Category: Publishing

"Do Download Reports Reliably Measure Journal Usage? Trusting the Fox to Count Your Hens?"

Alex Wood-Doughty, Ted Bergstrom, and Douglas G. Steigerwald have published "Do Download Reports Reliably Measure Journal Usage? Trusting the Fox to Count Your Hens?" in College & Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

Download rates of academic journals have joined citation counts as commonly used indicators of the value of journal subscriptions. While citations reflect worldwide influence, the value of a journal subscription to a single library is more reliably measured by the rate at which it is downloaded by local users. If reported download rates accurately measure local usage, there is a strong case for using them to compare the cost-effectiveness of journal subscriptions. We examine data for nearly 8,000 journals downloaded at the ten universities in the University of California system during a period of six years. We find that controlling for number of articles, publisher, and year of download, the ratio of downloads to citations differs substantially among academic disciplines. After adding academic disciplines to the control variables, there remain substantial “publisher effects”, with some publishers reporting significantly more downloads than would be predicted by the characteristics of their journals. These cross-publisher differences suggest that the currently available download statistics, which are supplied by publishers, are not sufficiently reliable to allow libraries to make subscription decisions based on price and reported downloads, at least without making an adjustment for publisher effects in download reports.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Publication Modalities ‘Article in Press’ and ‘Open Access’ in Relation to Journal Average Citation"

Sara M. González-Betancor and Pablo Dorta-González have self-archived "Publication Modalities 'Article in Press' and 'Open Access' in Relation to Journal Average Citation."

Here's an excerpt:

There has been a generalization in the use of two publication practices by scientific journals during the past decade: 1. 'article in press' or early view, which allows access to the accepted paper before its formal publication in an issue; 2. 'open access', which allows readers to obtain it freely and free of charge. This paper studies the influence of both publication modalities on the average impact of the journal and its evolution over time. It tries to identify the separate effect of access on citation into two major parts: early view and selection effect, managing to provide some evidence of the positive effect of both. Scopus is used as the database and CiteScore as the measure of journal impact. The prevalence of both publication modalities is quantified. Differences in the average impact factor of group of journals, according to their publication modalities, are tested. The evolution over time of the citation influence, from 2011 to 2016, is also analysed. Finally, a linear regression to explain the correlation of these publication practices with the CiteScore in 2016, in a ceteris paribus context, is estimated. Our main findings show evidence of a positive correlation between average journal impact and advancing the publication of accepted articles, moreover this correlation increases over time. The open access modality, in a ceteris paribus context, also correlates positively with average journal impact.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Developing a Research Data Policy Framework for All Journals and Publishers"

Iain Hrynaszkiewicz et al. have self-archived "Developing a Research Data Policy Framework for All Journals and Publishers."

Here's an excerpt:

More journals and publishers—and funding agencies and institutions—are introducing research data policies. But as the prevalence of policies increases, there is potential to confuse researchers and support staff with numerous or conflicting policy requirements. We define and describe 14 features of journal research data policies and arrange these into a set of six standard policy types or tiers, which can be adopted by journals and publishers to promote data sharing in a way that encourages good practice and is appropriate for their audience's perceived needs. Policy features include coverage of topics such as data citation, data repositories, data availability statements, data standards and formats, and peer review of research data. These policy features and types have been created by reviewing the policies of multiple scholarly publishers, which collectively publish more than 10,000 journals, and through discussions and consensus building with multiple stakeholders in research data policy via the Data Policy Standardisation and Implementation Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance. Implementation guidelines for the standard research data policies for journals and publishers are also provided, along with template policy texts which can be implemented by journals in their Information for Authors and publishing workflows. We conclude with a call for collaboration across the scholarly publishing and wider research community to drive further implementation and adoption of consistent research data policies.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"The Citation Advantage of Linking Publications to Research Data"

Giovanni Colavizza et al. have self-archived "The Citation Advantage of Linking Publications to Research Data."

Here's an excerpt:

We consider 531,889 journal articles published by PLOS and BMC which are part of the PubMed Open Access collection, categorize their data availability statements according to their content and analyze the citation advantage of different statement categories via regression. We find that, following mandated publisher policies, data availability statements have become common by now, yet statements containing a link to a repository are still just a fraction of the total. We also find that articles with these statements, in particular, can have up to 25.36% higher citation impact on average: an encouraging result for all publishers and authors who make the effort of sharing their data.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"OpenCitations"

Silvio Peroni and David Shotton have self-archived "OpenCitations."

