Publishing – Page 8 – DigitalKoans

"LIS Journals’ Lack of Participation in Wikidata Item Creation "

There are many items in Wikidata representing scholarly articles. However, these items have been created mostly by volunteer Wikidata editors and not systematically by journal publishers or editors, which can lead to gaps and inconsistencies in the datasets. This article presents findings from a survey investigating practices of library and information studies (LIS) journals in Wikidata item creation. Believing that a significant number of LIS journal editors would be aware of Wikidata and some would be creating Wikidata items for their publications, the authors sent a survey asking 138 English-language LIS journal editors if they created Wikidata items for materials published in their journal and follow-up questions. With a response rate of 41 percent, respondents overwhelmingly indicated that they did not create Wikidata items for materials published in their journal and were completely unaware of or only somewhat familiar with Wikidata. Respondents indicated that more familiarity with Wikidata and its benefits for scholarly journals as well as institutional support for the creation of Wikidata items could lead to greater participation; however, a campaign of education about Wikidata, documentation of benefits, and support for creation would be a necessary first step. The article presents and discusses the results of the survey, but the conclusions that can be drawn are minimal; therefore, the authors also discuss the benefits of creating Wikidata items for LIS journals as a first step in this educational campaign for editors and publishers.

https://doi.org/10.18357/kula.247

The European Landscape of Institutional Publishing — A Synopsis of Results from the DIAMAS Survey

The Institutional Publishing Landscape Report is built on 685 survey responses from institutional publishers and publishing service providers across the European Research Area. The findings illustrate the state of institutional publishing in Europe and show that a large portion of these organisations are operating with a diamond OA model. The report also discusses how institutional publishers are run and sustained, what activities they are involved in, and which services are outsourced. While the surveyed group is not necessarily representative of all institutional publishers and service providers in Europe, the findings broadly demonstrate the current operations of institutional publishers, their challenges, and the opportunities for supporting them in the future.

https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10551709

"Elsevier Launches Complete HeartX, the World’s First Heart Education Experience in Spatial Computing"

Elsevier Health, a global leader in medical information and data analytics, today launches Complete HeartX, a groundbreaking educational tool designed exclusively for Apple Vision Pro, the world’s first spatial computer. The tool unlocks an immersive and powerful experience that allows users to discover the heart like never before.

Designed to take advantage of the unique capabilities of Apple Vision Pro, Complete HeartX seamlessly merges the digital and physical world. By being able to explore the heart in stunning detail, users can bridge the gap between theory and practice. Complete HeartX combines detailed 3D models, animations, images, videos, educational scenes and clinical simulations to make learning about the heart engaging and informative. The app is based on Elsevier’s evidence-based content including Complete Anatomy, Osmosis and Gray’s Anatomy and has been created by Elsevier’s experts in anatomy and 3D modeling.

http://tinyurl.com/ya6d7ek6

"Is Gold Open Access Helpful for Academic Purification? A Causal Inference Analysis Based on Retracted Articles in Biochemistry"

The results showed that compared to non-OA, Gold OA is advantageous in reducing the retraction time of flawed articles, but does not demonstrate a significant advantage in reducing citations after retraction. This indicates that Gold OA may help expedite the detection and retraction of flawed articles, ultimately promoting the practice of responsible research.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2023.103640

Paywall: "The Scientific Periphery and New Flows of Knowledge: The Case of Regional Preprint Servers"

It is unclear whether regional rather than global or discipline-focussed preprint platforms as an innovation in the communication of science are removing any of the barriers faced by researchers in the scientific periphery or whether they are increasing access to and visibility of science from the periphery. In response, this paper focusses on the uptake, visibility and academic impact of regional preprint publishing platforms in two peripheral regions (Africa and Latin America) to gain insights into the use and possible impact of regional preprint servers.

https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0153

"DataCite Launches First Release of the Data Citation Corpus"

DataCite, in partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), is delighted to announce the first release of the Data Citation Corpus. A major milestone in the Make Data Count initiative, the release makes eight million data citations openly available and usable for the first time via an interactive dashboard and public data file.

https://makedatacount.org/first-release-of-the-open-global-data-citation-corpus/

"DIAMAS Results: Institutional Publishing Landscape Survey"

The publication of the survey results marks a significant milestone for DIAMAS and for Diamond Open Access. There is now a clear and intelligible picture of the European landscape of institutional publishing activities, with clear pathways to strengthen and support their operations. Our findings show how institutional publishers work, the scale of and nature of their operations, the ways finances and funding are managed, how open science practices are managed, and the nature of their challenges.

http://tinyurl.com/y3crvx8p

"Librarians as Agents of Change: New Sparc Europe Strategy for Open Education 2024-2026"

We are pleased to announce a new Open Education strategy for 2024-2026, Librarians as Agents of Change. We will support Higher Education policymakers, librarians, ambassadors and facilitators of OE in Europe to implement the UNESCO OER Recommendations using a targeted and action-oriented approach. With this strategy, we aim to make the many connections between Open Science policy and Open Education ever clearer to both policymakers and academic institutions.

http://tinyurl.com/mr45cv3f

Ithaka S+R: The Second Digital Transformation of Scholarly Publishing

Today, the scholarly publishing sector is undergoing its second digital transformation. The first digital transformation saw a massive shift from paper to digital, but otherwise publishing retained many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era. A variety of shared infrastructure was developed to serve the needs of this first digital transformation. In this current second digital transformation, many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era are being revamped in favor of new approaches that bring tremendous opportunities, and also non-trivial risks, to scholarly communication. The second digital transformation requires shared infrastructure that is fit for purpose. It is our objective with this paper to examine the needs for shared infrastructure that will support this second digital transformation.

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.320210

"Science’s Fake-Paper Problem: High-Profile Effort Will Tackle Paper Mills"

A high-profile group of funders, academic publishers and research organizations has launched an effort to tackle one of the thorniest problems in scientific integrity: paper mills, businesses that churn out fake or poor-quality journal papers and sell authorships. In a statement released on 19 January, the group outlines how it will address the problem through measures such as closely studying paper mills, including their regional and topic specialties, and improving author-verification methods.

http://tinyurl.com/2nxt93h4

"Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles"

This work reveals an alarming preservation deficit. Only 0.96% of Crossref members (n = 204) can be confirmed to digitally preserve over 75% of their content in three or more of the archives that we studied. (Note that when, in this article, we write "preserved," we mean "that we were able to confirm as preserved," as per the specified limitations of this study.) A slightly larger proportion, i.e., 8.5% (n = 1,797), preserved over 50% of their content in two or more archives. However, many members, i.e., 57.7% (n = 12,257), only met the threshold of having 25% of their material in a single archive. Most worryingly, 32.9% (n = 6,982) of Crossref members seem not to have any adequate digital preservation in place, which is against the recommendations of the Digital Preservation Coalition.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16288

"Determinants of Manuscript Submissions to Fully Open Access Journals: Elasticity to Article Processing Charges"

Article processing charges that authors and research institutions pay to make articles open access are increasing. If manuscript submission is price elastic, then rising charges will cause a significant reduction in submissions, leading to decreased revenues under constant acceptance rates. Therefore, the elasticity of manuscript submission to article processing charge is one of the determinants of publishers’ charges. However, several studies that investigated the determinants of article processing charges did not consider this elasticity. This study investigated the determinants of submissions, including the elasticity to article processing charge, by formulating the number of manuscript submissions to fully open access journals published by Hindawi and Elsevier in 2022. Moreover, this study formulated manuscript submissions using both list prices and charges paid to Elsevier that OpenAPC collected to compare the results. The estimation results reveal that the two publishers increase their revenues by raising the article processing charges due to the inelasticity. Moreover, these conclusions do not depend on the data set used, although the number of observations sourced from OpenAPC is small.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04934-3

"Promotion of Scientific Publications on ArXiv and X Is on the Rise and Impacts Citations"

Here, based on a large dataset of computer science publications, we study trends in the use of early preprint publications and revisions on ArXiv and the use of X (formerly Twitter) for promotion of such papers in the last 10 years. We find that early submission to ArXiv and promotion on X have soared in recent years. Estimating the effect that the use of each of these modern affordances has on the number of citations of scientific publications, we find that in the first 5 years from an initial publication peer-reviewed conference papers submitted early to ArXiv gain on average 21.1±17.4 more citations, revised on ArXiv gain 18.4±17.6 more citations, and promoted on X gain 44.4±8 more citations. Our results show that promoting one’s work on ArXiv or X has a large impact on the number of citations, as well as the number of influential citations computed by Semantic Scholar, and thereby on the career of researchers. We discuss the far-reaching implications of these findings for future scientific publishing systems and measures of scientific impact.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11116

