Publishing – Page 19 – DigitalKoans

"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

"Advancing Software Citation Implementation (Software Citation Workshop 2022)"

Software is foundationally important to scientific and social progress, however, traditional acknowledgment of the use of others’ work has not adapted in step with the rapid development and use of software in research. This report outlines a series of collaborative discussions that brought together an international group of stakeholders and experts representing many communities, forms of labor, and expertise. Participants addressed specific challenges about software citation that have so far gone unresolved. The discussions took place in summer 2022 both online and in-person and involved a total of 51 participants. The activities described in this paper were intended to identify and prioritize specific software citation problems, develop (potential) interventions, and lay out a series of mutually supporting approaches to address them. The outcomes of this report will be useful for the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) community, repository managers and curators, research software developers, and publishers.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07500v1

"Guest Post – Article Processing Charges are a Heavy Burden for Middle-Income Countries"

Perhaps recognizing that publication costs could be a barrier toward inclusive publishing, Plan S includes a provision that the journal/platform must provide APC waivers for authors from low-income economies and discounts for authors from lower middle-income economies. This policy is based on World Bank classifications of national economies and is adopted by companies such as Springer Nature (including Nature Portfolio and BMC journals) and Taylor & Francis. It sounds good in principle, but in practice is very limited . . . It is easy to see that many (if not most) countries widely recognized as developing, in which research investments are significantly lower than in the US or most of Europe, are not included by this waiver and discount recommendation. Indeed, no Latin American country qualifies for full APC waivers, since all are technically at least lower middle-income economies; only a handful qualify for partial discounts.

bit.ly/420W4Df

"Evaluating the Ability of Open-Source Artificial Intelligence to Predict Accepting-Journal Impact Factor and Eigenfactor Score Using Academic Article Abstracts: Cross-sectional Machine Learning Analysis"

Objective:

We sought to evaluate the performance of open-source artificial intelligence to predict the impact factor or Eigenfactor score tertile using academic article abstracts.

Methods:

PubMed-indexed articles published between 2016 and 2021 were identified with the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms "ophthalmology," "radiology," and "neurology." Journals, titles, abstracts, author lists, and MeSH terms were collected. Journal impact factor and Eigenfactor scores were sourced from the 2020 Clarivate Journal Citation Report. The journals included in the study were allocated percentile ranks based on impact factor and Eigenfactor scores, compared with other journals that released publications in the same year. All abstracts were preprocessed, which included the removal of the abstract structure, and combined with titles, authors, and MeSH terms as a single input. The input data underwent preprocessing with the inbuilt ktrain Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) preprocessing library before analysis with BERT. Before use for logistic regression and XGBoost models, the input data underwent punctuation removal, negation detection, stemming, and conversion into a term frequency-inverse document frequency array. Following this preprocessing, data were randomly split into training and testing data sets with a 3:1 train:test ratio. Models were developed to predict whether a given article would be published in a first, second, or third tertile journal (0-33rd centile, 34th-66th centile, or 67th-100th centile), as ranked either by impact factor or Eigenfactor score. BERT, XGBoost, and logistic regression models were developed on the training data set before evaluation on the hold-out test data set. The primary outcome was overall classification accuracy for the best-performing model in the prediction of accepting journal impact factor tertile.

Results:

There were 10,813 articles from 382 unique journals. The median impact factor and Eigenfactor score were 2.117 (IQR 1.102-2.622) and 0.00247 (IQR 0.00105-0.03), respectively. The BERT model achieved the highest impact factor tertile classification accuracy of 75.0%, followed by an accuracy of 71.6% for XGBoost and 65.4% for logistic regression. Similarly, BERT achieved the highest Eigenfactor score tertile classification accuracy of 73.6%, followed by an accuracy of 71.8% for XGBoost and 65.3% for logistic regression.

Conclusions:

Open-source artificial intelligence can predict the impact factor and Eigenfactor score of accepting peer-reviewed journals. Further studies are required to examine the effect on publication success and the time-to-publication of such recommender systems.

https://doi.org/10.2196/42789

"PreprintMatch: A Tool for Preprint to Publication Detection Shows Global Inequities in Scientific Publication"

Preprints, versions of scientific manuscripts that precede peer review, are growing in popularity. They offer an opportunity to democratize and accelerate research, as they have no publication costs or a lengthy peer review process. Preprints are often later published in peer-reviewed venues, but these publications and the original preprints are frequently not linked in any way. To this end, we developed a tool, PreprintMatch, to find matches between preprints and their corresponding published papers, if they exist. This tool outperforms existing techniques to match preprints and papers, both on matching performance and speed. PreprintMatch was applied to search for matches between preprints (from bioRxiv and medRxiv), and PubMed. The preliminary nature of preprints offers a unique perspective into scientific projects at a relatively early stage, and with better matching between preprint and paper, we explored questions related to research inequity. We found that preprints from low income countries are published as peer-reviewed papers at a lower rate than high income countries (39.6% and 61.1%, respectively), and our data is consistent with previous work that cite a lack of resources, lack of stability, and policy choices to explain this discrepancy. Preprints from low income countries were also found to be published quicker (178 vs 203 days) and with less title, abstract, and author similarity to the published version compared to high income countries. Low income countries add more authors from the preprint to the published version than high income countries (0.42 authors vs 0.32, respectively), a practice that is significantly more frequent in China compared to similar countries. Finally, we find that some publishers publish work with authors from lower income countries more frequently than others.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281659

"Is Writing a Book Chapter Still a Waste of Time?"

How has digital open access transformed academic communication for the better? LSE Press’s Editor in Chief, Patrick Dunleavy, explores the impact of chapters in edited books. Once the Cinderella of academic publishing, doomed to obscurity under paywall books’ formal and de facto access restrictions, chapters in books are, thanks to digital open access, once again rivalling journal articles in their visibility to academic communities, their usefulness as teaching resources, and in their ability to tackle innovative and state of-the-art topics.

bit.ly/3KYRMq6

"Revisiting Methodology for Identifying Open Access Advantages"

This study revisited the methodology for identifying the effects of open access and revealed the causes for contradictory conclusions using four indices for journals that transitioned from subscription to open access. . . . Although the aggregated data of the eight journals indicated that open access had a positive effect, the effect varied across journals. A few journals produced different results between the two citation scores as well as between citation scores and number of citations or articles. Furthermore, a publisher’s choice of which journal to shift to open access influenced their performance after the shift.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-023-09946-0

"Twenty Years of Wikipedia in Scholarly Publications: A Bibliometric Network Analysis of the Thematic and Citation Landscape"

Results also show that the author collaboration network is very sparsely connected, indicating the absence of close collaboration among the authors in the field. Furthermore, results reveal that the Wikipedia research institutions’ collaboration network reflects a North–South divide as very limited cooperation occurs between developed and developing countries’ institutions. Finally, the multiple correspondence analysis applied to obtain the Wikipedia research conceptual map reveals the breadth, diversity, and intellectual thrust of the Wikipedia’s scholarly publications.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-023-01626-7

Paywall: "Open Data and the 2023 NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy"

As the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) new Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Policy is a large step toward shifting the culture of medical research toward a broader sharing of scientific data. . . . This article will serve as a primer on open data, data sharing, the NIH’s DMS Policy and its implications, and how librarians can support researchers in this landscape.

https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2023.2168103

"Lack of Sustainability Plans for Preprint Services Risks Their Potential to Improve Science"

Despite successfully building a revenue model that shares the burden between Cornell University, the Simons Foundation and several members and supporters, arXiv’s “funding is still outpaced by [their] growth” – the server hosts over 2 million preprints already and is growing by 10% each year. And while arXiv has been supporting more and more scholars to share and discover preprints, the team behind it has been through significant changes in leadership and is dealing with the urgent need to modernize their 30-year-old technology. As a former Executive Director of arXiv noted, “[arXiv’s success] may not last forever”. Similarly, the recent news that Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has renewed its financial support for the leading preprint servers in biology and medicine, bioRxiv and medRxiv is welcome relief, but this support is temporary, and the team must find a way to continue in the long run.

bit.ly/3y745Ji

Bye, Bye Big Deal: "Indispensable or Unnecessary?: A Data-Driven Appraisal of Post-cancellation Access Rights"

When breaking out of ‘big deals’, some libraries and consortia have found that they can save money by negotiating away post-cancellation access (PCA) to subscribed resources after the subscription concludes. Using subscription data regarding major publisher contracts at several US research libraries, this article reviews options around PCA for libraries and presents a model for assigning a value to PCA content when negotiating a renewal contract.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.601

"With New Model Language, Library E-book Bills Are Back"

The revised language, developed with support from nascent library advocacy group Library Futures, takes a "regulate " rather than "mandate " approach. In other words, unlike Maryland’s law, which would have required publishers to offer license agreements to libraries "on reasonable terms " for digital books that were available to consumers, the new legislative language instead focuses regulating the terms of agreements. Key to the revised bill’s effectiveness is language that would render unenforceable any license term that "precludes, limits, or restricts" libraries from performing their traditional, core mission.

bit.ly/3y42wfh

"The Importance of Copyright and Shared Norms for Credit in Open Educational Resources"

Open Educational Resources (OER) are reducing barriers to education while allowing creators the opportunity to share their work with the world and continue owning copyright of their work. To support new authors and adaptors in the OER space, we provide an overview of common considerations that creators and adaptors of OER should make with respect to issues related to copyright in the context of OER. Further, and importantly, a challenge in the OER space is ensuring that original creators receive appropriate credit for their work, while also respecting the credit of those who have adapted work. Thus, in addition to providing important considerations when it comes to the creation of open access works, we propose shared norms for ensuring appropriate attribution and credit for creators and adaptors of OER.

https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.1069388