Here's an excerpt:

OpenCitations is a scholarly infrastructure organization dedicated to open scholarship and the publication of open bibliographic and citation data as Linked Open Data using Semantic Web technologies, to the development of software tools and services that enable convenient access to these open data, and to community advocacy for open citations.

This paper describes OpenCitations and its datasets, tools, services and activities. It introduces the OpenCitations Data Model and the SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies for encoding scholarly bibliographic and citation data in RDF, and OpenCitations' open software of generic applicability for searching, browsing and providing REST APIs over RDF triplestores. It describes Open Citation Identifiers (OCIs), globally unique and persistent identifiers for bibliographic citations, and the OpenCitations OCI Resolution Service that returns bibliographic and citation metadata when queried with an OCI. And it describes the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC), a database of open downloadable bibliographic and citation data harvested from bibliographic references in the scholarly literature and made available in RDF under a Creative Commons public domain dedication. Finally, it outlines the Open Citation Indexes of citation data openly available in third-party bibliographic databases that OpenCitations is currently making available as Linked Open Datasets accessible via its REST API, of which the first and largest is COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref DOI-to-DOI Citations which currently contains over 445 million bibliographic citations.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Preprints and Scholarly Communication: Adoption, Practices, Drivers and Barriers"

Andrea Chiarelli have published "Preprints and Scholarly Communication: Adoption, Practices, Drivers and Barriers" in F1000Research (awaiting peer review).

Here's an excerpt:

Background: Since 2013, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of preprint servers available online. To date, little is known about the position of researchers, funders, research performing organisations and other stakeholders with respect to this fast-paced landscape. In this article, we explore the benefits and challenges of preprint posting, along with issues such as infrastructure and financial sustainability. We also discuss the definition of a 'preprint' in different communities, and the impact this has on further uptake.

Methods: This study is based on 38 detailed semi-structured interviews of key stakeholders based on a purposive heterogeneous sampling approach. Interviews were undertaken between October 2018 and January 2019. These were recorded, transcribed and subjected to thematic analysis to identify trends. Interview questions were designed based on Innovation Diffusion Theory, which is also used to interpret the results of this study. Results: Our study is the first using empirical data to understand the new wave of preprint servers and found that early and fast dissemination is the most appealing feature of the practice. The main concerns are related to the lack of quality assurance and the 'Ingelfinger rule'. We identified trust as an essential enabler of preprint posting and stress the enabling role of Twitter in showcasing preprints and enabling comments on these.

Conclusions: The preprints landscape is evolving fast and disciplinary communities are at different stages in the innovation diffusion process. The landscape is characterised by significant experimentation, which leads to the conclusion that a one-size-fits-all approach to preprints is not feasible. Cooperation and active engagement between the stakeholders involved will play an important role in the future. In our paper, we share questions for the further development of the preprints landscape, with the most important being whether preprint posting will develop as a publisher- or researcher-centric practice.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Springer Nature Accelerates Its Transformative Journey with the Signing of Landmark Pure OA Deal"

Springer Nature has released "Springer Nature Accelerates Its Transformative Journey with the Signing of Landmark Pure OA Deal."

Here's an excerpt:

New agreements agreed this week with the Bibsam consortium in Sweden and Norway's Unit consortium take the number of Springer Nature’s read and publish deals to ten, putting the publisher firmly on the path to becoming a transformative publisher.

In a first for Springer Nature, Bibsam, representing the institutional libraries, and four of Sweden’s funding bodies (the Swedish Research Council, Formas, Forte and Vinnova) have agreed a deal which will see them share the costs of publishing in Springer Nature’s OA journals. . . .

Springer Nature has also agreed a transformative read and publish deal with Norway. This agreement, which will run from 2020 to 2022, will allow researchers in Norway to read articles in journals on SpringerLink and Norwegian authors to publish Open Access in over 2000 journals, making primary research with corresponding authors from Norway immediately and freely accessible from the point of publication, which Unit says will, "meet all our requirements for transition agreements, and will enable Norwegian researchers to read and publish in the majority of Springer journals".

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap