Publishing – Page 20 – DigitalKoans

"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

"China and Open Access"

In December 2022, the International Association of STM Publishers and the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) released a report: Open Access Publishing in China. The report is openly available in both English and Chinese. This interview with Mark Robertson, consultant to the STM Association on the project, highlights the findings of the report and their implications for the scholarly publishing industry as well as providing background on the STM/CAST collaboration.

bit.ly/3kHUuW5

Paywall: "An Investigation of Gold Open Access Publications of STEM Faculty at a Public University in the United States"

This study investigated Gold Open Access journal publication by science and engineering faculty at the authors’ university from 2013 to 2022. Specifically, did Gold Open Access (OA) by these faculty increase, and did the publication rate vary between disciplines? The authors found that Gold OA publication increased by 176% over the past 10 years, and that an important factor was the Libraries’ creation of an Open Access Publishing Fund in 2017.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0194262X.2023.2175103

"The Future of the Monograph in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences: Publisher Perspectives on a Transitioning Format"

A web-based survey of academic publishers was undertaken in 2021 by a team at Oxford International Centre for Publishing into the state of monograph publication in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. 25 publishing organisations responded, including many of the larger presses, representing approximately 75% of monograph output. Responses to the survey showed that the Covid 19 pandemic has accelerated the existing trend from print to digital dissemination and that Open Access (OA) titles receive substantially greater levels of usage than those published traditionally. Responses also showed that for most publishers OA publication stands at under 25% of output and that fewer than 10% of authors enquire about OA publication options. Continuing problem areas highlighted by respondents were the clearing of rights for OA publication and the standardisation of title and usage metadata. All responding organisations confirmed that they expect to be publishing monographs in ten years’ time, but that they anticipate the format and/or the model will be different, with open access expected to play a key part in the future, perhaps in the context of a mixed economy of OA and ‘toll access’ publication.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-023-09937-1

"Changes in the Absolute Numbers and Proportions of Open Access Articles from 2000 to 2021 Based on the Web of Science Core Collection: A Bibliometric Study"

Purpose:

The ultimate goal of current open access (OA) initiatives is for library services to use OA resources. This study aimed to assess the infrastructure for OA scholarly information services by tabulating the number and proportion of OA articles in a literature database.

Method:

We measured the absolute numbers and proportions of OA articles at different time points across various disciplines based on the Web of Science (WoS) database.

Results:

The number (proportion) of available OA articles between 2000 and 2021 in the WoS database was 12 million (32.4%). The number (proportion) of indexed OA articles in 1 year was 0.15 million (14.6%) in 2000 and 1.5 million (48.0%) in 2021. The proportion of OA by subject categories in the cumulative data was the highest in the multidisciplinary category (2000–2021, 79%; 2021, 89%), high in natural sciences (2000–2021, 21%–46%; 2021, 41%–62%) and health and medicine (2000–2021, 37%–40%; 2021, 52%–60%), and low in social sciences and others (2000–2021, 23%–32%; 2021, 36%–44%), engineering (2000–2021, 17%–33%; 2021, 31%–39%) and humanities and arts (2000–2021, 11%–22%; 2021, 28%–38%).

Conclusion:

Our study confirmed that increasingly many OA research papers have been published in the last 20 years, and the recent data show considerable promise for better services in the future. The proportions of OA articles differed among scholarly disciplines, and designing library services necessitates several considerations with regard to the customers’ demands, available OA resources, and strategic approaches to encourage the use of scholarly OA articles.

https://doi.org/10.6087/kcse.296

"Librarians and Academic Libraries’ Role in Promoting Open Access: What Needs to Change? "

Profound changes due to Open-Access (OA) publications lead to organizational changes in universities and libraries. This study examined Israeli librarians’ perceptions regarding their role and the academic library’s role in promoting OA-publication, including the barriers, challenges, needs and requirements necessary to promote OA publishing. Lack of a budget for OA-agreements and cooperation with university management, and researchers’ unawareness of OA were among the most prominent barriers. Librarians see great importance in their role of advising researchers regarding OA. However, they insisted on a regulated OA-policy at the national and institutional levels, which would strengthen their status as change-leaders of the OA-movement.

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

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Benefits of Open Access (OA) to Researchers from Lower-Income Countries: Tracing Evidence through an Analysis of Reference Patterns"

Making scientific literature freely available to everyone is a main objective of the open access (OA) movement. This may be of particular importance to researchers in lower-income countries, where access to literature is often hindered by high subscription costs. This study addresses this issue by analyzing reference lists of the world’s output of scientific publications over time. The core issues addressed include whether researchers from lower-income countries refer to fewer previous publications when they publish and how this pattern develops over time. Moreover, whether researchers from lower-income countries rely more on literature that is openly available through different OA routes than other researchers is explored. The study shows that the proportion of OA references increases over time for all publications and country groups. However, the main finding is that publications from lower-income countries have a higher growth rate of OA references. This suggests that an increase in OA publishing has been particularly beneficial to researchers in lower-income countries.

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

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"How and Why Do Researchers Reference Data? A Study of Rhetorical Features and Functions of Data References in Academic Articles"

Data reuse is a common practice in the social sciences. While published data play an essential role in the production of social science research, they are not consistently cited, which makes it difficult to assess their full scholarly impact and give credit to the original data producers. Furthermore, it can be challenging to understand researchers’ motivations for referencing data. Like references to academic literature, data references perform various rhetorical functions, such as paying homage, signaling disagreement, or drawing comparisons. This paper studies how and why researchers reference social science data in their academic writing. We develop a typology to model relationships between the entities that anchor data references, along with their features (access, actions, locations, styles, types) and functions (critique, describe, illustrate, interact, legitimize). We illustrate the use of the typology by coding multidisciplinary research articles (n=30) referencing social science data archived at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). We show how our typology captures researchers’ interactions with data and purposes for referencing data. Our typology provides a systematic way to document and analyze researchers’ narratives about data use, extending our ability to give credit to data that support research.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08477

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Measuring the Concept of PID Literacy: User Perceptions and Understanding of Persistent Identifiers in Support of Open Scholarly Infrastructure"

The increasing centrality of persistent identifiers (PIDs) to scholarly ecosystems and the contribution they can make to the burgeoning ‘PID graph’ has the potential to transform scholarship. Despite their importance as originators of PID data, little is known about researchers’ awareness and understanding of PIDs, or their efficacy in using them. In this article we report on the results of an online interactive test designed to elicit exploratory data about researcher awareness and understanding of PIDs. This instrument was designed to explore recognition of PIDs and the extent to which researchers correctly apply PIDs within digital scholarly ecosystems, as well as measure researchers’ perceptions of PIDs. Our results reveal irregular patterns of PID understanding and certainty across all participants, though statistically significant disciplinary and academic job role differences were observed in some instances. Uncertainty and confusion were found to exist in relation to dominant schemes such as ORCID and DOIs, even when contextualized within real-world examples. We also show researchers’ perceptions of PIDs to be generally positive but that disciplinary differences can be noted, as well as higher levels of aversion to PIDs in specific use cases and negative perceptions where PIDs are measured on an ‘activity’ semantic dimension. This work therefore contributes to our understanding of academics’ ‘PID literacy’ and should inform those designing PID-centric scholarly infrastructures, that a significant need for training and outreach to active researchers remains necessary.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07367

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |