Publishing – Page 13 – DigitalKoans

"The Cost Profiles of Alternative Approaches to Journal Publishing"

The digital era is having a substantial impact on journal publishing. In order to assist in analysing this impact, a model is developed of the costs incurred in operating a refereed journal. Published information and estimates are used to apply the model to a computation of the total costs and per–article costs of various forms of journal publishing. Particular attention is paid to the differences between print and electronic forms of journals, to the various forms of open access, and to the differences between not–for–profit and for–profit publishing undertakings.

Insight is provided into why for–profit publishing is considerably more expensive than equivalent activities undertaken by unincorporated mutuals and not–for–profit associations. Conclusions are drawn concerning the current debates among conventional approaches and the various open alternatives.

https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v12i12.2048

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

"Open Access Mirror Journals: An Experiment in Brand Loyalty"

Open access (OA) mirror journals have been launched by Elsevier as an alternative or supplement to original non-OA journals [1]. These OA mirror journals have the same title, aims and scope, editorial board, and peer-review process as their parent journal, and are distinguished by an "X" after the name. However, because the OA mirror journals have their own ISSNs (International Standard Serial Numbers), they are completely separate journals, which does not fit with Harrison’s [1] assertion that by publishing OA mirror journals, Elsevier is responding to authors’ need to publish in OA journals while simultaneously not wanting to sacrifice their association with the leading journal brands in their field. Asai [2] compared 22 pairs of Elsevier’s OA mirror journals with their parent journals and found that the parent journals were more preferred by authors. This essay analyses Elsevier’s OA mirror journals as an experiment of one publisher, which has a dominant position in the scientific publishing market. Elsevier has set an ambitious price level for article processing charges (APCs) in these OA mirror journals. The evolution of the price level for mirror journals, compared with the evolution of the price level for APCs for other Elsevier’s journals, is used to assess the success of Elsevier’s experiment.

https://doi.org/10.6087/kcse.308

"IOP Publishing and the University of Texas System Drive Forward Open Access to North American Research with New Transformative Agreement"

The University of Texas System (UT System) — one of the US’s largest public university systems — have established a three-year transformative agreement (TA) with society publisher IOP Publishing (IOPP). The agreement between IOPP and the UT System allows affiliated researchers to publish unlimited OA articles in IOPP’s journals and most partner journals with the costs to publish already covered. . . .

The TA will help to widen the readership and increase visibility of research published by authors affiliated with all 14 UT System Institutions. IOPP user data shows that OA content is downloaded 80% more and cited 30% more than paywalled content, demonstrating the substantial advantages of publishing research OA.

https://tinyurl.com/5n6t3z5u

"AI, the New Frontier — Opportunities and Challenges"

Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently all the rage in our global economy. The launch of ChatGPT broke all of the records for user adoption – Reuters reported that ChatGPT achieved 100 million users in two months. . . .

Within scholarly publishing, we have ushered in the internet, digital journals, and books, and now we are witnessing first-hand the benefits of AI, semantic search, IoT, and WEB3. This article aims to provide a context of the history of AI, the opportunities, challenges, new services, and governance.

https://tinyurl.com/yfmew3r8

"Article Processing Charges in Gold Open Access Journals: An Empirical Study"

This study focuses on analyzing the trends in article processing charges (APCs) levied by open access journals. . . . Among the 17,379 journals included in the DOAJ, only 5,122 journals were found to charge APCs. Through the examination of the collected data, it was discovered that the highest APC amount recorded was INR 518,334.95 (equivalent to USD 6680.46), while the lowest APC observed was INR 1.04 (equivalent to USD 0.013).

https://doi.org/10.1080/15424065.2023.2243801

NASA’s Public Access Plan for Increasing Access to the Results of Scientific Research

This section highlights the significant changes to this document since the original plan was released in 2014. To wit:

There shall be no publication embargo period for peer-reviewed publications

Data that support peer-reviewed publications shall be made available in a public archive at the time of publication

Software should be included as part of Open Access, subject to NASA software release requirements

Software used to generate research findings/results should be made available in a public archive at the time of publication

Other data products beyond peer-reviewed publications and software should be considered as part of Open Access

https://tinyurl.com/4h9ezkk8

"The Rights of UC Authors Are at Stake. Here’s What We Are Doing about It."

"We have learned that many publishers are requiring UC authors to sign misleading License to Publish agreements, which undermine the spirit and intent of [UC’s open access policies]," wrote Susan Cochran, Chair of the faculty Academic Senate PDF.

By purporting to restrict an author’s abilities to reuse their own work, "these agreements essentially turn faculty authors into readers, as opposed to creators and owners of their own work," the Academic Senate chair concludes.

The team that leads negotiations with scholarly publishers on behalf of the university, including representatives from UC’s California Digital Library, the 10 campus libraries, and the Academic Senate, is now taking up the charge, making author rights the next frontier in advocating for the UC research community.

https://tinyurl.com/mry3hczw

"Generative AI, ChatGPT, and Google Bard: Evaluating the Impact and Opportunities for Scholarly Publishing"

My group within Wiley Partner Solutions designs and develops intelligent services that leverage advanced AI, big data, and cloud technologies to support publishers and researchers in open access and open science environments. To identify both benefits and risks of generative AI for our industry, we tested ChatGPT and Google Bard for authoring, for submission and reviews, for publishing, and for discovery and dissemination. I hope that our findings will inspire you to find fresh ideas for using Generative AI, and will stimulate further conversation about this new and controversial but potentially beneficial tool.

https://tinyurl.com/2y2ue6zr

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

Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) Project: TOME Stakeholder Value Assessment: Final Report

The Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of University Presses published a final report assessing the success of the Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) project. The five-year pilot project engaged with more than 60 university presses and more than 150 open access scholarly works to encourage sustainable digital publication of and public access to scholarly books. The Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) project was launched in 2018 to publish humanities and social science scholarship on the internet, where these peer-reviewed works can be fully integrated into the larger network of scholarly and scientific research. The final report examines whether the pilot’s community of writers, institutions, libraries, and presses found it useful.

https://tinyurl.com/3wr7wv37

"Internet Archive Responds to Recording Industry Lawsuit Targeting Obsolete Media"

Late Friday, some of the world’s largest record labels, including Sony and Universal Music Group, filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive and others for the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records that are 70 to 120 years old. . . .

Of note, the Great 78 Project has been in operation since 2006 to bring free public access to a largely forgotten but culturally important medium. Through the efforts of dedicated librarians, archivists and sound engineers, we have preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium. The resulting preserved recordings retain the scratch and pop sounds that are present in the analog artifacts; noise that modern remastering techniques remove.

These preservation recordings are used in teaching and research, including by university professors like Jason Luther of Rowan University, whose students use the Great 78 collection as the basis for researching and writing podcasts for use in class assignments . . . While this mode of access is important, usage is tiny—on average, each recording in the collection is only accessed by one researcher per month.

https://tinyurl.com/bdevycm5

Paywall: "Identification and Portraits of Open Access Journals Based on Open Impact Metrics Extracted from Social Activities "

This study finds that open access journals strengthen international academic communication and cooperation, build cross-border and cross-regional knowledge-sharing projects, realize the knowledge of interdisciplinary sharing and exchange, and, most importantly, provide a one-stop service for readers. This research indicates that through the use of open impact metrics, it is possible to identify the portraits of open access journals, thus providing a new method to construct and reform open access journal evaluation systems.

https://tinyurl.com/3hvs2y8v

"Judgment Entered in Publishers, Internet Archive Copyright Case"

Most importantly, the proposed agreement includes a permanent injunction that would, among its provisions, bar the IA’s lending of unauthorized scans of in-copyright, commercially available books, as well as bar the IA from "profiting from" or "inducing" any other party’s "infringing reproduction, public distribution, public display and/or public performance" of books "in any digital or electronic form" once notified by the copyright holder. . . .

The negotiated payment is all inclusive—it covers costs, fees, damages, and other claims, including the IA’s claim that damages should be remitted—something that should assuage initial concerns expressed by some who feared a massive damage award might force the nonprofit IA to cease operations. The negotiated judgment does seek destruction of the IA’s scans as the publishers’ initial complaint had suggested.

https://tinyurl.com/p3yaszd9

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

"The New York Times Prohibits AI Vendors from Devouring Its Content"

The new terms prohibit the use of Times content—which includes articles, videos, images, and metadata—for training any AI model without express written permission. In Section 2.1 of the TOS, the NYT says that its content is for the reader’s “personal, non-commercial use” and that non-commercial use does not include “the development of any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system.”

https://tinyurl.com/2cc4uhuc

"Data Journals: Where Data Sharing Policy Meets Practice"

Data journals incorporate elements of traditional scholarly communications practices—reviewing for quality and rigor through editorial and peer-review—and the data sharing / open data movement—prioritizing broad dissemination through repositories, sometimes with curation or technical checks. Their goals for dataset review and sharing are recorded in journal-based data policies and operationalized through workflows. In this qualitative, small cohort semi-structured interview study of eight different journals that review and publish research data, we explored (1) journal data policy requirements, (2) data review standards, and (3) implementation of standardized data evaluation workflows. Differences among the journals can be understood by considering editors’ approaches to balancing the interests of varied stakeholders. Assessing data quality for reusability is primarily conditional on fitness for use which points to an important distinction between disciplinary and discipline-agnostic data journals.

https://doi.org/10.17615/nqtz-b568

"The Emergence of Preprints: Comparing Publishing Behaviour in the Global South and the Global North"

Purpose: The recent proliferation of preprints could be a way for researchers worldwide to increase the availability and visibility of their research findings. Against the background of rising publication costs caused by the increasing prevalence of article processing fees, the search for other ways to publish research results besides traditional journal publication may increase. This could be especially true for lower-income countries. Design/methodology/approach: Therefore, we are interested in the experiences and attitudes towards posting and using preprints in the Global South as opposed to the Global North. To explore whether motivations and concerns about posting preprints differ, we adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining a quantitative survey of researchers with focus group interviews. Findings: We found that respondents from the Global South were more likely to agree to adhere to policies and to emphasise that mandates could change publishing behaviour towards open access. They were also more likely to agree posting preprints has a positive impact. Respondents from the Global South and the Global North emphasised the importance of peer-reviewed research for career advancement. Originality: The study has identified a wide range of experiences with and attitudes towards posting preprints among researchers in the Global South and the Global North. To our knowledge, this has hardly been studied before, which is also because preprints only have emerged lately in many disciplines and countries.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04186

"AI Can Crack Double Blind Peer Review — Should We Still Use It?"

However, in the era of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, a pressing question arises: can an author’s identity be deduced even from an anonymized paper (in cases where the authors do not advertise their submitted article on social media)?

In a recent article we investigate this very question, by leveraging an artificial intelligence model trained on the largest authorship attribution dataset to date. . . . Focusing purely on well-established researchers with at least a few dozen publications, our work demonstrates that reliable author identification is possible.

https://tinyurl.com/2kbuh7wn

"Will Building LLMs [AI Large Language Models] Become the New Revenue Driver for Academic Publishing?"

In a world where peer-reviewed content holds value for Generative AI companies, the question arises whether content that is locked behind a paywall has greater value than OA content. . . . Will publishers who still have a lot of content locked up, such as IEEE or NEJM, retain the most valuable assets? Will publishers that limit licensing to more restrictive terms such as CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-ND have revenue streams denied to those exclusively using CC BY licenses? . . . Could authors receive income from their work via a CMO (Collective Management of Copyright) license, regardless of the agreement they have with the publisher?

https://tinyurl.com/zm6u5spc

Paywall: "Another Wiley Journal Loses Editorial Board"

At least two-thirds of the editorial board of Wiley’s Journal of Biogeography have resigned, citing the publisher’s push towards "exorbitant" open access fees and what they claimed was a policy to steer rejected manuscripts to other titles.

https://tinyurl.com/2bhf6ppp

"How Many Preprints Have Actually Been Printed and Why: A Case Study of Computer Science Preprints on arXiv"

In this paper, a case study of computer science preprints submitted to arXiv from 2008 to 2017 is conducted to quantify how many preprints have eventually been printed in peer-reviewed venues. Among those published manuscripts, some are published under different titles and without an update to their preprints on arXiv. In the case of these manuscripts, the traditional fuzzy matching method is incapable of mapping the preprint to the final published version. In view of this issue, we introduce a semantics-based mapping method with the employment of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). With this new mapping method and a plurality of data sources, we find that 66% of all sampled preprints are published under unchanged titles and 11% are published under different titles and with other modifications. A further analysis was then performed to investigate why these preprints but not others were accepted for publication. Our comparison reveals that in the field of computer science, published preprints feature adequate revisions, multiple authorship, detailed abstract and introduction, extensive and authoritative references and available source code.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01899

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

"MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D20) Achieves Second Year Goal, Opens Access to Eighty-Two New Books in 2023"

Thanks to the support of libraries participating in Direct to Open (D2O), the MIT Press will publish its full list (see below) of 2023 scholarly monographs and edited collections open access on the MIT Press Direct platform. . . .

In its second year, 322 libraries, an increase of 33% from the first year, from around the globe committed to support D2O. Expanding D2O’s international footprint, the Press also entered into all-in agreements with Big Ten Academic Alliance and the Konsortium der sächsischen Hochschulbibliotheken, as well as central licensing and invoicing agreements with Council of Australian University Librarians, Center for Research Libraries; Greater Western Library Alliance, MOBIUS, Northeast Research Libraries, Jisc, Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation, SCELC, and Lyrasis.

https://tinyurl.com/yc7vv3tc

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

"Judge Finds Revived Amazon E-book Monopoly Suit Should Proceed "

For a second time in two years, a magistrate judge in New York has recommended that a consumer class action lawsuit accusing the Big Five publishers of colluding with Amazon to fix e-book prices should be dismissed. But while the judge recommended tossing the case against the publishers, the court found that monopolization and attempted monopolization claims against Amazon should proceed.

https://tinyurl.com/7pru9f4m

"To Preprint or Not to Preprint: A Global Researcher Survey"

Open science is receiving widespread attention globally, and preprinting offers an important way to implement open science practices in scholarly publishing. To develop a systematic understanding of researchers’ adoption of and attitudes toward preprinting, we conducted a survey of authors of research papers published in 2021 and early 2022. Our survey results show that the US and Europe lead the way in the adoption of preprinting. US and European respondents reported a higher familiarity with and a stronger commitment to preprinting than their colleagues elsewhere in the world. The adoption of preprinting is much stronger in physics and astronomy as well as mathematics and computer science than in other research areas. Respondents identified free accessibility of preprints and acceleration of research communication as the most important benefits of preprinting. Low reliability and credibility of preprints, sharing results before peer review and premature media coverage are the most significant concerns about preprinting, emphasized in particular by respondents in the life and health sciences. According to respondents, the most crucial strategies to encourage preprinting are integrating preprinting into journal submission workflows and providing recognition for posting preprints.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/k7reb

"Powering Research with Dimensions AI Assistant"

Imagine using AI to leverage the power of Dimensions with the click of a button. That’s exactly what you can do with Dimensions AI Assistant: your interaction with the world’s research knowledge is assisted by a powerful AI that takes you beyond keywords to a semantically rich summary with references, fully contextualizing the results and linking them with the literature. Digital Science has announced a closed beta release of Dimensions AI Assistant, which will allow users to achieve their goals quicker by helping them find the most relevant research and receive relevant synposes, leveraging the power of the Dimensions large language model, Dimensions General Science-BERT, and Open AI’s GPT models.

https://tinyurl.com/4w2jfukt

"Elsevier takes Scopus to the Next Level with Generative AI"

Scopus AI will help early-career researchers and seasoned academics alike through:

Summarized views based on Scopus abstracts: Researchers obtain a concise and trustworthy snapshot of any research topic, complete with academic references, reducing lengthy reading time and the risk of hallucinations.

Easy navigation to “Go Deeper Links” for extended exploration: Scopus AI provides relevant queries for further exploration, leading to hidden insights in various research topics.

Natural language queries: Researchers can ask questions about a subject in a natural, conversational manner.

A soon-to-be-added graphical representation, offering new perspectives of interconnected research themes: Scopus AI visually maps search results, offering a comprehensive overview that allows researchers to navigate complex relationships easily.

https://tinyurl.com/27xxj465

"Does Double Dipping Occur? The Case of Wiley’s Hybrid Journals"

The number of open access articles published in hybrid journals has increased recently. However, there are concerns over the practice of double dipping, when hybrid journals charge for publishing the same article twice, once for subscription and once for open access. To determine whether double dipping occurs, this study examined the relationship between the subscription prices for hybrid journals and the proportions of open access articles in hybrid journals. . . . The findings suggest that article processing charges rise in tandem with increased subscription prices; therefore, university libraries and consortiums must exercise caution when making subscription contracts with publishers.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04800-8