Publishing – Page 16 – DigitalKoans

"10 Trends I Observed Interviewing 10 Publishing Executives about the Future of Academic Books"

If ten years ago, publishers sold most of their books to libraries and book stores, today Amazon leads sales by a large margin. Some publishers do more than half of their total sales on Amazon, making them quite vulnerable and susceptible to the algorithmic tweaks of the commercial behemoth. To make things worse, the vast majority of publishers have no direct line of communication with Amazon, so there is no way to negotiate better terms and conditions or report issues. This has had far reaching implications including the type of content (more trade titles) that these publishers now prioritize (see more on this below).

https://bit.ly/3Wtfped

"European Scholarly Journals from Small- and Mid-Size Publishers: Mapping Journals and Public Funding Mechanisms"

This study investigates the relationship between scholarly journal publishing and public funding, specifically concerning the context of small- and mid-sized journal publishers in European countries. As part of the movement towards open science, an increasing number of journals globally are free to both read and publish in, which increases the need for journals to seek other resources instead of subscription income. The study includes two separate components, collecting data separately for each European country (including transcontinental states): (1) the volume and key bibliometric characteristics of small- and mid-sized journal publishers and (2) information about country-level public funding mechanisms for scholarly journals. The study found that there are 16,387 journals from small- and mid-sized publishers being published in European countries, of which 36 per cent are already publishing open access. There is a large diversity in how countries reserve and distribute funds to journals, ranging from continuous inclusive subsidies to competitive grant funding or nothing at all.

https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scac081

"’More Than 600,000 Students and Teachers Use Z-Library’"

Pirate eBook repository Z-Library has shared some interesting data concluding that more than 600,000 students and scholars use the site. This is likely an underestimation, as the findings are based on email addresses. The United States is excluded from the analysis, Z-Library notes, due to the criminal prosecution of two alleged operators of the site.

https://bit.ly/4326X86

Council of the European Union: "Council Calls for Transparent, Equitable, and Open Access to Scholarly Publications"

In its conclusions, the Council calls on the Commission and the member states to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers. Some Member States have introduced secondary publication rights into their national copyright legislation, enabling open access to scholarly publications which involve public funds. The Council encourages national open access policies and guidelines to make scholarly publications immediately openly accessible under open licences. The conclusions acknowledge positive developments in terms of monitoring progress, like within the framework of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and suggest including open science monitoring in the European Research Area monitoring mechanism. The Council conclusions also encourage Member States to support the pilot programme Open Research Europe (to create a large-scale open access research publishing service), the use of open-source software and standards, to recognise and reward peer review activities in the assessment of researchers as well as to support the training of researchers on peer-review skills and on intellectual property rights.

https://bit.ly/3MS2leY

Paywall: "Automated Scholarly Paper Review: Concepts, Technologies, and Challenges"

In this paper, we propose the concept and pipeline of automated scholarly paper review (ASPR) and review the relevant literature and technologies of achieving a full-scale computerized review process. On the basis of the review and discussion, we conclude that there is already corresponding research and preliminary implementation at each stage of ASPR. We further look into the challenges in ASPR with the existing technologies.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2023.101830

"Gold Open Access Output and Expenditures in the United States in the Past Decade"

In this study we demonstrated some of the main differences in Gold Open Access publications and expenditures across various states and institutions in the United States. Our data shows that the majority of states published between 1,000 – 7,000 Gold Open Access publications and spent up to 6million dollars in the past 10 years. However, there are some noteworthy outliers such as Washington, Minnesota and Maryland with relatively low number of publications and high expenditures while states such as California, Ohio and especially New York which published relatively high number of Gold Open Access papers with relatively low costs comparatively.

https://doi.org/10.55835/64410a4a643beb0d90fc4707

"Books in a Bubble.: Assessing the OAPEN Library Collection "

Open access infrastructure for books is becoming more mature, and it is being used by an in-creasing number of people. The growing importance of open access infrastructure leads to more interest in sustainability, governance and impact assessment. For this paper, we will assess the OAPEN Library. In the spring of 2022, it passed the milestone of 20,000 titles. This was a good moment to evaluate the core asset of the OAPEN Library: its collection.

The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible books and chapters, all of which have undergone external peer review. In other words, it functions as an academic library and in our assessment we should treat it as such. However, it is an online library and the limitations of physical books do not play a part. Shelf space is not to be considered.

More important is the question of how well the collection meets the needs of its users. The OAPEN Library sees global usage; the collection reflects this by offering titles in over 50 languages. The collection is not focused on a specific subject area, but the choice of medium — books and chapters, not journals and articles — is more strongly associated with the humanities and social sciences. It does not track its users, but the supporters of the OAPEN Libraries are globally dis-tributed academic institutions, scientific and scholarly funders and publishers. An assessment of the OAPEN Library should therefore take into account the diversity of languages, subjects and stakeholders.

https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-498

"PeerJ Announces a New Open Access Model and the University of Bath as Their First Institutional Partner"

PeerJ has announced a new Open Access model and their first institutional partner. The award-winning publisher intends to move towards collective action for globally equitable Open Access, and their first step to this goal is a new model for institutional partners — Annual Institutional Memberships (AIMs). AIMs remove payment barriers to Open Access for authors, reduces the administration of Open Access payments, and guarantees value for partners. The University of Bath is PeerJ’s first partner in this new program, which will provide unlimited publishing for Bath’s faculty for a flat annual fee.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/989462

"A Scoping Review on the Use and Acceptability of Preprints"

Preprints are open and accessible scientific manuscript or report that has not been submitted to a peer reviewed journal. The value and importance of preprints has grown since its contribution during the public health emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic. Funders and publishers are establishing their position on the use of preprints, in grant applications and publishing models. However, the evidence supporting the use and acceptability of preprints varies across funders, publishers, and researchers. The purpose of this scoping review was to explore the current evidence on the use and acceptability of preprints by publishers, funders, and the research community throughout the research lifecycle.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/nug4p

"Project MUSE Announces Strategic Organizational Changes"

To better align with the changing scholarly communications landscape, MUSE has created a new department for Library & Publisher Partnerships. With many of our partner publishers now reporting to libraries, and many libraries now delving into publishing activities, MUSE seeks to create more connections between these two key constituencies. Kelley Squazzo has been appointed Director of Library & Publisher Partnerships, and will oversee both the current publisher relations and library sales teams at MUSE.

https://about.muse.jhu.edu/news/new-organization

How to Save ~ $2.5 Billion: "Saving Time and Money in Biomedical Publishing: The Case for Free-Format Submissions with Minimal Requirements"

By calculating average researcher salaries in the European Union and the USA, and the time spent on reformatting articles, we estimated that ~ 230 million USD were lost in 2021 alone due to reformatting articles. Should the current practice remain unchanged within this decade, we estimate ~ 2.5 billion USD could be lost between 2022 and 2030—solely due to reformatting articles after a first editorial desk rejection.

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-02882-y

"Unpicking Subscribe to Open"

Tricia Miller and Andrea Lopez explain how the [Subscribe to Open] model benefits everyone in the scholarly community.. . .The way S2O works is that existing institutional customers continue to subscribe to the journals. With sufficient support, every new volume is immediately converted to OA under a Creative Commons license and is available for everyone to read and re-use. If support is insufficient, the paywall is retained. The ethos of the model is "equity": there are no fees to publish and no barriers to readership, and it can be applied by journals in any field of research.

https://bit.ly/41nGqjW

Open Science: A Practical Guide for Early-Career Researchers

Beginning researchers are an important link in the transition to Open Science, so this guide is aimed at PhD candidates, Research Master Students, and early-career researchers from all disciplines at Dutch universities and research institutes. [This guide will be very useful to non-Dutch researchers.] It is designed to accompany researchers in every step of their research, from the phase of preparing your research project and discovering relevant resources (chapter 2) to the phase of data collection and analysis (chapter 3), writing and publishing articles, data, and other research output (chapter 4), and outreach and assessment (chapter 5). Every chapter provides you with the best tools and practices to implement immediately.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7716152

"Sustainable Futures for OA Books: The Open Book Collective"

This article describes and explains the need for the work of the Open Book Collective (OBC). The OBC is a major output of the COPIM project (Community-Led Infrastructures for Open Access Monographs). The collective will bring together diverse small-to-medium open access (OA) publishers, open publishing service providers, libraries, and other research institutions to create a new, mutually supportive, and interdependent community space and platform designed to sustainthe future of OA book publishing. The OBC is founded upon equitable, community-led governance and helping publishers move beyond Book Processing Charges (BPCs). Central to the functioning of the Open Book Collective is an online platform that will make it far quicker and easier for libraries and other potential subscribers to compare, evaluate, and subscribe to different OA publishers and open service providers via membership packages. The OBC supports small-to-medium OA publishers by way of the COPIM (Community-Led Publication Infrastructures for Open Access Books) philosophy of "scaling small." This allows publishers and other members to operate sustainably and collaboratively whilst retaining their diverse and singular editorial missions, rather than operating from philosophies centered on economic growth, competition, and monopoly.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3372

"Open Access at a Crossroads: Library Publishing and Bibliodiversity"

The open access movement has gained momentum since the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) first launched twenty years ago. Notably, there has been a drastic increase in the number of open access articles. Concerns have been raised about equality and diversity issues, however, for researchers without an affiliation (e.g. independent, unemployed and retired researchers) and researchers on the "scientific periphery" who are excluded from the gold open access model. This article argues that the gold open access model is destructive to the knowledge production ecosystem by addressing the importance of bibliodiversity and the ways in which library publishing can contribute to sustainable and equitable knowledge production.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.613

"Open Access to Books — the Perspective of a Non-profit Infrastructure Provider"

This article describes the open access (OA) book platforms OAPEN Library and Directory of Open AccessBooks (DOAB), based on 1.the development and activities of OAPEN in the first ten years; 2. the underlying technical approach behind the platforms; 3. the current role of OAPEN and DOAB and future outlook.

OAPEN started out as a project funded by the European Commission, and become a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2011. It hosts, disseminates and preserves open access books. OA book publishing has been explored in several pilot projects. Its current collection contains over 24,000 documents. DOAB launched in 2012, inspired and supported by DOAJ. It became a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2019, owned by the OAPEN Foundationand OpenEdition. It’s current collection contains close to 60,000 titles.

The data model of both platforms is optimised for a multilingual collection and supports funding information. Ingesting books has been optimised to support a wide array of publishers and the dissemination of books takes into account search engines; libraries and aggregators and other organisations. The usage has grown in the last years, to 1 million downloads per month.

The future developments entail increased support of research funders with the establishment of a FunderForum and multi-year research into policy development. DOAB will invest more in bibliodiversity, by adding more emphasis on African and Asian countries. Also,DOAB will roll out its Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM).

OAPEN and DOAB will continue to work on developing reliable infrastructures, policy development and quality assurance around open access books.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3303

"The MIT Press Receives $10 Million Endowment Gift for Open Access to Knowledge"

The new fund will support the MIT Press’s ground-breaking efforts to publish open access books and journals in fields ranging from science and technology to the social sciences, arts, and humanities. It will also help the MIT Press continue to develop tools, models, and resources that make scholarship more accessible to researchers and other readers around the world. . . .

Arcadia is providing an outright endowment gift of $5 million, as well as a $5 million “challenge” gift to incentivize other funders by matching their support of MIT’s open publishing activities.

https://bit.ly/3B5SWKb

"EU Ready to Back Immediate Open Access without Author Fees"

The EU is ready to agree that immediate open access to papers reporting publicly funded research should become the norm, without authors having to pay fees, and that the bloc should support non-profit scholarly publishing models.

In a move that could send shockwaves through commercial scholarly publishing, the positions are due to be adopted by the Council of the EU member state governments later this month.

https://cutt.ly/x6yTrFW

"Springer Nature Doublespeak"

Let’s take a close look at what SN says in its advice on this matter to authors:

"Springer Nature only ever assesses manuscripts on their editorial merit. If primary research manuscripts contain Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) language, they will not be rejected on the grounds of its inclusion, and we will not remove that text before publication if it is included in a section that is a normal part of the published primary research article."

The information gets off to a good start. Assessing manuscripts on editorial merit alone is something any author would want to be reassured about. Equally, authors will be pleased to learn that, even if they include rights retention language, SN will not amend the author’s text by removing the RR statement that the author included in the text they created and provided at no charge to SN for publication. So far, so good. The information continues:

"Authors should note, however, that manuscripts containing statements about open licensing of accepted manuscripts (AMs) can only be published via the immediate gold open access (OA) route, to ensure that authors are not making conflicting licensing commitments, and can comply with any funder or institutional requirements for immediate OA."

This is where things start to get tricksy. Translation &mdash: if the author assigns a prior licence to their AAM and submits the manuscript to a SN subscription journal that also offers an Open Access (OA) option (sometimes known as a hybrid journal), then the publisher will only accept it if the author pays for OA publication (sometimes known as ‘gold’ OA). Mind you, SN is not rejecting the manuscript outright; it’s just that they will ONLY accept it if the author pays. So by extension, if they don’t pay, SN won’t publish the paper, which amounts to a rejection. However hard I try, I can’t seem to tally "only be published via the immediate gold open access (OA) route" with "only accepting manuscripts on their editorial merit." The wording is slippery here. Like those politicians, SN doesn’t ACTUALLY state that if you don’t, won’t or can’t pay, they will reject your paper. But in practice, that is exactly what they imply. This is pure smoke and mirrors.

https://bit.ly/44rWrbr

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

"Supporting Diamond Open Access Journals. Interest and Feasibility of Direct Funding Mechanisms"

More and more academics and governements consider that the open access model based on Article Processing Charges (APC) is problematic, not only due to the inequalities it generates and reinforces, but also because it has become unsustainable and even opposed to open access values. They consider that scientific publishing based on a model where both authors and readers do not pay, the so-called Diamond, or non-APC model, should be developed and supported. However, beyond the display of such a support on an international scale, the landscape of Diamond journals is rather in the form of loosely connected archipelagos, and not systematically funded. This article explores the practical conditions to implement a direct funding mechanism to such journals, that is reccurent money provided by a funder to support the publication process. Following several recommendations from institutional actors in the open access world, we consider the hypothesis that such a funding would be fostered by research funding organizations (RFOs), which have been essential to the expansion of the APC model, and now show interest in supporting other models. Based on a questionnaire survey sent to more than 1000 Diamond Open Access journals, this article analyzes their financial needs, as well as their capacity to interact with funders. It is structured around four issues regarding the implementation of a direct funding model: do Diamond journals really make use of money, and to what end? Do they need additional money? Are they able to engage monetary transactions? Are they able to meet RFOs visibility requirements? We show that a majority of OA Diamond journals could make use of a direct funding mechanism with certain adjustments. We conclude on the challenges that such a financial stream would spur.

https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.05.03.539231

"Review of Research on Predatory Scientific Publications from Scopus Database between 2012 and 2022"

This study also reveals the complexity of issues and research trends around the topic of predatory scientific publications, including the review process for scientific journals, publication fees and article processing charges, open science and open-access publications, and the like and related topics such as the impact on scholars in developing countries and academic ethics. Finally, this article provides several recommendations, namely, the need for more efficient criteria to evaluate the quality of scientific journals, more public communication on the importance of ethics in research and publication, and a greater awareness among scholars and organizations of the implications of the "predator" issue in scientific publishing.

https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp-2022-0045

"Spain Adopts National Open Access Strategy"

Spain has approved a four-year national strategy for open science, under which all outputs of publicly financed research will made available free upon publication.

Under the strategy open access will become the default mode for all research funded directly or indirectly, with public funds. . . .

A budget of €23.8 million in 2023 will be maintained annually until 2027.

https://bit.ly/414w2gY

Paywall: "’Significant Reservations’ on UK’s Springer Nature Open-Access Deal"

These concerns centred on the high cost of publishing open access outside the agreement and limited transparency, particularly regarding how Springer Nature’s article-processing charges (APCs) are calculated, with gold open access for Nature priced at £8,490. Springer Nature was one of several major publishers — along with Elsevier — which opted in November not to participate in Plan S’ Journal Comparison Service, in which journals shared information about their costs and services.

https://bit.ly/44nG8wf

Academic Publishing and Open Access. What Does Economics Teach Us?

While the gold regime seems the most natural way to achieve open access, a generalized switch to open access may also have undesired consequences: projections indeed suggest that a massive move towards the gold regime would generate an explosion in the amount of APC unless there are controls to limit market power. Beside the sharp increase in APC, the shift to gold open access may create conflicts of interest for publishers given that their income comes from authors and may alter the quality of publications. The green regime, by introducing competition between the journal’s version of an article and a free public version, seems an efficient way to reduce market power while expanding access.

https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04080573

"What Can I Do with This? Indicators of Usage Rights in the User Interface "

With the continued push towards open access (OA) and the complicated nature of copyright law, users are often left wondering what they can do with the scholarly articles they find. Creative Commons (CC) licenses are the predominant mechanism for communicating usage rights; however, finding the CC license information — or being confident that there is not any — can be a challenge. Today we report on a project to investigate how publisher platforms represent CC licenses for OA and non-OA journal articles. We looked at how publishing platforms indicate usage rights for articles in results displays as well as in full-text formats.

https://bit.ly/3HwTZq1