Category: Publishing

The Future of the Monograph in the Digital Era: A Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Michael Elliott has self-archived The Future of the Monograph in the Digital Era: A Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Here's an excerpt:

Over the course of six months, our working group endeavored to consider whether a model of university-funded monograph publication could improve the publishing landscape for scholars in the humanities and facilitate the "digital transition" that Berkery foresees. Under such a model, a university would bear a high percentage of the publication costs through an initial contract. The university press would produce a high quality, open-access digital publication, as well as make the book available in print form—possibly through print-on-demand.

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"ARL, Higher Education Groups Support Lingua Editors, Open Access"

ARL has released ""ARL, Higher Education Groups Support Lingua Editors, Open Access."

Here's an excerpt:

Following in the footsteps of other editors and authors, the six editors and thirty-one editorial board members of the Elsevier journal Lingua resigned on October 27, 2015, in protest of Elsevier's practices. The Lingua editors argued that the journal's price has steadily increased year after year, far outpacing the cost of production. The editors also cited Elsevier's refusal to transition the journal to a "fair open access" model that would charge low and transparent article processing fees for authors, while allowing authors to retain copyright to their articles.

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"The Institution as E-Textbook Publisher"

Andrew Barker has published "The Institution as E-Textbook Publisher" in Insights: the UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Providing students with sufficient copies of core textbooks is an increasing challenge in an age of ever higher fees, economic realities and heightened student expectations regarding provision of library resources. This article outlines the partnership between the University of Liverpool Library and Liverpool University Press (LUP), which has progressed from the creation of a library advisory board to the co-creation of two bespoke and open access (OA) e-textbooks as part of a Jisc-funded project. It tells the story of why we have gone down this route at Liverpool and what we hope to gain from the creation of these e-textbooks.

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"Maximizing the Benefits of Open Access: Strategies for Enhancing the Discovery of Open Access Content"

Maria Bonn has published "Maximizing the Benefits of Open Access: Strategies for Enhancing the Discovery 0f Open Access Content" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

To achieve some economies of scale in library acquisition of OA publications, we should leverage the library crown and work the library network. There's no point in libraries all over the world laboriously replicating the same work of evaluation, selection, and acquisition when they have the tools, methods, and community to work in collaboration. Subject specialists might organize themselves in clusters to share the initial work of discovery and establish criteria for evaluation that can be collectively trusted

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BioMed Central Implements Author Contributorship Badges

BioMed Central has implemented Author Contributorship Badges.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

To receive credit for their work, researchers must publish. However, the traditional author list on scientific research articles provides little clarification as to who actually did what on the project. Conventions around author order often mean that key contributors to research are either left off the author list entirely, or given a position that provides no real "credit" in the grant-awarding/career ladder ecosystem.

The introduction of Author Contributorship Badges is an effort to solve this problem by crediting authors for the specific ways in which they contributed to a study. For example, it might distinguish whether the author drafted the copy, verified the results or curated the data for the project. A visual badge which illustrates their full contribution will be made available on the article page and on the ORCID site.

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"’Predatory’ Open Access: A Longitudinal Study of Article Volumes and Market Characteristics"

Cenyu Shen and Bo-Christer Björk have published "'Predatory' Open Access: A Longitudinal Study of Article Volumes and Market Characteristics" in BMC Medicine.

Here's an excerpt:

Despite a total number of journals and publishing volumes comparable to respectable (indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals) open access journals, the problem of predatory open access seems highly contained to just a few countries, where the academic evaluation practices strongly favor international publication, but without further quality checks.

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Research Library Issues, no. 287

ARL has released Research Library Issues, no. 287.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

ARL has published Research Library Issues (RLI) no. 287, an issue in which Rikk Mulligan offers an overview of the history of scholarly communication from its beginnings in the 17th century to recent innovations in digital and hybrid publishing.

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"An Interview with Peter Suber on Open Access"

Cheryl LaGuardia has published "An Interview with Peter Suber on Open Access" in Library Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Because hybrid is no-risk, it has spread like wildfire. I used to think that was good, since at least it gave publishers first-hand experience with the economics of fee-based OA journals. But I changed my mind about that years ago

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Open Library of Humanities Launched

The Open Library of Humanities has been launched.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

North Beach, San Francisco It is with great pleasure that we announce the launch of the Open Library of Humanities. Over two years in the planning and execution, the platform starts with seven journals, supported by 99 institutions. Our estimated publication volume for year one is 150 articles across these venues. The economics of this work out at approximately £4 ($6) per institution per open-access article.

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Monitoring the Transition to Open Access: A Report for the Universities UK Open Access Co-ordination Group

The Universities UK's Open Access Co-ordination Group has released Monitoring the Transition to Open Access: A Report for the Universities UK Open Access Co-ordination Group.

Here's an excerpt:

This study was commissioned in response to a recommendation of the Finch Group in its second report in 2013 that reliable indicators should be gathered on key features of the transition to open access (OA) in the UK. The findings presented here are thus a first attempt at generating such indicators covering five sets of issues:

  • OA options available to authors . . . .
  • Accessibility. . . .
  • Usage. . . .
  • Financial sustainability for universities . . . .
  • Financial sustainability for learned societies

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"Campus Open Access Funds: Experiences of the KU ‘One University’ Open Access Author Fund"

Rachel Gyore et al. have published "Campus Open Access Funds: Experiences of the KU 'One University' Open Access Author Fund" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

This report documents the group's experience in developing eligibility criteria and administering the OA Fund. Here we provide insight into our efforts implementing the project, funding results, and plans for continuation. We share the results of the first two years of the OA Author Fund pilot and the lessons learned about open access fund administration.

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"The Presence of High-impact Factor Open Access Journals in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) Disciplines"

Annarita Barbara et al. have published "The Presence of High-impact Factor Open Access Journals in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) Disciplines" in the Italian Journal of Library, Archives, and Information Science.

Here's an excerpt:

The present study means to establish to what extent high-quality open access journals are available as an outlet for publication, by examining their distribution in different scientific disciplines, including the distribution of those journals without article processing charges. The study is based on a systematic comparison between the journals included in the DOAJ, and the journals indexed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Science edition 2013, released by Thomson Reuters. The impact factor of Open Access (OA) journals was lower than those of other journals by a small but statistically significant amount. Open access journals are present in the upper quartile (by impact factor) of 85 out of 176 (48.8%) categories examined. There were no OA journals with an Impact Factor in only 16 categories (9%).

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"The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014"

Walt Crawford has published "The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014" in Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt:

This issue consists of an excerpted version of The Gold OA Landscape 2011- 2014, published September 10, 2015 as a PDF ebook for $55.00 and on September 11, 2015 as a paperback book for $60.00. . . .

This book represents the first overview of essentially all of serious gold OA—that is, what's published by the journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. I believe it's important for all OA publishers and for many libraries and OA advocates. If it does well, or if there's some form of alternative funding, I'll continue tracking the field in the future.

The issue—starting with the first numbered section below—includes a little more than one-third of what's in the book (a little more than half the text, but none of the 69 graphs, and probably less than half of the many, many tables), I believe these excerpts are useful on their own, and enough to provide a reasonably good picture of gold OA in 2011-2014- but they're not the whole story. For that, you'll have to buy the book.

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"Optimizing Open Access Policy "

Stevan Harnad has self-archived "Optimizing Open Access Policy."

Here's an excerpt:

This overview of the current status of Open Access (OA) to peer-reviewed research describes the steps that need to be taken to achieve universal OA. . . . To accelerate progress, more institutions and funders need to adopt more effective OA mandates: All universities and funders should require (1) institutional deposit (2) immediately upon acceptance for publication; urge (but not require) (3) immediate OA and (4) rights-retention; (5) minimize allowable embargo length, (6) implement the copy-request Button; (7) provide rich usage and citation metrics and (8) designate repository deposit of publications as the locus for institutional performance review as well as funding applications and renewals.

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"The Share of Open Access Journals (OAJ) and Open Access Articles (OAA) Charging Article Processing Charges (APC). Data from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) 2013 to 2015"

Falk Reckling has published "The Share of Open Access Journals (OAJ) and Open Access Articles (OAA) Charging Article Processing Charges (APC). Data from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) 2013 to 2015" in The Journal of Brief Ideas.

Here's an excerpt:

83.0% (186) of the OAJ charge APC, while 17.0% (38) of the OAJ don't. On the article level, 93.6% (683) of the articles were published with and 6.4% (47) without APC.

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"Barriers to Open Access Publishing: Views from the Library Literature"

Amy Forrester has published "Barriers to Open Access Publishing: Views from the Library Literature" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

The library and information science (LIS) community has an active role in supporting access to information and, therefore, is an important stakeholder in the open access conversation. One major discussion involves the barriers that have hindered the complete transition to open access in scientific publications. Building upon a longitudinal study by Bo-Christer Björk that looked at barriers to the open access publishing of scholarly articles, this study evaluates the discussion of those barriers in the LIS literature over the ten year period 2004-2014, and compares this to Björk's conclusions about gold open access publishing.

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PubPeer Foundation Launches

The PubPeer Foundation has been established.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The overarching goal of the Foundation is to help improve the quality of scientific research by enabling innovative approaches for community interaction. Our initial focus will be on maintaining and developing the PubPeer online platform for post-publication peer review.

See also: "PubPeer's Secret Is Out: Founder of Controversial Website Reveals Himself."

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"Open Access to a High-Quality, Impartial, Point-of-Care Medical Summary Would Save Lives: Why Does It Not Exist?"

James Heilman has published "Open Access to a High-Quality, Impartial, Point-of-Care Medical Summary Would Save Lives: Why Does It Not Exist?" in PLOS Medicine.

Here's an excerpt:

Summary Points

  • Currently no open access point-of-care (POC) medical summary aimed at a professional audience exists.
  • Some nonprofit and multiple professional, for-profit POC medical summaries are frequently accessed by clinicians and policymakers.
  • Efforts to create open access POC summaries have been stymied by the difficulty of attracting high-quality contributors.
  • The open access medical publishing community can create this resource with engaged donors, crowd-sourcing, and technology.

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"Dataverse 4.0: Defining Data Publishing"

Mercè Crosas has self-archived "Dataverse 4.0: Defining Data Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

The research community needs reliable, standard ways to make the data produced by scientific research available to the community, while getting credit as data authors. As a result, a new form of scholarly publication is emerging: data publishing. Data pubishing—or making data long-term accessible, reusable and citable—is more involved than simply providing a link to a data file or posting the data to the researchers web site. In this paper, we define what is needed for proper data publishing and describe how the open-source Dataverse software helps define, enable and enhance data publishing for all.

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"Is it True that Most Open Access Journals Do Not Charge an APC? Sort of. It Depends."

David Crotty has published "Is it True that Most Open Access Journals Do Not Charge an APC? Sort of. It Depends." in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Most journals in the study ["72% and 41%: A Gold OA 2011-2014 Preview"] do not charge authors, but the majority of authors are choosing to publish in journals that do charge. 27% (2,365) of the journals studied required an APC and were responsible for 57% of the articles.

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"Open Journal Systems and Dataverse Integration—Helping Journals to Upgrade Data Publication for Reusable Research"

Micah Altman et al. have self-archived "Open Journal Systems and Dataverse Integration—Helping Journals to Upgrade Data Publication for Reusable Research."

Here's an excerpt:

This article describes the novel open source tools for open data publication in open access journal workflows. This comprises a plugin for Open Journal Systems that supports a data submission, citation, review, and publication workflow; and an extension to the Dataverse system that provides a standard deposit API. We describe the function and design of these tools, provide examples of their use, and summarize their initial reception. We conclude by discussing future plans and potential impact.

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The Once and Future Publishing Library

The Council on Library and Information Resources has released The Once and Future Publishing Library .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The report explores the revitalization of library publishing and its possible future, and examines elements that influence the success and sustainability of library publishing initiatives.

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"The Oldest Internet Publication You’ve Never Heard Of"

Roy Tennant has published "The Oldest Internet Publication You've Never Heard Of" in Digital Shift.

Current Cites is now 25 years old. It was established by the Library Technology Watch Program at the University of California, Berkeley Library in 1990. It went online on the University of California's Melvyl system in February 1991, and it was distributed on the University of Houston's PACS-L discussion list starting eight months later. In January 1992, it became one of the first digital publications distributed on the University of Houston's PACS-P discussion list, and it was distributed on this list until May 2014. Starting in 2005, it was distributed by OCLC's WebJunction.org. As of 2011, the list has been supported by the University of Notre Dame and the website has been provided by Roy Tennant.

Current Cites is published monthly by Roy and written by Roy and his team of contributors. This serial has always been open access.

Congratulations, Roy on 25 years of publication!

You can read more about it at:

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"Small Steps Matter: FASTR Passes Senate Committee Hurdle"

SPARC has released Small Steps Matter: FASTR Passes Senate Committee Hurdle by Heather Joseph.

Here's an excerpt:

With its action today, the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) advanced the cause of public access to publicly funded research articles another crucial step. In a unanimous voice vote, the Committee approved S. 779, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act which now positions the legislation to be considered by the full Senate.

This marks the first time that a U.S. Senate Committee has acted on a government-wide policy ensuring public access to the results of publicly funded research and signals that there is deep support for the ideal that taxpayers have the right to access to the research that their tax dollars fund. This action continues the steady march towards enabling fast, barrier-free access to research articles that got its start with the establishment of a voluntary NIH policy in 2005, and slowly progressed with legislation shifting that policy to mandatory in 2008, again in 2010 with the America COMPETES Act and most recently with the 2013 White House OSTP Directive on public access. . . .

Today's progress on FASTR is another step in this long march. Under the leadership of Senator Cornyn (R-TX) and Senator Wyden (D-OR), FASTR provides the statutory framework needed codify the White House OSTP Directive, which was issued with the goal of accelerating scientific discovery and fueling innovation. While 13 federal agencies and departments have released their initial plans, the reality is that the OSTP Directive is not law, and can be easily overturned by a subsequent Administration. Should FASTR continue on course and be passed by both chambers of Congress, free, fair public access to research articles will become the law of the land – and not just the preference a President.

See also: "Cornyn Bill To Improve Access To Taxpayer-Funded Research Passes Committee Unanimously."

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