Publishing – Page 2 – DigitalKoans

"SPARC Releases Second Vendor Privacy Report Urging Action to Address Concerns with SpringerLink Data Privacy Practices"

SpringerLink provides a case study in the encroachment of the broader surveillance-based data brokering economy into academic systems. Among other findings, the report documents risks related to the 200 named third parties that are allowed to collect information from users of the site (along with what appear to be additional unlisted companies found only in our public website analysis). . . .

To fully understand how data may be used, librarians would need to read the 200 additional privacy policies from third parties that would likely stretch into the thousands of pages, a task complicated by numerous broken links to these policies at the time of publication.

https://tinyurl.com/wdkmha3z

Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Springer Nature’s SpringerLink

"Implementing Free Persistent Identifiers in a Scientific Journal Management System Alternatively to DOI "

The use and assignment of most persistent identifiers have an associated cost. Journals sometimes have difficulty covering this cost or transferring it to the authors of the articles, causing barriers to publishing scientific articles. This work aims to implement free persistent identifiers in a scientific journal management system. To accomplish this, software components for managing the persistent identifiers Archival Resource Key and Persistent Uniform Resource Locator are implemented for the Open Journal System. The results of implementing these persistent identifiers in a scientific journal are analyzed, as well as the implementation by the scientific community of 15 countries in 32 journals. Implementing free persistent identifiers in scientific journals allows for greater visibility and savings in publication costs.

https://tinyurl.com/2bsh2z6b

"Officially Launched! The New University-Based Publishing Futures Community Is Forming."

On Monday, September 30, the University Based Publishing Futures [UBPF] community officially launched with an open virtual meeting attended by 150 colleagues. UBPF is a new, multi-community coalition made up of the professionals who work at university presses, library publishers, and other academy-affiliated programs that support the infrastructure of scholarly publishing. The purpose of this “community of communities” is to share knowledge among university-based publishers and align our outreach and advocacy efforts for maximum impact. To learn more about this new community, watch the meeting recording, or visit the UBPF website on Knowledge Commons.

https://tinyurl.com/4b9eepr8

"Trapped in Transformative Agreements? A Multifaceted Analysis of >1,000 Contracts"

Transformative agreements between academic publishers and research institutions are ubiquitous. The ‘Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges’ (ESAC) Initiative lists more than 1,000 contracts in its database. We make use of this unique dataset by web-scraping the details of every contract to substantially expand the overview spreadsheet provided by the ESAC Initiative. Based on that hitherto unused data source, we combine qualitative and quantitative methods to conduct an in-depth analysis of the contract characteristics and the TA landscape. Our analysis demonstrates that research institutions seem to be ‘trapped’ in transformative agreements. Instead of being a bridge towards a fully Open Access world, academia is stuck in the hybrid system. This endows the legacy (non-Open Access) publishing houses with substantial market power. It raises entry barriers, lowers competition, and increases costs for libraries and universities.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.20224

"Taylor & Francis Announces Subscribe to Open Journals Pilot "

Taylor & Francis has today announced its first Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot, one of several innovative options it is trialing to accelerate open access (OA) publishing. S2O enables a journal’s subscribers to support its conversion to OA, making new articles available to readers everywhere.

Taylor & Francis is inviting existing subscribers of the participating journals to renew their subscriptions for next year by March. If enough institutions support S2O in this way, all articles published in the 2025 volume will be open access. This process can then be repeated, one volume at a time, for the following years. If the required level of support is not achieved for any of the pilot titles, they will remain as subscription journals (with a hybrid OA option).

https://tinyurl.com/245857eu

"Large Language Publishing: The Scholarly Publishing Oligopoly’s Bet on AI"

This article focuses on an offshoot of the big firms’ surveillance-publishing businesses: the post-ChatGPT imperative top profit from troves of proprietary “training data,” to make new AI products and—the essay predicts—to license academic papers and scholars’ tracked behavior to big technology companies.

https://tinyurl.com/ft2467my

"Enabling Preprint Discovery, Evaluation, and Analysis with Europe PMC"

Preprints provide an indispensable tool for rapid and open communication of early research findings. Preprints can also be revised and improved based on scientific commentary uncoupled from journal-organised peer review. The uptake of preprints in the life sciences has increased significantly in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when immediate access to research findings became crucial to address the global health emergency. With ongoing expansion of new preprint servers, improving discoverability of preprints is a necessary step to facilitate wider sharing of the science reported in preprints. To address the challenges of preprint visibility and reuse, Europe PMC, an open database of life science literature, began indexing preprint abstracts and metadata from several platforms in July 2018. Since then, Europe PMC has continued to increase coverage through addition of new servers, and expanded its preprint initiative to include the full text of preprints related to COVID-19 in July 2020 and then the full text of preprints supported by the Europe PMC funder consortium in April 2022. The preprint collection can be searched via the website and programmatically, with abstracts and the open access full text of COVID-19 and Europe PMC funder preprint subsets available for bulk download in a standard machine-readable JATS XML format. This enables automated information extraction for large-scale analyses of the preprint corpus, accelerating scientific research of the preprint literature itself. This publication describes steps taken to build trust, improve discoverability, and support reuse of life science preprints in Europe PMC. Here we discuss the benefits of indexing preprints alongside peer-reviewed publications, and challenges associated with this process.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303005

