Category: Publishing

"An Interview with Jeffrey Beall"

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.

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Association of Universities in the Netherlands and John Wiley Announce Open Access Agreement

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.

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"Are ‘Predatory’ Journals Completely Negative, or Also a Sign of Something Positive?"

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.

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"CHORUS Signs Agreement with US Department of Defense to Advance Public Access to Research"

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.

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Rachel Burley Named as Publishing Director, BioMed Central and SpringerOpen

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.

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"Library Publishing and Diversity Values: Changing Scholarly Publishing through Policy and Scholarly Communication Education"

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.

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"Open Access 2015: A Year Access Negotiators Edged Closer to the Brink"

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".

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OAPEN-UK Final Report: A Five-Year Study into Open Access Monograph Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences

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.

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"Bibliometric and Benchmark Analysis of Gold Open Access in Spain: Big Output and Little Impact"

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.

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Amazon and Empty Storefronts

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.

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"An Update on Peer Review and Research Data"

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.

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"Peer Review in Megajournals Compared with Traditional Scholarly Journals: Does It Make a Difference?"

Bo-Christer Björk and Paul Catani have published "Peer Review in Megajournals Compared with Traditional Scholarly Journals: Does It Make a Difference?" in Learned Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

We report on a small pilot study in which we looked at the citation distributions for articles in megajournals compared with journals with traditional peer review, which also evaluate articles for contribution and novelty. We found that elite journals with very low acceptance rates have far fewer articles with no or few citations, but that the long tail of articles with two citations or less was actually bigger in a sample of selective traditional journals in comparison with megajournals.

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"Tracing Digital Footprints to Academic Articles: An Investigation of PeerJ Publication Referral Data"

Xianwen Wang, Shenmeng Xu, and Zhichao Fang have self-archived "Tracing Digital Footprints to Academic Articles: An Investigation of PeerJ Publication Referral Data."

Here's an excerpt:

In this study, we propose a novel way to explore the patterns of people's visits to academic articles. About 3.4 million links to referral source of visitors of 1432 papers published in the journal of PeerJ are collected and analyzed. We find that at least 57% visits are from external referral sources, among which General Search Engine, Social Network, and News & Blog are the top three categories of referrals. Academic Resource, including academic search engines and academic publishers' sites, is the fourth largest category of referral sources. In addition, our results show that Google contributes significantly the most in directing people to scholarly articles. . . . Correlation analysis and regression analysis indicates that papers with more mentions are expected to have more visitors, and Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are the most commonly used social networking tools that refer people to PeerJ.

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"Academic Social Networks and Open Access: French Researchers at the Crossroads"

Christine Okret-Manville has published "Academic Social Networks and Open Access: French Researchers at the Crossroads" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

For some years, researchers have been using new ways to communicate and share their work by using academic social networks. In an attempt to foster the development of Open Access in France, the French consortium COUPERIN (Unified Consortium of Higher Education and Research Organizations for Access to Numerical Publications) proposed that academic social networks could be used to convince researchers of becoming more involved in Open Access. To test this hypothesis, a nationwide survey was launched in 2014 to explore whether and how these academic social networks are used to share content, but also how they compare to other Open Access classic tools. Within a month (20 May to 20 June), 1,898 researchers answered this 28-question survey. It was fully completed by 1,698 of them.

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"Publishing as Pedagogy: Connecting Library Services and Technology"

Laurie Alexander et al. have published "Publishing as Pedagogy: Connecting Library Services and Technology" in EDUCAUSE Review.

Here's an excerpt:

In the following three case studies we profile three student publishing outputs (a journal, a book, and an exhibit) from the University of Michigan Library. Beyond describing the products themselves, we identify the opportunities that the librarians involved found to emphasize particular learning experiences during the creation process.

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"Data Citation Services in the High-Energy Physics Community"

Patricia Herterich and Sünje Dallmeier-Tiessen have published "Data Citation Services in the High-Energy Physics Community" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

In this article we present a case study of data citation services for the High-Energy Physics (HEP) community using digital library technology. Our example shows how the concept of data citation is implemented for the complete research workflow, covering data production, publishing, citation and tracking of data reuse. We also describe challenges faced and distil lessons learnt for infrastructure providers and scholarly communication stakeholders across disciplines.

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"NIH Manuscript Collection Optimized for Text-Mining and More"

NIH has released "NIH Manuscript Collection Optimized for Text-Mining and More."

Here's an excerpt:

You can download the entire PMC collection of NIH-supported author manuscripts as a package in either XML or plain text formats. The collection will encompass all NIH manuscripts posted to PMC since July 2008. While the public can access the articles' full text and accompanying figures, tables, and multimedia on the PMC Web site, the newly available article packages include full text only, in a form that facilitates text-mining.

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"Text and Data Mining: Challenges and Solutions from the Publishers’ Perspective"

LIBER has released "Text and Data Mining: Challenges and Solutions from the Publishers' Perspective."

Here's an excerpt:

On 11 November, OpenMinTeD (a project in which LIBER participates) and Europeana organised a workshop titled 'Text and Data Mining in Europe: Challenges and Action'. The goal of the workshop was to bring together content providers (publishers, data centers, museums and libraries) who are open to making their data available for Text and Data Mining (TDM).

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"Open Access, Almost-OA, OA Policies, and Institutional Repositories"

Richard Poynder has published "Open Access, Almost-OA, OA Policies, and Institutional Repositories" in Open and Shut?. This is part one of a planned two-part post.

Here's an excerpt:

First, I want to discuss how many of the documents indexed in "open" repositories are in fact freely available, rather than on "dark deposit" or otherwise inaccessible

Second, I want to look at the so-called eprint request Button, a tool developed to allow readers to obtain copies of items held on dark deposit in repositories.

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"Opening the Black Box of Scholarly Communication Funding: A Public Data Infrastructure for Financial Flows in Academic Publishing"

Stuart Lawson et al. have self-archived "Opening the Black Box of Scholarly Communication Funding: A Public Data Infrastructure for Financial Flows in Academic Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper we present work to trace and reassemble a picture of financial flows around the publication of journals in the UK in the midst of a national shift towards open access. We contend that the current lack of financial transparency around scholarly communication is an obstacle to evidence-based policy-making—leaving researchers, decision-makers and institutions in the dark about the systemic implications of new financial models. We conclude that obtaining a more joined up picture of financial flows is vital as a means for researchers, institutions and others to understand and shape changes to the sociotechnical systems that underpin scholarly communication.

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"CHORUS Gets a Boost from Federal Agencies—But Will New Approaches Make It Harder to Implement?"

Angela Cochran has published "CHORUS Gets a Boost from Federal Agencies—But Will New Approaches Make It Harder to Implement?" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Today, CHORUS and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced an agreement to use CHORUS for facilitating the discovery of NSF funded works. . . .

With the NSF on board, CHORUS has been given a big boost. However, it seems many publishers, whose membership dues are the only source of financial support for CHORUS, have been hanging back to see which agencies will participate.

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"Criteria for Open Access and Publishing"

ScienceOpen has released an e-print of "Criteria for Open Access and Publishing" by Tom Olijhoek, Lars Bjørnshauge, and Dominic Mitchell .

Here's an excerpt:

This article gives an overview of the history and current status of the DOAJ. After a brief historical overview, DOAJ policies regarding open access, intellectual property rights and questionable publishers are explained in detail. The larger part of this article is a much requested explanation on how DOAJ uses its new set of criteria for the evaluation of open access journals and the rationale behind choosing the seven extra criteria that qualify for the DOAJ Seal. A final section is devoted to the extended possibilities that DOAJ will be offering shortly to scholars and publishers for searching the database and for uploading metadata. The result is a renewed DOAJ that offers a more robust platform, a more stable database and enhanced services to allow the upload and collection of metadata.

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"Considering Non-Open Access Publication Charges in the ‘Total Cost of Publication’"

Andrew Gray has published "Considering Non-Open Access Publication Charges in the 'Total Cost of Publication'" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

Recent research has tried to calculate the "total cost of publication" in the British academic sector, bringing together the costs of journal subscriptions, the article processing charges (APCs) paid to publish open-access content, and the indirect costs of handling open-access mandates. This study adds an estimate for the other publication charges (predominantly page and colour charges) currently paid by research institutions, a significant element which has been neglected by recent studies. When these charges are included in the calculation, the total cost to institutions as of 2013/14 is around 18.5% over and above the cost of journal subscriptions—11% from APCs, 5.5% from indirect costs, and 2% from other publication charges.

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"The History and Future of Academic Library Collecting in Eleven Pictures"

David W. Lewis has self-archived "The History and Future of Academic Library Collecting in Eleven Pictures."

Here's an excerpt:

In the digital world and using the strategy I have outlined what we have is more like an open checkbook that will purchase the books an articles any library user wants. It is the difference between a public park and giving citizens free ticket s to Disney Land whenever they need recreation. Or, like the difference between a soup kitchen and food stamps.

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"Examining the Impact of the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy on the Citation Rates of Journal Articles"

Sandra L. De Groote et al. have published "Examining the Impact of the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy on the Citation Rates of Journal Articles" in PLoS One.

Here's an excerpt:

Purpose

To examine whether National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded articles that were archived in PubMed Central (PMC) after the release of the 2008 NIH Public Access Policy show greater scholarly impact than comparable articles not archived in PMC. . . .

Results

A total of 45,716 articles were examined, including 7,960 with NIH-funding. An analysis of the number of times these articles were cited found that NIH-funded 2006 articles in PMC were not cited significantly more than NIH-funded non-PMC articles. However, 2009 NIH funded articles in PMC were cited 26% more than 2009 NIH funded articles not in PMC, 5 years after publication. This result is highly significant even after controlling for journal (as a proxy of article quality and topic).

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