Category: Publishing

"The Educational Value of Truly Interactive Science Publishing"

Michael J. Ackerman has published "The Educational Value of Truly Interactive Science Publishing" in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

Interactive Scientific Publishing (ISP) has been developed by the Optical Society of America with support from the National Library of Medicine at NIH. It allows authors to electronically publish papers which are linked to the referenced 2D and 3D original image datasets. These image datasets can then be viewed and analyzed interactively by the reader. ISP provides the software for authors to assemble and link their source data to their publication. But more important is that it provides readers with image viewing and analysis tools. The goal of ISP is to improve learning and understanding of the presented information. This paper describes ISP and its effect on learning and understanding. ISP was shown to have enough educational value that readers were willing to invest in the required set-up and learning phases. The social aspects of data sharing and the enlarged review process may be the hardest obstacles to overcome.

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"AHRQ, NASA, USDA Release Plans for Public Access to Funded Research"

ARL has released AHRQ, NASA, USDA Release Plans for Public Access to Funded Research.

Here's an excerpt:

Three US Government agencies-the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)-recently released their plans for increasing public access to federally funded research in response to the 2013 White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) directive. The OSTP memorandum directed federal agencies with R&D budgets of $100 million or more to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication.

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"The Case of the Disappearing E-book: Academic Libraries and Subscription Packages"

College & Research Libraries has released "The Case of the Disappearing E-Book: Academic Libraries and Subscription Packages" by Helen Georgas.

Here's an excerpt:

This study begins with a one-year analysis of "disappeared" titles from ebrary's Academic Complete™ collection at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY). Were certain subject areas particularly affected? Which publishers were removed? Were the removed titles mainly scholarly, or were they titles published by popular presses? Were the removed monographs older publications, or were recent titles deleted as well?

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"Open Access Article Processing Charges: DOAJ Survey May 2014"

Heather Morrison et al. have published "Open Access Article Processing Charges: DOAJ Survey May 2014" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

As of May 2014, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed close to ten thousand fully open access, peer reviewed, scholarly journals. Most of these journals do not charge article processing charges (APCs). This article reports the results of a survey of the 2567 journals, or 26% of journals listed in DOAJ, that do have APCs based on a sample of 1432 of these journals. Results indicate a volatile sector that would make future APCs difficult to predict for budgeting purposes. DOAJ and publisher title lists often did not closely match. A number of journals were found on examination not to have APCs. A wide range of publication costs was found for every publisher type. The average (mean) APC of $964 contrasts with a mode of $0. At least 61% of publishers using APCs are commercial in nature, while many publishers are of unknown types. The vast majority of journals charging APCs (80%) were found to offer one or more variations on pricing, such as discounts for authors from mid to low income countries, differential pricing based on article type, institutional or society membership, and/or optional charges for extras such as English language editing services or fast track of articles. The complexity and volatility of this publishing landscape is discussed.

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"Reflections on Library Licensing"

Ann Shumelda Okerson has published "Reflections on Library Licensing" in Information Standards Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

The way libraries acquire basic content for their readers has been completely upended in the last two decades. In this rapid electronic environment, content providers are pressed to enhance and update existing products or to produce competitive new products, with ever-increasing functionality and with great uncertainty about what users will pay for and how much they will pay. At the same time, numerous new producers are entering the electronic marketplace. We are living in an information Wild West, which can put libraries and publishers face to face on Main Street at high noon, often without the third-party subscription agents or book jobbers we used to depend on. This article discusses how we got to this place; whether one should prefer copyright or license; the differing view of rights by authors, publishers, libraries and their end users; different types of licenses; and current issues in licensing.

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Managing Open Access Publication: A System Specification

JISC Monitor has released Managing Open Access Publication: A System Specification.

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this document is to provide a specification for a system to help UK HE institutions manage administrative data in relation to the publication of open access Academic Outputs. The document is intended to:

  • Describe the scope of such a system and the workflows it should support
  • Describe an appropriate data model given the scope and workflows
  • Provide illustrative wireframes for a user interface (UI) to such a system

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"A Proposal for Regularly Updated Review/Survey Articles: ‘Living Reviews’"

David L. Mobley and Daniel M. Zuckerman have self-archived "A Proposal for Regularly Updated Review/Survey Articles: 'Living Reviews'."

Here's an excerpt:

We propose and encourage the publication of review/survey articles that will be updated regularly, both in traditional journals and novel venues. We call these "living reviews." This idea naturally builds on the dissemination and archival capabilities present in the modern internet, and indeed living reviews exist already in some forms. Living review articles allow authors to maintain over time the relevance of non-research scholarship that requires a significant investment of effort. We also envision living reviews leading to the creation of a new category of review—review papers published as living reviews in a purely electronic format without space constraints. This will also permit more pedagogical scholarship and clearer treatment of technical issues that remain obscure in a brief treatment.

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"One More Chunk of DOAJ"

Walt Crawford has published "One More Chunk of DOAJ" in Cites & Insights Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt:

Because there will be a published concise version of all this stuff—out this summer from ALA's Library Technology Reports, working title "Idealism and Opportunism: The State of Open Access Journals"—I went through 2,200-odd additional DOAJ journals with English as one of the language options (but not the first one), and was able to add 1,507 more entries to my DOAJ master spreadsheet, which now includes 6,490 journals qualifying for full analysis and 811 that don't. This essay offers some summary information on the 1,507 added journals and some overall notes on the full DOAJ set-including some new and replacement tables (there may be errors in tables 2.66 b and c and 2.67 b and c in earlier issues).

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"Adjunct No More: Promoting Scholarly Publishing as a Core Service of Academic Libraries"

Isaac Gilman has self-archived "Adjunct No More: Promoting Scholarly Publishing as a Core Service of Academic Libraries."

Here's an excerpt:

For small academic libraries, which are largely absent from ARL-dominated literature on library publishing (with some notable exceptions 14), the decision to pivot towards publishing services leads to several key questions: What skills and resources are needed in order to ensure quality and avoid Daniel Coit Gilman's disdained practice of "printing without publishing"?15) In what ways should the traditional work of the library change in order to accommodate this shift in focus? At the same time, in what ways can the work of publication be connected with traditional work and skills found within the library?

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JEP Publishes Books in Browsers V Proceedings

The Journal of Electronic Publishing has released its latest issue, which presents the Books in Browsers V proceedings. The articles are primarily in video format

Here's an excerpt from "Editor's Note [18.1]":

While there are a few changes, what remains is the mission of the conference and the consistently high quality of its programming. As Peter Brantley, the driving force behind Books in Browsers, notes, the conference intends to and does "explore how rapidly evolving open web standards can support advanced digital publishing, and in turn how the frontiers of digital publishing design, supporting highly customized authorial intentions, push on our understanding of the nature and corpus of web standards."

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"Who Should We Trust?"

Kevin Smith has published "Who Should We Trust?" in Scholarly Communications @ Duke.

Here's an excerpt:

It is not that we exactly trust commercial publishers, nor do we exactly distrust them. We may recognize that the values and goals of the commercial publishing business are different from, and even in conflict with, the best interests of scholarly authors and of scholarship itself. Perfectly nice people, working to advance their own interests as best they can, come in to conflict as the conditions for research and teaching change. And a real ambivalence is created because of how interwoven the parts of the academic enterprise are. More than just inertia is a work; important aspects of the academic enterprise remain interlocked with traditional forms of publication.

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"PeerJ—A PLOS ONE Contender in 2015?"

Phil Davis has published "PeerJ—A PLOS ONE Contender in 2015?" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

In my last post, I reported that PeerJ was growing, publishing more papers and attracting more authors, although it was not clear whether the company was moving toward financial stability. In a crowded market of multidisciplinary open access journals, I argued that the success (or failure) of PeerJ would be determined when it received its first Impact Factor, which will be announced in mid-June with the publication of Thomson Reuters' Journal Citation Report. The purpose of this post is to estimate PeerJ's first Impact Factor and discuss its implications.

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"Ask The Chefs: What Do You Think Will Have the Biggest Impact on Scholarly Publishing In 2015?"

Ann Michael has published "Ask the Chefs: What Do You Think Will Have The Biggest Impact on Scholarly Publishing In 2015" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

According to the Chefs, we're looking at a year of mergers and acquisitions, the continuing growth of open access both in number of opportunities and in scale, the publication of data and objects (like multimedia, application code, etc.), and more start-ups.

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Bibliometric Study on Dutch Open Access

The Government of the Netherlands has released Bibliometric Study on Dutch Open Access.

Here's an excerpt:

In this text we will primarily focus on the way Open Access (OA from now on) publications are represented in the Web of Science database. We have collected data for this analysis in two different ways, which leads to different perspectives on OA publishing in the Netherlands. We focus on the output of three smaller scientific nations in Europe, next to the Netherlands we focus on Denmark and Switzerland, as these countries do contest the scientific runner up positions globally after the USA, and are more or less of comparable volume in economic terms.

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SciELO: 15 Years of Open Access

SciELO has released SciELO: 15 Years of Open Access.

Here's an excerpt:

The creation of SciELO 15 years ago and its further development were driven by two innovative and pioneering approaches: first, the indexing of national quality journals to complement international indexes and the publication of the full texts with free access on the Web in the modality known today as the "Golden Road", which took place about four years before the launch of the Budapest Declaration that is internationally agreed to as the beginning of the Open Access movement; and, second, the cooperative convergence of independent publishers, editors and national research agencies around a common objective to increase the visibility and quality of journals (Packer 1998; Meneghini, 2003; Packer 2009). During this development, SciELO became a standard of quality for the journals it indexes. As of June 2013, the SciELO network covers 15 Ibero-American countries plus South Africa, with each country publishing a national collection of journals in the network. There are also two multinational thematic collections in the network. Together these countries index about one thousand journal titles that publish more than 40 thousand articles per year. To date, the network has published a total of more than 400 thousand open access articles that receive a daily average of over 1.5 million article downloads, 65% as PDF files and 35% as HTML files.

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"The Open Access Citation Advantage"

SPARC Europe has released "The Open Access Citation Advantage."

Here's an excerpt:

The OpCit project has for many years kept up to date a list of studies on whether or not there is a citation advantage for Open Access articles. That project has now completed and the list is no longer being managed. SPARC Europe is pleased to maintain the list henceforth and has brought it up to date.

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"Why Principal Investigators Funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health Publish in the Public Library of Science Journals"

Nancy Pontika has published "Why Principal Investigators Funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health Publish in the Public Library of Science Journals" in Information Research.

Here's an excerpt:

The Institutes-funded investigators submitted to the Public Library of Science journals because they favour the high impact factor, fast publication speed, fair peer-review system and the articles/ immediate open access availability.

Conclusions. The requirements of the National Institutes' public access policy do not influence the investigators' decision to submit to one of the Public Library of Science journals and do not increase their familiarity with open access publishing options.

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Monographs and Open Access: A Report to HEFCE

The HEFCE has released Monographs and Open Access: A Report to HEFCE.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

  • Monographs are a vitally important and distinctive vehicle for research communication, and must be sustained in any moves to open access. The availability of printed books alongside the open-access versions will be essential.
  • Contrary to many perceptions, it would not be appropriate to talk of a crisis of the monograph; this does not mean that monographs are not facing challenges, but the arguments for open access would appear to be for broader and more positive reasons than solving some supposed crisis.
  • Open access offers both short- and long-term advantages for monograph publication and use; many of these are bound up with a transition to digital publishing that has not been at the same speed as that for journals.
  • There is no single dominant emerging business model for supporting open-access publishing of monographs; a range of approaches will coexist for some time and it is unlikely that any single model will emerge as dominant. Policies will therefore need to be flexible.

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"Macmillan + Springer: Some Lessons to Learn, Some Twists to Watch"

Kent Anderson has published "Macmillan + Springer: Some Lessons to Learn, Some Twists to Watch" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

The competition this merger creates at the top of the market—turning a two-billionaire race into a three-billionaire race—is unlikely to trickle down in any helpful way. More Big Deals will leave fewer scraps for others. Some top-end titles may benefit from the increased competition on the acquisitions front, but I don't think a general bidding war will break out.

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Making Open Access Work for Authors, Institutions and Publishers

The Copyright Clearance Center has released Making Open Access Work for Authors, Institutions and Publishers.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), a global licensing and content solutions organization, recently brought together institutions from the UK and publishers from both the US and UK for an Open Access roundtable discussion to explore the implications of managing Open Access fees on a large scale. During this meeting, held at University College in London, the attendees examined a number of issues related to fragmentation, approach and processes, including ways vendors can play an expanded role in addressing the challenges. CCC published the group's findings in a report written by Rob Johnson, Founder and Director of Research Consulting.

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Towards a UK Digital Public Space—A Blueprint Report

The Strategic Content Alliance has released Towards a UK Digital Public Space—A Blueprint Report.

Here's an excerpt:

"Imagine … that much of the UK's publicly held cultural and heritage media assets could be found in a unified online space … connected together, searchable, open, accessible, visible and usable … in a way that allows individuals, institutions and machines to add additional material, meaning and context to each other's media, indexed and tagged to the highest level of detail … This emerging vision of a free-to-everyone, open access environment for learning and creative endeavour has been referred to as a digital public space."

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

DOAJ Journal Analysis: "Intersections: The Third Half"

Walt Crawford has published "Intersections: The Third Half" in Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Most of this essay (pp. 7-19) is the "Third Half" of the two-part Journals and "Journals" examination in the October/November and December 2014 issues-adding another 1,200-odd bio/med journals from DOAJ and looking at overall patterns. The essay also includes four briefer discussions related to DOAJ and gold OA journals.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

CNI Executive Roundtable Report: E-Book Strategies

CNI has released CNI Executive Roundtable Report: E-Book Strategies .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

During two separate convenings of this roundtable, we explored questions that these new directions raise for institutions, the strategies that institutions are using to make choices among the available paths, the stakeholders involved, and the new programs and projects that CNI’s members are planning or have implemented. Our emphasis was on breadth rather than deep explorations of very specific issues; often we were most interested in understanding how institutions were shaping the questions and how they were exploring them, since many of these questions are far from resolution. Roundtable participants included representatives from academic libraries and information technology units from research institutions and liberal arts colleges, library associations, publishers, and aggregators/intermediaries.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"A Living Open Book"

Peter Suber has published "A Living Open Book" in Ebooks in Education: Realising The Vision.

Here's an excerpt:

This is a case study of my short book, Open Access (Suber 2012a). The book is not "enhanced" in the way that a growing number of digital academic books are enhanced. It has no graphics, no multimedia, and no interactivity beyond links, and does not offer different layers or pathways for readers at different levels. From that point of the view the book is conventional and text-oriented. But it has two other enhancements worth highlighting. First, the full text is open access, which benefits authors and readers, and sometimes also publishers. Second, the book has a companion web site of open-access updates and supplements, which benefits all three groups.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future

Martin Paul Eve has published Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future with Cambridge University Pres.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

I am extremely pleased to announce that my book, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future has today been published by Cambridge University Press. The book offers a background to open access and its specifics for the humanities disciplines, as well as setting out the economics and politics of the phenomenon. It also has a very fine preface by Peter Suber! You can download the book for absolutely free (under a CC BY-SA license) at the official website (click the green "open access" button). You can also buy an extremely good value paperback copy, with all my royalties going to Arthritis Research UK, from the usual suspects.

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