Publishing – Page 3 – DigitalKoans

"eLife’s New Model: One Year On"

On January 31 2023, we launched our new model for publishing, combining the speed and transparency of preprints with the expert scrutiny and evaluation of peer review. We committed to publish everything that we reviewed. We would publish preprints together with public reviews and assessments. By doing so we would reshape the purpose of a journal. . . .

More than 6,200 teams of researchers have submitted their research (fig.1), choosing our journal and publishing model. Our month-on-month submissions have been stable since launch, but this January marks the highest number so far with 615.

At present, 27.7% of submissions (fig. 2) to our new model are sent for review. This is compared to 31.4% of submissions sent for review in our legacy model (from February 1, 2022–January 31, 2023). . . .

Reviewed Preprints help researchers share their peer-reviewed and assessed research faster. For a Reviewed Preprint, the median time from submission to publication of the first version with reviews and eLife assessment is 91 days (fig. 3). This is over two and a half times faster than the median submission to publication time in the legacy model. . . .

By the end of January 2024 we had published 1332 Reviewed Preprints, and this figure rises to 1836 when we include revised versions. These articles have been viewed over 850,000 times by more than 320,000 readers.

https://tinyurl.com/yknkm2fn

"How Open Are Hybrid Journals Included in Transformative Agreements?"

This study presents a novel approach based on open data, which leverages metadata on over 700 agreements and nine million journal articles to estimate the extent to which transformation agreements contribute to the transition of this journal business model. The results highlight a strong growth in open access between 2018 and 2022, driven by an increasing number of institutions that had transformative agreements in place. However, the majority of research literature published in hybrid journals in this five-year period remained behind publisher paywalls. Growth in the adoption of open access in hybrid journals, in particular through transformative agreements, can be largely attributed to three large commercial publishers — Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley — but varies substantially across journals, publishers, disciplines, and country affiliations. Despite the limitations of the data, the findings indicate that the current level of implementation of transformative agreements is insufficient to bring about a large-scale transition to fully open access.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18255

"Plan S: Annual Review 2023"

Plan S is an initiative for Open Access (OA) publishing, which requires that from 2021 scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms. . . .

In this annual review, we provide an overview of our activities in 2023, along with the latest advancements in our policies. Furthermore, we delineate ongoing initiatives that will significantly influence our future steps. The review sheds light also on specific actions taken by cOAlition S funders in the realm of scholarly communication.

http://tinyurl.com/5n8nkc7y

"Does It Pay to Pay? A Comparison of the Benefits of Open-Access Publishing across Various Sub-Fields in Biology"

Authors are often faced with the decision of whether to maximize traditional impact metrics or minimize costs when choosing where to publish the results of their research. Many subscription-based journals now offer the option of paying an article processing charge (APC) to make their work open. Though such "hybrid" journals make research more accessible to readers, their APCs often come with high price tags and can exclude authors who lack the capacity to pay to make their research accessible. Here, we tested if paying to publish open access in a subscription-based journal benefited authors by conferring more citations relative to closed access articles. We identified 146,415 articles published in 152 hybrid journals in the field of biology from 2013–2018 to compare the number of citations between various types of open access and closed access articles. In a simple generalized linear model analysis of our full dataset, we found that publishing open access in hybrid journals that offer the option confers an average citation advantage to authors of 17.8 citations compared to closed access articles in similar journals. After taking into account the number of authors, Journal Citation Reports 2020 Quartile, year of publication, and Web of Science category, we still found that open access generated significantly more citations than closed access (p < 0.0001). However, results were complex, with exact differences in citation rates among access types impacted by these other variables. This citation advantage based on access type was even similar when comparing open and closed access articles published in the same issue of a journal (p < 0.0001). However, by examining articles where the authors paid an article processing charge, we found that cost itself was not predictive of citation rates (p = 0.14). Based on our findings of access type and other model parameters, we suggest that, in the case of the 152 journals we analyzed, paying for open access does confer a citation advantage. For authors with limited budgets, we recommend pursuing open access alternatives that do not require paying a fee as they still yielded more citations than closed access. For authors who are considering where to submit their next article, we offer additional suggestions on how to balance exposure via citations with publishing costs.

https://peerj.com/articles/16824/

"How Transformative Are Transformative Agreements? Evidence from Germany across Disciplines"

Research institutions across the globe attempt to change the academic publishing system as digitization opens up new opportunities, and subscriptions to the large journal bundles of the leading publishers put library budgets under pressure. One approach is the negotiation of so-called transformative agreements. I study the "DEAL" contracts between nearly all German research institutions and Springer Nature and Wiley. I investigate 6.1 million publications in 5,862 journals covering eight fields in the years 2016–2022 and apply a causal difference-in-differences design to identify whether the likelihood of a paper appearing in an eligible journal increases. The effect strongly depends on the discipline. While material science, chemistry, and economics’s tend to shift towards these journals, all other disciplines in my sample do not react. Suggestive evidence hints at the market position of the encompassed publishers before the "DEAL" was established: Springer Nature and Wiley appear to benefit more from the contracts in disciplines in which they possessed a higher market share ex ante. The transformative vigor of these agreements in terms of publication behavior seems to be limited. It and highlights that the developments in this intertwined market require further examination.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04955-y

"Taylor & Francis Extends Wikipedia Editor Access to All Journals"

The work of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors has been given a significant boost with the announcement they now have free access to all Taylor & Francis and Routledge journals. Through The Wikipedia Library, a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, the global non-profit that hosts Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, active Wikipedia editors will be able to read and cite millions of peer-reviewed journal articles across every discipline, from anthropology to zoology.

http://tinyurl.com/mv2af6hf

"Scaling up Open Access Publishing through Transformative Agreements: Results from 2019 to 2022"

The Biochemical Society’s transformative Read & Publish (R&P) agreements follow an all-inclusive and unlimited model (developed in collaboration with other society publishers) that cover all titles, both hybrid and fully open access (OA), and does not place caps on article numbers.

This case study shows that these R&P agreements have significantly boosted OA uptake in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

It also shows that the agreements are most effective in regions where there is adequate funding, high research output and a willingness from institutions to engage collectively (through consortium agreements).

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1601

"How Persistent Identifiers Work Together in the Research Ecosystem"

Each PID requires metadata, or information about the person, thing or organization that the identifier is identifying, and different PIDs can be included in the metadata of other PIDs:

ORCID iDs can be included in DOI metadata to identify the people involved in the existence of the object that the DOI is identifying.

DOIs can be included in an ORCID record to identify the works that a person has produced, or the funding that a person has received.

ROR IDs can be included in ORCID records to identify the organizations that an individual is affiliated with.

ROR IDs can be included in DOI metadata to identify the organizations that are involved in the existence of the object that the DOI is identifying.

http://tinyurl.com/3bkx6ytv

"Guest Post — There is More to Reliable Chatbots than Providing Scientific References: The Case of ScopusAI"

In October, my institution was granted access to the Beta version of ScopusAI. I have tested it using a concept connected to my PhD dissertation in physics, an "electromagnon". In this post, I want to share my experience and use it to illustrate the many dimensions the design and assessment of such tools need to consider. . . .

[The author provides an extensive description and analysis of the performed tests as well as their broader implications.]

And if AI is only as good as its underlying data, let’s not forget who owns the scholarly data and regulates access to it. Big scholarly publishers have long been using content as a resource to capitalize on. AI tools amplify existing imbalances in access to scholarly text: if a publisher owns the exclusive right to a text, they can train their own AI on it and make this content unavailable to competing AI projects, profiting from the copyright yet again. Currently, most AI research assistants are grounded with abstracts, but the real value is contained in the full text of articles, and accessing them remains very difficult.

"Citation Amnesia: NLP and Other Academic Fields Are in a Citation Age Recession"

This study examines the tendency to cite older work across 20 fields of study over 43 years (1980–2023). . . . Our analysis, based on a dataset of approximately 240 million papers, reveals a broader scientific trend: many fields have markedly declined in citing older works (e.g., psychology, computer science). . . . Our results suggest that citing more recent works is not directly driven by the growth in publication rates. . . even when controlling for an increase in the volume of papers. Our findings raise questions about the scientific community’s engagement with past literature, particularly for NLP, and the potential consequences of neglecting older but relevant research.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12046

"Platformisation of Science: Conceptual Foundations"

The digital platforms we are dealing with in this article are auxiliary tools that do not produce anything themselves but provide an infrastructure for service providers and users to meet. They have potentially unlimited scaling potential and have become the central places of exchange. In academia, we can also observe that research and its communication become more digital and that digital services are aiming to become platforms. In this article we explore the concept of digital platforms and their potential impact on academic research, firstly addressing the question: To what extent can digital platforms be understood as a specific type of research infrastructure? We draw from recent literature on platforms and platformisation from different streams of scholarship and relate them to the science studies concept of research infrastructures, to eventually arrive at a framework for science platforms. Secondly, we aim to assess how science platforms may affect scholarly practice. Thirdly, we aim to assess to what extent science is platformised and how this interferes with scientific understandings of quality and autonomy. At the end of this article, we argue that the potential benefits of platform infrastructure for academic pursuits cannot be ignored, but the commercialization of the infrastructure for scholarly communication is a cause for concern. Ultimately, a nuanced and well-informed perspective on the impact of platformisation on academia is necessary to ensure that the academic community can maximize the benefits of digital infrastructures while mitigating negative consequences.

http://dx.doi.org/10.53377/lq.16693

"A Guide for Social Science Journal Editors on Easing Into Open Science"

Journal editors have a large amount of power to advance open science in their respective fields by incentivising and mandating open policies and practices at their journals. The Data PASS Journal Editors Discussion Interface (JEDI, an online community for social science journal editors: www.dpjedi.org) has collated several resources on embedding open science in journal editing (www.dpjedi.org/resources). However, it can be overwhelming as an editor new to open science practices to know where to start. For this reason, we created a guide for journal editors on how to get started with open science. The guide outlines steps that editors can take to implement open policies and practices within their journal, and goes through the what, why, how, and worries of each policy and practice. This manuscript introduces and summarizes the guide (full guide: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/hstcx).

https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-023-00141-5

"On the Challenges of Open Access Monitoring"

Monitoring systems are essential for tracking the progress in open access (OA) and particularly the goal of transitioning from paywalled to OA publications in many European countries. In this work, we express our opinion about the challenges faced by monitoring dashboards in providing a complete view of the OA status, ensuring accuracy in measuring OA production and achieving efficiency in the entire process. We analyze the characteristics of various monitoring systems from European countries, including the sources of data, formats, visualization methods, update frequencies, granularity and types of access recorded. We conclude by underlining the importance of monitoring systems in showcasing policy implementation, aiding decision-making, ensuring compliance and measuring impact in the pursuit of a more open scholarly landscape.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.641

"The Text File That Runs the Internet"

But robots.txt is not a legal document — and 30 years after its creation, it still relies on the good will of all parties involved. Disallowing a bot on your robots.txt page. . . sends a message, but it’s not going to stand up in court. Any crawler that wants to ignore robots.txt can simply do so, with little fear of repercussions. . . . As the AI companies continue to multiply, and their crawlers grow more unscrupulous, anyone wanting to sit out or wait out the AI takeover has to take on an endless game of whac-a-mole. . . . If AI is in fact the future of search, as Google and others have predicted, blocking AI crawlers could be a short-term win but a long-term disaster.

http://tinyurl.com/5n8s72bz

"Additional Experiments Required: A Scoping Review of Recent Evidence on Key Aspects of Open Peer Review"

