Category: Publishing

"Recalibrating the Scope of Scholarly Publishing: A Modest Step in a Vast Decolonization Process"


By analyzing 25,671 journals largely absent from common journal counts, as well as Web of Science and Scopus, this study demonstrates that scholarly communication is more of a global endeavor than is commonly credited. These journals, employing the open source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS), have published 5.8 million items; they are in 136 countries, with 79.9% in the Global South and 84.2% following the OA diamond model (charging neither reader nor author). A substantial proportion of journals operate in more than one language (48.3%), with research published in a total of 60 languages (led by English, Indonesian, Spanish, and Portuguese). The journals are distributed across the social sciences (45.9%), STEM (40.3%), and the humanities (13.8%). For all their geographic, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity, 1.2% are indexed in the Web of Science and 5.7% in Scopus. On the other hand, 1.0% are found in Cabells Predatory Reports, while 1.4% show up in Beall’s questionable list. This paper seeks to both contribute and historically situate expanded scale and diversity of scholarly publishing in the hope that this recognition may assist humankind in taking full advantage of what is increasingly a global research enterprise.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00228

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"Non-Fungible Token (NFT) in the Academic and Open Access Publishing Environment: Considerations towards Science-Friendly Scenarios"


The article describes the use and possible value creation of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) in the academic and open access publishing environment. It defines NFTs, describes disadvantages and possible solutions, especially in the intended scientific environment. An overview of existing NFT service providers from the publishing environment illustrates that there is not yet a suitable one for researchers. Accordingly, three possible scenarios are shown where NFT services could be located in a science-friendly way. One would be with library- or scholarly-led university presses, repositories, and other publication infrastructures (such as OJS or OMP). Another would be to use centralizing and channelling article submission platforms with which universities have contracts, such asChronosHub. The third and broadest approach would be through Digital ObjectIdentifier (DOI) registration agencies such as ChronosHub and DataCite, although complexities come into play here due to the triangular relationship with publishers registering DOIs (some of them having exclusive usage rights transferred to themselves). This complexity could be reduced by registeringNFTs only for open access publications with a Creative Commons Attribution license. A summary and outlook provide an overview of open questions and initial starting points to get started.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.2574

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"FAIRifying a Scholarly Publishing Service: Methodology Based on the OpenEdition’s Internal FAIR Audit"


The FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) constitute a guide whose aim is to improve the management of digital scholarly resources. Nevertheless, the literature regarding data services other than data repositories is still scarce.OpenEdition is a digital infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) that carried out an internal full review to assess the degree of FAIRness of its activities. The objective of this paper is to present the methodology employed by OpenEdition’s team and the recommendations for the FAIRification of a publishing system, and hence, the elements for the FAIR Publishing Toolkit. The FAIR review was conducted in three main phases: preparation, assessment, and result phase, which listed the recommendations for the FAIR principles implementation. The preparation phase gathered the available information to define the perimeter of the FAIR review. It comprised two steps: the landscape study and the exam of actual use cases. The assessment phase contextualized the FAIR principles according to the scholarly publishing context, defined the datasets to be analyzed, carried outa FAIR maturity review per dataset, and analyzed the state of the art of some important FAIR-related elements. The result phase produced the recommendations, organized as priorities and extended objectives. The priority recommendations regard persistent identifiers and licensing policies. The extended objectives focus on authors’ information management, controlled vocabularies, machine-actionability, and Digital Management Plans.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.1540

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"Ten Recommended Practices for Managing Preprints in Generalist and Institutional Repositories"


Currently, there are numerous gaps in geographic and domain coverage and some authors will choose to deposit their research outputs into another type of repository, such as an institutional or generalist repository. . . . To address these gaps, a COAR-ASAPbio Working Group on Preprint in Repositories identified ten recommended practices for managing preprints across three areas: linking, discovery, and editorial processes. While we acknowledge that many of these practices are not currently in use by institutional and generalist repositories, we hope that these recommendations will encourage repositories around the world that collect preprints to begin to apply them locally.

https://cutt.ly/R0gursT

Full report

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"Comparison of Clinical Study Results Reported in medRxiv Preprints vs Peer-reviewed Journal Articles"


Most clinical studies posted as preprints on medRxiv and subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals had concordant study characteristics, results, and final interpretations. With more than three-fourths of preprints published in journals within 24 months, these results may suggest that many preprints report findings that are consistent with the final peer-reviewed publications.

https://cutt.ly/k0gyQOv

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"Adding Equity to Transformative Agreements and Journal Subscriptions — The Read & Let Read Model"


Not only should libraries pay for access to that number of articles in the next year, they should multiply it by two. This will mean that likely about half the prepaid article uses will go unclaimed by a libraries’ community during the coverage year. To justify the "double" payment, these unclaimed uses shall be made available for any online reader during the following year. . . . I call this plan Read & Let Read (R&LR).

bit.ly/3iGSgoz

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"Evaluation of Publication of COVID-19–Related Articles Initially Presented as Preprints"


In this study, we identified 3343 COVID-19–related preprints posted on medRxiv in 2020. Our March 2022 search indicated that 1712 of those preprints (51.2%) were subsequently published in the peer-reviewed literature; this number increased to 1742 (52.1%) when we repeated the search in October 2022. Not considering January 2020, in which only 1 article on COVID-19 was posted, the rate of subsequent publication in a scientific journal ranged from 43.5% (94 of 216 preprints; observed in March 2020) to 60.6% (177 of 292 preprints posted in August 2020). The Table shows the top 25 of 579 peer-reviewed journals in which these preprints were published; 827 preprints (47.5%) were subsequently published in quartile 1 journals (Figure).

bit.ly/3HprhIq

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"Open Access Journals Lack Image Accessibility Considerations in Author Guidelines"


Using image accessibility and alt text as a lens, our objective was to evaluate how open access journals incorporate disability accessibility as part of open access publishing. Using a random sample of 300 English language open access journals, we assessed author guidelines to understand image requirements for submissions and open access statements to understand how journals conceive of openness and accessibility. We found that most open access journals do not include disability accessibility elements in their guidelines to authors when submitting images as part of their scholarship. While over half the journals had required parameters for image submission, none of them required alt text. And while the majority of journals included the word 'access' or 'accessibility' in their open access statements, almost none included disability or inclusion related terms.

https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/zsjqw

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"Amazon, Publishers Seek to Knock Out Refiled E-book Price-Fixing Suit"


In separate court filings this week, lawyers for Amazon and the Big Five publishers said that a revived class action suit accusing them of colluding to fix e-book prices is not significantly different from the case that was dismissed in September for lack of evidence, and should not be allowed to go forward.

bit.ly/3W1KlRf

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Wolters Kluwer: The Path to Open Medicine: Driving Global Health Equity through Medical Research


The paper is divided into three parts. Part 1 traces the historical events that led to the modern system of scientific research, funding, knowledge dissemination, and recognition, which largely confines health and medical knowledge production to those in HICs [high income countries]. By understanding our shared past and the rise of structural barriers to global health equity, we can better inform our shared path to dismantle them. Part 2 takes a clear-eyed look at where the scientific community is now. Are the ideals of Open Medicine playing out as envisioned? Are the benefits of Open Medicine shared amongst all of humanity, or with only a select few? Lastly, Part 3 offers ideas and recommendations for all stakeholders to chart a path to bring Open Medicine into alignment with its goals and aspirations.

https://cutt.ly/E15vETj

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John Willinsky: Copyright’s Broken Promise: How to Restore the Law’s Ability to Promote the Progress of Science


In Copyright’s Broken Promise, John Willinsky presents the case for reforming copyright law so that it supports, rather than impedes, public access to research and scholarship. He draws on the legal strategy of statutory licensing to set out the terms and structures by which the Copyright Act could ensure that publishers are fairly compensated for providing immediate open access.

https://cutt.ly/E15zPXH

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"Institute of Physics Publishing Strikes Unlimited Publishing Deal with Big Ten Academic Alliance"


Strengthening the commitment to opening research, IOP Publishing (IOPP) has agreed to a three-year unlimited open publishing agreement with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) consortium in the United States (US). Beginning January 2023, the agreement enables affiliated researchers to publish unlimited Open Access (OA) papers at no cost to them. . . . During the agreement, authors affiliated with Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions will be able to make their research openly accessible to the global community immediately after publication while retaining their copyright.

https://cutt.ly/u19NN2u

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"Free and Open-Source Automated Open Access Preprint Harvesting"


Universities are attempting to ensure that all of their research is publicly accessible because of funding mandates. Many universities have established campus open access (OA) repositories but are struggling with how to upload millions of manuscripts under numerous license agreements while also linking metadata to make them discoverable. To do this manually requires around 15 minutes per manuscript from an experienced librarian. The time and cost to do this campus-wide is prohibitive. To radically reduce the time and costs of this process and to harvest all past work, this article reports on the development and testing of a free and open source (FOSS) JavaScript-based application, aperta-accessum, which does the following: 1) harvests names and emails from a department’s faculty webpage; 2) identifies scholars’ Open Researcher and Contributor Identifiers (ORCID iDs); 3) obtains digital object identifiers (DOIs) of publications for each scholar; 4) checks for existing copies in an institution’s OA repository; 5) identifies the legal opportunities to provide OA versions of all of the articles not already in the OA repository; 6) sends authors emails requesting a simple upload of author manuscripts; and 7) adds link-harvested metadata from DOIs with uploaded preprints into a bepress repository; the code can be modified for additional repositories. The results of this study show that, in the administrative time needed to make a single document OA manually, aperta-accessum can process approximately five entire departments worth of peer-reviewed articles. Following best practices discussed, it is clear that this open-source OA harvester enables institutional library’s stewardship of OA knowledge on a mass scale for radically reduced costs.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.14421

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Paywall: "Ratios for Evaluating Full-Text Journal Article Access: A Quantitative Study"


This article proposes a methodology for systematically assessing the cost of journal subscriptions. The authors of the paper. . . established ratios comparing the list costs of journal articles as advertised by publishers against the cost per article of journal articles available in aggregated collections in library databases. . . The researchers propose that the ratios can be used by libraries wishing to apply a standard methodology for assessing journal packages containing full-text articles.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2022.2139331

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"Texas Universities Reach Historic Deal with Elsevier: TLCUA Saves Texas Universities Millions Collectively"


All TLCUA members will receive a discount on journal subscriptions—some as high as 30%—while still maintaining significant amounts of access to journals and combined, will realize a savings of over $4.75M annually. Beyond initial cost savings, Elsevier agreed to a maximum annual increase of 2% over the course of the license agreement, with some years as low as 0%, which is significantly lower than industry standard. . . . TLCUA and Elsevier have agreed to partner on a pilot project to revert ownership of journal articles back to original authors—and not just those at TLCUA-member institutions. Currently, authors transfer copyright of their work in exchange for that work being published. This pilot will provide for rights to go back to authors after a period of time that will be collaboratively determined with Elsevier. . . . Further, all TLCUA-member authors who choose to publish their work under an open access license will have access to discounted author publication charges (APCs). TLCUA also negotiated a license template that removed non-disclosure terms, restrictions on sharing usage data, and 44-year-old limitations on interlibrary loans (i.e., CONTU Guidelines) to expand library collaboration and improve how libraries can share information on journal usage.

https://cutt.ly/G1Yu8IU

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"Adoption of Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines across Journals"


Journal policies continuously evolve to enable knowledge sharing and support reproducible science. However, that change happens within a certain framework. Eight modular standards with three levels of increasing stringency make Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines which can be used to evaluate to what extent and with which stringency journals promote open science. Guidelines define standards for data citation, transparency of data, material, code and design and analysis, replication, plan and study pre-registration, and two effective interventions: "Registered reports" and "Open science badges", and levels of adoption summed up across standards define journal’s TOP Factor. In this paper, we analysed the status of adoption of TOP guidelines across two thousand journals reported in the TOP Factor metrics. We show that the majority of the journals’ policies align with at least one of the TOP’s standards, most likely "Data citation" (70%) followed by "Data transparency" (19%). Two-thirds of adoptions of TOP standard are of the stringency Level 1 (less stringent), whereas only 9% is of the stringency Level 3. Adoption of TOP standards differs across science disciplines and multidisciplinary journals (N = 1505) and journals from social sciences (N = 1077) show the greatest number of adoptions. Improvement of the measures that journals take to implement open science practices could be done: (1) discipline-specific, (2) journals that have not yet adopted TOP guidelines could do so, (3) the stringency of adoptions could be increased.

https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10040046

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"Accountability in the Knowledge Commons: Lessons from Next Generation Library Publishing and the 2022 Values and Principles Summit"


Values and principles provide a scaffold for community governance of the knowledge commons, engaging stakeholders in the construction of a system that encourages participants to adhere to a shared set of ethical and functional practices. This article introduces the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication, a toolkit and approach developed by the Next Generation Library Publishing project to assess a community or organization’s alignment with scholarly values and principles. The article situates the FOREST Framework within the context of other initiatives advancing values-based scholarly communication and explains the importance of assessment mechanisms as a core element in governing an equitable and sustainable knowledge commons. It also synthesizes the findings of a half-day summit hosted in February 2022 that convened representatives of values-and-principles-based frameworks and initiatives in scholarly communication to strategize a collective future for these efforts.

http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.588

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India: "Ministry [of Education] Sets ‘One Nation, One Subscription ’ Deal Deadline"


"One Nation, One Subscription" (ONOS) is a scheme of the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India. The letter from the ministry’s Department of Higher Education said the government will negotiate with journal publishers for "all people in India" to have access to journal articles under a single centrally negotiated payment to be made by the government.

https://cutt.ly/A1bnyQK

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"Open Science Infrastructure as a Key Component of Open Science"


The Open Science movement is a response to the accumulated problems in scholarly communication, like the "reproducibility crisis", "serials crisis", and "peer review crisis". The European Commission defines priorities of Open Science as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reproducible (FAIR) data, infrastructure and services in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), Next generation metrics, altmetrics and rewards, the future of scientific communication, research integrity and reproducibility, education and skills and citizen science. Open Science Infrastructure is also one of four key components of Open Science defined by UNESCO.

Mainly represented among Open Science Infrastructures are institutional and thematic repositories for publications, research data, software and code. Furthermore, the Open Science Infrastructure services range may include discovery, mining, publishing, the peer review process, archiving and preservation, social networking tools, training, high-performance computing, and tools for processing and analysis. Successful Open Science Infrastructure should be based on community values and responsive to needed changes. Preferably the Open Science Infrastructure should be distributed, enabling machine-actionable tools and services, supporting reusability and reproducibility, quality FAIR data, interoperability, sustainability, long-term preservation and funding.

https://doi.org/10.7557/5.6777

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"Recommendations for Transformative Journal Agreements with Providers of Publishing Services Published"


These formulated criteria will serve as a common, action-guiding framework for actors from all science organizations—that is, higher education institutions as well as non-university research institutions—for negotiations with providers of publishing services. . . .The criteria are organized into the following aspects: journal transformation, pricing; transparency, workflow, preprints, metadata and interfaces, statistics, tracking, and waivers.

https://cutt.ly/z1zjc9H

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"‘Anna’s Archive ’ Opens the Door to Z-Library and Other Pirate Libraries"


Anna’s Archive is basically a meta-search engine that can find content from third-party ‘pirate’ sources. . . . The Z-Library links rely on the Tor version of the site, which remains online. However, the goal is to ultimately make all content available through IPFS [InterPlanetary File System] as well. This would make it pretty much impossible to take down, similar to the Library Genesis forks, which also use IPFS.

https://cutt.ly/pMZYb6Y

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Oregon State University: "Elsevier Negotiations Suspended — Library Plans and Alternative Ways to Access Articles"


You have probably just read the Provost’s announcement that we are suspending our negotiations with Elsevier for the remainder of this year. We did not make this decision lightly. Our Elsevier contract represents more than one-fifth of our entire collections budget at OSU, and we know that this decision will be disruptive. . . .Our primary strategy will be article-level fulfillment. We will build on our already outstanding Interlibrary Loan service (ILL), and add some additional tools that should improve those workflows and provide a more seamless user experience. . . . In the summer of 2023 we will develop a timeline and goals for access to Elsevier content in 2024. At that point, we will be looking to secure access to a curated list of titles, informed by the assessment I described above, and by the ongoing conversations we have been having with our OSU community about open and sustainable scholarly communication.

https://cutt.ly/sMZWsgs

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University of Washington: "Elsevier Negotiation Update 11/2/2022"


At $2.6M per year and an annual 2.5% increase, the Elsevier journal package is the most expensive annual expenditure for the University of Washington (UW) Libraries. For context, the total UW Libraries collections budget for the Seattle campus is approximately $16 million, and we spend about $13 million on ongoing subscriptions. Immediate access to 2,500 Elsevier journal titles published in the current year represent about 15% of the Libraries annual collections budget. . . .The Elsevier journal package reinforces the scholarly publishing model based on paywalls and rationing of access, inequitable opportunities for publishing, and excessive pricing and annual price increases that undermines a scholarly ecosystem where the open sharing of knowledge is critical to accelerating change for the public good. . . .As a result, the Libraries will be unable to maintain immediate access for all titles in our current list of 2,500 Elsevier journal titles on ScienceDirect. There is no choice but to begin identifying which journals need to be available for immediate access to meet patient care needs as well as long term use for research, teaching, and learning. The Libraries will continue to provide faculty, students and staff access to published articles through alternative access options such as PubMed Central, Google Scholar, and interlibrary loan — most requested articles are delivered within a few hours or business days.

https://cutt.ly/bMZQwIf

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"eLife Reviewed Preprints: Interview with Fiona Hutton"


How is the new publishing model similar to or different from older publishing models based on preprints combined with peer review (e.g. Copernicus, F1000)? There are three main differences. 1) Peer review and assessment at eLife continues to be organised by an editorial team made up of academic experts and led by an Editor-in-Chief, Deputy Editors, Senior Editors, and a Board of Reviewing Editors via a consultative peer-review model already known as one of the most constructive for authors in the industry. 2) The addition of an eLife assessment is a further crucial part of our model, distinctive from what others are doing—it is a key addition to our public peer reviews and it enables readers to understand the context of the work, the significance of the research and the strength of the evidence. 3) We are no longer making accept/reject decisions based on peer review—authors will choose if and when to produce a Version of Record at any point following the review process.

https://cutt.ly/gMPfonI

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"Authors Guild Applauds Arrest, Indictment of Major E-Book Pirates"


"While we are heartened by the takedown and the resulting reduction in harm to authors, we are not unsympathetic to the plight of those college and other students who have perhaps felt forced to resort to such illegal pirate websites and other free sources of textbooks to help them manage the extremely high cost of higher education," Rasenberger [Authors Guild CEO] said. "However, these students’ anger is misdirected. The exorbitant cost of education should not be borne by authors and publishers but by the universities, and it should not be used to justify reliance on foreign criminals for textbooks or to trivialize the immense personal and economic harm Z-Library was causing authors who are trying to make a living under increasingly difficult and hostile economic circumstances."

https://cutt.ly/hMPgka5

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