Publishing – Page 6 – DigitalKoans

"Transitional Agreements Aren’t Working: What Comes Next?"

Most important is the question of whether TAs deliver on their promise of their name to be transitional and transformative. Overall, the rate of journal "flipping" is low (with the exception of some smaller publishers). Most shocking, if not entirely unsurprising, to me was the following finding: based on the journal flipping rates observed between 2018 -2022 it would take at least 70 years for the big five publishers to flip their TA titles to OA.

https://tinyurl.com/n2ukvxr6

"VeriXiv Supports Gates-Funded Researchers to Comply with New Open Access Policy"

F1000 and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced plans to launch a new verified preprint platform that will enable the rapid availability of new findings and promote research integrity. VeriXiv [pronounced very-kive] will support researchers in complying with the Gates Foundation’s refreshed open access policy that requires all their funded research to be made available as a preprint from January 2025. . . .

Twenty different ethics and integrity checks will assess a range of issues, including plagiarism, image manipulation, author verification and competing interests. In addition, open research transparency checks will check whether the data is available in an appropriate repository and that methods have been included to support reproducibility. Each preprint will have clear labelling so that readers know the level of verification conducted on the article, and which levels have been passed.

https://www.f1000.com/verixiv/

"New Report on the Sustainability of Diamond OA in Europe"

A new report from the DIAMAS work package that SPARC Europe looks at understanding how institutional publishing is sustained today. Institutional publishers and service providers are diverse due to their missions, size and service provision. In addition, there is no definitive set of tasks that all institutional publishers share. These characteristics influence the sustainability options available to them and the choices they make. . . .

Diamond OA publishing needs more stable and long-term funding. IPSPs utilise diverse funding models, and 40% depend on time-limited grants to support their operations and many are burdened by the administration that these grants demand. They rely primarily on parent organisations for basic support, especially in-kind support, such as personnel, and services. Personnel are more central to IPSPs’ financial sustainability than revenue streams, but they are often employed outside the boundary of the IPSP itself, which means that IPSPs have to negotiate for resources.

https://tinyurl.com/yw9ythtx

Report

"The Open Access Coverage of Openalex, Scopus and Web of Science"

Using OpenAlex and the Directory of Open Access Journals as a benchmark, this paper investigates the coverage of diamond and gold through authorship and journal coverage in the Web of Science and Scopus by field, country, and language. Results show their lower coverage in WoS and Scopus, and the local scope of diamond OA. The share of English-only journals is considerably higher among gold journals. High-income countries have the highest share of authorship in every domain and type of journal, except for diamond journals in the social sciences and humanities. Understanding the current landscape of diamond OA indexing can aid the scholarly communications network with advancing policy and practices towards more inclusive OA models.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01985

"Forensic Scientometrics — An Emerging Discipline to Protect the Scholarly Record"

Forensic Scientometrics (FoSci) is emerging as a vital discipline at the intersection of scientific integrity and security. Scholarship and scholarly communication are critical for maintaining scientific integrity, influencing public trust in science, health, technology, policy, and law. Yet, these foundations are threatened by the misuse of scientific research for personal, commercial, ideological, and geopolitical gains, including questionable practices and misconduct. The rise of paper mills and predatory publishers, along with ideological and geopolitical motivations, undermines academic integrity. This field pioneers the integration of traditional scientometric methods with ethics to address pressing challenges in research integrity and security, crucial in an era of heightened scrutiny over science’s reliability. FoSci’s development signifies a collective commitment to maintaining scientific trust, marked by a call for official recognition and support from stakeholders across the scientific ecosystem.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00478

"Guest Post: FoSci — The Emerging Field of Forensic Scientometrics"

The complexity of maintaining research integrity is driving the development of a new disciplinary field dedicated to the study of research integrity forensics. Currently, efforts to uphold the integrity of scientific activities are dispersed across various stakeholders, including researchers, librarians, independent scholars, research institutions, journalists, government officials, funders, and lawyers. These efforts, while valuable, are often siloed within their respective disciplines, leading to a fragmented approach to addressing lapses in research integrity. By establishing a specialized field focused on the forensics of research integrity, we can foster a multidisciplinary collaboration that leverages the expertise of all relevant actors.

https://tinyurl.com/5b8t54eb

"Generative AI for Trustworthy, Open, and Equitable Scholarship"

We focus on the potential of GenAI to address known problems for the alignment of science practice and its underlying core values. As institutions culturally charged with the curation and preservation of the world’s knowledge and cultural heritage, libraries are deeply invested in promoting a durable, trustworthy, and sustainable scholarly knowledge commons. With public trust in academia and in research waning [reference] and in the face of recent high-profile instances of research misconduct [reference], the scholarly community must act swiftly to develop policies, frameworks, and tools for leveraging the power of GenAI in ways that enhance, rather than erode, the trustworthiness of scientific communications, the breadth of scientific impact, and the public’s trust in science, academia, and research.

https://doi.org/10.21428/e4baedd9.567bfd15

"TDM & AI Rights Reserved? Fair Use & Evolving Publisher Copyright Statements"

Earlier this year, we noticed that some academic publishers have revised the copyright notices on their websites to state they reserve rights to text and data mining (TDM) and AI training (for example, see the website footers for Elsevier and Wiley). . . .SPARC asked Kyle K. Courtney, Director of Copyright and Information Policy for Harvard Library, to address key questions regarding these revised copyright statements and the continuing viability of fair use justifications for TDM.

https://tinyurl.com/4prkfbb3

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Ends APC Support and Requires Preprints

For over a decade, our foundation has championed transparency, access, and equity in scholarly publishing by working with publishers and journals to develop more open and accessible research publishing practices. But our quest for a truly equitable and inclusive scholarly publishing ecosystem remains incomplete. Today, we’re announcing a refreshed policy for our grantees that we hope will help foundation-supported breakthroughs reach the field in the fastest and fairest way possible.

At its core, the policy will:

End the foundation’s payment of individual article publishing fees such as APCs—paving the way for more equitable publishing models

Require grantees to share preprints of their articles—breaking free from journal constraints while prioritizing access to research and preserving grantee publishing choices

https://tinyurl.com/mtba833c

"On the Fast Track to Full Gold Open Access"

The world of scientific publishing is changing; the days of an old type of subscription-based earnings for publishers seem over, and we are entering a new era. It seems as if an ever-increasing number of journals from disparate publishers are going Gold, Open Access that is, yet have we rigorously ascertained the issue in its entirety, or are we touting the strengths and forgetting about constructive criticism and careful weighing of evidence? We will therefore present the current state of the art, in a compact review/bibliometrics style, of this more relevant than ever hot topic and suggest solutions that are most likely to be acceptable to all parties–while the performed analysis also shows there seems to be a link between trends in scientific publishing and tumultuous world events, which in turn has a special significance for the publishing environment in the current world stage.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08313

"Guest Post — Making Sense of Open Access Business Models "

As part of my work to help not-for-profit publishers with their open access (OA) transitions, I have developed a classification system for OA business models. Considering the different models as broad groups with shared attributes enables us to have more effective discussions about what types of model are the best fit for each publisher, taking into consideration the discipline in which they publish, the geographic diversity of their authors, existing institutional and funder relationships and mandates, and of course the types of content they publish. . . .In the rest of this blog post I’ll give you a short summary of each category and describe what I consider to be the archetypal business model within each of them.

https://tinyurl.com/6cdda452

"We Need to Rethink the Way We Identify Diamond Open Access Journals in Quantitative Science Studies"

With the announcement of several new diamond open access (OA) related initiatives, such as the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, the DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA projects, and the recent creation of the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, it is clear that diamond OA is now at the forefront of the OA movement. Diamond OA is a publishing model that is free for both authors and readers, with the publishing costs generally assumed by grants, governments, subsidies, or a community. However, while working on our recent Quantitative Science Studies publication and dataset, we noticed that temporarily waiving APCs was a commonly used strategy by the Big 5 for-profit publishers for some of their journals. This letter discusses the need for more cautiousness when doing research about diamond OA and APCs, as well as the need for more transparency in the costs for publishing.

https://doi.org/10.1590/SciELOPreprints.8272

D3.2 Extensible Quality Standard in Institutional Publishing (EQSIP) V2.0 for Diamond Open Access

The objective of EQSIP for Diamond Open Access is to set a common quality standard for IPs that publish scholarly journals, based on the seven core components of scholarly publishing outlined in the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access[3] (Ancion et al. 2022, 4), which were subsequently revised and modified by the DIAMAS project team. These are:

Funding

Legal ownership, mission and governance

Open Science

Editorial management, editorial quality and research integrity

Technical service efficiency

Visibility, communication, marketing, and impact

Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (EDIB), multilingualism and gender equity

EQSIP for Diamond Open Access applies to scholarly journals. EQSIP’s underlying goal is to set a common quality standard for publishing as a public good, i.e. defined and controlled by the public through expert communities, thus guaranteeing that academic contributions in scholarly journals are also a public good.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10726732

"The Latest ‘Crisis’ — Is the Research Literature Overrun with ChatGPT- and LLM-generated Articles?"

Elsevier has been under the spotlight this month for publishing a paper that contains a clearly ChatGPT-written portion of its introduction. The first sentence of the paper’s Introduction reads, "Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic:. . . ." To date, the article remains unchanged, and unretracted. A second paper, containing the phrase "I’m very sorry, but I don’t have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model" was subsequently found, and similarly remains unchanged. This has led to a spate of amateur bibliometricians scanning the literature for similar common AI-generated phrases, with some alarming results.

https://tinyurl.com/4a8bjmzy

"Support for OSF Preprint Infrastructure and Community Servers"

Numerous Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC) partner institutions* will provide three years of financial support for the Center for Open Science’s OSF Preprints, an open source platform and infrastructure that enables the facilitation and discovery of scholarship. COS notes that submission and consumption of preprints continues to grow with "~150,000 preprints hosted across all of the current and prior preprint communities, and 1.7 million views on preprint pages since September 2023."

https://tinyurl.com/yn9nntvu

Paywall: "Starting In-House Copyright Education Programs: Commonalities and Conclusions from Two Southeastern Us Academic Libraries"

This case study introduces two copyright education programs and summarizes the state of copyright education within library and information science (LIS) and academic libraries. . . . The following themes within the two copyright education programs were identified through a case study: the complexity of copyright, the engagement (or lack thereof) across a college or university, the necessity of including copyright in information literacy instruction and the calls for professional development with copyright.

https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-09-2023-0069

Paywall: "Applying Librarian-Created Evaluation Tools to Determine Quality and Credibility of Open Access Library Science Journals"

The researchers investigate quality and credibility attributes of forty-eight peer-reviewed library science journals with open access components using two evaluative tools developed and published by librarians. The results identify common positive and negative attributes of library science journals, compare the results of the two evaluation tools, and discuss their ease of use and limitations.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/916990

"Plan S and Open Access (OA) in Quebec: What Does the Revised FRQ OA Policy Mean for Researchers?"

Our article examines the effects of Quebec’s provincial funding agency (FRQ)’s revised 2022 OA policy on researchers. Following FRQ’s participation as a cOAlition S funding agency, which involves endorsing Plan S principles, we provide an overview of the OA options for researchers. We examine these options under the FRQ 2019 and FRQ 2022 policy years, account for the effect of transformative agreements (TA) on OA publishing options, as well as the financial implications for researchers under the revised policy.

https://tinyurl.com/2wvt5bhj

"[AAP] Publishers File Brief Opposing Internet Archive Appeal of Loss"

Controlled digital lending is a frontal assault on the foundational copyright principle that rightsholders exclusively control the terms of sale for every different format of their work — a principle that has spawned the broad diversity in formats of books, movies, television and music that consumers enjoy today.

"[T]here is no resemblance between IA’s conversion of millions of print books into ebooks and the historical practice of lending print books. Nor does IA’s distribution of ebooks without paying authors and their publishers a dime conform with the modern practices of libraries, which acquire licenses to lend ebooks to their local communities and enjoy the benefits of digital distribution lawfully."

The Internet Archive ("IA") operates a mass-digitization enterprise in which it copies millions of complete, in-copyright print books and distributes the resulting bootleg ebooks from its website to anyone in the world for free. Granting summary judgment, the District Court properly held that IA’s infringement is not saved by fair use as each of the four factors weighs against IA under longstanding case law.

https://tinyurl.com/5ah5vx3x

"OurResearch Receives $7.5M grant from Arcadia to Establish OpenAlex, a Milestone Development for Open Science"

OurResearch is proud to announce a $7.5M grant from Arcadia, to establish a sustainable and completely open index of the world’s research ecosystem. With this 5-year grant, OurResearch expands their open science ambitions to replace paywalled knowledge graphs with OpenAlex. . . .

OpenAlex indexes more than twice as many scholarly works as the leading proprietary products and the entirety of the knowledge graph and its source code are openly licensed and freely available through data snapshots, an easy to use API, and a nascent user interface. . . .

Development of OpenAlex started only two years ago and it already serves 115M API calls per month; underlies a major university ranking; is displacing proprietary products at Universities; and has established partnerships with national governments. We are excited by these early successes of OpenAlex and its promise to revolutionize scholarly communication and democratize the world’s research.