Diverse efforts are underway to reform the journal peer review system. Combined with growing interest in Open Science practices, Open Peer Review (OPR) has become of central concern to the scholarly community. However, what OPR is understood to encompass and how effective some of its elements are in meeting the expectations of diverse communities, are uncertain. This scoping review updates previous efforts to summarize research on OPR to May 2022. Following the PRISMA methodological framework, it addresses the question: "What evidence has been reported in the scientific literature from 2017 to May 2022 regarding uptake, attitudes, and efficacy of two key aspects of OPR (Open Identities and Open Reports)?" The review identifies, analyses and synthesizes 52 studies matching inclusion criteria, finding that OPR is growing, but still far from common practice. Our findings indicate positive attitudes towards Open Reports and more sceptical approaches to Open Identities. Changes in reviewer behaviour seem limited and no evidence for lower acceptance rates of review invitations or slower turnaround times is reported in those studies examining those issues. Concerns about power dynamics and potential backfiring on critical reviews are in need of further experimentation. We conclude with an overview of evidence gaps and suggestions for future research. Also, we discuss implications for policy and practice, both in the scholarly communications community and the research evaluation community more broadly.Diverse efforts are underway to reform the journal peer review system. Combined with growing interest in Open Science practices, Open Peer Review (OPR) has become of central concern to the scholarly community. However, what OPR is understood to encompass and how effective some of its elements are in meeting the expectations of diverse communities, are uncertain. This scoping review updates previous efforts to summarize research on OPR to May 2022. Following the PRISMA methodological framework, it addresses the question: "What evidence has been reported in the scientific literature from 2017 to May 2022 regarding uptake, attitudes, and efficacy of two key aspects of OPR (Open Identities and Open Reports)?" The review identifies, analyses and synthesizes 52 studies matching inclusion criteria, finding that OPR is growing, but still far from common practice. Our findings indicate positive attitudes towards Open Reports and more sceptical approaches to Open Identities. Changes in reviewer behaviour seem limited and no evidence for lower acceptance rates of review invitations or slower turnaround times is reported in those studies examining those issues. Concerns about power dynamics and potential backfiring on critical reviews are in need of further experimentation. We conclude with an overview of evidence gaps and suggestions for future research. Also, we discuss implications for policy and practice, both in the scholarly communications community and the research evaluation community more broadly.

https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvae004

"Strategies for Negotiating and Signing Transformative Agreements in the Global South: The Colombia Consortium Experience"

The article presents the methodology used by the Colombia Consortium to negotiate the first transformative agreements (TAs) in Latin America. These TAs are a strategy to manage costs associated with Article Processing Charges (APCs), facilitate the transition to Open Access (OA) and increase the visibility of Colombian publications.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2023.2287945

"E-book Acceptance by First-Year Undergraduate Students: A Longitudinal Examination and Implications for Library Researchers"

The frequency of electronic book usage by students, according to the research described here, appears fairly positive. On a six-level scale, ranging from 1 (I don’t use it at all) to 6 (I use it several times a week), the average score was 3.27, and the most frequent response, was "Use several times a month" (n = 84, 28 %). This suggests that, on average, students tend to use e-books approximately once or twice a month.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102847

Inteview with Stevan Harnad: "Open and Impactful Scholarly Communication"

We posed selected questions to Stevan Harnad thirty years after his "subversive proposal" to self-archive online scholarly articles in university-hosted or disciplinary repositories to make them openly available and thus maximize research impact. A combination of factors including unfounded scepticism concerning open access, and bureaucratic access to the few institutional repositories launched by universities chiefly drove this outcome. The conclusions of the study may further inform educational efforts on scholarly communication in the digital era aimed at undergraduate students and researchers alike.

http://tinyurl.com/383u7nfe

"LIS Journals’ Lack of Participation in Wikidata Item Creation "

