Category: Publishing

Norway Update: "Elsevier’s response to The Directorate for ICT and Shared Services in Higher Education and Research (UNIT)’s Decision to Not Renew Their Agreement with Elsevier"

Tom Reller has posted "Elsevier's response to The Directorate for ICT and Shared Services in Higher Education and Research (UNIT)'s Decision to Not Renew Their Agreement with Elsevier" to LIBLICENSE-L.

Here's an excerpt:

While Elsevier is working hard to accommodate the desire of some for an author-pays-to-publish (open access) world, the reality is that current author choices mean that 85 percent of journal articles globally are published under the reader-pays (subscription) model, where authors publish for free. It’s possible to come up with a negotiated agreement at reasonable costs, and Elsevier offered Norway multiple low-cost options for a rapid transition to gold open access publishing, but open access is a service that has to be funded in some form. Norway is essentially asking to receive two services for the price of one.

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"Ten Myths Around Open Scholarly Publishing"

Jonathan P. Tennant et al. have self-archived "Ten Myths Around Open Scholarly Publishing".

Here's an excerpt:

The changing world of scholarly communication and the emergence of 'Open Science' or 'Open Research' has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly-debated topics. Yet, evidence-based rational debate is regularly drowned out by misinformed or exaggerated rhetoric, which does not benefit the evolving system of scholarly communication. The aim of this article is to provide a baseline evidence framework for ten of the most contested topics, in order to help frame and move forward discussions, practices and policies. We address preprints and scooping, the practice of copyright transfer, the function of peer review, and the legitimacy of 'global' databases. The presented facts and data will be a powerful tool against misinformation across wider academic research, policy and practice, and may be used to inform changes within the rapidly evolving scholarly publishing system.

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"Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual"

Jill Cirasella and Polly Thistlethwaite have self-archived "Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual. "

Here's an excerpt:

Now that dissertations are deposited and distributed electronically, students must perform yet another anxiety-inducing task: deciding whether they want to make their dissertations immediately open access (OA) or, at universities that require OA, coming to terms with openness. For some students, mostly in the humanities and some of the social sciences, who hope to transform their dissertations into books, OA has become a bogeyman, a supposed saboteur of book contracts and destroyer of careers.

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"How to Fight Fair Use Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt: The Experience of One Open Educational Resource"

Lindsey Weeramuni has published "How to Fight Fair Use Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt: The Experience of One Open Educational Resource" in The Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

At the launch of one of the early online open educational resources (OER) in 2002, the approach to addressing copyright was uncertain. Did the university or the faculty own their material? How would the third-party material be handled? Was all of its use considered fair use under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act (Title 17, United States Code) because of its educational purpose? Or was permission-seeking necessary for this project to succeed and protect the integrity of faculty and university? For many years, this OER was conservative in its approach to third-party material, avoiding making fair use claims on the theory that it was too risky and difficult to prove in the face of an infringement claim. Additionally, being one of the early projects of its kind, there was fear of becoming a target for ambitious copyright holders wanting to make headlines (and perhaps win lawsuits). It was not until 2009 that the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare was written by a community of practitioners who believed that if fair use worked for documentary film makers, video creators, and others (including big media), it worked in open education as well. Once this Code was adopted, universities and institutions were able to offer more rich and complete course content to their users than before. This paper explains how it happened at this early open educational resource offering.

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"From Finch to Plan S: and You May Ask Yourself, Well How Did I Get Here?"

