Publishing – Page 3 – DigitalKoans

"WIPO Study: Research4Life Program Spikes Research Output by up to 75% in Low- and Middle-Income Countries"

A new study conducted by leading researchers from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the University of the Bundeswehr Munich and the German Economic Institute reveals that free or low-cost online access to scientific publications — as provided by Research4Life programs — results in a surge in scientific output, particularly in health sciences, by up to 75% in low- and middle-income countries. . . .

Research institutions in the Caribbean, Central Asia, Europe, and Latin America saw their academic paper output increase by 80-100%. In terms of clinical trials, program participation was most impactful for East Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East, and North Africa, with trial activity rising by up to 35%.

Report

https://tinyurl.com/vjpfub7u

"The Road to Sustainability: Examining Key Drivers in Open Access Diamond Journal Publishing"

Despite the rising interest in open access (OA) diamond journals as a scholarly journal publishing model, their sustainability remains a pressing concern. Using the Open Access Diamond Journals Study (OADJS) Dataset, we examined the characteristics and factors of OA diamond journal publishing that are associated with high sustainability. From 1335 journals, 476 journals with low sustainability and 438 journals with high sustainability were selected and compared. Our analysis revealed that factors such as the region and official language of the publishing country and the discipline, ownership, and financial status of the journal were significantly associated with sustainability. Journals owned by government or national agencies, those with financial stability, and those promoting open practices like unrestricted text and data mining are more likely to be sustainable. This study also discusses the implications of these findings for the future of scholarly publishing and the open science movement. Ultimately, we emphasize the need for national and international support to enhance the sustainability of OA diamond journals and propose that a collective approach involving policymakers, funding agencies, and journal administrators is crucial for fostering a sustainable open access ecosystem.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1611

"Relationships between Expert Ratings of Business/Economics Journals and Key Citation Metrics: The Impact of Size-Independence, Citing-Journal Weighting, and Subject-Area Normalization"

This study uses data for >3300 business and economics journals to explore the relationships between 5 subjective (expert) journal ratings and 10 citation metrics including 5IF (5-year Impact Factor), Article Influence (AI) score, CiteScore, Eigenfactor, Impact per Publication, SJR, and SNIP. Overall, AI and SJR are the citation metrics most closely related to the expert journal ratings. . . . These results, which are consistent across the 5 expert ratings, suggest that evaluators consider the average impact of an article in each journal rather than the total impact of the journal as a whole, that they give more credit for citations in high-impact journals than for citations in lesser journals, and that they assess each journal’s relative standing within its own field or subfield rather than its broader scholarly impact.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102882

"MIT Press releases Direct to Open (D2O) Impact Report"

The MIT Press announces the release of a report on its Direct to Open (D2O) program detailing the impact that it has had in its first three years. Launched in 2021, D2O is a sustainable framework for open access monographs that shifts publishing from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model. . . .

To date, D2O has funded 240 books: 159 in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), and 81 in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art/Design, and Mathematics (STEAM). The data show that, on average, open access HSS books in the program are used 3.75 times more and receive 21% more citations than their paywalled counterparts. Open access books in STEAM fields are used 2.67 times more and receive 15% more citations than their non-open counterparts, on average. . . .

At a time when average print runs for academic monographs are often in the low hundreds, books in the D2O program are reaching larger audiences online than ever before—averaging 3,061 downloads per title and bringing important scholarship to international audiences.

https://tinyurl.com/4cwet48f

"Different Open Access Routes, Varying Societal Impacts: Evidence from the Royal Society Biological Journals"

In this article, we explore different OA routes (i.e., gold OA, hybrid OA, and bronze OA) and their varying effects on multiple types of societal impacts (i.e., social media and web) by using the case of four biological journals founded by the Royal Society. The results show that (1) gold OA is significantly and positively related to social media indicators (Twitter counts and Facebook counts), but significantly and negatively associated with web indicators (Blog counts and News counts); (2) hybrid OA has a significant and positive effect on both social media and web indicators; and (3) bronze OA is significantly and positively associated with social media indicators, but it turns to be negative albeit nonsignificant for web indicators.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05032-0

Open Access Projects in Europe: From a General Perspective to Monographs and Ebooks

The development of policies in favour of open science and the transformation of publication channels for academic literature and research produced with public funding by researchers and authors in higher education, combined with technological and financial developments in open access models for scholarly publication and the interest shown by funders for a long time in journals and articles and more recently in monographs and textbooks, continue to reshape the face of academic publication.

