Publishing – Page 9 – DigitalKoans

"MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D20) Achieves Second Year Goal, Opens Access to Eighty-Two New Books in 2023"

Thanks to the support of libraries participating in Direct to Open (D2O), the MIT Press will publish its full list (see below) of 2023 scholarly monographs and edited collections open access on the MIT Press Direct platform. . . .

In its second year, 322 libraries, an increase of 33% from the first year, from around the globe committed to support D2O. Expanding D2O’s international footprint, the Press also entered into all-in agreements with Big Ten Academic Alliance and the Konsortium der sächsischen Hochschulbibliotheken, as well as central licensing and invoicing agreements with Council of Australian University Librarians, Center for Research Libraries; Greater Western Library Alliance, MOBIUS, Northeast Research Libraries, Jisc, Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation, SCELC, and Lyrasis.

https://tinyurl.com/yc7vv3tc

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Judge Finds Revived Amazon E-book Monopoly Suit Should Proceed "

For a second time in two years, a magistrate judge in New York has recommended that a consumer class action lawsuit accusing the Big Five publishers of colluding with Amazon to fix e-book prices should be dismissed. But while the judge recommended tossing the case against the publishers, the court found that monopolization and attempted monopolization claims against Amazon should proceed.

https://tinyurl.com/7pru9f4m

"To Preprint or Not to Preprint: A Global Researcher Survey"

Open science is receiving widespread attention globally, and preprinting offers an important way to implement open science practices in scholarly publishing. To develop a systematic understanding of researchers’ adoption of and attitudes toward preprinting, we conducted a survey of authors of research papers published in 2021 and early 2022. Our survey results show that the US and Europe lead the way in the adoption of preprinting. US and European respondents reported a higher familiarity with and a stronger commitment to preprinting than their colleagues elsewhere in the world. The adoption of preprinting is much stronger in physics and astronomy as well as mathematics and computer science than in other research areas. Respondents identified free accessibility of preprints and acceleration of research communication as the most important benefits of preprinting. Low reliability and credibility of preprints, sharing results before peer review and premature media coverage are the most significant concerns about preprinting, emphasized in particular by respondents in the life and health sciences. According to respondents, the most crucial strategies to encourage preprinting are integrating preprinting into journal submission workflows and providing recognition for posting preprints.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/k7reb

"Powering Research with Dimensions AI Assistant"

Imagine using AI to leverage the power of Dimensions with the click of a button. That’s exactly what you can do with Dimensions AI Assistant: your interaction with the world’s research knowledge is assisted by a powerful AI that takes you beyond keywords to a semantically rich summary with references, fully contextualizing the results and linking them with the literature. Digital Science has announced a closed beta release of Dimensions AI Assistant, which will allow users to achieve their goals quicker by helping them find the most relevant research and receive relevant synposes, leveraging the power of the Dimensions large language model, Dimensions General Science-BERT, and Open AI’s GPT models.

https://tinyurl.com/4w2jfukt

"Elsevier takes Scopus to the Next Level with Generative AI"

Scopus AI will help early-career researchers and seasoned academics alike through:

Summarized views based on Scopus abstracts: Researchers obtain a concise and trustworthy snapshot of any research topic, complete with academic references, reducing lengthy reading time and the risk of hallucinations.

Easy navigation to “Go Deeper Links” for extended exploration: Scopus AI provides relevant queries for further exploration, leading to hidden insights in various research topics.

Natural language queries: Researchers can ask questions about a subject in a natural, conversational manner.

A soon-to-be-added graphical representation, offering new perspectives of interconnected research themes: Scopus AI visually maps search results, offering a comprehensive overview that allows researchers to navigate complex relationships easily.

https://tinyurl.com/27xxj465

"Does Double Dipping Occur? The Case of Wiley’s Hybrid Journals"

The number of open access articles published in hybrid journals has increased recently. However, there are concerns over the practice of double dipping, when hybrid journals charge for publishing the same article twice, once for subscription and once for open access. To determine whether double dipping occurs, this study examined the relationship between the subscription prices for hybrid journals and the proportions of open access articles in hybrid journals. . . . The findings suggest that article processing charges rise in tandem with increased subscription prices; therefore, university libraries and consortiums must exercise caution when making subscription contracts with publishers.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04800-8

"Data Sharing Implementation in Top 10 Ophthalmology Journals in 2021"

Background/Aims: Deidentified individual participant data (IPD) sharing has been implemented in the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors journals since 2017. However, there were some published clinical trials that did not follow the new implemented policy. This study examines the number of clinical trials that endorsed IPD sharing policy among top ophthalmology journals.

Method: All published original articles in 2021 in 10 highest-ranking ophthalmology journals according to the 2020 journal impact factor were included. Clinical trials were determined by the WHO definition of clinical trials. Each article was then thoroughly searched for the IPD sharing statement either in the manuscript or in the clinical trial registry. We collected the number of published clinical trials that implemented IPD sharing policy as our primary outcome.

Results: 1852 published articles in top 10 ophthalmology journals were identified, and 9.45% were clinical trials. Of these clinical trials, 44% had clinical trial registrations and 49.14% declared IPD sharing statements. Only 42 (48.83%) clinical trials were willing to share IPD, and 5 (10.21%) of these share IPD via an online repository platform. In terms of sharing period, 37 clinical trials were willing to share right after the publication and only 2 showed the ending of sharing period.

Conclusion: This report shows that the number of clinical trials in top ophthalmology journals that endorsed the IPD sharing policy and the number of registrations is lower than half even though the policy has been implemented for several years. Future updates are necessary as policy evolves.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjophth-2023-001276

An Index, a Publisher and an Unequal Global Research Economy

This is the story of how a publisher and a citation index turned the science communication system into a highly profitable global industry. Over the course of seventy years, academic journal articles have become commodities, and their meta-data a further source of revenue. . . . During the 1950s, two men — Robert Maxwell and Eugene Garfield — begin to experiment with their blueprint for the research economy. Maxwell created an ‘international’ publisher — Pergamon Press — charming the editors of elite, not-for-profit society journals into signing commercial contracts. Garfield invented the science citation index to help librarians manage this growing flow of knowledge. . . . Sixty years later, the global science system has become a citation economy, with academic credibility mediated by the currency produced by the two dominant commercial citation indexes: Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivates Web of Science. The reach of these citation indexes and their data analytics is amplified by digitisation, computing power and financial investment. . . . Non-Anglophone journals are disproportionately excluded from these indexes, reinforcing the stratification of academic credibility geographies and endangering long established knowledge ecosystems.

https://tinyurl.com/3x7try9p

"Sustainability of Open-Access Author Fund: A Case Study of Faculty Usage Patterns and APC Cost"

The California State University, Los Angeles Library established a pilot program on Open-Access (OA) Author Fund in 2018. This article presents information about the management of the University Library’s Open-Access Author Fund. Particularly, this article focuses on faculty usage of the OA Author Fund by colleges, disciplines, and publishers. Additionally, the authors examined the article processing charges (APCs) and self-archiving policies of the top open-access journals where Cal State LA faculty publish. This analysis will assist the University Library’s Open-Access Group to understand if the University Library needs to provide additional funding and explore new ways to sustain the funding. Our research also revealed that librarians in specific academic areas can be more proactive in educating, explaining, and initiating conversations with disciplinary faculty about the benefits of open-access publications.

https://tinyurl.com/35kprj6a

"eLife and PREreview to Enhance the ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ Ecosystem Through Adoption of COAR Notify"

The project will put in place the basic infrastructure and protocols needed for all-round and standardised connections between preprint repositories, community-led preprint review platforms, journals, and preprint review aggregation and curation platforms. The aim is to lower existing technological and cost barriers so that as many of these services as possible can more easily participate in the ‘publish, review, curate’ future for research.

https://tinyurl.com/36emyk9b

"Springer Nature Continues Open Research Drive with Acquisition of protocols.io"

Scientific advancement depends on data credibility and work that can be verified, built upon and reproduced. Sharing all elements of research, including data, methods and materials, and even negative results, makes research more efficient, enables reproducibility and therefore builds trust in science. Studies show that lack of awareness of existing work or negative results leads to unnecessary duplication and could waste up to €26 billion in Europe alone.

By laying out detailed step-by-step instructions for research methods, aiming to standardise the process, ensure accuracy of results and enabling research to be reproduced, protocols have a vital role to play in addressing this. With protocols.io joining Springer Nature’s leading protocol offering, researchers will now have the option to make their protocols openly available on the protocols.io platform (fully OA) as well as publishing them in peer-reviewed publications (searchable via the Springer Nature Experiments).

https://tinyurl.com/3j4kn49w

"Open Access Initiatives in European Countries: Analysis of Trends and Policies"

Of the total journals (n = 25,231) published worldwide and indexed in Scopus, 53% are published in European countries, with 23.7% being OA journals. In total, 34% of the OA repositories (n = 5,714) are in European countries. The proportion of OA journal papers has grown significantly in all European countries, with a 14.3% annual growth rate. The average proportion of OA publications in European countries is significantly higher (39.07%) than the world average (30.16%), with a clear inclination for making research literature openly accessible via the green OA route (79.41%) compared to the gold OA route (52.30%).

https://doi.org/10.1108/DLP-06-2022-0051

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Comparing Different Search Methods for the Open Access Journal Recommendation Tool B!Son"

Finding a suitable open access journal to publish academic work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of predatory publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. A systematic requirements analysis was conducted in the form of a survey. The developed tool suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendations are built on open data, publisher-independent and work across domains and languages. Transparency is provided by its open source nature, an open application programming interface (API) and by specifying which matches the shown recommendations are based on. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using two different evaluation techniques, including several new recommendation methods. We were able to improve the results from our previous paper with a pre-trained transformer model. The beta version of the tool received positive feedback from the community and in several test sessions. We developed a recommendation system for open access journals to help researchers find a suitable journal. The open tool has been extensively tested, and we found possible improvements for our current recommendation technique. Development by two German academic libraries ensures the longevity and sustainability of the system.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-023-00372-3

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

SPARC: "Oppose Section 552 That Will Block Taxpayer Access to Research"

The U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) has released an appropriations bill containing language that would block implementation of the 2022 updated OSTP policy guidance (the Nelson Memo) that would ensure immediate, free access to taxpayer-funded research. If enacted, this will prevent American taxpayers from seeing the benefits of the more than $90 billion in scientific research that the U.S. government funds each year. . . .

Write to Congress

Look up contact details for your Representatives and Senators, then customize the text in this template letter.

Call Congress

Look up contact details for your Representatives and Senators, then call the office and tell them to remove Section 552 of the House CJS bill.

https://tinyurl.com/3mbbmwxw

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Mastodon over Mammon: Towards Publicly Owned Scholarly Knowledge"

Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record—encompassing text, data and code—to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230207

"NISO Approves Working Group to Develop Recommended Practice for Operationalizing Open Access Business Processes"

The volume of OA content has proliferated in recent years, but the systems and workflows currently used by publishers and librarians were designed for traditional, pay-to-read models. Business processes are currently inadequate to address the requirements of—for example—transformative agreements, which require complex financial management and the tracking of authors and publishing outputs across large institutions. Libraries face challenges in managing micropayments and assessing the financial impact of such agreements, and authors often have difficulty determining whether their manuscript is eligible for OA publication under agreement terms. These complexities also impact publisher editorial and financial systems. As a result, organizations often adopt manual processes for managing these agreements, giving rise to inefficiencies across the ecosystem.

NISO’s Working Group will address the problem by identifying gaps in the infrastructure for OA publications and agreements, developing terminology to describe the surrounding processes, and outlining best practices for exchanging data and analytics and metrics. The work will focus first on the metadata required for exchange prior to publication as well as for article-level financial transactions, and then address reporting following publication. As the new Recommended Practice will be of interest to publishers, libraries, authors, funders, and OA advocates and community initiatives, the group is seeking volunteers representing a range of stakeholder groups from across the scholarly communications industry.

https://tinyurl.com/ywb7cu3e

"How Are Exclusively Data Journals Indexed in Major Scholarly Databases? An Examination of the Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, and OpenAlex"

As part of the data-driven paradigm and open science movement, the data paper is becoming a popular way for researchers to publish their research data, based on academic norms that cross knowledge domains. Data journals have also been created to host this new academic genre. The growing number of data papers and journals has made them an important large-scale data source for understanding how research data is published and reused in our research system. One barrier to this research agenda is a lack of knowledge as to how data journals and their publications are indexed in the scholarly databases used for quantitative analysis. To address this gap, this study examines how a list of 18 exclusively data journals (i.e., journals that primarily accept data papers) are indexed in four popular scholarly databases: the Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, and OpenAlex. We investigate how comprehensively these databases cover the selected data journals and, in particular, how they present the document type information of data papers. We find that the coverage of data papers, as well as their document type information, is highly inconsistent across databases, which creates major challenges for future efforts to study them quantitatively. As a result, we argue that efforts should be made by data journals and databases to improve the quality of metadata for this emerging genre.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09704

"Spotlight on: Schol-AR "

Schol-AR transforms standard scientific PDF articles into fully digital entities, enabling the inclusion of interactive digital media and scientific data directly into manuscripts. Schol-AR is designed specifically to provide full digital integration in a manner that benefits the publishers, authors, and readers of the research community. An introductory video can be seen at https://www.Schol-AR.io/demo/

https://tinyurl.com/4yvmc29m

Ithaka S+R Draft for Comment: The Second Digital Transformation of Scholarly Publishing: Strategic Context and Shared Infrastructure

The issue that we identified as the biggest gap today is the perceived need for a secure digital identity for legitimate scholars, to help editors triage submissions into more and less trusted categories. We see opportunities for researcher identifiers to be used as the hub for much greater information about digital identity, in part by allowing publishers and other parties to submit markers of identity into identifier records. As examples, publishers that have processed APC transactions using credit cards have substantial signs of verified identity, as do universities that have securely linked an email address.

The boundaries of the scholarly record represent another aspect of research integrity that requires new forms of infrastructure. Of course the record has never had absolute boundaries. But in a subscription landscape, libraries played an important role in establishing the metes and bounds of the scholarly record (and what would be preserved over time) based on their selection decision-making. In a gold or diamond open access environment, libraries may have a reduced role and so other forms of boundary-setting may be required. Journal rankings may increasingly serve to set the boundaries of the scholarly record, although whether that is the right form of shared infrastructure, or whether it has the right governance and business model to allow it to serve this role without fear or favor, is not yet settled.

https://tinyurl.com/mr2ce748

"Rebranding of Predatory Journals and Conferences: Understanding Its Implication and Prevention Strategy"

There are several ways in which publishing groups can manipulate early career researchers. The first way is by creating "sister pirate websites" or "hijacked websites" through which low-budgeted conferences in developing nations and even branded conferences can be easily replicated [3]. This has led to huge issues wherein search results are manipulated and boosted, creating dilemmas and confusion between fake and real conferences [3]. Thus, many established conferences have now started to provide a disclaimer claiming authenticity. . . The second way is through “rebranding,” wherein some of the established, but poorly funded publishing groups, are bought by predatory publishing groups, for instance, the takeover of the Pulsus Publishing Group by OMICS [7]. Now, this takeover is neither represented in the official site for Pulsus conferences (publicizes itself as a legal and popular entity, utilizing its previous track record) which continues to operate despite legal brandishing of OMICS group nor on the OMICS website [7].

https://tinyurl.com/383mfndc

"Over 1000 Institutions Now Covered by RSC (Royal Society of Chemistry) Read & Publish Agreements"

The Royal Society of Chemistry has signed a Read & Publish agreement with CRUE (Conferencia de Rectores de las Universidades Españolas, the national consortium of Spanish Universities), taking the number of institutions in the RSC’s R&P community to more than one thousand covering 32 countries.

https://tinyurl.com/3jc9juus

"The Future of Academic Publishing"

Ultimately, we might be forced to rethink publication. If scientific research is mostly read by machines, the question arises of whether it is relevant to package it into a single coherent narrative that is adapted to the limitations of human cognition. This seems like a lot of busywork for scientists. We could unbundle scientific research from the constraints of journal formatting, as suggested by Neuromatch Open Publishing. In this view, research will be a living compendium of code, datasets, graphs and narrative content remixable and always up to date. Open and freely accessible research will be more valuable and influential because it will be seen by LLMs.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01637-2

"Read Your Open Access Publishing Agreements, Or: How You Might Accidentally Give Elsevier or Wiley the Exclusive Right to Profit from Your OA Article"

Those publishing agreements do provide what many authors want in OA publishing—free online access and broad reuse rights to users. But, if authors select the wrong option, they are also giving away their own residual rights while granting Elsevier or Wiley the exclusive right to commercially exploit their work. That includes the right for those publishers to exclude the author herself from making or authorizing even the most basic of commercial uses, such as posting the article to a for-profit repository like Researchgate or even SSRN. This is not a result I think most authors intend, but it’s hard to spot the problem unless you read these publication agreements carefully.

https://tinyurl.com/mrytecfk

"Unreviewed Science in the News: The Evolution of Preprint Media Coverage from 2014-2021"

It has been argued that preprint coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a paradigm shift in journalism norms and practices. This study examines whether, in what ways, and to what extent this is the case using a sample of 11,538 preprints posted on four preprint servers—bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and SSRN—that received coverage in 94 English-language media outlets between 2014-2021. We compared mentions of these preprints with mentions of a comparison sample of 397,446 peer reviewed research articles indexed in the Web of Science to identify changes in the share of media coverage that mentioned preprints before and during the pandemic. We found that preprint media coverage increased at a slow but steady rate pre-pandemic, then spiked dramatically. This increase applied only to COVID-19-related preprints, with minimal or no change in coverage of preprints on other topics. In addition, the rise in preprint coverage was most pronounced among health and medicine-focused media outlets, which barely covered preprints before the pandemic but mentioned more COVID-19 preprints than outlets focused on any other topic. These results suggest that the growth in coverage of preprints seen during the pandemic period may imply a shift in journalistic norms, including a changing outlook on reporting preliminary, unvetted research.

https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.07.10.548392

"The Relationship between University Presses, E-Book Vendors, and Academic Libraries: A Platform Theory Analysis"

We investigate the relations among university presses, academic libraries, and e-book vendors, by examining university presses’ perceptions of academic libraries and e-book vendors, and presses’ perceptions of themselves and the university press community. Findings are drawn from one-on-one interviews with 19 participants from 18 different university presses in the United States during 2020–2021. We observe a market structure for HSS e-books where most presses were satisfied with Big Four e-book vendors, including Project MUSE, EBSCO, ProQuest, and JSTOR, and lacked strong incentives to search for new e-book vendors. We find that most presses often treat libraries, including the one from the same institution, as their customers with limited interactions; findings also show university presses’ varied self-imaging, along with a shared perception about the collegiality of the university press community.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006231185883