Frank Manista and Graham Stone have edited "From Finch to Plan S: and You May Ask Yourself, Well How Did I Get Here?" in Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

We have gone through the catalogue of previously published articles to give an interesting overview of what has been happening at the coalface since the Finch report. Post Finch, Sykes suggested that 'there is nothing inevitable about the triumph of open access'. The bigger picture that emerges from the articles is certainly that a great deal of effort and compromise have brought us to a place much closer to the end-game than we were back in 2012. However, as the various articles show, there is a great diversity of thought on how to get to where we think we ought to be. There is a value in healthy debate, particularly when there is the benefit that OA can bring. In the days leading up to the Plan S announcement, articles in Insights signalled a more urgent tone (Earney, 2018; Lundén, Smith and Wideberg, 2018) as things were not moving fast enough in navigating the bumpy golden road towards OA (Otegem, Wennström and Hormia-Poutanen, 2018). This is something that cOAlition-S explicitly targeted. Finally, Johnson (2019) brings the special collection to a close with a round-up of the immediate aftermath post Plan S. Like you, we await the next chapter.

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"Another Brick in the Paywall: The Popularity and Privacy Implications of Paywalls"

Panagiotis Papadopoulos, Peter Snyder, and Benjamin Livshits have self-archived "Another Brick in the Paywall: The Popularity and Privacy Implications of Paywalls."

Here's an excerpt:

Funding the production and distribution of quality online content is an open problem for content producers. Selling subscriptions to content, once considered passe, has been growing in popularity recently. Decreasing revenues from digital advertising, along with increasing ad fraud, have driven publishers to "lock" their content behind paywalls, thus denying access to non-subscribed users. How much do we know about the technology that may obliterate what we know as free web? What is its prevalence? How does it work? Is it better than ads when it comes to user privacy? How well is the premium content of publishers protected? In this study, we aim to address all the above by building a paywall detection mechanism and performing the first full-scale analysis of real-world paywall systems. Our results show that the prevalence of paywalls across the top sites in Great Britain reach 4.2%, in Australia 4.1%, in France 3.6% and globally 7.6%. We find that paywall use is especially pronounced among news sites, and that 33.4% of sites in the Alexa 1k ranking for global news sites have adopted paywalls. Further, we see a remarkable 25% of paywalled sites outsourcing their paywall functionality (including user tracking and access control enforcement) to third-parties. Putting aside the significant privacy concerns, these paywall deployments can be easily circumvented, and are thus mostly unable to protect publisher content.

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"Guidelines for Open Peer Review Implementation"

Tony Ross-Hellauer and Edit Gõrõgh have published "Guidelines for Open Peer Review Implementation" in Research Integrity and Peer Review (Attribution 4.0 International License).

Here's an excerpt:

Open peer review (OPR) is moving into the mainstream, but it is often poorly understood and surveys of researcher attitudes show important barriers to implementation. As more journals move to implement and experiment with the myriad of innovations covered by this term, there is a clear need for best practice guidelines to guide implementation. This brief article aims to address this knowledge gap, reporting work based on an interactive stakeholder workshop to create best-practice guidelines for editors and journals who wish to transition to OPR. Although the advice is aimed mainly at editors and publishers of scientific journals, since this is the area in which OPR is at its most mature, many of the principles may also be applicable for the implementation of OPR in other areas (e.g., books, conference submissions).

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"Bringing Citations and Usage Metrics Together to Make Data Count"

Helena Cousijn et al. have published "Bringing Citations and Usage Metrics Together to Make Data Count" in Data Science Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Over the last years, many organizations have been working on infrastructure to facilitate sharing and reuse of research data. This means that researchers now have ways of making their data available, but not necessarily incentives to do so. Several Research Data Alliance (RDA) working groups have been working on ways to start measuring activities around research data to provide input for new Data Level Metrics (DLMs). These DLMs are a critical step towards providing researchers with credit for their work. In this paper, we describe the outcomes of the work of the Scholarly Link Exchange (Scholix) working group and the Data Usage Metrics working group. The Scholix working group developed a framework that allows organizations to expose and discover links between articles and datasets, thereby providing an indication of data citations. The Data Usage Metrics group works on a standard for the measurement and display of Data Usage Metrics. Here we explain how publishers and data repositories can contribute to and benefit from these initiatives. Together, these contributions feed into several hubs that enable data repositories to start displaying DLMs. Once these DLMs are available, researchers are in a better position to make their data count and be rewarded for their work.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 9 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap