Category: Publishing

SSRN Launches Biology Research Network (BioRN)

SSRN has launched the Biology Research Network (BioRN).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Biology researchers are able to post preprints and working papers on BioRN, share ideas and other early stage research, and collaborate. It allows users to quickly upload and read abstracts and full-text papers, free of charge. A preprint is the author’s own write-up of research results and analysis that has not been peer-reviewed or had any value added to it by a publisher (such as formatting, copy-editing, technical enhancements). A preprint server, or working paper repository as they are also known, allows users to share these documents.

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"Data Sharing Statements for Clinical Trials—A Requirement of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors"

Darren B. Taichman et al. have published "Data Sharing Statements for Clinical Trials—A Requirement of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors" in PLOS Medicine.

Here's an excerpt:

Therefore, ICMJE will require the following as conditions of consideration for publication of a clinical trial report in our member journals:

  1. As of July 1, 2018 manuscripts submitted to ICMJE journals that report the results of clinical trials must contain a data sharing statement as described below.
  2. Clinical trials that begin enrolling participants on or after January 1, 2019 must include a data sharing plan in the trial’s registration. The ICMJE's policy regarding trial registration is explained at www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/clinical-trial-registration.html. If the data sharing plan changes after registration this should be reflected in the statement submitted and published with the manuscript, and updated in the registry record.

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"Are Open Access Journals Immune from Piracy?"

Angela Cochran has published "Are Open Access Journals Immune from Piracy?" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Even though Sci-Hub is billed as providing access to paywalled content, there appear to be thousands of open access articles in the host database. Sci-Hub provided usage of their services from 2015 to Science news writer John Bohannon with the full data set. Reviewing just the data from December 2015, I found that over 200 users accessed PLOS ONE content, over 450 users accessed Hindawi content, and a whopping 2,145 users accessed BioMed Central content.

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"Digital Public Library of America to Pilot eBook Lending in Fall"

DPLA has released "Digital Public Library of America to Pilot eBook Lending in Fall."

Here's an excerpt:

Planned for this fall, DPLA will be lending ebooks in what it hopes is a streamlined, non-proprietary and vendorless platform.

While ebook lending has grown fast among US public libraries, the process is not always seamless. Book discovery, borrowing, and consumption must happen within the provide'’s app or website. DPLA wants to create a process that isn’t as specific, and one that works with a broader range of content producers for better access to ebooks.

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"Detours and Diversions—Do Open Access Publishers Face New Barriers?"

Kent Anderson has published "Detours and Diversions—Do Open Access Publishers Face New Barriers?" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Analyzing their [Altmetric's] Top 100 articles for 2016 (data available here), 70% of the Top 100 articles were published behind paywalls. Given the preponderance of paywalled journals, it may be tempting to interpret a 30% rate of non-paywalled articles in the data as an indication that OA journals are punching above their weight, as they comprise only 18% of papers currently, according the best available estimate. Drilling into the data, however, tells a different story. Fully 1/3 of the articles in the Top 100 categorized by Altmetric as OA come from Gold OA journals from for-profit publishers (mainly Elsevier and SpringerNature), which suggests that for-profit publishers’ promotional practices may benefit the prominence of the content they publish.

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"Steady Growth of Articles in Fully OA Journals Using a CC-BY License"

OASPA has released "Steady Growth of Articles in Fully OA Journals Using a CC-BY License."

Here's an excerpt:

A total of 905,687 articles were published with the CC BY license in open access-only journals by members of OASPA during the period shown above [2000-2016], with 189,529 of those being published in 2016.

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Untangling Academic Publishing: A History of the Relationship between Commercial Interests, Academic Prestige and the Circulation of Research

Aileen Fyfe et al. have self-archived "Untangling Academic Publishing: A History of the Relationship between Commercial Interests, Academic Prestige and the Circulation of Research."

Here's an excerpt:

This briefing paper aims to provide a historical perspective that can inform the debates about what the future of academic publishing should look like We argue that current policy regarding open access publishing, and many of the other proposals for the reform of academic publishing, have been too focused on the opportunities and financial challenges of the most recent changes in digital communications technologies and have given undue weight to commercial concerns.

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"Rhyme or Reason?: Patterns in Book Pricing by Format"

Jonathan Harwell has published "Rhyme or Reason?: Patterns in Book Pricing by Format" in the The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

This study illuminates the differentials in book pricing by format, which can appear arbitrary and unpredictable. Using the paperback list price as the base, the research uses a sample of 500 titles selected for purchase by a small, private liberal arts college library during a defined time period. I have recorded the prices of paperback, hardcover, single and multiple-user e-books from Ebrary, EBSCO, and Amazon Kindle. The mean pricing differential is calculated for each version across all titles in the sample, as well as for the top five publishers represented in the sample, in order to identify patterns in pricing decisions.

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Knowledge Exchange Consensus on Monitoring Open Access Publications and Cost Data

The Knowledge Exchange has released Knowledge Exchange Consensus on Monitoring Open Access Publications and Cost Data .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The report gives a great deal of detail on the presentations from the different countries, as well as the keynote address from Stuart Lawson on the true costs of publishing, which coincides significantly with the excellent work he and Katie Shamash have done with the Total Cost of Ownership project in Jisc Collections. In addition, Kai Geschuhn from the Max Planck Digital Library spoke about the idea of moving from offsetting deals to pay-as-you-publish; Rachel Lammey discussed CrossREF and open access meta-data; and Graham Stone, from Jisc, focused on collecting information on APC cost data.

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"Journal Publishers’ Big Deals: Are They Worth It?"

Stéphani Gagnon has self-archived "Journal Publishers' Big Deals: Are They Worth It?."

Here's an excerpt:

Following the initial Wiley's unbundling based on quantitative indicators, Université de Montréal refined its analysis methodology to incorporate qualitative indicators; i.e., the voice of its community. That methodology allowed identification of 5,893 periodicals deemed essential out of a possible 50,000 subscriptions. We realized that, at best, barely more than a third of the periodicals included in most Big Deals are truly of use.

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"Making Progress Toward Open Data: Reflections on Data Sharing at PLOS ONE"

Meg Byrne has published "Making Progress Toward Open Data: Reflections on Data Sharing at PLOS ONE" in the EveryONE Blog

Here's an excerpt:

PLOS ONE has published over 65,000 papers with a DAS in the three years since the open data policy was put in place. We were initially concerned we would not be able to consider a significant number of submissions because authors could not share data, but this did not turn out to be the case. Since the implementation of the updated policy, we estimate staff have rejected less than 0.1% of submissions due to authors’ unwillingness or inability to share data. What we have seen is a growing acceptance of data sharing and evolution of data sharing practices. For instance, there has been a steady growth in datasets available directly via public data repositories such as the NCBI databases, Figshare or Dryad. While the proportion of articles with a data availability statement linking to one of these repositories is still relatively low, at around 20% in 2016, the growth is encouraging.

Another 60% of articles include data in the main text and supplementary information. While we strongly recommend discipline-specific open repositories where they exist, we also deposit the supporting information files, figures, and tables included with every article to Figshare and give each of these its own DOI. Thus, in addition to being available via the PLOS ONE article, this content is also available through an external data repository. The remaining 20% of papers have data available upon request due to restrictions acceptable under our policy, including restrictions related to sensitive data or because the data are owned by and available from a third party.

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"From the Ground Up: A Group Editorial on the Most Pressing Issues in Scholarly Communication"

Nicky Agate et. al have published "From the Ground Up: A Group Editorial on the Most Pressing Issues in Scholarly Communication" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately about the future of scholarly communication in libraries (for an example, see Clifford Lynch's guest editorial in the February issue of C&RL), and we wanted to give our board a chance to weigh in. They were asked to share their take on the most pressing issues in scholarly communication today, in their capacity as Editorial Board members (rather than as representatives of their respective institutions), and the following six short pieces are the result.

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A System That Prioritises Publications Means Early Career Researchers’ Scholarly Attitudes and Behaviours Remain Conservative

Dave Nicholas has published "A System That Prioritises Publications Means Early Career Researchers' Scholarly Attitudes and Behaviours Remain Conservative" in the LSE Impact Blog.

Here's an excerpt:

Reporting the first-year findings of a longitudinal study of an international panel of ECRs, Dave Nicholas reveals that many remain conservative in their scholarly attitudes and practices. ECRs are concerned by "risky" open peer review, regard archiving their work in repositories as a non-priority, and display little interest in open science or altmetrics. Many ECRs see opportunities for change, but do not feel able to grasp them as they are shackled to a reputational system that promotes publication record and citation scores above all else.

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"It Takes a Village: One Year of Journals Requiring ORCID iDs"

Alice Meadows has published "It Takes a Village: One Year of Journals Requiring ORCID iDs" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Today, well over 1,500 journals published by 16 publishers and societies, require iDs for at least their corresponding authors and, from our conversations with leaders of organizations across all sectors, we know that similar approaches are actively being considered by organizations in other sectors.

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"A Century of Science: Globalization of Scientific Collaborations, Citations, and Innovations"

Yuxiao Dong, Hao Ma, Zhihong Shen, and Kuansan Wang have self-archived "A Century of Science: Globalization of Scientific Collaborations, Citations, and Innovations."

Here's an excerpt:

In this work, we study the evolution of scientific development over the past century by presenting an anatomy of 89 million digitalized papers published between 1900 and 2015. We find that science has benefited from the shift from individual work to collaborative effort, with over 90% of the world-leading innovations generated by collaborations in this century, nearly four times higher than they were in the 1900s. We discover that rather than the frequent myopic- and self-referencing that was common in the early 20th century, modern scientists instead tend to look for literature further back and farther around. Finally, we also observe the globalization of scientific development from 1900 to 2015, including 25-fold and 7-fold increases in international collaborations and citations, respectively, as well as a dramatic decline in the dominant accumulation of citations by the US, the UK, and Germany, from 95% to 50% over the same period.

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"The Influence of Journal Submission Guidelines on Author’s Reporting of Statistics and Use of Open Research Practices"

David Giofrè et al. have published "The Influence of Journal Submission Guidelines on Author's Reporting of Statistics and Use of Open Research Practices" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

From January 2014, Psychological Science introduced new submission guidelines that encouraged the use of effect sizes, estimation, and meta-analysis (the "new statistics"), required extra detail of methods, and offered badges for use of open science practices. We investigated the use of these practices in empirical articles published by Psychological Science and, for comparison, by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, during the period of January 2013 to December 2015. The use of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) was extremely high at all times and in both journals. In Psychological Science, the use of confidence intervals increased markedly overall, from 28% of articles in 2013 to 70% in 2015, as did the availability of open data (3 to 39%) and open materials (7 to 31%). The other journal showed smaller or much smaller changes. Our findings suggest that journal-specific submission guidelines may encourage desirable changes in authors’ practices.

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"New World, Same Model: Periodicals Price Survey 2017"

Stephen Bosch and Kittie Henderson have published "New World, Same Model: Periodicals Price Survey 2017" in Library Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Since e-journal package prices are often based on custom publisher quotes, we analyzed the 2017 price increases of more than 6,300 e-journal packages handled by EBSCO and found that the average inflationary increase for 2017 was in the 4.5%–4.9% range. Reflecting the percentage of library orders dedicated to electronic format, approximately 78% of the 2017 orders placed by EBSCO on behalf of academic libraries were for either e-only or print plus online combinations.

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"The Stars Are Aligning for Preprints"

Judy Luther has published "The Stars Are Aligning for Preprints" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Significant events have occurred in rapid succession in the last year signaling that preprints, the author’s original manuscript before submission to a journal, will play a much larger role in the landscape. Developments with DOIs, changes in funder expectations, and the launch of new services indicate that preprints will no longer be limited to the hard sciences and social sciences.

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"Publisher Revenue for Trade Books Up 10.2% in November 2016"

AAP has released "Publisher Revenue for Trade Books Up 10.2% in November 2016."