There are many items in Wikidata representing scholarly articles. However, these items have been created mostly by volunteer Wikidata editors and not systematically by journal publishers or editors, which can lead to gaps and inconsistencies in the datasets. This article presents findings from a survey investigating practices of library and information studies (LIS) journals in Wikidata item creation. Believing that a significant number of LIS journal editors would be aware of Wikidata and some would be creating Wikidata items for their publications, the authors sent a survey asking 138 English-language LIS journal editors if they created Wikidata items for materials published in their journal and follow-up questions. With a response rate of 41 percent, respondents overwhelmingly indicated that they did not create Wikidata items for materials published in their journal and were completely unaware of or only somewhat familiar with Wikidata. Respondents indicated that more familiarity with Wikidata and its benefits for scholarly journals as well as institutional support for the creation of Wikidata items could lead to greater participation; however, a campaign of education about Wikidata, documentation of benefits, and support for creation would be a necessary first step. The article presents and discusses the results of the survey, but the conclusions that can be drawn are minimal; therefore, the authors also discuss the benefits of creating Wikidata items for LIS journals as a first step in this educational campaign for editors and publishers.

https://doi.org/10.18357/kula.247

The European Landscape of Institutional Publishing — A Synopsis of Results from the DIAMAS Survey

The Institutional Publishing Landscape Report is built on 685 survey responses from institutional publishers and publishing service providers across the European Research Area. The findings illustrate the state of institutional publishing in Europe and show that a large portion of these organisations are operating with a diamond OA model. The report also discusses how institutional publishers are run and sustained, what activities they are involved in, and which services are outsourced. While the surveyed group is not necessarily representative of all institutional publishers and service providers in Europe, the findings broadly demonstrate the current operations of institutional publishers, their challenges, and the opportunities for supporting them in the future.

https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10551709

"Elsevier Launches Complete HeartX, the World’s First Heart Education Experience in Spatial Computing"

Elsevier Health, a global leader in medical information and data analytics, today launches Complete HeartX, a groundbreaking educational tool designed exclusively for Apple Vision Pro, the world’s first spatial computer. The tool unlocks an immersive and powerful experience that allows users to discover the heart like never before.

Designed to take advantage of the unique capabilities of Apple Vision Pro, Complete HeartX seamlessly merges the digital and physical world. By being able to explore the heart in stunning detail, users can bridge the gap between theory and practice. Complete HeartX combines detailed 3D models, animations, images, videos, educational scenes and clinical simulations to make learning about the heart engaging and informative. The app is based on Elsevier’s evidence-based content including Complete Anatomy, Osmosis and Gray’s Anatomy and has been created by Elsevier’s experts in anatomy and 3D modeling.

http://tinyurl.com/ya6d7ek6

"Is Gold Open Access Helpful for Academic Purification? A Causal Inference Analysis Based on Retracted Articles in Biochemistry"

The results showed that compared to non-OA, Gold OA is advantageous in reducing the retraction time of flawed articles, but does not demonstrate a significant advantage in reducing citations after retraction. This indicates that Gold OA may help expedite the detection and retraction of flawed articles, ultimately promoting the practice of responsible research.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2023.103640

Paywall: "The Scientific Periphery and New Flows of Knowledge: The Case of Regional Preprint Servers"

It is unclear whether regional rather than global or discipline-focussed preprint platforms as an innovation in the communication of science are removing any of the barriers faced by researchers in the scientific periphery or whether they are increasing access to and visibility of science from the periphery. In response, this paper focusses on the uptake, visibility and academic impact of regional preprint publishing platforms in two peripheral regions (Africa and Latin America) to gain insights into the use and possible impact of regional preprint servers.

https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0153

"DataCite Launches First Release of the Data Citation Corpus"

DataCite, in partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), is delighted to announce the first release of the Data Citation Corpus. A major milestone in the Make Data Count initiative, the release makes eight million data citations openly available and usable for the first time via an interactive dashboard and public data file.

https://makedatacount.org/first-release-of-the-open-global-data-citation-corpus/

"DIAMAS Results: Institutional Publishing Landscape Survey"

The publication of the survey results marks a significant milestone for DIAMAS and for Diamond Open Access. There is now a clear and intelligible picture of the European landscape of institutional publishing activities, with clear pathways to strengthen and support their operations. Our findings show how institutional publishers work, the scale of and nature of their operations, the ways finances and funding are managed, how open science practices are managed, and the nature of their challenges.

http://tinyurl.com/y3crvx8p