"MIT Press’s Direct to Open Reaches Annual Funding Goal, Opens Access to Full List of 2024 Monographs"

Now in its third year of operation, Direct to Open (D2O) is proud to announce that it has reached its full funding goal in 2024 and will open access to 79 new monographs and edited book collections this year. What makes this year noteworthy is that this is the first year in which D2O has been fully funded by its November 30 deadline and will not require an extension through the end of the fiscal year.

http://tinyurl.com/4phkat8x

"Launch of Scopus AI to Help Researchers Navigate the World of Research "

Scopus AI is based on Scopus’ trusted content from over 27,000 academic journals, from more than 7,000 publishers worldwide, with over 1.8 billion citations, and includes over 17 million author profiles. Scopus content is vetted by an independent board of world-renowned scientists and librarians who represent the major scientific disciplines.

Since the alpha launch in August 2023, thousands of researchers across the world have tested Scopus AI. Their feedback has reinforced that, as generative AI evolves, researchers want trustworthy, cited research that is relevant and highly personalized to their needs.

Feedback from the research community has led to Scopus AI offering the following powerful features:

Expanded and Enhanced Summaries that provide researchers with fast overviews of key topics that they can dig deeper into, sometimes even highlighting gaps in literature. . . .

Foundational and Influential Papers that enable researchers to rapidly pinpoint seminal works, navigating academic progress and impact with precision and ease.

Academic Expert Search identifies leading experts in their fields and provides explanations of their expertise relevant to the user’s query, helping save time.

Enhanced breadth of research, covering ten years of Scopus content to support well-rounded perspective on topics of interest, and improved design to enhance the user experience.

http://tinyurl.com/22f78hv6

Paywall: "Can ChatGPT Identify Predatory Biomedical and Dental Journals? A Cross-Sectional Content Analysis"

ChatGPT may effectively distinguish between predatory and legitimate journals, with accuracy rates of 92.5% and 71%, respectively. The potential utility of large-scale language models in exposing predatory publications is worthy of further consideration.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdent.2024.104840

"Towards a Quality Indicator for Research Data Publications and Research Software publications — A Vision from the Helmholtz Association"

Research data and software are widely accepted as an outcome of scientific work. However, in comparison to text-based publications, there is not yet an established process to assess and evaluate quality of research data and research software publications. This paper presents an attempt to fill this gap. Initiated by the Working Group Open Science of the Helmholtz Association the Task Group Helmholtz Quality Indicators for Data and Software Publications currently develops a quality indicator for research data and research software publications to be used within the Association. This report summarizes the vision of the group of what all contributes to such an indicator. The proposed approach relies on generic well-established concepts for quality criteria, such as the FAIR Principles and the COBIT Maturity Model. It does — on purpose — not limit itself to technical implementation possibilities to avoid using an existing metric for a new purpose. The intention of this paper is to share the current state for further discussion with all stakeholders, particularly with other groups also working on similar metrics but also with entities that use the metrics.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08804

"Applying Librarian Created Evaluation Tools to Determine Quality and Credibility of Open Access Library Science Journals"

The researchers investigate quality and credibility attributes of fortyeight peer-reviewed library science journals with open access components using two evaluative tools developed and published by librarians. . . . Overall, the results show that while library science journals do not fall prey to the same concerning characteristics that librarians use to caution other researchers, there are several areas in which publishers can improve the quality and credibility of their journals.

https://tinyurl.com/4yydkckw

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Self-Archiving Adoption in Legal Scholarly Communication: A Literature Review;"

This article explores the current Library and Information Science (LIS) literature on open access and self-archiving and related studies. . . It further investigates the open access and self-archiving practices in disciplinary . . . Finally, it examines self-archiving in law and concludes that the research gap and lack of literature on self-archiving in the discipline of law makes this study worthwhile.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13614576.2023.2279760

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Where Did the Open Access Movement Go Wrong?: An Interview with Richard Poynder"

Open access was intended to solve three problems that have long blighted scholarly communication — the problems of accessibility, affordability, and equity. 20+ years after the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) we can see that the movement has signally failed to solve the latter two problems. And with the geopolitical situation deteriorating solving the accessibility problem now also looks to be at risk. The OA dream of "universal open access" remains a dream and seems likely to remain one.

https://tinyurl.com/fcxj5ew2

How did the three foundational statements about open access (the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities) actually define it?

