Category: Publishing

"The Academic, Economic and Societal Impacts of Open Access: An Evidence-Based Review"

Jonathan P. Tennant et al. have published an e-print for review of "The Academic, Economic and Societal Impacts of Open Access: An Evidence-Based Review" in F1000 Research.

Here's an excerpt:

This review presents published evidence of the impact of Open Access on the academy, economy and society. Overall, the evidence points to a favorable impact of OA on the scholarly literature through increased dissemination and reuse. OA has the potential to be a sustainable business venture for new and established publishers, and can provide substantial benefits to research- and development-intensive businesses, including health organisations, volunteer sectors, and technology. OA is a global issue, highlighted by inequalities beset at all levels between developing and developed nations, and largely fueled by financial inequality. Current levels of access in the developing world are insufficient and unstable, and only OA has the potential to foster the development of stable research ecosystems. While predatory publishing remains an ongoing issue, particularly in the developing world, increasing public engagement, development of OA policies, and discussion of sustainable and ethical publishing practices can remove this potential threat to OA.

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"Dramatic Growth of Open Access March 31, 2016"

Heather Morrison has published "Dramatic Growth of Open Access March 31, 2016 " in The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics.

Here's an excerpt:

There are now 150 publishers of peer-reviewed open access books listed in the Directory of Open Access Books, publishing more than 4,400 open access books. 620 books were published in this quarter alone, a 16% increase in just this quarter. The Directory of Open Access Journals has been adding titles at a net rate of 6 titles per day, 540 journals added this quarter for a total of over 11,000 journals.

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Springer Will Automatically Deposit MIT-Authored Papers in DSpace@MIT

Springer and MIT have reached an agreement that will result in Springer automatically depositing MIT-authored papers in DSpace@MIT nine months after publication.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, one of the first initiatives of its kind in the United States, made a bold commitment to disseminate the results of MIT research and scholarship as widely and openly as possible. Recently, the MIT Libraries affirmed this commitment by signing an innovative agreement with Springer, one of the world's largest scholarly publishers. Springer will send manuscripts of MIT-authored scholarly papers directly to the Open Access Articles Collection of DSpace@MIT, the Institute's open access repository.

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"A Spiritual Successor to Aaron Swartz Is Angering Publishers All Over Again"

David Kravets has published "A Spiritual Successor to Aaron Swartz Is Angering Publishers All Over Again" in Ars Technica.

Here's an excerpt:

Meet Alexandra Elbakyan, the developer of Sci-Hub, a Pirate Bay-like site for the science nerd. It's a portal that offers free and searchable access "to most publishers, especially well-known ones."

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"The Costs of Open and Closed Access: Using the Finnish Research Output as an Example"

Jyrki Ilva et al. have published "The Costs of Open and Closed Access: Using the Finnish Research Output as an Example" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

As business models of Open Access publishing are still under development, the aim of our paper is to assess the statistical tools and data that the Finnish libraries currently have for comparing the costs associated with different modes of disseminating scientific publications. We will also analyse the potential costs associated with Open Access publishing models and compare them with the current cost structure of—mostly—paywalled (PW) access. . . . We will discuss the alternatives on how best to develop statistical tools to estimate the true costs of scientific publishing.

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"Small Scholar-Led Scholarly Journals: Can They Survive and Thrive in an Open Access Future?"

Heather Morrison has published "Small Scholar-Led Scholarly Journals: Can They Survive and Thrive in an Open Access Future?" in Learned Publishing (open access article).

Here's an excerpt:

This article presents early results of a research project designed to further our understanding of how to ensure that small scholar-led journals can survive and thrive in a global open access knowledge commons. This phase of the research focuses on generation of ideas through interviews and focus groups with 15 participants involved in producing small scholar-led journals that either are or would like to become open access. Although a couple of journals reported that they could survive in an open access future based on existing resources, most were concerned about survival and none expressed confidence that they could thrive in an open-access future.

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Cambridge Press v. Georgia State University: "Here We Go Again: Latest GSU Ruling an Odd Victory for Libraries"

Kevin Smith has published "Here We Go Again: Latest GSU Ruling an Odd Victory for Libraries" in Scholarly Communications @ Duke.

Here's an excerpt:

So this ruling, like each ruling in the case, is clearly a disaster for the plaintiff publishers. Once again it establishes that there is significant space for fair use in higher education, even when that use is not transformative. Nevertheless, it is a difficult victory for libraries, in the sense that the analysis it uses is not one we can replicate; we simply do not have access to the extensive data about revenue, of which Judge Evans makes such complex use.

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Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2015

Ithaka S+R has released the Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2015 .

Here's an excerpt:

Ithaka S+R's survey of US faculty members has been fielded regularly since 2000. This project provides a periodic snapshot of practices and perceptions related to scholarly communications and information usage. The scholar-centric nature of the questionnaire ensures that potential changes in research and teaching inform our thinking, not only about academic libraries and scholarly publishing, but about changes in the educational enterprise more broadly.

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How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Publications

Simon Inger Consulting Ltd has released How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

This report is the output of a large-scale survey of readers of scholarly publications (n=40439) and their behaviour in the discovery of journal articles and online books. The survey was conducted during October, November, and December of 2015. While usage statistics and analytics gathered by publishers, libraries and intermediaries can give us a partial view of discovery behaviour, there are many gaps in the knowledge that these can provide which we have endeavoured to fill by aski ng readers what tools they use in discovery.

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"Open Access, Open Science, Open Society"

Thomas Margoni et al. have self-archived "Open Access, Open Science, Open Society."

Here's an excerpt:

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that Open Access is a key enabler of Open Science, which in turn will lead to a more Open Society. Furthermore, the paper argues that while legislative interventions play an important role in the top-down regulation of Open Access, legislators currently lack an informed and systematic vision on the role of Open Access in science and society. In this historical phase, other complementary forms of intervention (bottom-up) appear much more "informed" and effective. This paper, which intends to set the stage for future research, identifies a few pieces of the puzzle: the relationship between formal and informal norms in the field of Open Science and how these impact on intellectual property rights, the protection of personal data, the assessment of science and the technology employed for the communication of science.

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Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics Publishes 10,000th Article

The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) has published its 10,000th article.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

SCOAP3 celebrates the publication of its 10,000th Open Access article. Since the start of its operation in 2014, the initiative has supported Open Access publication of High-Energy-Physics articles in 10 high-quality peer-reviewed journals. More than 18,000 scientists from over 90 countries have benefited from this initiative without any financial or administrative burden, retain copyright of their work and automatically comply with their institutional or funders Open Access mandates.

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OA2020 Initiative Launched

The OA2020 Initiative has launched with an "Expression of Interest in the Large-scale Implementation of Open Access to Scholarly Journals."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

A growing number of research organizations want to establish an international initiative which aims to convert the majority of today's scholarly journals from subscription to Open Access (OA) publishing. This is the result of the 12th Berlin Open Access Conference hosted by the Max Planck Society in December 2015. An Expression of Interest, published today and already adopted by thirty signatories, invites all parties involved in scholarly publishing to collaborate on a swift and efficient transition for the benefit of scholarship and society at large.

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"Open Access Publishing in Higher Education: Charting the Challenging Course to Academic and Financial Sustainability"

Mark I. Greenberg has published "Open Access Publishing in Higher Education: Charting the Challenging Course to Academic and Financial Sustainability" in the Journal of Educational Controversy.

Here's an excerpt:

The benefits, pitfalls, and sustainability of open access publishing are hotly debated. Commercial publishers dominate the marketplace and oppose alternative publishing models that threaten their bottom line. Scholars' use of open access remains relatively limited due to awareness and perceived benefits to their professional goals. Readership of open access publications is generally strong, but some people disagree that more readers leads to increased citations and research impact. Libraries have grown their influence by supporting and promoting open access, but these efforts come with significant financial costs. Today, open access has flourished most significantly as a philosophy: the belief that the world's scholarship should be freely available to readers and that publicly funded research, in particular, should be accessible to the taxpayers who paid for it.

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"Researchers’ Adoption of an Institutional Central Fund for Open-Access Article-Processing Charges: A Case Study Using Innovation Diffusion Theory"

Stephen Pinfield and Christine Middleton have published "Researchers' Adoption of an Institutional Central Fund for Open-Access Article-Processing Charges: A Case Study Using Innovation Diffusion Theory" in SAGE Open.

Here's an excerpt:

This article analyzes researchers' adoption of an institutional central fund (or faculty publication fund) for open-access (OA) article-processing charges (APCs) to contribute to a wider understanding of take-up of OA journal publishing ("Gold" OA). Quantitative data, recording central fund usage at the University of Nottingham from 2006 to 2014, are analyzed alongside qualitative data from institutional documentation. The importance of the settings of U.K. national policy developments and international OA adoption trends are considered. Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) is used as an explanatory framework.

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Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences

The Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication has released a draft of Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences for comment.

Here's an excerpt:

This report identifies ways through which subscription-based scholarly journals have converted their publishing models to open access (OA). The major goal was to identify specific scenarios that have been used or proposed for transitioning subscription journals to OA so that these scenarios can provide options for others seeking to "flip" their journals to OA.

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"The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship"

Mark D. Wilkinson et al. have published "The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship" in Scientific Data.

Here's an excerpt:

A diverse set of stakeholders-representing academia, industry, funding agencies, and scholarly publishers-have come together to design and jointly endorse a concise and measurable set of principles that we refer to as the FAIR Data Principles. The intent is that these may act as a guideline for those wishing to enhance the reusability of their data holdings.

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"Creative Commons Licenses: Empowering Open Access"

Thomas Margoni and Diane M. Peters have self-archived "Creative Commons Licenses: Empowering Open Access."

Here's an excerpt:

Open access (OA) is a concept that in recent years has acquired popularity and widespread recognition. International statements and scholarly analysis converge on the following main characteristics of open access: free availability on the public Internet, permission for any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, and link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, and use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself. The only legal constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

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"Publication Phishing: A Growing Challenge for Researchers and Scientific Societies"

Shahryar Sorooshian has published "Publication Phishing: A Growing Challenge for Researchers and Scientific Societies" in Current Science.

Here's an excerpt:

Specifically, hijacked journals are those that scam researchers using identifiers and reputation of their original counterpart. These fraudsters present themselves as the principal journal editors by designing an on-line website for existing journals that offers print-only access, but lacks on-line or electronic access

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"Three Years after the OSTP Public Access Directive: A Progress Report"

Fred Dylla has published "Three Years after the OSTP Public Access Directive: A Progress Report" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

So three years out from the directive, 1) public access policy is in place for 98% of the research funding from US federal agencies starting in the last year, 2) a robust article identification system is in place from Crossref that is already tracking more than 11,000 funding agencies worldwide, 3) CHORUS, a public-private partnership, is actively assisting the agencies with implementing their public access plans, 4) TDM solutions are beginning to appear, and 5) agencies, supported by various stakeholders, are making some headway on data management.

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"Developing Infrastructure to Support Closer Collaboration of Aggregators with Open Repositories"

Nancy Pontika et al. have published "Developing Infrastructure to Support Closer Collaboration of Aggregators with Open Repositories" in Liber Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

The COnnecting REpositories (CORE) project has been dealing with these challenges by aggregating and enriching content from hundreds of open access repositories, increasing the discoverability and reusability of millions of open access manuscripts. As repository managers and library directors often wish to know the details of the content harvested from their repositories and keep a certain level of control over it, CORE is now facing the challenge of how to enable content providers to manage their content in the aggregation and control the harvesting process. In order to improve the quality and transparency of the aggregation process and create a two-way collaboration between the CORE project and the content providers, we propose the CORE Dashboard.

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"Making OA Monographs Happen: Library-Press Collaboration at the University of Ottawa, Canada"

Tony Horava has published "Making OA Monographs Happen: Library-Press Collaboration at the University of Ottawa, Canada" in Insights: The UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

At the University of Ottawa, Canada, the UO Press and the UO Library have developed a strategic partnership to publish and disseminate selected new monographs as gold open access (OA). Starting in 2013, the Library agreed to fund three books at C$10,000 per book (a total of C$30,000 per year) in order to remove barriers to accessing scholarship and to align with scholarly communication goals of the University. In 2015 this agreement was renewed for another three years and the funding was increased to cover four books (a total of C$40,000 per year). Ten titles have so far been published under this model. The data reveals that there have been 12,629 downloads as well as 16,584 page views of these titles, as of September 2015. There have been over 4,700 copies (print and EPUB) sold in spite of the free availability of the PDF version.

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"Making Sense of Journal Research Data Policies"

Linda Naughton and David Kernohan have published "Making Sense of Journal Research Data Policies" in Insights: The UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

This article gives an overview of the findings from the first phase of the Jisc Journal Research Data Policy Registry pilot (JRDPR), which is currently under way. . . . The project undertook an analysis of 250 journal research data policies to assess the feasibility of developing a policy registry to assist researchers and support staff to comply with research data publication requirements. The evidence shows that the current research data policy ecosystem is in critical need of standardization and harmonization if such services are to be built and implemented. To this end, the article proposes the next steps for the project with the objective of ultimately moving towards a modern research infrastructure based on machine-readable policies that support a more open scholarly communications environment.

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"Big Publishers, Bigger Profits: How the Scholarly Community Lost the Control of Its Journals"

Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon have published "Big Publishers, Bigger Profits: How the Scholarly Community Lost the Control of Its Journals" in MediaTropes.

Here's an excerpt:

Despite holding the potential to liberate scholarly information, the digital era has, to the contrary, increased the control of a few for-profit publishers. While most journals in the print era were owned by academic institutions and scientific societies, the majority of scientific papers are currently published by five for-profit publishers, which often exhibit profit margins between 30%-40%. This paper documents the evolution of this consolidation over the last 40 years, discusses the peculiar economics of scholarly publishing, and reflects upon the role of publishers in today's academe.

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"Beams of Particles and Papers. The Role of Preprint Archives in High Energy Physics"

Alessandro Delfanti has self-archived "Beams of Particles and Papers. The Role of Preprint Archives in High Energy Physics."

Here's an excerpt:

The role of preprint archives is also highlighted by the existence of viXra.org, arXiv's evil twin. This dissenting and independent archive, that mimics the appearance and functioning of the original one, is aimed at overcoming the forms of policing that keep undesired papers outside of arXiv. ViXra claims to be " truly open" and to serve "the whole scientific community." In fact, the review processes enforced by arXiv are seen as failing to meet the standards of openness preprint archives are supposed to live up to.

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"Persistent URIs Must Be Used to Be Persistent"

Herbert Van de Sompel, Martin Klein, and Shawn M. Jones have self-archived "Persistent URIs Must Be Used to Be Persistent."

Here's an excerpt:

We quantify the extent to which references to papers in scholarly literature use persistent HTTP URIs that leverage the Digital Object Identifier infrastructure. We find a significant number of references that do not, speculate why authors would use brittle URIs when persistent ones are available, and propose an approach to alleviate the problem.

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