Category: Publishing

Open Divide? Critical Studies on Open Access

Litwin Books has released Open Divide? Critical Studies on Open Access.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This book brings together seventeen short critical studies of scientists and librarians from different continents, all interested in open access, most of them supporting and accompanying the open access projects and initiatives since many years, each one with the motivation to better understand (and make understood) the ongoing transformation of scientific communication.

With the agreement of Litwin Books, some authors have made open access versions of their papers available.

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"Push Versus Pull"

Sheldon H. Jacobson has published "Push Versus Pull" in Communications of the ACM.

Here's an excerpt:

The access subscription fee model represents a "Push Model" for financing publications, whereby publishers push access onto institutions, for an access subscription fee. An alternative "Pull Model" positions publishers to pull submissions to their journals. In such a model, no access subscription fees are paid, and hence, anyone can access research publications. What institutions would pay are submission subscription fees, an institution-wide fee that permits their entire faculty to submit papers to a particular journal or a publisher's portfolio of journals.

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"Predator in the Pool? A Quantitative Evaluation of Non-indexed Open Access Journals in Aquaculture Research"

Jeff C. Clements et al. have published "Predator in the Pool? A Quantitative Evaluation of Non-indexed Open Access Journals in Aquaculture Research" in Frontiers in Marine Science.

Here's an excerpt:

Predatory open access (OA) journals can be defined as non-indexed journals that exploit the gold OA model for profit, often spamming academics with questionable e-mails promising rapid OA publication for a fee. In aquaculture—a rapidly growing and highly scrutinized field—the issue of such journals remains undocumented. We employed a quantitative approach to determine whether attributes of scientific quality and rigor differed between OA aquaculture journals not indexed in reputable databases and well-established, indexed journals. Using a Google search, we identified several non-indexed OA journals, gathered data on attributes of these journals and articles therein, and compared these data to well-established aquaculture journals indexed in quality-controlled bibliometric databases. We then used these data to determine if non-indexed journals were likely predatory OA journals and if they pose a potential threat to aquaculture research. On average, non-indexed OA journals published significantly fewer papers per year, had cheaper fees, and were more recently established than indexed journals. Articles in non-indexed journals were, on average, shorter, had fewer authors and references, and spent significantly less time in peer review than their indexed counterparts; the proportion of articles employing rigorous statistical analyses was also lower for non-indexed journals. Additionally, articles in non-indexed journals were more likely to be published by scientists from developing nations. Worryingly, non-indexed journals were more likely to be found using a Google search, and their articles superficially resembled those in indexed journals. These results suggest that the non-indexed aquaculture journals identified herein are likely predatory OA journals and pose a threat to aquaculture research and the public education and perception of aquaculture. Several points of reference from this study, in combination, may help scientists and the public more easily identify these possibly predatory journals, as these journals were typically established after 2010, publishing <20 papers per year, had fees <$1,000, and published articles <80 days after submission. Subsequently checking reputable and quality-controlled databases such as the Directory of Open Access Journals, Web of Science, Scopus, and Thompson Reuters can aid in confirming the legitimacy of non-indexed OA journals and can facilitate avoidance of predatory OA aquaculture journals.

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"IPA-WIPO Publishing Industry Pilot Survey Published"

The International Publishers Association has released "IPA-WIPO Publishing Industry Pilot Survey Published."

Here's an excerpt:

The IPA has initiated a partnership with the World Intellectual Property Organisation, WIPO, to help gather global statistics on the book industry. It will be updated and added to each year, enabling year-on-year comparisons and measuring the impact of policy and market changes on the sector. The WIPO-IPA pilot study conducted in 2017 as a first step to a full survey already includes interesting data about 2016 trends.

Read the report: The Global Publishing Industry in 2016: A Pilot Survey by the IPA and WIPO.

