Category: Publishing

John Willinsky Gets SPARC Innovator Award

John Willinsky has received a SPARC Innovator Award.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In the late 1990s, Willinsky founded the Public Knowledge Project and developed Open Journal Systems (OJS), a free, open source platform that allows journals to be more easily and affordably published online. The results speak for themselves—today, more than 1.5 million articles are published in journals using the OJS platform. In 2012 alone, over 5,000 journals published at least 10 articles using the software Willinsky and his team pioneered.

Because Willinsky is both a visionary and pragmatist who brings effective business teams together, SPARC honors Willinsky with its January 2014 Innovator Award.

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"Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: The Elsevier Article of the Future Project"

The LIBER Quarterly has released a future article: "Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: The Elsevier Article of the Future Project."

Here's an excerpt:

In 2009, Elsevier introduced the"Article of the Future" project to define an optimal way for the dissemination of science in the digital age, and in this paper we discuss three of its key dimensions. First we discuss interlinking scientific articles and research data stored with domain-specific data repositories—such interlinking is essential to interpret both article and data efficiently and correctly. We then present easy-to-use 3D visualization tools embedded in online articles: a key example of how the digital article format adds value to scientific communication and helps readers to better understand research results. The last topic covered in this paper is automatic enrichment of journal articles through text-mining or other methods. Here we share insights from a recent survey on the question: how can we find a balance between creating valuable contextual links, without sacrificing the high-quality, peer-reviewed status of published articles?

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Open Access Publishing: A Literature Review

CREATe has released Open Access Publishing: A Literature Review.

Here's an excerpt:

Within the context of the Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe) research scope, this literature review investigates the current trends, advantages, disadvantages, problems and solutions, opportunities and barriers in Open Access Publishing (OAP), and in particular Open Access (OA) academic publishing. This study is intended to scope and evaluate current theory and practice concerning models for OAP and engage with intellectual, legal and economic perspectives on OAP. It is also aimed at mapping the field of academic publishing in the UK and abroad, drawing specifically upon the experiences of CREATe industry partners as well as other initiatives such as SSRN, open source software, and Creative Commons. As a final critical goal, this scoping study will identify any meaningful gaps in the relevant literature with a view to developing further research questions. The results of this scoping exercise will then be presented to relevant industry and academic partners at a workshop intended to assist in further developing the critical research questions pertinent to OAP.

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Université de Montréal Will Cancel about 75% of Wiley Online Library Periodicals

The Université de Montréal will cancel about 75% of its Wiley Online Library periodicals.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Out of 1510 periodicals in the Wiley Online Library, the Université de Montréal is cancelling subscriptions to 1142 titles at the end of January. As a result, and from this point on, the articles found in the cancelled titles will no longer be available on-line. However, access to earlier issues will be entirely maintained.

This action results from a process that started a long while ago. The financial cut-backs imposed by the Québec government only accelerated the decision process. The result of the analysis is simple: libraries have been driven to the wall because of the yearly rise of subscriptions to periodicals that hover between 3% and 6%. They cannot go on cutting back the acquisition of monographs to compensate for such price increases. As a result, this conclusion, as well as the adopted solution, would have been the same a few years down the line, independently of the financial context.

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"E-Book Monopolies and the Law"

Angela Daly has self-archived "E-Book Monopolies and the Law" in SSRN

Here's an excerpt:

This article will examine the legality of the digital rights management ("DRM") measures used by the major e-book publishers and device manufacturers in the United States, European Union and Australia not only to enforce their intellectual property rights but also to create monopolistic content silos, restrict interoperability and affect the ability for users to use the content they have bought in the way they wish. The analysis will then proceed to the recent competition investigations in the US and EU over price-fixing in e-book markets, and the current litigation against Amazon in the US for an alleged abuse of its dominant position. A final point will be made on possible responses in Australia to these issues taking into account the jurisprudence on DRM in other scenarios.

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"Do Altmetrics Correlate with Citations? Extensive Comparison of Altmetric Indicators with Citations from a Multidisciplinary Perspective"

Rodrigo Costas, Zohreh Zahedi, Paul Wouters have self-archived "Do Altmetrics Correlate with Citations? Extensive Comparison of Altmetric Indicators with Citations from a Multidisciplinary Perspective" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

An extensive analysis of the presence of different altmetric indicators provided by Altmetric.com across scientific fields is presented, particularly focusing on their relationship with citations. Our results confirm that the presence and density of social media altmetric counts are still very low and not very frequent among scientific publications, with 15%-24% of the publications presenting some altmetric activity and concentrating in the most recent publications, although their presence is increasing over time. Publications from the social sciences, humanities and the medical and life sciences show the highest presence of altmetrics, indicating their potential value and interest for these fields. The analysis of the relationships between altmetrics and citations confirms previous claims of positive correlations but relatively weak, thus supporting the idea that altmetrics do not reflect the same concept of impact as citations. Also, altmetric counts do not always present a better filtering of highly cited publications than journal citation scores. Altmetrics scores (particularly mentions in blogs) are able to identify highly cited publications with higher levels of precision than journal citation scores (JCS), but they have a lower level of recall. The value of altmetrics as a complementary tool of citation analysis is highlighted, although more research is suggested to disentangle the potential meaning and value of altmetric indicators for research evaluation.

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E-Reading Rises as Device Ownership Jumps

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has released E-Reading Rises as Device Ownership Jumps.

Here's an excerpt:

The percentage of adults who read an e-book in the past year has risen to 28%, up from 23% at the end of 2012. At the same time, about seven in ten Americans reported reading a book in print, up four percentage points after a slight dip in 2012, and 14% of adults listened to an audiobook.

Though e-books are rising in popularity, print remains the foundation of Americans' reading habits. Most people who read e-books also read print books, and just 4% of readers are "e-book only." Audiobook listeners have the most diverse reading habits overall, while fewer print readers consume books in other formats.

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Press and Library Collaboration Survey

The AAUP Library Relations Committee has released the Press and Library Collaboration Survey.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Library Relations Committee of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) today issued a number of broad conclusions and recommendations for successful collaboration between presses and libraries. These conclusions are the product of extensive surveying and interviews with member institutions of both AAUP and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), conducted through 2012-2013.

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Transforming Peer Review Bibliography

Digital Scholarship has released the Transforming Peer Review Bibliography, which includes selected English-language articles that are useful in understanding significant transformations to the peer review process.

It is concerned with major changes to peer review, such as open peer review (excluding just revealing the identity of traditional peer reviewers) and post-publication review.

Most sources have been published from January 2010 through December 2012; however, a limited number of earlier key sources are also included. The bibliography includes links to freely available versions of included works. If such versions are unavailable, italicized links to the publishers' descriptions are provided.

It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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Altmetrics in Context

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) has released Altmetrics in Context.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

As scholarly communication takes on new forms and moves increasingly to digital and open access venues, the value of new types of metrics is increasingly important for the research community. It is causing discussion and, in some camps, heated debate.

Altmetrics report the impact of a wide range of research outputs, including data sets, articles and code. This document, available on the CARL Website, provides a quick introduction to this new field of research impact assessment and encourages researchers to use altmetrics in their work.

Want more information on altmetrics? Try the Altmetrics Bibliography.

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"Multidimensional Journal Evaluation of PLOS ONE"

Christel Fein has published "Multidimensional Journal Evaluation of PLOS ONE" in Libri: International Journal of Libraries and Information Services.

Here's an excerpt:

All 28,852 documents published in PLOS ONE during the 5-year-period between 2007 and 2011 have been extracted from Web of Science. This data provides the basis for the evaluation. The data concerning the conducted evaluation has been collected as well as analysed multidimensionally, to demonstrate more fully the complex structures and aspects of the impact, prestige and position of PLOS ONE, and to assess the information and data obtained as specifically as possible. Based on Juchem, Schlögl, and Stock (2006) and Haustein (2012), a framework of five dimensions of journal evaluation has been applied, in which each contains several metrics to analyse scientific periodicals from various perspectives, i.e. journal output,journal content, journal perception, journal citations, and journal management.

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Stop the Presses: Is the Monograph Headed toward an E-only Future?

Ithaka S+R has released Stop the Presses: Is the Monograph Headed toward an E-only Future?.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Can we expect the print monograph to disappear anytime soon?

While the road to a fully digital future for scholarly monographs is not clearly in sight, the widespread availability of e-books is already transforming researchers' reading habits. As librarians and publishers consider their options, they must take into account how the usage behavior of academics is evolving. In this Issue Brief, Roger Schonfeld explores the challenges and possibilities if we "Stop the Presses."

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SCOAP3 High-Energy Physics Open Access Publishing Initiative Launches on 1/1/2014

The SCOAP3 High-Energy Physics open access publishing initiative will launch on 1/1/2014.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

After intense preparations and consensus building, CERN1 has today confirmed that the SCOAP3 Open Access publishing initiative will start on 1 January 2014. With the support of partners in 24 countries2, a vast fraction of scientific articles in the field of High-Energy Physics will become Open Access at no cost for any author: everyone will be able to read them; authors will retain copyright; and generous licenses will enable wide re-use of this information.

Convened at CERN this is the largest scale global Open Access initiative ever built, involving an international collaboration of over one thousand libraries, library consortia and research organizations. SCOAP3 enjoys the support of funding agencies and has been established in co-operation with leading publishers. . . .

The objective of SCOAP3 is to grant unrestricted access to scientific articles appearing in scientific journals, which so far have only been available to scientists through certain university libraries, and generally unavailable to the wider public. Open dissemination of preliminary information, in the form of pre-peer-review articles known as preprints, has been the norm in High-Energy Physics and related disciplines for two decades. SCOAP3 sustainably extends this opportunity to high-quality peer-review service, making final version of articles available, within the Open Access tenets of free and unrestricted dissemination of science with intellectual property rights vested in the authors and wide re-use opportunities. In the SCOAP3 model, libraries and funding agencies pool resources currently used to subscribe to journals, in co-operation with publishers, and use them to support the peer-review system directly instead.

The SCOAP3 initiative looks forward to establishing further partnerships in the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, where scientists will enjoy the advantages of Open Access and many libraries and library consortia will benefit from reductions in their subscription costs. . . .

More information–publishers and scientific societies participating in SCOAP3:
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft
Elsevier
Hindawi
Institute of Physics Publishing
Jagellonian University
Oxford University Press
Physical Society of Japan
SISSA Medialab
Springer
Società Italiana di Fisica

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"American ETD Dissemination in the Age of Open Access: ProQuest, NoQuest, or Allowing Student Choice"

Gail P. Clement has published "American ETD Dissemination in the Age of Open Access: ProQuest, NoQuest, or Allowing Student Choice" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

A stark incongruity in the treatment of academic scholarship persists on many U.S. campuses today. Faculty authors are generally free to publish in whatever vehicle suits their needs and goals, while also expected (or mandated) to deposit their works in the open access university repository. By contrast, graduate students typically must send their scholarship to a single commercial publisher for toll-access, while also required to submit their works to the university repository.

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"PeerJ—A Case Study in Improving Research Collaboration at the Journal Level"

Peter Binfield has published "PeerJ—A Case Study in Improving Research Collaboration at the Journal Level" in the latest issue of Information Services & Use.

Here's an excerpt:

PeerJ Inc. is the Open Access publisher of PeerJ (a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal) and PeerJ PrePrints (an un-peer-reviewed or collaboratively reviewed preprint server), both serving the biological, medical and health sciences.

The Editorial Criteria of PeerJ (the journal) are similar to those of PLOS ONE in that all submissions are judged only on their scientic and methodological soundness (not on subjective determinations of impact, or degree of advance). PeerJ's peer-review process is managed by an Editorial Board of 800 and an Advisory Board of 20 (including 5 Nobel Laureates).

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"Books, E and P"

Walt Crawford has published "Books, E and P" in the latest issue of Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt:

You might think of this discussion as Part 3 of WORDS: THE EBOOK MARKETPLACE. It is another set of notes and comments on material ranging back as far as May 2010 and related to ebooks, but it's really about books and the media in which they appear.

Note another key distinction from previous discussions in this area: E and P, not E versus P. Sure, some of these items make the digital-triumphalist assumption that print books will die out within the next generation (or next five years!) or become irrelevant collectibles, and there may be a few suggesting that ebooks will disappear or become a niche segment (although that seems unlikely). But my sense—not yet tested, since I'm writing this preface before beginning the essay—is that much of the discussion is now more nuanced and plausible, starting with the real-world fact that old media rarely die and the likelihood that there's room in this world for both print books and ebooks, in very large quantities in both cases, for the foreseeable future.

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"Green Open Access Policies of Scholarly Journal Publishers: A Study of What, When, and Where Self-Archiving Is Allowed"

Bo-Christer Björk, et al. have self-archived "Green Open Access Policies of Scholarly Journal Publishers: A Study of What, When, and Where Self-Archiving Is Allowed."

Here's an excerpt:

The degree to which scholarly journal articles published in subscription-based journals could be provided open access (OA) through publisher-permitted uploading to freely accessible web locations, so called green OA, is an underexplored area of research. This study combines article volume data originating from the Scopus bibliographic database with manually coded publisher policies of the 100 largest journal publishers measured by article output volume for the year 2010. Of the 1,1 million articles included in the analysis, 80.4% could be uploaded either as an accepted manuscript or publisher version to an institutional or subject repository after one year of publication. Publishers were found to be substantially more permissive with allowing accepted manuscripts on personal webpages (78.1% of articles) or in institutional repositories (79.9%) compared to subject repositories (32.8%). With previous studies suggesting realized green OA to be around 12% of total annual articles the results highlight the substantial unused potential for green OA.

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Peer Review: An Introduction and Guide

The Publishing Research Consortium has released Peer Review: An Introduction and Guide.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The reader of this short Guide will be left with a coherent and forward-looking overview of the processes, the shortcomings, and the innovations around peer review, and a deeper understanding of why peer review is such a vital element of effective scholarship.

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"Open Access Publishing from the Legal Point of View. Why Freedom of Information Rules and Other Legal Principles Matter. Towards A New Fair Open Access Model."

Jiří Kolman and Petr Kolman have published "Open Access Publishing from the Legal Point of View. Why Freedom of Information Rules and Other Legal Principles Matter. Towards A New Fair Open Access Model." in tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society.

Here's an excerpt:

This article focuses on aspects that, as far as we know, have never been discussed in previous debates dealing with open access. The EU and national competition legal rules ensuring fair competition are a rather neglected aspect of open access. Another crucial topic is the unfairness of the current publication system. Why should commercial publishers be paid by publicly supported research such as EU or national research programmes? In the article a new publication model is suggested. The proposed model is trying to keep high research standards, to be fair to researchers and the public and to take into account the actual costs of the new open access model.

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"Identifying the Effect of Open Access on Citations Using a Panel of Science Journals"

Mark J. McCabe and Christopher M. Snyder have self-archived "Identifying the Effect of Open Access on Citations Using a Panel of Science Journals." in SSRN

Here's an excerpt:

An open-access journal allows free online access to its articles, obtaining revenue from fees charged to submitting authors or from institutional support. Using panel data on science journals, we are able to circumvent problems plaguing previous studies of the impact of open access on citations. In contrast to the huge effects found in these previous studies, we find a more modest effect: moving from paid to open access increases cites by 8% on average in our sample. The benefit is concentrated among top-ranked journals. In fact, open access causes a statistically significant reduction in cites to the bottom-ranked journals in our sample, leading us to conjecture that open access may intensify competition among articles for readers' attention, generating losers as well as winners.

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"Going for Gold: An Investigation into Financial Models of Open Access Publishing in Biology"

Lucy van Dorp has self-archived her master's thesis "Going for Gold: An Investigation into Financial Models of Open Access Publishing in Biology"

Here's an excerpt:

Using the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as an entry point, this study considers the numbers of OA journals in the life and biological sciences along with the proportion using an author-pays model. It considers how impact factor is related to business model, in particular author fees2, using data from the 2011 Journal Citation Reports (JCR, 2011) and SCImago Journal and Country Rank (SCImago); data for year 2011; retrieved in 2012. The most prominent publishing organisations are considered in depth looking explicitly at the income sources making up revenue. The study concludes with comments from three industry specialists on their views on the future of academic publishing, the place of subscription-based journals and what their own organisation is doing to allow sustainable, barrier-free literature dissemination.

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SciELO—15 Years of Open Access: An Analytic Study On Open Access And Scholarly Communication (Preliminary version)

SciELO has relaeased SciELO—15 Years of Open Access: An Analytic Study On Open Access And Scholarly Communication (Preliminary version).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The 15 year path taken by the SciELO Program in bringing about the improvement of the academic journals which it indexes and publishes in Open Access—a path which it continues to follow to this day—is examined from various perspectives such as the rationale and objectives of the program, its origin in Brazil and expansion to 15 other countries, the results it has achieved, its quality control and production system, the technological platform and the impact that has been made by the Program.

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Encouraging Digital Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities: White Paper

The University of North Georgia has released Encouraging Digital Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities: White Paper.

Here's an excerpt:

This project, led by the University Press of North Georgia, and funded by a Digital Start-Up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities focused on exploring the peer review process and increasing its usefulness to presses and scholars publishing digitally. By exploring this issues we have made recommendations for best practices in digital publishing, specifically for small academic presses. Through surveys and a workshop of key stakeholder groups (press directors, college administrators, humanities faculty, and library/technology center directors), we found a strong investment in the "gold standard" of double- or single-blind peer review. Working within the current academic publishing structure (including publishing in print) was a priority, even to presses and faculty members who were actively exploring digital publishing and open access models. On closer inspection, we realized that the various stakeholders valued the current peer review process for different reasons. And we found that the value of peer review goes beyond vetting the quality of scholarship and manuscript content. Based on these findings, we considered ways to obtain these benefits within the current academic structure through innovative peer review processes. At the same time, we looked for ways of offsetting potential risks associated with these alternative methods. We considered cost effective ways to accommodate the needs of the disparate constituencies involved in academic publishing while allowing room for digital publishing. While our findings focus primarily on small academic presses, they also have significant implications for the open access community.

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Preservation, Trust and Continuing Access for e-Journals

The Digital Preservation Coalition has released Preservation, Trust and Continuing Access for e-Journals.

Here's an excerpt:

This report discusses current developments and issues which libraries, publishers, intermediaries and service providers are facing in the area of digital preservation, trust and continuing access for e-journals. It also includes generic lessons and recommendations on outsourcing and trust learnt in this field of interest to the wider digital preservation community. It is not solely focused on technology, and covers relevant legal, economic and service issues.

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"Cost Differentials between E-Books and Print in Academic Libraries"

College & Research Libraries has released an e-print of "Cost Differentials between E-Books and Print in Academic Libraries."

Here's an excerpt:

A survey conducted at Auburn University at Montgomery (AUM) has confirmed for academic libraries the work of Gray and Copeland on e-books being more expensive than print for public libraries. For AUM, the mean cost for e-books are significantly higher than for the print counterpart of those titles. The cost differentials between the two formats show e-books as being consistently higher than print in initial price. This consistency holds true across all LC classifications, regardless of whether or not the title is published by a university press or a commercial press.

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