You can use OpenAlex‘s Author Profile Change Request Form, to correct certain types of errors about your publications, such as "My work has been incorrectly attributed to another author."

There is also a Submit a Request form, but it is not clear if this can be used to correct citation count or other types of errors not covered by the above form.

https://tinyurl.com/3396s27m

"The Cost of Open Access: Comparing Public Projects’ Budgets and Article Processing Charges Expenditure"

Thus, this research tries to estimate the percentage of the budget of the projects funded by the Spanish State Plan for the Generation of Knowledge and Scientific and Technological Strengthening of the R&D&I, Spain’s two main public project funding calls in Spain. The period studied is 2013-2019. Additionally, we study the relationships between publication intensity, funding attraction, and the availability of OA journals with APC expenditure at the area level. The results show that €43.67 million were spent on APCs, with most projects spending 3-8% of their budgets. However, numerous outliers with rates over 10% suggest further study on the role of APCs in the financial performance of the research activity.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/98j5p

"To Preprint or Not to Preprint: A Global Researcher Survey"

Open science is receiving widespread attention globally, and preprinting offers an important way to implement open science practices in scholarly publishing. To develop a systematic understanding of researchers’ adoption of and attitudes toward preprinting, we conducted a survey of authors of research papers published in 2021 and early 2022. Our survey results show that the United States and Europe led the way in the adoption of preprinting. The United States and European respondents reported a higher familiarity with and a stronger commitment to preprinting than their colleagues elsewhere in the world. The adoption of preprinting is much stronger in physics and astronomy as well as mathematics and computer science than in other research areas. Respondents identified free accessibility of preprints and acceleration of research communication as the most important benefits of preprinting. Low reliability and credibility of preprints, sharing results before peer review and premature media coverage are the most significant concerns about preprinting, emphasized in particular by respondents in the life and health sciences. According to respondents, the most crucial strategies to encourage preprinting are integrating preprinting into journal submission workflows and providing recognition for posting preprints.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24880

Advancing Ireland’s Open Repository Landscape: A Strategic Roadmap

This report presents an in-depth analysis and strategic roadmap for advancing the open repository landscape in Ireland. Drawing on comprehensive data from interviews, surveys, self-assessments, and both national and international initiatives, the document outlines the current status, challenges, and future prospects for open repositories in Ireland. Key findings highlight significant advancements in open access adherence. Despite these successes, persistent challenges such as metadata quality, resource limitations, and sustainability issues underscore the need for concerted effort and strategic planning.

The report proposes a forward-looking roadmap spanning from 2025 to 2030 and beyond, prioritising the enhancement of repository infrastructures, metadata quality improvement, open mandates promotion, technological advancements, capacity building, and fostering collaborative partnerships. This strategic vision aims to develop and encourage Ireland’s transition to open research, leveraging innovative practices and collaborative efforts to facilitate a more open, inclusive, and sustainable research environment. By addressing current limitations and embracing future opportunities, the roadmap sets the stage for a transformative shift in Ireland’s scholarly communication landscape, with potential significant impacts on researchers, institutions, and society at large.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10810233

"Supporting Open Access Monographs: Penn State University Libraries’ Participation in the TOME Initiative"

In 2017, Penn State pledged to participate in the then newly established Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) Initiative. TOME was launched by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) as a five-year pilot with two main types of participants: colleges and universities and university presses. Penn State was one of the first universities to commit funds to participate in TOME, which was designed to support peer-reviewed, open access monographs in the humanities and social sciences. Each participating university committed $225,000 total for the five-year pilot, split out into $45,000 per academic year to support three grants of $15,000 per monograph. This number was established based on the recommendation from the Ithaka S+R Report "The Costs of Publishing Monographs."

https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.85.3.66

"Are Price, Value, and Openness the Most Important Scholarly Communication Priorities?"

Specifically, academia has an enormous stake in imperatives like ensuring the trustworthiness of the scholarly record, providing for the platforms through which humans and machines will engage with scholarship, and addressing the atomization of the scholarly article. These topics demand collaboration by academia and research publishers. The current investments in developing AI-powered tools that support scholarly communication — and in resisting some of the challenges posed by the use of AI — makes these kinds of partnerships only more important and urgent. But how can academia and publishers build the basis for stronger collaboration when so much of the relationship in recent decades has been adversarial?

https://tinyurl.com/ppmucwn5