Publishing – Page 7 – DigitalKoans

"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

"The ‘Must Stock’ Challenge in Academic Publishing: Pricing Implications of Transformative Agreements"

While several contract designs exist, the ‘publish-and-read’ (PAR) scheme is the one that comes closest to the ideal of an entirely open access environment: Publishers are paid a fixed case-by-case rate for each publication, which includes a fee for their extensive libraries. In turn, all subscription payments are waived. I theoretically derive that this contract design benefits the included publishers regardless of whether the number of publications in these publishers’ journals grows or declines. Consequently, widespread PAR contracts are likely to raise entry barriers for new (open-access) competitors even further.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03597

"Wiley Sees Light at the End of the Tunnel"

The Research group had more mixed results. Revenue rose 1%, to $256 million, but EBITDA fell 1% due to higher editorial and marketing costs and the continuing impact of the reorganization of its Hindawi unit. (Last year, Wiley suspended Hindawi’s open access publishing operations after its discovered a number of "compromised" articles; the company is in the processing of “sunsetting” the Hindawi brand and merging its operations into other Wiley groups).

https://tinyurl.com/mwkzw4xa

"CACM [Communications of the ACM] Is Now Open Access"

For almost 65 years, the contents of CACM have been exclusively accessible to ACM members and individuals affiliated with institutions that subscribe to either CACM or the ACM Digital Library. In 2020, ACM announced its intention to transition to a fully Open Access publisher within a roughly five-year timeframe (January 2026) under a financially sustainable model. The transition is going well: By the end of 2023, approximately 40% of the ~26,000 articles ACM publishes annually were being published Open Access utilizing the ACM Open model. As ACM has progressed toward this goal, it has increasingly opened large parts of the ACM Digital Library, including more than 100,000 articles published between 1951–2000. It is ACM’s plan to open its entire archive of over 600,000 articles when the transition to full Open Access is complete.

https://tinyurl.com/yuph6ec3

"Innovative Open Research Publisher PeerJ Joins Taylor & Francis"

PeerJ is best known for its multidisciplinary flagship title PeerJ Life & Environment serving the Biological, Medical and Environmental Sciences and PeerJ Computer Science (covering all areas of computer science, including AI, quantum, and robotics). In addition, PeerJ offers five titles in the Chemical Sciences, meaning that in total Taylor & Francis will welcome 7 new journals to its open research program.

All PeerJ journals offer high-quality peer review and rapid publication, supported by PeerJ’s own submission and peer review platform, and dedicated contributor support. Articles are selected on scientific value and methodological soundness, providing a forum for world-class research addressing many of the globe’s current challenges. PeerJ also hosts a digital hub for the International Association for Biological Oceanography, promoting the advancement of knowledge of the biology of the sea.

https://tinyurl.com/ms2unw2b

"De Gruyter Brill Begins Here"

De Gruyter and Brill have joined forces to form De Gruyter Brill, a leading academic publisher in the humanities and beyond. To mark the occasion, a new corporate website has been launched today at degruyterbrill.com.

With combined pro forma revenues of approximately €140 million and 750 employees, De Gruyter Brill is uniquely positioned to offer outstanding services and technological infrastructure tailored to the needs of academic authors, librarians, and institutions around the world. Together, De Gruyter Brill publishes well over 3,500 books and 800 journals per year, with a particularly strong focus on the humanities and social sciences, while extending to subject areas in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

https://tinyurl.com/27e8szc2

"Choice of Open Access in Elsevier Hybrid Journals"

Open access articles in hybrid journals have recently increased despite high article processing charges. This study investigated the impacts of grants and transformative agreements on authors’ choice of open and non-open access articles by comparing two article types. The samples were hybrid journals launched independently by Elsevier. The results revealed that the authors who received more grants in countries with transformative agreements were more likely to choose open access articles. By contrast, authors in developing countries were likely to publish non-open access articles. These findings imply that authors’ choices depend on the funding systems and open access policies in individual countries. Consequently, open access may become a barrier to the dissemination of work for researchers who have financial difficulty choosing open access, although it enables everyone to access articles free of charge.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-024-09978-0

"What Do We Know about DOIs"

What, though, do we actually know about the state of persistence of these links? How many DOIs resolve correctly? How many landing pages, at the other end of the DOI resolution, contain the information that is supposed to be there, including the title and the DOI itself?. . . .

Let’s talk about the resolution statistics. Other studies, looking at general links on the web, have found a link-rot rate of about 60%-70% over a ten-year period (Lessig, Zittrain, and Albert 2014; Stox 2022). The DOI resolution rate that we have, with 97% of links resolving (or a 3% link-rot rate), is far better and more robust than a web link in general.

Is 3% a good or a bad number? It’s more robust than the web in general, but it still means that for every 100 DOIs, just under 3 will fail to resolve. We also cannot tell whether these DOIs are resolving to the correct target, except by using the metadata detection metrics (are the title and DOI on the landing page, which we could only detect at a far lower rate). It is entirely possible for a website to resolve with an HTTP 200 (OK) response, but for the page in question to be something very different to what the user expected, a phenomenon dubbed content drift.

https://www.crossref.org/blog/what-do-we-know-about-dois/

"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/