Publishing – Page 14 – DigitalKoans

Paywall: "Which Nationals Use Sci-Hub Mostly?"

Considering the result, the author argues that academic users in South American countries may use Sci-Hub more frequently than their counterparts in the rest of the world. Moreover, users in the Global North also rely on Sci-Hub to complete their research as well. The new evidence on Google Scholar proves the universal use of Sci-Hub across the world.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2023.2193613

Paywall: "When the Big Deal Gets Smaller: Use of ScienceDirect after Cancellations "

This study investigates how article downloads from ScienceDirect changed after Temple University Libraries downsized its all-inclusive Elsevier big deal bundle to a selective custom package. After the libraries lost current-year access to nearly half of Elsevier’s active journals, the total downloads from Elsevier journals declined by 16.2 percent over three years. Combined use of still-subscribed and open access journals fell 10.6 percent in the same three years. . . . Reliance on open access appears to have increased.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/887660

"Science Journals Integrate Dryad to Simplify Data Deposition and Strengthen Scientific Reproducibility"

The Science family journals have announced a partnership with the nonprofit data repository Dryad that simplifies the process by which authors deposit data underlying new work — a critical step to facilitating data’s routine reuse. The partnership is yet another step taken by the Science journals to ensure data the scientific community requires to verify, replicate and reanalyze new research is openly available. . . .

Because the partnership with Dryad integrates Dryad’s platform with the Science family journal’s submission process, authors will have the option to deposit data at Dryad directly from the submission site of any Science family journal. As authors submit research to the journals, they will be prompted about data availability and welcome to deposit their data to any suitable disciplinary repository. But, if data do not yet have a home, authors will have the opportunity to upload their data to Dryad. . . .

To ensure that this service is widely available, the Science journals will cover costs of Dryad data publication for accepted papers.

http://bit.ly/43wtVoD

Paywall: "Going for Gold, Deep in the Red"

Having survived the budget uncertainties following the Great Recession and during the COVID-19 pandemic, libraries are no strangers to the hard work, patience, and luck needed when it comes to budget planning and pushing publishers toward OA. But will libraries ever achieve the ultimate feat of bagging gold OA for all titles in all disciplines? Open access comes at a price; a gold sweep may not be possible as many institutions continue to struggle financially with the after-effects of the pandemic and lower enrollment figures.

http://bit.ly/3MHU5yy

"How Related are Journal Impact and Research Impact? "

The dominance of journal impact factors as a proxy for research quality and impact has been challenged, to the extent that academic impacts are being eroded from definitions of research impact all together. It’s one of many bandwagons that seem logical to jump on, but which don’t necessarily hold up under scrutiny. The publishing community needs to demonstrate that it is a following wind, not a headwind.

http://bit.ly/3GBv0kS

"University of California Agreement with Wiley Expands to All 10 UC Campuses: New Agreement Quadruples the Number of UC Articles Eligible for Free and Open Access in Wiley Journals"

The University of California, which generates nearly 10 percent of U.S. research output, and Wiley, one of the world’s largest publishers, announced today an expansion of their open access agreement. Researchers at all 10 UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) will now receive funding support to publish open access, making significantly more UC research freely available to people around the world.

http://bit.ly/3GYDW4n

"The Politics of Rights Retention"

This article presents a commentary on the recent resurgence of interest in the practice of rights retention in scholarly publishing. Led in part by the evolving European policy landscape, rights retention seeks to ensure immediate access to accepted manuscripts uploaded to repositories. The article identifies a trajectory in the development of rights retention from something that publishers could previously ignore to a practice they are now forced to confront. Despite being couched in the neoliberal logic of market-centric policymaking, I argue that rights retention represents a more combative approach to publisher power by institutions and funders that could yield significant benefits for a more equitable system of open access publishing.

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:52287

"Open Access without Open Access Values: The State of Free and Open Access to Law Reviews"

This study examines 648 currently published student-run journals as of June 2019, to determine the extent of freely available journal issues and whether those journals have adopted open access behaviors including use of Creative Commons licenses, publicly available reuse policies and model agreements, and publication agreements that maximize author rights.

https://bit.ly/3zNbiiE

"Z-Library Plans to Let Users Share Physical Books through ‘Z-Points’"

Z-Library appears to be shrugging off a criminal investigation as if nothing ever happened. The site continues to develop its shadow library and, following a successful fundraiser, now plans to expand its services to the physical book market. Z-Library envisions a book "sharing" market, where its millions of users can pick up paperbacks at dedicated "Z-Points" around the globe.

https://cutt.ly/i7bAHGU

"Do Open Access Mandates Work? A Systematized Review of the Literature on Open Access Publishing Rates"

