Publishing – Page 17 – DigitalKoans

"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

"The Continued Problem of URL Decay: An Updated Analysis of Health Care Management Journal Citations"

Objective: This study updates a 2009 study which examined uniform resource locator (URL) decay in health care management journals and seeks to determine whether continued URL availability relates to publication date, resource type, or top-level domain. The authors also provide an analysis of differences in findings between the two study periods.

Methods: The authors collected the URLs of web-based resources cited in articles published in five health care management source journals from 2016 to 2018. The URLs were checked to see if they were still active and then analyzed to determine if continued availability was related to publication date, resource type, or top-level domain.

Results: There were statistically significant differences in URL availability across publication date, resource type, and top-level domain. Domains with the highest rate of decay were .com and .net and the lowest rate were .edu and .gov. As expected, the older the citation, the higher the rate of decay. The overall rate of URL decay decreased from 49.3% to 36.1% between studies.

Conclusion: URL decay in health care management journals has decreased in the last 15 years. Still, URL decay does continue to be a problem. Interestingly, health services policy research journals had a lower rate of decay than practitioner-oriented journals (34.8% vs. 51.7%). Authors, publishers, and librarians should continue to promote the use of digital object identifiers and web archiving and perhaps study and replicate efforts used by health services policy research journals to increase continued URL availability rates.

https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2022.1456

"Society and University Journal Publishers Gradually Progressing Towards New OA Models"

Overall, there’s no question that society and university publishers are progressing in the race to OA. It appears they’re just doing so at a slow and steady pace, likely to avoid stumbling over ongoing sustainability challenges, as revealed in Part 1 of "The OA Diamond Journals Study" from cOAlition S, based on a survey of 1,619 fully-OA journals. Respondents to that survey reported mixed degrees of OA publishing program sustainability, with a little over 40% breaking even and 25% operating at a loss.

http://bit.ly/42UFeqr

Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, Version 3

Digital Scholarship has released the Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, version 3. This bibliography includes over 300 selected English-language articles, books, and technical reports about academic libraries’ digital publishing programs from 1989 though 2022. While academic libraries have published a variety of digital publications during this period, this bibliography primarily covers the open access publishing of scholarly books, journals, and other serials. It provides a brief narrative overview of the early development of these publishing efforts. It covers the establishment of new university presses by academic libraries, especially all-digital open access presses, and the merger or cooperative efforts of libraries and university presses. It also covers the technical publishing infrastructures used by library publishing programs. It includes full abstracts for works under certain Creative Commons Licenses. It is available as a website and a PDF file (52 pages). It includes a Google Translate link.

The bibliography has the following major sections:

https://digital-scholarship.org/alsp/alsp.htm

Digital Scholarship’s website bibliographies have been reformatted as single-page files and a PDF file designed for printing has been made available for each one. They include a Google Translate link.

"In a Swift Decision, Judge Eviscerates Internet Archive’s Scanning and Lending Program"

"At bottom, IA’s fair use defense rests on the notion that lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book entitles the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it in place of the print book, so long as it does not simultaneously lend the print book," Koeltl wrote in a March 24 opinion granting the publisher plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and denying the Internet Archive’s cross-motion. "But no case or legal principle supports that notion. Every authority points in the other direction."

https://cutt.ly/54AdZfY

Millions of Digitized Books May Be Destroyed: "Press Conference Statement: Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive"

Here’s what’s at stake in this case: hundreds of libraries contributed millions of books to the Internet Archive for preservation in addition to those books we have purchased. Thousands of donors provided the funds to digitize them.

The publishers are now demanding that those millions of digitized books, not only be made inaccessible, but be destroyed.

This is horrendous. Let me say it again—the publishers are demanding that millions of digitized books be destroyed.

And if they succeed in destroying our books or even making many of them inaccessible, there will be a chilling effect on the hundreds of other libraries that lend digitized books as we do.

This could be the burning of the Library of Alexandria moment—millions of books from our community’s libraries mdash;gone.

http://bit.ly/3JHMjli

"Guest Post — Open Access for Monographs Is Here. But Are We Ready for It?"

For our next step at UNC Press, we have been helping to develop a new initiative that is essentially a compromise between the legacy model of university press publishing and a fully -funded OA model. Path to Open is a concept modeled on the NEH Fellowship Open Book Program which provides for a three-year embargo period during which presses can participate in conventional cost-recovery activities, including selling print and consumer (e.g., Kindle) eBooks. During this time, JSTOR will be offering the digital versions of these titles to academic libraries and institutions in an exclusive subscription collection. JSTOR will pay presses an estimated $5,000 for each title put into the program.

http://bit.ly/3K4wO88

"Octopus and Research Equals Aim to Break the Publishing Mould"

Instead of fully fledged manuscripts, Octopus and ResearchEquals allow researchers to publish individual units of research—from research questions and hypotheses to code, multimedia and presentations. The concept is called modular publishing, and both sites hope to push academics to think beyond conventional publications as the primary unit of scholarly research by breaking the research cycle into pieces.

https://bit.ly/3Zc7IbR

"Springer Nature Makes Data Sharing Easier with Single Data Policy across All Journals and Books"

Springer Nature has taken a further step forwards in its commitment to open science by requiring mandatory data availability statements (DAS) across its journals portfolio, and introducing its first unified data policy across the books portfolio.

Despite researchers’ support for open data sharing, less than 40% of authors actively make their data available. Researchers tell us this can be down to practical challenges, including a lack of clarity about what is required. Increasingly, governments, funders and research institutes are adopting data sharing requirements in their policies. Encouraging data sharing across all publishing formats recognises this growing need for clearer, more accessible, actionable and measurable data policies. As a longstanding supporter of Open Research, Springer Nature is Introducing DAS as standard for its journal portfolio to promote greater transparency and reproducibility. Adopting a unified policy for books for the first time, is a further exciting step towards encouraging open research practices across all publications and driving forward open science for all.

http://bit.ly/3FNihv9

"The Rapid Growth of Mega-Journals: Threats and Opportunities"

Mega-journals, those that publish large numbers of articles per year,¹ are growing rapidly across science and especially in biomedicine. Although 11 Scopus-indexed journals published more than 2000 biomedical full papers (articles or reviews) in 2015 and accounted for 6% of that year’s literature, in 2022 there were 55 journals publishing more than 2000 full articles, totaling more than 300 000 articles (almost a quarter of the biomedical literature that year). In 2015, 2 biomedical research journals (PLoS One and Scientific Reports) published more than 3500 full articles. In 2022, there were 26 such prolific journals (Table). The accelerating growth of mega-journals creates both threats and opportunities for biomedical science.

http://bit.ly/3nfZhio

"Nothing about Us without Us: the Roles of Diverse Stakeholders in Scientific Publishing"

Publisher codes of ethics, and how they are enforced, should occupy a larger part of the discourse around scientific ethics and, in turn, influence where scientists choose to publish. The current editorial policies of many major scientific journals describe how journals enforce the code of ethics for scientists, not the rules that govern the publishing process itself. Why should scientists ask their journals to publish an editorial policy akin to a newsroom operations ethics policy (https://www.washingtonpost.com/policies-and-standards/)? Publishers play a pivotal role in filtering stories. Through their definitions and weighting of significance/impact/novelty, scientific editors select the stories that get sent out for peer review, pick the peer reviewers, and arbitrate the peer review process. In addition, while scientific institutions are responsible for adjudicating charges of scientific misconduct, journals are responsible for managing retractions. Thus, journals determine who gets published (and when) and set the pace of retractions. In other words, they play multiple roles in scientific governance. Finally, biased publishing outcomes—where a group is underrepresented in the pool of published authors relative to the pool of eligible authors—have been documented at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) (1) and other journals. . . .

In the face of biased publishing outcomes, what should we expect of our publishers? Research is often conducted using money from federally funded grants. The publication fees we pay, if not taken from federal grant funding, are in some way supported by it. As a consequence, we can expect that publishers will meet their responsibility, not just to us, but also to the taxpayers of ensuring fairness in what gets reported. If publishers were to make transparent the principles that guide their decisions, then scientists could use these new policies (and accountability for them) to determine where to publish, rather than using impact factor as a single guiding light.

"At Hearing, Judge Appears Skeptical of Internet Archive’s Scanning and Lending Program"

Over the course of a 90-minute hearing on the parties’ cross motions for summary judgment, Koeltl appeared skeptical that there was sufficient basis in law to support the Internet Archive’s scanning and lending of print library books under a legally untested protocol known as controlled digital lending, and unconvinced that the case is fundamentally about the future of library lending, as Internet Archive attorneys have argued.

http://bit.ly/3FFjVyS

Handbook on Comparative E-lending Policies in Europe

This Handbook overhauls current stereotypes about e-lending. The studies and investigations quoted in the Handbook demonstrate that e-lending in libraries is a formidable instrument for promoting e-books.Results may be short of sensational: when promoted by libraries, an individual title may see a 818% growth in e-book sales and 201% growth in print sales.