Cécile Swiatek Cassafieres, a member of the Executive Board of the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBEReurope.org), will provide a general overview of the main European trends, initiatives and projects in this area, focusing on the diamond model and its current prospects, before addressing the case of ‘books’ in open access, from the angle of monographs on the one hand, and textbooks on the other. A presentation of LIBER’s own initiatives will illustrate the Association of European Research Libraries’ support for such developments.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11149567

"Guidance Needed for Using Artificial Intelligence to Screen Journal Submissions for Misconduct"

Journals and publishers are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to screen submissions for potential misconduct, including plagiarism and data or image manipulation. While using AI can enhance the integrity of published manuscripts, it can also increase the risk of false/unsubstantiated allegations. Ambiguities related to journals’ and publishers’ responsibilities concerning fairness and transparency also raise ethical concerns. In this Topic Piece, we offer the following guidance: (1) All cases of suspected misconduct identified by AI tools should be carefully reviewed by humans to verify accuracy and ensure accountability; (2) Journals/publishers that use AI tools to detect misconduct should use only well-tested and reliable tools, remain vigilant concerning forms of misconduct that cannot be detected by these tools, and stay abreast of advancements in technology; (3) Journals/publishers should inform authors about irregularities identified by AI tools and give them a chance to respond before forwarding allegations to their institutions in accordance with Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines; (4) Journals/publishers that use AI tools to detect misconduct should screen all relevant submissions and not just random/purposefully selected submissions; and (5) Journals should inform authors about their definition of misconduct, their use of AI tools to detect misconduct, and their policies and procedures for responding to suspected cases of misconduct.

https://doi.org/10.1177/17470161241254052

AI-native Platform: "Reimagining Research Impact: Introducing Web of Science Research Intelligence"

Currently being developed in partnership with leading academic institutions, Web of Science Research Intelligence is an AI-native platform that embodies a vision centered on three pillars: unification, innovation and impact. It seamlessly integrates funding data with research outputs that include publications, patents, conference proceedings, books, policy documents and more. Based on these data, the platform identifies relevant funding opportunities within emerging research areas, equipping institutions and researchers to innovate.

A conversational assistant powered by generative AI enables all users to gain insights and create qualitative narratives for more balanced impact assessment, from data scientists to those with limited analysis experience.

Tailored recommendations for collaboration and funding help early career researchers build their networks and all researchers position themselves to win.

A new framework for measuring societal impact beyond traditional citation metrics will empower researchers and institutions to showcase the broader impacts of their work.

https://tinyurl.com/2zdshm6b

"Researchers from over 3700 Global Institutions Now Supported by Springer Nature Transformative Agreements"

Springer Nature now supports researchers from over 3700 institutions, across six continents, with open access (OA) publication via its Transformative Agreements (TA). The continued growth of the publisher’s TAs underscores the Springer Nature’s in accelerating the global transition to OA, ensuring all who want to publish OA can do so regardless of location or funding.

https://tinyurl.com/4xrsebkr

Paywall: "Open Peer Review Correlates with Altmetrics but Not with Citations: Evidence from Nature Communications and PLoS One"

The analysis reveals articles subjected to OPR [Open Peer Review] have no obvious advantage in citations but a notable higher score in altmetrics. The distribution of data variation across most disciplines, displaying a statistically significant difference between OPR and non-OPR, mirrors the overall trend. Two potential explanations for the disparity in OPR’s impact on citations compared to altmetrics are proposed. The first relates to the quality heterogeneity between OPR and non-OPR research, while the second is related to the diverse authors citing and mentioning articles in distinct communities.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2024.101540

"And Never the Twain Shall Meet? Institutional Open Access Policies (IOAPs) and Review, Promotion, and Tenure (RPT)"

Introduction: Institutional open access policies (IOAPs) express an institutional commitment to making scholarly knowledge openly accessible, typically by asking academics to deposit their scholarship into an open access (OA) repository. Faculty, however, must prioritize other scholarly requirements, such as those specified in review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) processes and policies. If IOAPs are ignored or in conflict with RPT, they will not be as effective as possible. Literature Review: Despite the fact that many higher education institutions say they value scholarly research contributing to the public good, they often do not articulate that OA is a necessary component to achieve this goal. Parallelly, increasing numbers of higher education institutions have adopted an IOAP, but few of them include the policy in RPT policies. Methods: An electronic survey was disseminated to members of the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI) in order to quantify how many include the concept of OA and/or their IOAP in their RPT mechanisms. Results: Only four out of 28 respondents indicated that the concept of OA is integrated into RPT at their institution, and only one out of 28 reported that the IOAP is present in RPT. Discussion: Consistent with sparse examples in the literature, this study suggests that most IOAPs exist in separation from RPT, and this separation threatens the success of IOAPs. Conclusion: Faculty prioritize RPT guidelines in order to advance their careers, but these policies rarely address OA and IOAPs. More attention to the relationship between IOAPs and RPT is necessary in order to discover how they can complement one another and enhance scholarly knowledge production and exchange.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16899

"Are Transformative Agreements Worth It? An Analysis of Open Access Publication Data at the University of Kentucky"

Open access publishing is continuing to grow as funders such as cOAlition S, National Institutes of Health, and the White House implement mandates and requirements that publicly funded research be made immediately available for public consumption. Publishers have adopted open access as a business model through transformative agreements that combine subscription and publishing fees. However, it is unclear whether these agreements are beneficial for libraries. This article discusses a project by the University of Kentucky Libraries to gather and analyze open access publication data to aid in the evaluation of transformative agreement proposals. This article also discusses how the University of Kentucky compares to peer institutions in the Southeastern Conference and other benchmark institutions regarding open access publishing output. Additionally, this article discusses downsides of transformative agreements and highlights promising alternatives.

https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.68n1.8211

"Navigating Open Access and Transformative Agreements: A Case Study of the University of Maryland"

"What should we be doing as a public institution when it comes to open access and transformative publishing agreements"” Most large US research institutions are facing this question, including the University of Maryland, College Park. This article explores this issue by looking at the University’s publishing landscape from a high level. It then dives deeper into three recent transformative agreements the University library has entered, investigating pricing, usage, and publishing data for a nonprofit society publisher, a for-profit commercial publisher, and, finally, a university press. The goal is to better understand how these agreements intersect with university-sponsored scholarship, library budgets, and the implications for the academic publishing landscape.

https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.68n1.8219

"Exploring a Read and Publish Agreement: The Three-Year Taylor & Francis Pilot"

The Ohio State University Libraries (University Libraries) entered into a three-year read and publish pilot agreement with Taylor & Francis in 2020—the first read and publish agreement for The Ohio State University and the first such deal for Taylor & Francis in the Americas. This study provides an overview of University Libraries’ motivations behind the agreement, the lessons we learned implementing and supporting the agreement, and the open access publishing outcomes of the pilot agreement that ended December 2022.

https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.68n1.8213

"DIAMAS Report Investigating the Financial Sustainability of Institutional Publishers and Service Providers"

The report shows that although institutional publishers and service providers are diverse — in terms of their missions, sizes, services they provide and tasks they perform, access to funding options and the choices they make — they face similar challenges, such as the need for more financial resources, the lack of stability and permanence in personnel and the dependence on parent organizations. Along with public national or regional funders, parent organizations, which provide significant in-kind support (personnel, services), are the main local supporters of Diamond open access (OA).

https://tinyurl.com/ypnefum2

"A Census of Institutional Repositories at Regional Public Universities"

This study reports on the implementation of institutional repositories (IRs) at regional public universities (RPUs) in the United States and its territories. The author investigated repository platform choice, operation style, and content. More than half of RPUs have implemented an IR. The author discusses how these findings align with trends in previous research and explores the unique aspects of IRs at RPUs—particularly the prevalence of student works and special collections materials. For over two decades, institutional repositories (IRs) have been used at institutions of higher education to collect, preserve, and share the scholarly works of an institution. During that same time there have been an increasing number of studies looking at who has implemented an IR, the most popular IR platforms, and type and number of objects deposited in IRs. While some studies have looked at small or teaching-focused institutions, most of these studies have focused on IR implementations at large research-focused institutions.

https://tinyurl.com/yc2fs4r2

"Developing Open Access Resource Management Principles in a Consortial Environment: A University of California Model"

