Journal Systems), they can control the flows of publishing (meta) data and be transparent about its usage. At the same time, many community-driven journals question the widespread and nontransparent system of assessing impact using the over-simplified interpretation of bibliometrics and instead consider other evaluation forms, such as alt metrics (Sugimoto et al., 2017). This open approach extends to the use of licensing models that are approved for the creation of "Free Cultural Works" (see Creative Commons). Acknowledging that research benefits society as a whole and must be available for reuse, we find community-driven publishing projects widely applying the most open licenses to their publications.

https://tinyurl.com/ywzcyk5n