The number of e-lending transactions, measured in relation to the number of inhabitants, also shows that the market for e-loan transactions is now dramatically low and has to make great strides for the benefit of all actors in the e-book value chain.

The number of e-lending transactions, measured in relation to the number of inhabitants, also shows that the market for e-loan transactions is now dramatically low and has to make great strides for the benefit of all actors in the e-book value chain. It is now from 10 to 100 times lower than the number of book loans and in some cases, like in France, 400 times less.

bit.ly/3JuFwew

"Book Publishers with Surging Profits Struggle to Prove Internet Archive Hurt Sales"

Today, the Internet Archive (IA) defended its practice of digitizing books and lending those e-books for free to users of its Open Library. In 2020, four of the wealthiest book publishers sued IA, alleging this kind of digital lending was actually "willful digital piracy" causing them "massive harm." But IA’s lawyer, Joseph Gratz, argued that the Open Library’s digitization of physical books is fair use, and publishers have yet to show they’ve been harmed by IA’s digital lending.

bit.ly/3JTMDP2

"The Transformation of the Green Road to Open Access"

(1) Background: The 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative recommended on self-archiving of scientific articles in open repositories as the "green road" to open access. Twenty years later, only one part of the researchers deposits their publications in open repositories; moreover, one part of the repositories’ content is not based on self-archived deposits but on mediated nonfaculty contributions. The purpose of the paper is to provide more empirical evidence on this situation and to assess the impact on the future of the green road. (2) Methods: We analyzed the contributions on the French national HAL repository from more than 1,000 laboratories affiliated to the ten most important French research universities, with a focus on 2020, representing 14,023 contributor accounts and 166,939 deposits. (3) Results: We identified seven different types of contributor accounts, including deposits from nonfaculty staff and import flows from other platforms. Mediated nonfaculty contribution accounts for at least 48% of the deposits. We also identified difference between institutions and disciplines. (4) Conclusions: Our empirical results reveal a transformation of open repositories from self-archiving and direct scientific communication towards research information management. Repositories like HAL are somewhere in the middle of the process. The paper describes data quality as the main issue and major challenge of this transformation.

https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202302.0268.v1

"AI Makes Plagiarism Harder to Detect, Argue Academics — In Paper Written by Chatbot"

An academic paper entitled Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring Academic Integrity in the Era of ChatGPT was published this month in an education journal. . . . What readers — and indeed the peer reviewers who cleared it for publication — did not know was that the paper itself had been written by the controversial AI chatbot ChatGPT.

bit.ly/40kvjZ2

"Funding the Business of Open Access: A Bibliometric Analysis of Article Processing Charges, Research Funding and the Revenues of the Oligopoly of Publishers"

Since the early 2010s, more than half of peer-reviewed journal articles have been published by the so-called oligopoly of academic publishers — Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. These publishers are now increasingly charging fees for open access journals, especially given the rise of funder OA mandates. It is worthwhile to examine the amount of revenue generated through OA fees since many of the journals with the most expensive article processing charges are owned by the oligopoly. This study aims to estimate the amount of article processing charges for gold and hybrid open access articles in journals published by the oligopoly of academic publishers, which acknowledge funding from the Canadian Tri-Agencies between 2015 and 2018. The Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications mandates that all funded research for Canadian Institute of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grantees be made available as OA. To comply, grantees will often use grant funds to pay OA fees, or APCs. During the four-year period analyzed, a total of 6,892 gold and 4,097 hybrid articles that acknowledge Tri-Agency funding were identified, for which the total list prices amount to $USD 25.3 million ($13.1 for gold and $12.2 for hybrid).

bit.ly/3THSB9f

Open Access Policies in Latin America, the Caribbean and the European Union Progress towards a Political Dialogue

Latin America and the Caribbean and the European Union are strategic regions for one another and natural partners to collaborate in the development of research and innovation policy priorities such as open science. This work describes the open access policies for scientific production that have been developed in LAC and in the EU, analyses the common challenges and convergence avenue for both regions to establish a policy dialogue, and proposes specific recommendations for a joint policy action on which to base intra-LAC and EU-LAC collaboration. These are structured into 4 priority objectives broken down into 7 actions and 19 concrete measures.

https://op.europa.eu/s/yefB

"Open Access Citation Advantage? A Local Study at a Large Research University"

This study examines the open access citation advantage of gold open access (OA) journal articles published at a large U.S. research university. Most studies that examine the open access citation advantage focus on specific journals, disciplines, countries or global output. Local citation patterns may differ from these larger patterns. . . . This study reports on a method and compares average citation counts for subscription and gold OA journal articles using Web of Science. Gold OA physics journals showed a definite open access citation advantage, whereas other disciplines showed no difference or no open access citation advantage.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2017.14505401126