"The Benefits of Diamond Are Not Crystal Clear"

One misunderstanding seems to be that these costs are the same for commercial and non-profit publishers, and that commercial firms chisel out a profit on top of these allegedly equal costs. . . .

And diamond, non-profit publishing projects will likely face higher costs than commercial publishing houses, particularly given they will struggle to replicate large companies’ synergies and economies of scale. . . .

But this [market power] could be weakened by higher competition between publishers rather than embarking on the vast task of internalising the entire production process into university libraries. . . ..

Finally, even though seeing non-profit open access as inherently good is a valid position, it is equally valid to question the appetite for diamond journals, especially newly founded ones, among their clientele of academics.

https://tinyurl.com/2uw645dy

"Open Book Futures InfoHub Scoping Report"

One of the deliverables of Copim’s Open Book Futures project is to establish a ‘knowledge base’ (or equivalent) to provide comprehensive resources on alternative funding models and modes of publishing, acquiring and archiving open access books, alongside new training and guidance on archiving and preservation best practice. The deliverable states that we will (a) develop resources for stakeholders, (b) consolidate existing resources, (c) promote business models best practice, and (d) showcase project work on metadata, experimental publishing and archiving. By providing a comprehensive tool suite of resources we will accelerate outreach to libraries, publishers, academics and the wider public, to advocate for, advise on and encourage open access publishing and initiatives.

This scoping report is the first step in this process. Drawing on the myriad of resources we know exist (produced within and outside the OBF project), it presents an overview of existing assets and guidance for OA book publishing, a gap analysis, and our initial recommendations for the OBF working group to consider, all of which will be used to scope the direction and final format of the ‘knowledge base’.

https://tinyurl.com/2xv52u6b

"The ‘Publish or Perish’ Mentality Is Fuelling Research Paper Retractions – And Undermining Science"

In the past decade, there have been more than 39,000 retractions, and the annual number of retractions is growing by around 23% each year.

Nearly half the retractions were due to issues related to the authenticity of the data. For example, in August the United States Office of Research Integrity found that Richard Eckert, a senior biochemist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, faked data in 13 published papers. Four of these papers have been corrected, one has been retracted and the remainder are still awaiting action.

Plagiarism was the second most common reason research papers were retracted, accounting for 16% of retractions. . . .

However, the use of fake peer reviewers has increased tenfold over the past decade. There has also been an eightfold rise in publications linked to so-called “paper mills”, which are businesses that provide fake papers for a fee.

In 2022, up to 2% of all publications were from paper mills.

The prevailing reward system in academia often prioritises publication quantity over quality. When promotions, funding, and recognition are tied to the number of papers published, scientists may feel pressured to cut corners, rush experiments, or even fabricate data to meet these metrics.

Initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment are pushing for change. This initiative advocates for evaluating research based on its quality and societal impact rather than journal-based metrics such as impact factors or citation counts.

https://tinyurl.com/4c2pjem9

OCLC Research: Improving Open Access Discovery for Academic Library Users

The research findings shared in this report analyze the efforts made by library staff to make OA publications discoverable and explore user behaviors at seven institutions in the Netherlands. The findings can serve as a catalyst for academic libraries worldwide to engage in meaningful conversations about enhancing OA discoverability given local contexts and user needs.

Key Contributions of the Report:

Provides valuable insights into the measures taken by library staff in the Netherlands to facilitate the discoverability of OA publications.

Highlights library staff’s successful efforts to support user needs and explores opportunities to improve.