Here's an excerpt:

Professional Publishing was down 21.1% From Jan. – Nov. 2016 vs. the same time in 2015. These categories include business, medical, law, scientific and technical books. University presses were down 2.5% for the 11 months.

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University of Hawai’i Awarded $90,000 Humanities Open Book Program Grant

The University of Hawai'i has received a $90,000 Humanities Open Book Program grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the University of Hawai‘i a $90,000 grant to digitize 100 out-of-print University of Hawai‘i Press books for open access.

The project is part of the Humanities Open Book Program, a joint initiative between the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). . . .

Beginning in 2018, the digitized titles will be hosted on a custom open-access portal where readers will be able to download them in EPUB and PDF formats. A print-on-demand option will also be offered for select titles.

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"What Are the Barriers to Post-Publication Peer Review?"

Jon Tennant has published "What Are the Barriers to Post-Publication Peer Review?" in the LSE Impact Blog.

Here's an excerpt:

Post-publication peer review emerged in response to increased calls for continuous moderation of the published research literature, consistent questioning of the functionality of the traditional peer review model, and a recognition that scientific discourse does not stop at the point of publication. However, uptake remains low overall. Jon Tennant sets out what the barriers to more widespread adoption of post-publication peer review have been and proposes potential solutions for each.

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"Ready for the Future? A Survey on Open Access with Scientists from the French National Research Center"

Joachim Schöpfel et al. have self-archived "Ready for the Future? A Survey on Open Access with Scientists from the French National Research Center."

Here's an excerpt:

The CNRS senior research managers (laboratory directors) globally share the positive opinion towards OA revealed by other studies with researchers from the UK, Germany, the USA and other countries. However, they are more supportive of open repositories (green road) than of OA journal publishing (gold). The response patterns reveal a gap between generally positive opinions about OA and less supportive behaviours, principally publishing articles with article processing charges (APCs). A small group of senior research managers does not seem to be interested in green or gold OA and reluctant to self-archiving and OA publishing.

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"The World’s Approach towards Publishing in Springer and Elsevier’s APC-Funded Open Access Journals "

College & Research Libraries has released an e-print of "The World's Approach towards Publishing in Springer and Elsevier's APC-Funded Open Access Journals.

Here's an excerpt:

The Netherlands, Norway and Poland ranked highest in terms of their OA shares. This can be attributed to the financial resources allocated to publication in general, and publishing in OA journals, in particular, by the countries. All developed countries and a large number of scientifically lagging and developing nations were found to publish OA articles in the APC journals. The OA papers have been exponentially growing across all the country scientific groups annually. Although the advanced nations published the lion share of the OA-APC papers and exhibited the highest growth, the under-development groups have been displaying high OA growth rates.

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"Open Data, [Open] Access: Linking Data Sharing and Article Sharing in the Earth Sciences"

Samantha Teplitzky has published "Open Data, [Open] Access: Linking Data Sharing and Article Sharing in the Earth Science" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION The norms of a research community influence practice, and norms of openness and sharing can be shaped to encourage researchers who share in one aspect of their research cycle to share in another. Different sets of mandates have evolved to require that research data be made public, but not necessarily articles resulting from that collected data. In this paper, I ask to what extent publications in the Earth Sciences are more likely to be open access (in all of its definitions) when researchers open their data through the Pangaea repository. METHODS Citations from Pangaea data sets were studied to determine the level of open access for each article. RESULTS This study finds that the proportion of gold open access articles linked to the repository increased 25% from 2010 to 2015 and 75% of articles were available from multiple open sources.

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"What Constitutes Peer Review of Data: A Survey of Published Peer Review Guidelines"

Todd A. Carpenter has self-archived "What Constitutes Peer Review of Data: A Survey of Published Peer Review Guidelines."

Here's an excerpt:

Since a number of journals specifically focus on the review and publication of data sets, reviewing their policies seems an appropriate place to start in assessing what existing practice looks like in the 'real world' of reviewing and publishing data. This article outlines a study of the publicly available peer review policies of 39 scientific publications that publish data papers to discern which criteria are most and least frequently referenced. It also compares current practice with proposed criteria published in 2012.

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