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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
DuraSpace has released "VIVO plus SHARE: Closing the Loop on Tracking Scholarly Activity."
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
On February 24, 2016, Rick Johnson (Program Co-Director, Digital Initiatives and Scholarship Head, Data Curation and Digital Library Solutions Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame; Visiting Program Officer for SHARE at the Association of Research Libraries) and Mike Conlon (VIVO Project Director, DuraSpace; Professor Emeritus, University of Florida) presented, "VIVO plus SHARE: Closing the Loop on Tracking Scholarly Activity."
Monica Ward and Joanie Lavoie have published "A Library-Publisher Partnership for Open Access: Building an Innovative Relationship between Scholarly Publishers and Academic Libraries" in LIBER Quarterly.
Here's an excerpt:
This article presents an overview of a strategic partnership undertaken by the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and the Érudit Consortium (Érudit) to support the move towards open access for Canadian francophone scholarly journals.
CRKN and Érudithave had a relationship through a traditional commercial subscription model since 2008. In 2014, the two organizations recognized the need for a new relationship that would address two major challenges: the fragility of the Canadian not-for-profit scholarly publishing environment and the increasing pressure from libraries and funding agencies for scholarly journals to move towards open access. Érudit and CRKN have worked collaboratively to create an innovative partnership, which provides a framework for a new relationship between publishers and libraries, and helps to provide financial support to Canadian publishers during the transition to a fully open access model.
Michael Eisen and Leslie B. Vosshall have self-archived "Coupling Pre-Prints and Post-Publication Peer Review for Fast, Cheap, Fair, and Effective Science Publishing."
Here's an excerpt:
Pre-prints will be not be embraced by biomedical scientists until we stop treating them as "pre" anything, which suggests that a better "real" version is yet to come. Instead, pre-prints need to be accepted as formally published works. This can only happen if we first create and embrace systems to evaluate the quality and impact of, and appropriate audience for, these already published works.
Nathan Hosburgh and Chris Bulock have self-archived "OA in the Library Collection: The Challenges of Identifying and Maintaining Open Access Resources."
Here's an excerpt:
At this session, they [the authors] shared survey results, reflected on OA workflows at their own libraries, and updated audience members on relevant standards and initiatives. Survey respondents reported challenges related to hybrid OA, inaccurate metadata, and inconsistent communication along the serials supply chain. Recommended solutions included the creation of consistent, centralized article-level metadata and the development of OA collection development principles for libraries.
Ithaka S+R has released The Costs of Publishing Monographs: Toward a Transparent Methodology .
Here's an excerpt:
While there have been numerous efforts to understand the costs of publishing a scholarly monograph, this study is unique in that we worked with an advisory group of university press publishers to identify all of the cost components in scholarly monographic publishing and to work with a wide variety of university presses to calculate their costs of each of those components in a bottom-up fashion.
Sarah Beaubien, Julie Garrison, and Doug Way have published "Evaluating an Open Access Publishing Fund at a Comprehensive University" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.
Here's an excerpt:
Wanting to learn how faculty have benefitted from an open access publishing fund, Grand Valley State University Libraries surveyed recipients of the fund. The survey asked authors why they chose an open access publishing option and whether the fund influenced this decision. Authors were also asked whether they perceived that selecting an open access option broadened exposure to their work and about their likelihood of choosing open access in the future.
Joseph Esposito has published "An Interview with Jeffrey Beall" in The Scholarly Kitchen.
Here's an excerpt:
[Beall] In the scholarly open access segment of the scholarly publishing industry, we are seeing that the most prosperous publishers are the larger ones, those able to offshore their production work. Hindawi (in Egypt) and MDPI (with most of its work done in China) are two examples. I think the industry will continue to select for publishers like these, meaning many production-related jobs in North America and Europe will move to South Asia and East Asia.
The Association of Universities in the Netherlands and John Wiley and Sons, Inc. have announced an open access agreement.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
The negotiations between VSNU and Wiley resulted in an unprecedented agreement covering 2016 – 2019. It provides students and researchers at Dutch universities affiliated to the VSNU with access to all Wiley subscription journal content and enables authors at Dutch universities affiliated to the VSNU to enjoy unlimited open access publication in Wiley's hybrid journals (c.1400), with no publishing charge levied at the article level.
Jan Velterop has published "Are 'Predatory' Journals Completely Negative, or Also a Sign of Something Positive?" in SciELO in Perspective.
Here's an excerpt:
Yet, even with the drawback of being polluted by predatory journals, a functioning market is preferable to a quasi-market, completely dominated by monopolies or monopoly-like players. A system of subscriptions, in which the party who pays—the institutional library—has practically no meaningful choice of what to buy, differs from one of article processing charges (APCs, which make open access possible), in that the party who pays—the author—is the party who does have a meaningful choice of where to submit and publish. So 'flipping' the system from subscriptions to APCs does deliver something much more akin to a functioning market, and 'caveat emptor', 'buyer beware', applies to all markets.
CHORUS has released "CHORUS Signs Agreement with US Department of Defense to Advance Public Access to Research."
Here's an excerpt:
DTIC will employ CHORUS' services to build on open standards, distributed networks and established infrastructure to advance access to scholarly articles reporting on DoD-funded research, as well as enable agency indexing and long-term preservation of those articles. The DoD system will dovetail with the interoperable CHORUS framework, along with Crossref's Open Funder Registry, to provide an article submission workflow for DoD-funded researchers and facilitate public access to all articles that report on DoD-funded research. The agreement enables readers searching DTIC's Public Access Search to follow links that point to publicly available articles/accepted manuscripts in context of the journal where they were published.
Springer Nature has named Rachel Burley as Publishing Director, BioMed Central and SpringerOpen.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
Burley was previously with John Wiley & Sons, where she was Vice President and Director of Open Access and Business Development. There, she led the strategic planning and development of Wiley's open access initiatives and was instrumental in identifying and implementing strategic partnerships. Prior to that, Burley was Vice President and Publisher of Life Sciences at Wiley, and spent seven years at Nature Publishing Group.
Charlotte Roh has published "Library Publishing and Diversity Values: Changing Scholarly Publishing through Policy and Scholarly Communication Education" in College & Research Libraries News.
Here's an excerpt:
What are the consequences of this lack of diversity in publishing, librarianship, and faculty? We know already that privilege can bias access to material, which is part of why the open access movement exists, to alleviate the barriers that cost can create for researchers. However, one possible consequence is a feedback loop in scholarship that privileges and publishes the majority voice, which is often white and male.
Hilda Bastian has published "Open Access 2015: A Year Access Negotiators Edged Closer to the Brink " in Absolutely Maybe.
Here's an excerpt:
It's the year many negotiators got seriously tough on double dipping—charging for both the ability to read (via subscriptions) and for publishing (author processing charges, or APCs).
Last year it was France getting tough on the toughest negotiator: Elsevier. This year, the Netherlands took it right to the brink of cutting Elsevier loose. It was summed up by a January headline: "Dutch universities dig in for long fight over open access".
OAPEN-UK has released OAPEN-UK Final Report: A Five-Year Study into Open Access Monograph Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences .
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
Examining the attitudes and perceptions of funders, researchers, publishers, learned societies, universities and libraries, our study reiterated the deep strength of feeling and connectedness that each group has with the monograph, especially in terms of identity and reputation. It also found that while many think open access is a good idea in principle, there is uncertainty about how easy it would be to implement the necessary policies and systems to support OA monographs.
Daniel Torres-Salinas et al. have published "Bibliometric and Benchmark Analysis of Gold Open Access in Spain: Big Output and Little Impact" in El Profesional de la Información.
Here's an excerpt:
This bibliometric study analyzes the research output produced by Spain during the 2005-2014 time period in Open Access (OA) journals indexed in Web of Science.. . . . Spain is the second highest ranking European country with gold OA publication output and the fourth highest in Open Access output (9%). . . . Spain's normalized citation impact in Open access (0.72) is lower than the world average and that of the main European countries.
The American Booksellers Association and Civic Economics have released Amazon and Empty Storefronts.
Here's an excerpt:
In 2014, Amazon sold $44.1 billion worth of retail goods nationwide, all while avoiding $625 million in state and local sales taxes.
That is the equivalent of 3,215 retail storefronts. . . which might have paid $420 million in property taxes.
A total of more than $1 billion in revenue lost to state and local governments, $8.48 for every household in America.
Fiona Murphy has published "An Update on Peer Review and Research Data" in Learned Publishing.
Here's an excerpt:
As has been outlined here, the question of how to review research data and incorporate this into the publication process remains a knotty one. Various groups have made a certain amount of progress with potential recommendations, and domain-related and technical support functions are also emerging. However, the critical mass of active researchers has so far failed to engage.