Identifies key stakeholders in the OA landscape and provides actionable suggestions for them to maximize the impact of their contributions.

https://tinyurl.com/2m8638y5

"Research Assessment Systems and the Effects of Publication Language: Manifestations in the Directory of Open Access Books"

Research assessment is a major driver of research behavior. The current emphasis on journal citations in a limited number of journals with an English focus has multiple effects. The need to publish in English even when it is not the local language affects the type of research undertaken and further consolidates the Global North-centric view or scientific approach. The bibliometric databases on which assessments of universities and journals are based are owned by two large corporate organizations, and this concentration of the market has in turn concentrated the research environment. Open infrastructure offers an alternative option for the research endeavor. The OAPEN online open access library and the Directory of Open Access Books form part of this infrastructure and we consider the pattern of languages present in the directories over time.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.4847

"How Balanced Is Multilingualism in Scholarly Journals? A Global Analysis Using the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) Database"

The concept of balanced multilingualism aims to establish “instruments for documenting and measuring the use of language for all the different purposes in research, thereby providing the basis for the monitoring of further globalization of research in a more responsible direction” (Sivertsen, 2018, p. 2). However, an analysis of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the largest database of fully open access journals produced in 130 countries, does not show balanced multilingualism in the global landscape. The DOAJ promotes linguistic diversity by indexing journals in 80 languages, including dialectal variations, indigenous languages, and languages spoken by less than 50,000 speakers (eg, Aragonese). In this article, we present the main trends related to the languages in which journals publish their full-text contributions to respond to this unbalanced landscape. We conducted a descriptive analysis of the 17,564 journals listed in the DOAJ (July 2023). Our findings show that 65% (11,331) of the journals listed publish only in one language, and 35% (6,234) publish in two, three, and up to 16 languages. Our research also shows that 50% of the multilingual journals are based in Asia, Southern and Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.6448

"’Does It Feel like a Scientific Paper?’: A Qualitative Analysis of Preprint Servers’ Moderation and Quality Assurance Processes"

In recent years, preprints—i.e., scholarly manuscripts that have not been peer reviewed or published in a journal—have emerged as a major source of research communication and a critical component of open science. However, concerns have been raised about preprints’ potential to facilitate the spread of flawed or misleading research due to the lack of quality control performed by preprint servers. Yet, there is limited knowledge of how servers currently vet incoming content and how this impacts the openness and diversity of scholarly content. In this paper, we examine preprint servers’ moderation processes, the intentions underpinning them, and their potential effects through a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with 14 key preprint server personnel. We find a wide range of moderation processes, which vary depending on specific server contexts and needs and are motivated by a desire to prevent the spread of misinformation and protect trust in preprints and servers. Participants repeatedly emphasized the difference between their moderation processes and peer review, but in practice often applied similar criteria for delineating scientific from unscientific content. Moreover, moderation processes often relied on trust cues, such as article formats or author affiliations, as proxies for research quality, potentially introducing similar biases as have been found in traditional journal peer review. We discuss implications for the diversity of preprint content and authors, as well as the future of preprint servers within an evolving scholarly communication ecosystem.

https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/mp6ky

"New Open Access Agreement Between the University of California and Taylor & Francis"

The University of California (UC) and Taylor & Francis today announced a memorandum of understanding for a four-year read and publish agreement that will make it easier and more affordable for UC researchers to publish open access (OA) articles in nearly 2,500 Taylor & Francis journals. . . .

Under the agreement, the UC Libraries will automatically cover the OA fees in full for any UC corresponding author who chooses to publish OA in Taylor & Francis and Routledge journals. Authors of articles accepted for publication in a hybrid or full OA title will have the opportunity to choose OA at no cost to them. . . .

To maximize the number of UC researchers who can benefit from the newly signed agreement, authors of qualifying articles published since January 1, 2024, will be given the opportunity to retrospectively convert their article to open access, with the OA fees fully covered. Authors who have already published OA since January 1 will be offered refunds for OA fees already paid.

https://tinyurl.com/y8zutk9m

"Clarivate Launches Generative AI-Powered Primo Research Assistant"

Key features include:

Semantic search and natural language queries: Users can interact with the system using everyday language, making the search process more intuitive.

AI-powered answers with references to sources used: The tool provides immediate answers based on the top five abstracts, with links to the full text and the complete result list.

Search suggestions: The assistant offers suggestions to help users expand their topics and delve deeper into their research.

Non-English query support: Users can ask questions and receive answers in multiple non-English languages.

https://tinyurl.com/bdcnbku3

Plan S: "New Tool to Assess Equity in Scholarly Communication Models"

The tool [https://tinyurl.com/2crwwhes], which was inspired by the “How Open Is It?” framework, is targeted at institutions, library consortia, funders and publishers, i.e. the stakeholders either investing or receiving funds for publishing services. It offers users the opportunity to rate scholarly communication models and arrangements across seven criteria:

Access to Read

Publishing immediate Open Access

Maximizing participation

Re-use rights

Pricing and fee transparency

Promoting and encouraging open research practices: data and code

Promoting and encouraging open research practices: preprints and open peer review

https://tinyurl.com/ycwmp3nk

"Resistance and Collaboration Within the Panoptivarsity: Differing Views of ORCID in Ireland"

The results demonstrate a clear difference in perceptions concerning ORCID, with library staff being very positive and uncritical, even arguing for mandatory adoption. Although some academics were using ORCID IDs in a performative manner, most were suspicious of, or resigned to their use. Concerns about ORCID ranged across various issues including employer surveillance, a lack of institutional autonomy and its inappropriateness for the sector.

https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2024-0184

"CDL Decision Round Two: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Why There is Still Hope OR The Reports of CDL’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated"

Let me be unequivocal: libraries do not need a license to loan books, whether physical or digital. Lending legally acquired books is not illegal. Libraries are entitled to share these works, with no obligation to enter into licensing agreements or contracts beforehand. Furthermore, libraries—and their patrons—are legally permitted to make various uses of these works, including interlibrary loan, reserves, preservation, and fair use, all without needing permission from rightsholders.

This is because various exceptions in the law, including Section 108 for Libraries and Archives, ad Section 109 known as the first sale doctrine. We know that Section 109 preserves the balance between rightsholders and libraries. When a library purchases a book, it has the right to loan that work freely, without requiring additional permissions or payments to the copyright holder. A digitized version of a legally acquired book simply replaces the physical copy, not an unpurchased one in the marketplace. Any “market harm” is already factored into the initial sale, for which both the authors and publishers have been compensated.

https://tinyurl.com/3exh96bu

"Open Access Is Shaping Scientific Communication"

It seems likely that OA and traditional reader-pay journals will coexist in the immediate future, and probably should in the long run. In this context, the OSTP OA mandate will neither undermine the gatekeeping role of scientific journals nor much perturb the future evolution of scientific communication. The widespread adoption of TAs was already underway; if anything, the mandate reinforces that path. In an environment where both readers pay and OA journals operate alongside preprint platforms, it is natural to ask whether preprints might constrain subscription prices and APCs. If preprints and their peer-reviewed counterparts were close substitutes, then APCs for most OA journals would decline considerably.

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adp8882

"The Living Library: A Process-Based Tool for Open Literature Review, Probing the Boundaries of Open Science"

In this paper, we present a new tool for open science research, the Living Library. The Living Library provides an online platform and methodological framework for open, continuous literature reviewing. As a research medium, it explores what openness means in light of the human dimension and interpretive nature of engaging with societal questions. As a tool, the Living Library allows researchers to collectively sort, dynamically interpret and openly discuss the evolving literature on a topic of interest. The interface is built around a timeline along which articles can be filtered, themes with which articles are coded, and an open researcher logbook that documents the development of the library. The first rendition of a Living Library can be found via this link: https://eduvision-living-library.web.app/, and the code to develop your own Living Library can be found via this link: https://github.com/Simon-Dirks/living-library.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-024-00964-z

6 Major Academic Publishes Sued: "Academic Journal Publishers Antitrust Litigation"

On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier B.V., John Wiley & Sons, Wolters Kluwer NV, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), on behalf of a putative class of scientists and scholars who allege that these six world’s-largest for-profit publishers of peer-reviewed scholarly journals conspired to unlawfully appropriate billions of dollars that would otherwise have funded scientific research.

https://tinyurl.com/mv5r5nba

Filed Complaint

Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein

"Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats: A Comprehensive SWOT Analysis of AI and Human Expertise in Peer Review"

Instead of casting blame [about peer review failures], we must ask ourselves the critical questions: Are we equipping our peer reviewers with the right tools to succeed in an increasingly complex landscape? How can AI be harnessed not as a burden, but as a true ally in maintaining the integrity of research? Are we prepared to re-think the roles within peer review? Can we stop viewing AI as a threat or as a problem and instead embrace it as a partner—one that enhances human judgment rather than complicates it?

https://tinyurl.com/4p5pr6k6

"eBooks, Interlibrary Loan and an Uncertain Future"

Important advancements are underway, but ILL for ebooks is hampered by restrictive licensing models, resource sharing systems, and current practices. This study provides an environmental scan of the current acquisitions and ILL practices of academic libraries. This paper guides academic libraries through these conversations so that they can support the borrowing and lending of ebooks into the future.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2024.2391735

"Is Open Access Disrupting the Journal Business? A Perspective from Comparing Full Adopters, Partial Adopters, and Non-adopters"

This study employs the concept of disruptive innovation to develop a more systematic perspective on the impact of OA. It compares the market power of full-OA adopters with that of partial adopters and non-adopters. Using Lerner’s definition of market power, a series of mean difference tests and regressions were conducted using Lerner’s definition of market power. The findings reveal that both full-OA adopters and partial adopters exhibit greater market power than non-adopters. However, full adopters do not have more market power than partial adopters, even when compared to the subscription options of hybrid journals. This suggests that OA disrupts the market power of both incumbents and traditional businesses. Nevertheless, the situation changes once incumbents integrate an OA option into their publishing repertoire and transition to a hybrid model.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2024.101574