Category: Publishing

"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.

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More Coverage of the University of California’s Cancellation of Its Elsevier Subscriptions

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"Towards Open Annotation: Examples and Experiments"

Lindsey Seatter has published "Towards Open Annotation: Examples and Experiments" in KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies.

Here's an excerpt:

This article interrogates how digital text annotation tools and projects facilitate online engagement and virtual communities of practice. With the rise of the Web 2.0 movement and the proliferation of digital resources, annotation has evolved from an isolated practice to a collaborative one. This article unpacks the impact of this shift by providing an in-depth discussion of five web-based tools and two social reading projects. This article examines issues of design, usability, and applicability to pedagogical intervention as well as underscores how productive group dynamics can be fostered through digital, social annotation.

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"University of California Academic Council Statement on the University’s Negotiations with Elsevier Publishing"

The Academic Council of the Academic Senate of the University of California has released "University of California Academic Council Statement on the University's Negotiations with Elsevier Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

The Academic Council of the Academic Senate of the University of California (UC), hereby signals its collective and resolute commitment to support UC's negotiating position with Elsevier in order to advance UC's mission as a public institution, make the products of our research and scholarship as freely and widely available as possible, and ensure that UC spends taxpayer money in the most ethically, morally, and socially-responsible way when entering into agreements with commercial publishers. . . .

At the present time, UC and Elsevier have reached an impasse in their negotiations and our contract has lapsed. Nonetheless, the Academic Council of the Academic Senate stands firm in its conviction that a comprehensive transformative agreement that covers all Elsevier titles is required to achieve the aspirations embodied in the Academic Senate's Open Access Policy, and articulated by the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC) in its Declaration of Rights and Principles, and by the Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Committee (SLASIAC) in its Call to Action. We support the unified strategies of the UC libraries to ameliorate the negative effects of the impasse on faculty, researchers, and students, and applaud their efforts to closely monitor alternative access along with the impacts it may have on research and teaching. . . .

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"UC Terminates Subscriptions with World’s Largest Scientific Publisher in Push for Open Access to Publicly Funded Research"

The University of California has released "UC Terminates Subscriptions with World's Largest Scientific Publisher in Push for Open Access to Publicly Funded Research."

Here's an excerpt:

As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC's key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals.

In negotiating with Elsevier, UC aimed to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by ensuring that research produced by UC's 10 campuses — which accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output — would be immediately available to the world, without cost to the reader. Under Elsevier's proposed terms, the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university's multi-million dollar subscription, resulting in much greater cost to the university and much higher profits for Elsevier. . . .

Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC's reasonable contract terms, which would integrate subscription charges and open access publishing fees, making open access the default for any article by a UC scholar and stabilizing journal costs for the university.

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"Introducing eLife’s First Computationally Reproducible Article"

eLife has released Introducing eLife's First Computationally Reproducible Article by Giuliano Maciocci, Michael Aufreiter and Nokome Bentley.

Here's an excerpt:

Reproducible manuscripts enrich the traditional narrative of a research article with code, data and interactive figures that can be executed in the browser, downloaded and explored, giving readers a direct insight into the methods, algorithms and key data behind the published research.

Today eLife, in collaboration with Substance, Stencila and Tim Errington, Director of Research at the Center for Open Science, US, published its first reproducible article, based on one of Errington's papers in the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology.

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