To encourage the sharing of research, various entities—including public and private funders, universities, and academic journals—have enacted open access (OA) mandates or data sharing policies. It is unclear, however, whether these OA mandates and policies increase the rate of OA publishing and data sharing within the research communities impacted by them. A team of librarians conducted a systematized review of the literature to answer this question. A comprehensive search of several scholarly databases and grey literature sources resulted in 4,689 unique citations. However, only five articles met the inclusion criteria and were deemed as having an acceptable risk of bias. This sample showed that although the majority of the mandates described in the literature were correlated with a subsequent increase in OA publishing or data sharing, the presence of various confounders and the differing methods of collecting and analyzing the data used by the studies’ authors made it impossible to establish a causative relationship.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15444

Essential Reading: Walt Crawford’s Books on Open Access

For over a decade, Walt Crawford been writing books about open access. With one exception published by ALA, they are all freely available as PDF files. What makes Crawford’s books stand apart is his in-depth, incisive investigation of key global open access trends. Some of the recent books were sponsored by SPARC. These books belong in every academic library’s cataloged collection.

Gold Open Access by Country 2016-2021: The Long Tail

This book looks at the long tail of gold OA—for 2021, the 13,714 DOAJ-listed journals that are not published by one of what I call the Big Eleven: eleven publishers or publishing groups, including two university presses and one society, that dominate fee-based OA. You could think of them as Corporate OA, except for the society and universities, and the fact that several traditional publishers such as De Gruyter are included in the long tail.

Chapter 6 of Gold Open Access 2016-2021: Articles in Journals (GOA7) discusses the Big Eleven and the Long Tail; the Big Eleven are named on page 45. The group publishes 17% of the serious journals, but 55% of the 2021 articles and 89% of potential fee (APC) revenues.

Gold Open Access by Country 2015-2020

Gold Open Access by Country 2014-2019

Gold Open Access Journals by Country 2012-2017

Gold Open Access 2016-2021: Articles In Journals (GOA7)

Gold OA continues to grow: by around 1,500 active journals, 170,000 articles, and nearly half a billion dollars in fees in 2021. This study attempts to answer questions about the state of serious gold OA publishing in 2021 (and how it’s changed over the past few years).

The overall picture in 2021:

1,275,212 articles, up from 1,104,179 in 2020 (for the current set of journals), an increase of 15.5%. My estimate is that around 2,200 journals were added to DOAJ during 2021 and around 700 were deleted during the year.

16,620 fully-analyzed journals, of which 15,643 published articles in 2021, for an average of 82 articles per journal (up from 75 in last year’s report).

The usual articles-vs.-journals split continues: 68% of active journals are no-fee, but 69% of articles appeared in fee journals The average cost per article was $1,374 in 2021, up around $170 from 2020.

The rest of this book provides more detail and ways of looking at gold OA. The book is patterned after previous editions.

While some discussions and tables involve the full 16,620 journals, most—where 2021 article counts are fundamental—address only 15,643, ignoring 977 journals with no 2021 articles when checked.

Gold Open Access 2015-2020: Articles in Journals (GOA6)

Gold Open Access 2014-2019: Articles in Journals (GOA5)

Gold Open Access 2013-2018: Articles in Journals (GOA4)

Gold Open Access Journals 2012-2017 (GOA3)

Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2016 (GOAJ2)

Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015

Gray OA 2012-2016: Open Access Journals Beyond DOAJ

Open Access: What You Need to Know Now

Governing Scholar-Led OA Book Publishers: Values, Practices, Barriers

This report develops and focuses on some of the issues we have previously explored within COPIM with regard to community governance, such as the challenges of governing a collective and the relationship of governance to common resources, to explore how these apply in practice to the publication of books by small-to-medium Open Access publishers, as well as what barriers they have faced in implementing their governance models. It presents and discusses the results of six interviews with the small and medium Open Access publishers which make up the ScholarLed consortium. It then offers some recommendations and insights into how other small and medium Open Access publishers might set up and/or improve their governance practices, including how the Open Book Collective might support them in doing so.

https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.e6fcb523

"Guest Post — Why Interoperability Matters for Open Research — And More Than Ever"

The question remains, why have we not achieved more in delivering connectivity across the research system? While funding for this kind of underpinning infrastructure is notable in its absence (or where it is available it is often too temporary in nature), the other major challenge is in securing adoption among the service providers (funders, publishers, and institutions among the key players) that would maximize the use and potential of building those connections. It is notoriously hard for organisations to tweak or adapt existing workflows and legacy systems and to demonstrate the benefits (and hence prioritise the work) at an individual organisation level that may seem obvious at a system level.

https://cutt.ly/K7hxFQz

"What’s Missing? The Role of Community Colleges in Building a More Inclusive Institutional Repository Landscape"

The precise number of community college communities with access to an IR is unknown and certainly higher than ten, but uptake is low. As a result, the rich intellectual outputs generated at these institutions are not openly shared. Repositories provide community college communities with the ability to read content they would not otherwise have access to, but to fulfill the original purposes of open access to "share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich," it’s imperative that the faculty and students at community colleges are recognized as contributors to the scholarly communications landscape and empowered to disseminate their works, via repositories, to the larger knowledge ecosystem

https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.84.4.173

Digital Scholarship Releases New PDF Versions of Its Bibliographies

This spring, Digital Scholarship’s bibliographies in the HTML format were reformatted as single page files with internal navigation. This included all bibliographies that were in HTML format only as well as the HTML versions of paperback books. These new PDFs are in a 12 point font and are designed for printing; however, they also have live links for immediate access. There were no content changes. For a list of all Digital Scholarship publications, see the site map.

Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, v. 3

Altmetrics Bibliography

Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography, v. 2

Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works

Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement

Digital Curation Resource Guide

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, v.7

E-science and Academic Libraries Bibliography

Google Books Bibliography, v. 7

Institutional Repository Bibliography, v. 4

Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals

Open Access Journals Bibliography

Open Access Webliography

Research Data Curation Bibliography, v. 10

Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography

Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, v. 80

Transforming Peer Review Bibliography

Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography

"Towards a Better Understanding of Facebook Altmetrics in LIS Field: Assessing the Characteristics of Involved Paper, User and Post"

These findings indicate that Facebook mentions to LIS papers mainly reflect the institutional level advocacy and attention, with low level of engagement, and could be influenced by several features including collaborative patterns and research topics.

https://doi.org/10.1145/2756406.2756913

Transparent Peer Review Test: "Publishing Review Reports to Reveal and Preserve the Quality and Fairness of the Peer Review Process"

The European Journal of Higher Education seeks to pioneer the policy of ‘transparent peer review’ among higher education journals by publishing anonymous peer review reports to demonstrate the rigour of its peer review process. Starting in April 2023, the European Journal of Higher Education will start a pilot policy to publish the peer review report with the published article. Hence, any submission received after the launch of the policy and accepted for publication will at the time of publication include a link to an open access online peer review report including anonymous peer reviews from all rounds of review, while not including the responses of the authors.

https://doi.org/10.1080/21568235.2023.2192549

"What Constitutes Equitable Data Sharing in Global Health Research? A Scoping Review of the Literature on Low-Income and Middle-Income Country Stakeholders’ Perspectives"

Introduction: Despite growing consensus on the need for equitable data sharing, there has been very limited discussion about what this should entail in practice. As a matter of procedural fairness and epistemic justice, the perspectives of low-income and middle-income country (LMIC) stakeholders must inform concepts of equitable health research data sharing. This paper investigates published perspectives in relation to how equitable data sharing in global health research should be understood.

Methods: We undertook a scoping review (2015 onwards) of the literature on LMIC stakeholders’ experiences and perspectives of data sharing in global health research and thematically analysed the 26 articles included in the review.

Results: We report LMIC stakeholders’ published views on how current data sharing mandates may exacerbate inequities, what structural changes are required in order to create an environment conducive to equitable data sharing and what should comprise equitable data sharing in global health research.

Conclusions: In light of our findings, we conclude that data sharing under existing mandates to share data (with minimal restrictions) risks perpetuating a neocolonial dynamic. To achieve equitable data sharing, adopting best practices in data sharing is necessary but insufficient. Structural inequalities in global health research must also be addressed. It is thus imperative that the structural changes needed to ensure equitable data sharing are incorporated into the broader dialogue on global health research.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2022-010157

With Open Source Software: "How to Build a Publishers’ Catalogue"

As a consortium of six open access presses, ScholarLed had a use case for a publishers’ catalogue that would present all their recent book publications in one catalogue. . . . Fortunately all the presses have included the metadata for their monograph publications in Thoth, the open metadata management and dissemination platform that has been produced as another COPIM [Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs] output. This made it possible to easily conceive of a catalogue published as both a website and a PDF that pulls in and arranges the bibliographic metadata automatically and that can be updated on a regular basis without manual intervention. . . .

Our computational publishing model and workflow allowed us to put together this catalogue prototype very easily using only a few pieces of readily-available open source software: Quarto, Jupyter Notebook, and Git. This provided us an instant framework for web publication that didn’t require editing any HTML or CSS. . . .

Our ScholarLed publishers’ catalogue offers a working prototype of an automatically-updated book that retrieves the data for its content directly from an API. It does so with readily available open source software that can be installed with relative ease by anyone who wants to use this model to create a publication with computational elements.

http://bit.ly/3m1exzz

"Guest Post — Academic Publishers Are Missing the Point on ChatGPT"

On the other hand, publishers would be wise to leave the back door open for authors to use AI tools in order to support their research for two reasons. First, strictly policing the use of these tools would not only be an exercise in futility, but enforcement could quickly become a nightmare. Second, an arms race seems to already be underway to build out software to detect AI writing. Publishers will likely spend ungodly sums of money on these tools, only to be set back by even better models that can outsmart the detectors. Whether that should be our focus is an important question to ponder before diving in headfirst.

https://bit.ly/3nEiYkm

"Controlled Digital Lending Takes a Blow in Court"

The implications of this ruling are potentially profound, and, given the strong lean in the publisher’s favor, they are potentially troubling for libraries and the rights of those who seek to engage with content in our evermore digital and digitized world if the decision stands through the forthcoming appeals. For the significant amount of content that exists in print form and for which there is no publisher-sanctioned digital version available, that content has become effectively walled off from the digital world until it passes into the public domain—essentially for longer than anyone reading this blog is alive. Those who live in close proximity to and have access to world-class institutions with sizable print collections can get access to much of this content. For the vast majority of library users, this will not be the case. Their access will be significantly curtailed, but to paraphrase the ruling, this public interest is secondary to the interests of publishers in exercising their monopoly.

http://bit.ly/40GaNC4

"Fast-Growing Open-Access Journals Stripped of Coveted Impact Factors"

Nearly two dozen journals from two of the fastest growing open-access publishers, including one of the world’s largest journals by volume, will no longer receive a key scholarly imprimatur. On 20 March, the Web of Science database said it delisted the journals along with dozens of others, stripping them of an impact factor, the citation-based measure of quality that, although controversial, carries weight with authors and institutions. . . . Clarivate initially did not name any of the delisted journals or provide specific reasons. But it confirmed to Science the identities of 19 Hindawi journals and two MDPI titles after reports circulated about their removals.

https://bit.ly/3Kjx1ET

"AUPresses Receives NEH Grant to Study Impact of Open Access on Print Sales"

The project seeks to understand empirically whether the availability of OA editions of scholarly books has a quantifiable effect on the sales performance of print editions. While many university presses have pursued experiments with OA publishing, sustainable financing of high-quality, rigorous scholarly publishing operations is a significant concern. The study will look at both OA and traditionally published titles across multiple disciplines from many presses. Findings from the study will be shared publicly in support of scholarly publishers, peer institutions, and associations devoted to humanities scholarship.

"Interoperable Infrastructure for Software and Data Publishing"

Achieving scalable, high-quality, interoperable data and software publishing is possible. There are already builders, some represented by the authorship of this article, that are on the right path, building tools that effectively meet the needs of researchers in an open and pluggable way. One example is InvenioRDM, a flexible and turn-key next-generation research data management repository built by CERN and more than 25 multi-disciplinary partners world-wide; InvenioRDM leverages community standards and supports FAIR practices out of the box. Another example of agnostic, pluggable tooling, in this case for software submission, are the submission workflow tools currently developed in the HERMES project. These allow researchers to automate the publication of software artifacts together with rich metadata, to create software publications following the FAIR Principles for Research Software.

http://bit.ly/42Lc5Oe

"Hybrid Gold Open Access Citation Advantage in Clinical Medicine: Analysis of Hybrid Journals in the Web of Science"

Biomedical fields have seen a remarkable increase in hybrid Gold open access articles. However, it is uncertain whether the hybrid Gold open access option contributes to a citation advantage, an increase in the citations of articles made immediately available as open access regardless of the article’s quality or whether it involves a trending topic of discussion. This study aimed to compare the citation counts of hybrid Gold open access articles to subscription articles published in hybrid journals. The study aimed to ascertain if hybrid Gold open access publications yield an advantage in terms of citations. This cross-sectional study included the list of hybrid journals under 59 categories in the "Clinical Medicine" group from Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR) during 2018–2021. The number of citable items with ‘Gold Open Access’ and ‘Subscription and Free to Read’ in each journal, as well as the number of citations of those citable items, were extracted from JCR. A hybrid Gold open access citation advantage was computed by dividing the number of citations per citable item with hybrid Gold open access by the number of citations per citable item with a subscription. A total of 498, 636, 1009, and 1328 hybrid journals in the 2018 JCR, 2019 JCR, 2020 JCR, and 2021 JCR, respectively, were included in this study. The citation advantage of hybrid Gold open access articles over subscription articles in 2018 was 1.45 (95% confidence interval (CI), 1.24–1.65); in 2019, it was 1.31 (95% CI, 1.20–1.41); in 2020, it was 1.30 (95% CI, 1.20–1.39); and in 2021, it was 1.31 (95% CI, 1.20–1.42). In the ‘Clinical Medicine’ discipline, the articles published in the hybrid journal as hybrid Gold open access had a greater number of citations when compared to those published as a subscription, self-archived, or otherwise openly accessible option.

https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11020021