"A Critical Survey of Open-Access Policies in US Land Grants"

Introduction: Land-grant universities in the United States and the international open-access (OA) movement both purport to advance public access to knowledge and assert a public benefit to doing so. The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that land-grant universities would have a high rate of adoption of institutional OA policies. To date, no study has looked at OA approaches or policies across the land grants.

Methods: This study considers the critical literature on both land-grants and OA, surveys land-grant institutional OA policies, and analyzes relevant demographic and financial data.

Results: The study identified 15 mandates and 4 resolutions across the diverse institutional types and populations represented in the 112 land-grants. None of the 21 historically Black colleges and universities or 35 tribal colleges and universities among the land-grants have adopted OA policies.

Conclusion: Despite shared objectives, land-grant colleges and universities have not systematically embraced OA, and relatively few have adopted institutional OA policies. In the context of profound, institutionalized inequities among the land-grants, and attentive to the potential of OA to deepen existing inequities, this study considers the causes of and implications for low institutional OA policy adoption among land-grants.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15605

Current State and Future Directions for Open Repositories in Europe

In January 2023, OpenAIRE, LIBER, SPARC Europe, and COAR launched a joint strategy aimed at strengthening the European repository network. As a first step, a survey of the European repository landscape was undertaken in February-March 2023. The survey found that, collectively, European repositories acquire, preserve and provide open access to tens or possibly hundreds of millions of valuable research outputs and represent critical, not-for-profit infrastructure in the European open science landscape. They are used for sharing articles that may be pay-walled in published journals, but also for providing access to a large variety of other types of research outputs including research data, theses/dissertations, conference papers, preprints, code, and so on.

However, in order to ensure the European repository network is fit for purpose and able to support the evolving needs of the research community, the survey also identified three areas in particular that could be strengthened: maintaining up-to-date, highly functioning software platforms; applying consistent and comprehensive good practices in terms of metadata, preservation, and usage statistics; and gaining appropriate visibility in the scholarly ecosystem.

Despite the challenges, the current climate offers exciting opportunities for repositories. Many funders are actively promoting the repository route for articles because of their role in supporting equitable access to content (i.e. no fees to access or deposit). The value proposition for open science is growing and repositories are increasingly recognised as the main mechanism for collecting and providing access to a wide range of other research outputs. Add to this, the nascent, but growing, interest in the publish-review-curate model in which repositories have a central function, and it seems they are well placed to expand their current role in the ecosystem.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10255559

STM: "New White Paper Launch: Generative AI in Scholarly Communications"

The paper looks at the ethical, legal, and practical aspects of GenAI, highlighting its potential to transform scholarly communications, and covers a range of topics from intellectual property rights to the challenges of maintaining integrity in the digital age. The paper provides best-practice principles and recommendations for authors, editorial teams, reviewers, and vendors, ensuring a responsible and ethical approach to the use of GenAI tools.

https://tinyurl.com/4m6m8n9j

MIT: "New White Paper ‘Access to Science and Scholarship: Key Questions about the Future of Research Publishing’"

The project—including MIT Press’s Director and Publisher Amy Brand and Director of Journals and Open Access Nick Lindsay—examines the current state of the research enterprise and what might come next. . . .

To illustrate how researcher behavior, funder policies, and publisher business models and incentives interact, part 1 of this report presents an historical overview of open access publishing. Part 2 of the report provides a list of key questions for further investigation to understand, measure, and best prepare for the impact of new policies related to open access in research publishing, categorized into six general areas: access and business models, research data, preprint publishing, peer review, costs to researchers and universities, and infrastructure.

https://tinyurl.com/2s3fb7n8

Two Reports on Scientific Publishing from the International Science Council

The Council’s studies led to development of eight essential principles for modern scientific publication, which were endorsed by over 90% of the membership present at its 2021 General Assembly. The principles are listed in Paper One, The Key Principles for Scientific Publishing accompanied by an analysis of the extent to which they are observed operationally. . . .

Paper Two, The case for reform of scientific publishing, identifies many of the failures to observe the principles in Paper One as lying within the commercial sector of scientific publication. It lies not only in so-called predatory publishing, where lax or non-existent editorial standards provide a low barrier to publication, but also in journals that, although they have far higher standards, compromise the essential global distribution of scientific knowledge by excessive prices and profit margins.

International Science Council members include 45 international scientific Unions and Associations, over 140 national and regional scientific organizations, and other organizations.

https://tinyurl.com/mnavvrxt