In the summer of 2021, the University of California (UC) migrated to a new integrated library system, called the Systemwide Integrated Library System project (SILS), which for the first time brought all ten UC campuses, two regional storage facilities, and the California Digital Library (CDL) together into one shared library system. With new potential for increased collaboration and cooperation, SILS leadership groups identified consortial open access (OA) resource management as a key opportunity in the new system, in alignment with UC’s priorities around discovery and access to library collections, as well as UC’s commitment to open access and transforming the scholarly communication landscape. This article discusses the formation of the UC Open Access Resource Management Task Force (OARMTF), a group charged to investigate what it would mean to consortially manage OA resources. Specifically, this article focuses on the OARMTF’s work setting out principles for OA resource management, which the authors hope may serve as a useful case study for other institutions or consortia interested in developing principles around OA resource management, as well as encourage more discussion and research into best practices for consortial management of OA resources.

https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.68n1.8216

"Opening Up: A Global Context for Local Open Access Initiatives in Higher Education"

Open access policies and mandates can be a useful tool in persuading faculty at higher education institutions around the globe to produce and share open scholarship. But are such policies widely written, accepted, and adopted? Leveraging information found on the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies, this paper analyzes open access policies at higher education institutions worldwide. The data indicate that Europe holds the most policies, while fewer policies have been enacted in the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and Asia due to a myriad of barriers. Overall, better strategies to promote open access are needed, and such strategies may not necessarily take the form of an open access policy. My own investigation of global open access policies has informed my practices with respect to open access. In this paper, I demonstrate how librarians acting as policy entrepreneurs can assist with the promotion of open access at their institutions and then conclude with suggestions, solutions, and pathways beyond policy adoption to promote and advocate for open access.

https://tinyurl.com/2h3uz5n4

"An Analysis of the Effects of Sharing Research Data, Code, and Preprints on Citations"

In this study, we investigate whether adopting one or more Open Science practices leads to significantly higher citations for an associated publication, which is one form of academic impact. We use a novel dataset known as Open Science Indicators, produced by PLOS and DataSeer, which includes all PLOS publications from 2018 to 2023 as well as a comparison group sampled from the PMC Open Access Subset. In total, we analyze circa 122’000 publications. We calculate publication and author-level citation indicators and use a broad set of control variables to isolate the effect of Open Science Indicators on received citations. We show that Open Science practices are adopted to different degrees across scientific disciplines. We find that the early release of a publication as a preprint correlates with a significant positive citation advantage of about 20.2% on average. We also find that sharing data in an online repository correlates with a smaller yet still positive citation advantage of 4.3% on average. However, we do not find a significant citation advantage for sharing code.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16171

"Harvard Library is Launching Harvard Open Journals Program"

Harvard Library is launching a new initiative called the Harvard Open Journals Program (HOJP), which will help researchers advance scholarly publishing that is open access, sustainable, and equitable. HOJP will provide publishing services, resources, and seed funding to participating Harvard researchers for new academic journals. All journal articles will be entirely free for authors and readers, with no barriers to publish or to access.. . . Yuan Li, University Scholarly Communication Officer and Director of Open Scholarship and Research Data Services at Harvard Library, pointed out the innovative nature of the program, "It is new for an institution to support faculty in seeking out an academic press to publish a no-fee open access journal and to provide assistance in securing its long-term funding. And offering a repository overlay journal model provides an alternative that appeals to some editorial boards and is gaining traction through initiatives such as Episciences. As we implement and refine this program on our campus, we hope it will inspire other universities to adopt such approaches to supporting barrier-free scholarly publishing."

https://tinyurl.com/ymkhs4db

Ithaka S+R: "Generative AI and Scholarly Publishing: Announcing a New Research Project"

To help, Ithaka S+R is launching a new study of the strategic implications of generative AI for scholarly publishing, with support from STM Solutions and a group of its members. The following key questions will guide our inquiry:

Will generative AI be integrated into the existing goals, processes, and infrastructures for scholarly publishing? Or, does this represent a transformative technology that will require fundamental restructuring of those goals, processes, and infrastructures?

Could generative AI effectively render our current assumptions about the role and purpose of publishers obsolete? What new roles could publishers play in a radically transformed information environment?