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"Understanding and Supporting Researchers’ Choices in Sharing Their Publications: The Launch of the FairShare Network and Shareable PDF"

Charlie Rapple has published "Understanding and Supporting Researchers' Choices in Sharing Their Publications: The Launch of the FairShare Network and Shareable PDF" in Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

Researchers have for many years had access to new platforms and channels for networking and sharing resources, but the pace of growth in their usage of these networks has substantially increased recently. This has led to full-text sharing on a scale that concerns publishers and libraries, because of the proportion of such sharing that infringes copyright. This article summarizes key findings of a 2017 survey that explored researchers’ awareness of and behaviours in relation to scholarly collaboration networks and other emerging mechanisms for discovering and gaining access to content, along with their views on copyright. The article also describes 'Shareable PDF', a new approach to PDF-based sharing that better enables such sharing to be measured and contextualized, and which has recently been successfully launched with authors and readers.

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"The Open Access Big Deal: Back to the Future"

Richard Poynder has published "The Open Access Big Deal: Back to the Future" in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

One obvious problem with the OA Big Deal is that it allows large legacy publishers to lock their high prices into the new OA environment, while marginalising and excluding the new-entrants that were supposed to disrupt the market. Unless something changes, therefore, the affordability problem will only be perpetuated.

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"Engaging and Supporting a University Press Scholarly Community"

Megan Taylor and Kathrine S. H. Jensen have published "Engaging and Supporting a University Press Scholarly Community" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper we explore how the development of The University of Huddersfield Press, a publisher of open access scholarly journals and monographs, has enabled the sharing of research with a wider online audience. We situate the development of the Press within a wider research environment and growing community of New University Presses (NUPs) where there is an increasing demand for demonstrating research impact, which drives the need for improved analysis and reporting of impact data, a task that often falls within the remit of library and academic support services. We detail the benefits of the University Press Manager role in terms of ensuring professional service that delivers consistency and sustainability. We go on to outline the experiences of engaging with different online spaces and detail the extensive support for student authors. We argue that in order for the Press to support building a strong and engaged scholarly community and provide new spaces for emerging research, continued investment in both platform development and infrastructure is required.

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"Digital Delivery Breathes New Life into Professional Books and Scholarly Monographs"

Simba Information has released "Digital Delivery Breathes New Life into Professional Books and Scholarly Monographs."

Here's an excerpt:

Scholarly and professional e-books sales increased globally by 5.6% in 2017 and will grow an additional 4.8% in 2018, revitalizing a medium publishers once wrote off, according to the latest report from Simba Information.

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"Congress Funds $5 Million Open Textbook Grant Program in 2018 Spending Bil"

SPARC has released "Congress Funds $5 Million Open Textbook Grant Program in 2018 Spending Bil."

Here's an excerpt:

In a landmark victory for the Open Education movement, the U.S. Congress has included funding for a $5 million open textbook grant program in the Fiscal Year 2018 omnibus appropriations bill unveiled today. This marks the first major investment by Congress explicitly in open educational resources (OER) as a solution to the high cost of college textbooks, and underscores that course materials are a significant factor in making higher education affordable. The FY18 omnibus is expected to proceed swiftly to votes in the House and Senate and get signed into law this week.

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Pathways to Open Access

The University of California has released Pathways to Open Access.

Here's an excerpt:

Pursuant to the University of California (UC) Council of University Librarian’s (CoUL) 1 3 August 2017 charge, this Pathways to OA Working Group 2 has identified the current universe of Open Access (OA) approaches, and has analyzed the suite of strategies available for effectuating those approaches. Each approach described within this Pathways document offers unique and, in some cases, overlapping challenges, opportunities, and room for experimentation. The strategies examined here create space and freedom for the campuses to pursue both individualized and connected paths toward a large-scale transition to OA—though as we highlight below, collective action on implementing the strategies is likely to bear greater fruit.

See also: "Chart Summarizing OA Approaches and Strategies."

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"Evidence of Open Access of Scientific Publications in Google Scholar: A Large-Scale Analysis"

Alberto Martín et al. have self-archived "Evidence of Open Access of Scientific Publications in Google Scholar: A Large-Scale Analysis."

Here's an excerpt:

This article uses Google Scholar (GS) as a source of data to analyse Open Access (OA) levels across all countries and fields of research. All articles and reviews with a DOI and published in 2009 or 2014 and covered by the three main citation indexes in the Web of Science (2,269,022 documents) were selected for study. The links to freely available versions of these documents displayed in GS were collected. To differentiate between more reliable (sustainable and legal) forms of access and less reliable ones, the data extracted from GS was combined with information available in DOAJ, CrossRef, OpenDOAR, and ROAR. This allowed us to distinguish the percentage of documents in our sample that are made OA by the publisher (23.1%, including Gold, Hybrid, Delayed, and Bronze OA) from those available as Green OA (17.6%), and those available from other sources (40.6%, mainly due to ResearchGate). The data shows an overall free availability of 54.6%, with important differences at the country and subject category levels. The data extracted from GS yielded very similar results to those found by other studies that analysed similar samples of documents, but employed different methods to find evidence of OA, thus suggesting a relative consistency among methods.

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"Why the World Reads Wikipedia: What We Learned about Reader Motivation from a Recent Research Study"

Florian Lemmerich et al. have published "Why the World Reads Wikipedia: What We Learned about Reader Motivation from a Recent Research Study."

Here's an excerpt:

Wikimedia's mission is to provide educational content and to effectively disseminate it. Doing so requires understanding the needs and motivations of the people who read Wikipedia. In this blog post, we discuss what we learned about Wikipedia reader motivations and needs across 14 languages from a recent research study.

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"The Intellectual Properties of Learning: John Willinsky Discusses His New Book"

Richard Poynder has published "The Intellectual Properties of Learning: John Willinsky Discusses His New Book" in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

Willinsky sets out to place open access within the larger historical context of learning's traditions, values, and norms. And he does so by casting his eye all the way back to the rise of the monasteries, and then forward to the Statute of Anne (1710), which for the first time brought the regulation of copyright under the control of the government and courts, rather than private parties

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After 28 Years of Open Access Publishing, the Bryn Mawr Classical Review Needs Your Support

The Bryn Mawr Classical Review has released "A Request to Support BMCR."

Here's an excerpt:

However, BMCR also relies on a publishing platform that was designed and built in the 1990s. We now desperately need to update this platform, and we seek at the same time to modernize BMCR's extraordinary archive of data on the history of classical scholarship. We have already contracted for proposals to do this work—which was itself an expensive process!—and would be happy to discuss our plans with any interested parties.

In short, to see this process through, we urgently need $80,000. The expense is beyond the scale of our very limited resources. We cannot continue to operate with our current platform, nor can we update it on the basis of our modest endowment.

Donate here.

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"Nearly One-in-Five Americans Now Listen to Audiobooks"

The Pew Research Center has released "Nearly One-in-Five Americans Now Listen to Audiobooks."

Here's an excerpt:

Despite some growth in certain digital formats, it remains the case that relatively few Americans consume digital books (which include audiobooks and e-books) to the exclusion of print. Some 39% of Americans say they read only print books, while 29% read in these digital formats and also read print books. Just 7% of Americans say they only read books in digital formats and have not read any print books in the past 12 months.

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"Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to the Internet Archive for Long Tail Journal Preservation"

The Internet Archive has released "Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to the Internet Archive for Long Tail Journal Preservation."

Here's an excerpt:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a research and development grant to the Internet Archive to address the critical need to preserve the "long tail" of open access scholarly communications. The project, Ensuring the Persistent Access of Long Tail Open Access Journal Literature, builds on prototype work identifying at-risk content held in web archives by using data provided by identifier services and registries. Furthermore, the project expands on work acquiring missing open access articles via customized web harvesting, improving discovery and access to this materials from within extant web archives, and developing machine learning approaches, training sets, and cost models for advancing and scaling this project’s work.

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"Collectivity and Collaboration: Imagining New Forms of Communality to Create Resilience in Scholar-Led Publishing"

Janneke Adema and Samuel A. Moore have self-archived "Collectivity and Collaboration: Imagining New Forms of Communality to Create Resilience in Scholar-Led Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

The Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access (OA) projects. The collective promotes a progressive vision for open access based on mutual alliances between the 45+ member presses and projects seeking to offer an alternative to commercial and legacy models of publishing. This article presents a case study of the collective, highlighting how it harnesses the strengths and organizational structures of not-for-profit, independent and scholar-led publishing communities by 1) further facilitating collective efforts through horizontal alliances, and by 2) enabling vertical forms of collaboration with other agencies and organizations within scholarly publishing. It provides a background to the origins of the ROAC, its members, its publishing models on display and its future plans, and highlights the importance of experimenting with and promoting new forms of communality in not-for-profit OA publishing.