"Open Access Charges — Continued Consolidation and Increases"

Publishers that only publish fully open journals (the group of bars to the left) have historically charged lower APCs than their mixed-model siblings (shown on the right). However, the fully OA prices of the OA-only publishers have caught up over the last few years and are now slightly higher than the fully OA prices of mixed-model publishers. Although not shown here, our data allows us to separate out fully OA imprints (such as BioMed Central) from their parent publishers. These have followed similar trends to the prices of OA-only publishers but are slightly cheaper than their OA-only siblings.

bit.ly/3JDRkfF

Only 10% Fully Understand "Preprint": "Framing COVID-19 Preprint Research as Uncertain: A Mixed-Method Study of Public Reactions"

Unlike hedging, preprint disclosure had no impact on audience message evaluations, nor vaccine attitudes and intentions. In one sense, this is a positive finding in that transparency about preprint status is unlikely to produce negative public reactions. Yet a likely explanation for the null effects is that most participants lacked the knowledge to differentiate between preprints and peer-reviewed research and did not understand this disclosure as an indicator of preliminary science. The qualitative data supported this explanation. When asked how they interpret the term "preprint" when they see it in a scientific news article, participants’ responses indicated that most had a limited understanding of the concept, even among those who received the preprint disclosure message with a brief explanation of the term. In total, only 10% of participants provided definitions of preprint that aligned with those accepted by the scholarly community. Only 15% described the term as an indicator of uncertain or preliminary evidence.

https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2023.2164954

"Do Altmetric Scores Reflect Article Quality? Evidence from the UK Research Excellence Framework 2021"

Altmetrics are web-based quantitative impact or attention indicators for academic articles that have been proposed to supplement citation counts. This article reports the first assessment of the extent to which mature altmetrics from Altmetric.com and Mendeley associate with individual article quality scores. It exploits expert norm-referenced peer review scores from the UK Research Excellence Framework 2021 for 67,030+ journal articles in all fields 2014–2017/2018, split into 34 broadly field-based Units of Assessment (UoAs). Altmetrics correlated more strongly with research quality than previously found, although less strongly than raw and field normalized Scopus citation counts. Surprisingly, field normalizing citation counts can reduce their strength as a quality indicator for articles in a single field. For most UoAs, Mendeley reader counts are the best altmetric (e.g., three Spearman correlations with quality scores above 0.5), tweet counts are also a moderate strength indicator in eight UoAs (Spearman correlations with quality scores above 0.3), ahead of news (eight correlations above 0.3, but generally weaker), blogs (five correlations above 0.3), and Facebook (three correlations above 0.3) citations, at least in the United Kingdom. In general, altmetrics are the strongest indicators of research quality in the health and physical sciences and weakest in the arts and humanities.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24751

"Transparency in Conducting and Reporting Research: A Survey of Authors, Reviewers, and Editors across Scholarly Disciplines"

Calls have been made for improving transparency in conducting and reporting research, improving work climates, and preventing detrimental research practices. To assess attitudes and practices regarding these topics, we sent a survey to authors, reviewers, and editors. We received 3,659 (4.9%) responses out of 74,749 delivered emails. We found no significant differences between authors’, reviewers’, and editors’ attitudes towards transparency in conducting and reporting research, or towards their perceptions of work climates. Undeserved authorship was perceived by all groups as the most prevalent detrimental research practice, while fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and not citing prior relevant research, were seen as more prevalent by editors than authors or reviewers. Overall, 20% of respondents admitted sacrificing the quality of their publications for quantity, and 14% reported that funders interfered in their study design or reporting. While survey respondents came from 126 different countries, due to the survey’s overall low response rate our results might not necessarily be generalizable. Nevertheless, results indicate that greater involvement of all stakeholders is needed to align actual practices with current recommendations.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270054

"ChatGPT and a New Academic Reality: Artificial Intelligence-Written Research Papers and the Ethics of the Large Language Models in Scholarly Publishing"

The history and principles behind ChatGPT and similar models are discussed. This technology is then discussed in relation to its potential impact on academia and scholarly research and publishing. ChatGPT is seen as a potential model for the automated preparation of essays and other types of scholarly manuscripts. Potential ethical issues that could arise with the emergence of large language models like GPT-3. . . and its usage by academics and researchers, are discussed and situated within the context of broader advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing for research and scholarly publishing.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24750