Which potential transformations should publishers encourage, and which risks require immediate coordinated responses while the technology is still taking root in the sector?

What new kinds of shared technical and/or social infrastructure are needed to support the ethical adoption of generative AI in support of the goals of scholarship and scholarly publishing? What systems and structures will be necessary to balance the needs of authors, readers, rights holders, publishers, and aggregators?

https://tinyurl.com/2s432pfh

"State of Open Science in Cancer Research"

This study has been focused on assessing the Open Science scenario of cancer research during the period 2011–2021, in terms of the derived scientific publications and raw data dissemination. . . .

50,822 papers were recovered, 71% of which belong to first and second quartile journals. 59% of the articles were published in Open Access (OA) journals. The Open Access model and international collaboration positively conditioned the number of citations received. Among the most productive journals stood out Plos One, Cancers, and Clinical and Translational Oncology. 2693 genomics, proteomics and metabolomics datasets were retrieved, being Gene Expression Omnibus the favoured repository.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12094-024-03468-7

"Sorry We’re Open, Come in We’re Closed: Different Profiles in the Perceived Applicability of Open Science Practices to Completed Research Projects"

Open science is an increasingly important topic for research, politics and funding agencies. However, the discourse on open science is heavily influenced by certain research fields and paradigms, leading to the risk of generalizing what counts as openness to other research fields, regardless of its applicability. In our paper, we provide evidence that researchers perceive different profiles in the potential to apply open science practices to their projects, making a one-size-fits-all approach unsuitable. In a pilot study, we first systematized the breadth of open science practices. The subsequent survey study examined the perceived applicability of 13 open science practices across completed research projects in a broad variety of research disciplines. We were able to identify four different profiles in the perceived applicability of open science practices. For researchers conducting qualitative-empirical research projects, comprehensively implementing the breadth of open science practices is tendentially not feasible. Further, research projects from some disciplines tended to fit a profile with little opportunity for public participation. Yet, disciplines and research paradigms appear not to be the key factors in predicting the perceived applicability of open science practices. Our findings underscore the case for considering project-related conditions when implementing open science practices. This has implications for the establishment of policies, guidelines and standards concerning open science.

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230595

The Open Access Tracking Project Is Now 15 Years Old

Peter Suber has announced that the Open Access Tracking Project is now 15 years old. This project has made an invaluable contribution to the Open Access and Open Science movements. Readers are encouraged to considering joining it and posting new works of interest to it. Even occasional contributions are meaningful.

Here is a description of the project from its home page:

OATP is a crowd-sourced social-tagging project running on free software to capture news and comment on open access to research.

Its mission is (1) to create real-time alerts for OA-related news and comment, and (2) to organize knowledge of the field, by tag or subtopic, for easy searching and sharing.

OATP publishes a comprehensive primary feed of new OA developments, and hundreds of smaller secondary feeds on subtopics or subsets, for example, one feed for each project tag, one for each search, and one for each user-created boolean combination of its other feeds.

OATP runs on TagTeam, open-source software developed specifically for OATP and now available for open, tag-based research projects on any topic. See the OATP hub within TagTeam. TagTeam stores all OATP tag records for deduping, export, preservation, modification, and search. OATP started on Connotea and moved to TagTeam in September 2012.

Peter Suber launched OATP in April 2009, and wrote a full-length description of it in the SPARC Open Access Newsletter for May 2009. In mid-2011 OATP became part of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP).

https://tinyurl.com/m5ku5mxh

"Benefits of Open Access to Researchers from Lower-Income Countries: A Global Analysis of Reference Patterns in 1980–2020"

The main objective of the open access (OA) movement is to make scientific literature freely available to everyone. This may be of particular importance to researchers in lower-income countries, who often face barriers due to high subscription costs. In this article, we address this issue by analysing over time the reference lists of scientific publications around the world. Our study focuses on key issues, including whether researchers from lower-income countries reference fewer publications in their research and how this trend evolves over time. We also investigate whether researchers from lower-income countries rely more on the literature that is openly available through different OA routes compared with other researchers. Our study revealed that the proportion of OA references has increased over time for all publications and country groups. However, publications from lower-income countries have seen a higher growth rate of OA-based references, suggesting that the emergence of OA publishing has been particularly advantageous to researchers in these countries.

https://doi.org/10.1177/01655515241245952