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"Effective Practices and Strategies for Open Access Outreach: A Qualitative Study"

Diane (DeDe) Dawson has published "Effective Practices and Strategies for Open Access Outreach: A Qualitative Study" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION There are many compelling reasons to make research open access (OA), but raising the awareness of faculty and administrators about OA is a struggle. Now that more and more funders are introducing OA policies, it is increasingly important that researchers understand OA and how to comply with these policies. U.K. researchers and their institutions have operated within a complex OA policy environment for many years, and academic libraries have been at the forefront of providing services and outreach to support them. This article discusses the results of a qualitative study that investigated effective practices and strategies of OA outreach in the United Kingdom. METHODS Semistructured interviews were conducted with 14 individuals at seven universities in the United Kingdom in late 2015. Transcripts of these interviews were analyzed for dominant themes using an inductive method of coding. RESULTS Themes were collected under the major headings of "The Message"; "Key Contacts and Relationships"; "Qualities of the OA Practitioner"; and "Advocacy versus Compliance." DISCUSSION Results indicate that messages about OA need to be clear, concise, and jargon free. They need to be delivered repeatedly and creatively adapted to specific audiences. Identifying and building relationships with influencers and informers is key to the uptake of the message, and OA practitioners must have deep expertise to be credible as the messengers. CONCLUSION This timely research has immediate relevance to North American libraries as they contend with pressures to ramp up their own OA outreach and support services to assist researchers in complying with new federal funding policies.

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"Making the Transition as the New Copyright Librarian"

Emilie Regina Algenio has published "Making the Transition as the New Copyright Librarian" in the Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

The corpus of academic librarianship literature notes very little material in relation to the work of new copyright librarians. However, the number of academic libraries hiring librarians to fill these positions is increasing, and the need for such literature is real and pertinent. The purpose of this research is to assist incoming copyright librarians with practical, evidence-based guidance for colleagues just starting out in roles focused on copyright issues. The author drew from professional experience as a first-time copyright librarian at a Carnegie One academic institution in the United States. The author highlights the value of constructing a copyright educational foundation for the university community, cultivating a community of practice, establishing best practices around copyright questions and the utility of effective, vetted copyright resources. Understanding the finer details of a copyright librarian’s job are important, as academic libraries are hiring candidates for other scholarly communication positions, and the applicants are expected to know American copyright law.

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"Funding Community Controlled Open Infrastructure for Scholarly Communication: The 2.5% Commitment Initiative"

David W. Lewis, Lori Goetsch, Diane Graves, and Mike Roy have published "Funding Community Controlled Open Infrastructure for Scholarly Communication: The 2.5% Commitment Initiative" in College and Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

In August 2017, a short paper, "The 2.5% Commitment," was distributed on several email lists. The paper proposed that every academic library should commit to invest 2.5% of its total budget to support the common infrastructure needed to create the open scholarly commons. Somewhat to our surprise, the paper and the ideas it contained have generated widespread discussions and interest.

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"Copyright ‘Safe Harbours’ Distort Digital Market, Profit Tech Giants and Harm Creators, New Economic Study Finds"

The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers has released "Copyright 'Safe Harbours' Distort Digital Market, Profit Tech Giants and Harm Creators, New Economic Study Finds."

Here's an excerpt:

"Economic Analysis of Safe Harbour Provisions", by Ashbel Smith Professor Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas at Dallas, is the most detailed economic examination to date of how copyright owners have been damaged by so-called "safe harbour" rules in copyright law.

Read the report.

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"Digital Archives as Big Data"

Luis Martinez-Uribe has self-archived "Digital Archives as Big Data."

Here's an excerpt:

Digital archives contribute to Big data. Combining social network analysis, coincidence analysis, data reduction, and visual analytics leads to better characterize topics over time, publishers' main themes and best authors of all times, according to the British newspaper The Guardian and from the 3 million records of the British National Bibliography.

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