Category: Publishing

"The Embargoes Don’t Work: The British Academy Provides the Best Evidence Yet"

Cameron Neylon has "The Embargoes Don't Work: The British Academy Provides the Best Evidence Yet" in PLOS Opens.

Here's an excerpt:

Embargoes are an artificial monopoly created to make the competition a bit less fierce. But truly, if a publisher believes that they add value and wants to be competitive then why should they fear a Word doc sitting on the web? Indeed if they do it suggests a lack of confidence in the additional value that they offer in the version of record. The best way to give yourself that confidence is to be tough on yourself and take a good look at how and where you add value. And the best way to do that is to compete successfully with "free."

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"Peer Review of Datasets: When, Why, and How"

Matthew S. Mayernik et al. have published "Peer Review of Datasets: When, Why, and How" in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper discusses issues related to data peer review, in particular the peer review processes, needs, and challenges related to the following scenarios: 1) Data analyzed in traditional scientific articles, 2) Data articles published in traditional scientific journals, 3) Data submitted to open access data repositories, and 4) Datasets published via articles in data journals.

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"The Number of Scholarly Documents on the Public Web"

Madian Khabsa and C. Lee Giles mail have published "The Number of Scholarly Documents on the Public Web" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

The number of scholarly documents available on the web is estimated using capture/recapture methods by studying the coverage of two major academic search engines: Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. Our estimates show that at least 114 million English-language scholarly documents are accessible on the web, of which Google Scholar has nearly 100 million. Of these, we estimate that at least 27 million (24%) are freely available since they do not require a subscription or payment of any kind. In addition, at a finer scale, we also estimate the number of scholarly documents on the web for fifteen fields: Agricultural Science, Arts and Humanities, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics and Business, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geosciences, Material Science, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, Social Sciences, and Multidisciplinary, as defined by Microsoft Academic Search. In addition, we show that among these fields the percentage of documents defined as freely available varies significantly, i.e., from 12 to 50%.

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"Inter-Rater Reliability and Convergent Validity of F1000Prime Peer Review"

Lutz Bornmann has self-archived "Inter-Rater Reliability and Convergent Validity of F1000Prime Peer Review."

Here's an excerpt:

Peer review is the backbone of modern science. F1000Prime is a post-publication peer review system of the biomedical literature (papers from medical and biological journals). This study is concerned with the inter-rater reliability and convergent validity of the peer recommendations formulated in the F1000Prime peer review system. The study is based on around 100,000 papers with recommendations from Faculty members. Even if intersubjectivity plays a fundamental role in science, the analyses of the reliability of the F1000Prime peer review system show a rather low level of agreement between Faculty members. This result is in agreement with most other studies which have been published on the journal peer review system. Logistic regression models are used to investigate the convergent validity of the F1000Prime peer review system. As the results show, the proportion of highly cited papers among those selected by the Faculty members is significantly higher than expected. In addition, better recommendation scores are also connected with better performance of the papers.

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"Four Facets of Privacy and Intellectual Freedom in Licensing Contracts for Electronic Journals"

College & Research Libraries has released an eprint of "Four Facets of Privacy and Intellectual Freedom in Licensing Contracts for Electronic Journals."

Here's an excerpt:

This is a study of the treatment of library patron privacy in licenses for electronic journals in academic libraries. We begin by distinguishing four facets of privacy and intellectual freedom based on the LIS and philosophical literature. Next, we perform a content analysis of 42 license agreements for electronic journals, focusing on terms for enforcing authorized use and collection and sharing of user data. We compare our findings to model licenses, to recommendations proposed in a recent treatise on licenses, and to our account of the four facets of intellectual freedom. We find important conflicts with each.

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"Funding Open Access Journal Publishing Article Processing Charges"

Christine Fruin and Fred Rascoe have published "Funding Open Access Journal Publishing Article Processing Charges" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

Libraries are viewed as the primary resource at academic institutions for information on scholarly publishing issues, including OA. Faculty interest in OA publishing is increasing, and when recent federal mandates for OA are implemented, the interest from those doing federally funded research will grow quickly. As such, librarians should be prepared to answer questions from faculty and researchers on how they can cover the costs that are often attendant to publishing in OA journals. While librarians should advocate and educate their constituents on the availability of green OA and the cost-free options available with many gold OA journals, they should also be cognizant of the frequency at which faculty and researchers are publishing in gold OA publications that charge a fee and the available options for covering those costs.

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

Mikael Laakso has 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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The Evolution of Open Access: What Might Happen Next?

The University of Maryland Libraries have released a video of a presentation by Heather Joseph, The Evolution of Open Access: What Might Happen Next? Her presentation slides are also available.

Here's an excerpt:

As Open Access becomes established as a permanent fixture in the scholarly communication area, the challenges and opportunities presented by the Open environment increase in scale and complexity. This talk will examine some of the key trends pointing towards additional opportunities for large-scale change in not only how we access and use scholarly research outputs – but also how they are disseminated, curated and evaluated. Heather Joseph serves as the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an international coalition of academic and research libraries working to expand the global, cost-effective digital communication of research results. As SPARC's Director since 2005, Ms. Joseph leads the strategic and operational activities of the organization, and has focused SPARC's efforts on supporting emerging publishing models, enabling digital archives, and establishing open access policies on the national and international levels.

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"Data Publication Consensus and Controversies"

F1000Research has released an eprint of "Data Publication Consensus and Controversies."

Here's an excerpt:

As data publication venues proliferate, significant debate continues over formats, processes, and terminology. Here, we present an overview of data publication initiatives underway and the current conversation, highlighting points of consensus and issues still in contention.

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"A Survey of Authors Publishing in Four Megajournals"

David J. Solomon has published "A Survey of Authors Publishing in Four Megajournals" in PeerJ.

Here's an excerpt:

Megajournals are drawing an international group of authors who tend to be experienced academics. They are choosing to publish in megajournals for a variety of reasons but most seem to value the quality of the journal and the speed of the review/publication process. Having a broad scope was not a key factor for most authors though being OA was important for PeerJ and SAGE Open authors. Most authors appeared pleased with the experience and indicated they are likely to submit future manuscripts to the same or similar megajournal which seems to suggest these journals will continue to grow in popularity.

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"Librarian, Heal Thyself: A Scholarly Communication Analysis of LIS Journals"

Micah Vandegrift and Chealsye Bowley have published "Librarian, Heal Thyself: A Scholarly Communication Analysis of LIS Journals" in In the Library with the Lead Pipe.

Here's an excerpt:

This article presents an analysis of 111 Library and Information Science journals based on measurements of "openness" including copyright policies, open access self-archiving policies and open access publishing options. We propose a new metric to rank journals, the J.O.I. Factor (Journal Openness Index), based on measures of openness rather than perceived rank or citation impact. Finally, the article calls for librarians and researchers in LIS to examine our scholarly literature and hold it to the principles and standards that we are asking of other disciplines.

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"Statement Regarding the Suspension of Springer’s Membership in OASPA"

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association has released a "Statement Regarding the Suspension of Springer's Membership in OASPA."

Here's an excerpt:

In February, it was reported by Nature (http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763) that around 120 fake articles had been published in apparently peer-reviewed conference proceedings.

Springer, one of the affected publishers, which published 16 of these articles, is a member of OASPA. Given that the publication of these articles is evidence of a systematic problem with editorial processes, we have placed Springer's membership of OASPA 'under review', pending a thorough response and description of the steps that are being taken to strengthen the necessary processes. Springer has already indicated that the fake articles are being retracted (http://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/statements?SGWID=0-1760813-6-1458253-0).

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"’The Returned’: on the Future of Monographic Books"

Mercedes Bunz has published "'The Returned': on the Future of Monographic Books" in Insights: The UKSG journal.

Here's an excerpt:

This article evaluates the current state of academic book publishing based on the findings of the Hybrid Publishing Lab's business model research. With students relying more and more on Google and Wikipedia, the role of books within today's university studies is a difficult one. From the perspective of publishers, open access (OA) embracing the digital is seen as one potential way to bridge this gap between online search engines and traditional monographs. To illustrate this further, the article delivers an overview of its findings, which highlight changes in academic publishing: publishers have switched their emphasis from delivering a product to creating a service, whereby the author rather than the reader becomes their most focused-on customer. Research frameworks, funding and conventions about academic careers, however, often still need to adjust to this new development. If these frameworks acknowledge and foster OA publishing, and new experiments with collaborative book productions flourish, the monograph will have a future.

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"Open Access Monograph Business Models"

Eelco Ferwerda has published "Open Access Monograph Business Models" in Insights: The UKSG journal.

Here's an excerpt:

In recent years, a number of business models have been developed for open access (OA) monographs in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). While each model has been created in response to specific circumstances and needs, some commonalities can be observed. This article outlines some of the main types of model to support the costs of publishing OA books and provides examples of these models across the world.

It is followed by three short sketches providing more depth on: firstly, a traditional publisher's OA monograph offer; secondly, a licensing-based model which draws from existing library budgets; and finally, an experiment with delayed open access for books in philosophy: http://dx.doi.org/10.1629/2048-7754.118.

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"How Well Developed Are Altmetrics? A Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of the Presence of ‘Alternative Metrics’ in Scientific Publications"

Zohreh Zahedi, Rodrigo Costas, and Paul Wouters have self-archived "How Well Developed Are Altmetrics? A Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of the Presence of 'Alternative Metrics' in Scientific Publications."

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper an analysis of the presence and possibilities of altmetrics for bibliometric and performance analysis is carried out. Using the web based tool Impact Story, we collected metrics for 20,000 random publications from the Web of Science. We studied both the presence and distribution of altmetrics in the set of publications, across fields, document types and over publication years, as well as the extent to which altmetrics correlate with citation indicators. The main result of the study is that the altmetrics source that provides the most metrics is Mendeley, with metrics on readerships for 62.6% of all the publications studied, other sources only provide marginal information. In terms of relation with citations, a moderate spearman correlation (r=0.49) has been found between Mendeley readership counts and citation indicators.

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"Internet Publicity of Data Problems in the Bioscience Literature Correlates with Enhanced Corrective Action"

Paul S. Brookes has published "Internet Publicity of Data Problems in the Bioscience Literature Correlates with Enhanced Corrective Action" in PeerJ.

Here's an excerpt:

Several online forums exist to facilitate open and/or anonymous discussion of the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Data integrity is a common discussion topic, and it is widely assumed that publicity surrounding such matters will accelerate correction of the scientific record. This study aimed to test this assumption by examining a collection of 497 papers for which data integrity had been questioned either in public or in private. As such, the papers were divided into two sub-sets: a public set of 274 papers discussed online, and the remainder a private set of 223 papers not publicized. The sources of alleged data problems, as well as criteria for defining problem data, and communication of problems to journals and appropriate institutions, were similar between the sets. The number of laboratory groups represented in each set was also similar (75 in public, 62 in private), as was the number of problem papers per laboratory group (3.65 in public, 3.54 in private). Over a study period of 18 months, public papers were retracted 6.5-fold more, and corrected 7.7-fold more, than those in the private set. Parsing the results by laboratory group, 28 laboratory groups in the public set had papers which received corrective action, versus 6 laboratory groups in the private set. For those laboratory groups in the public set with corrected/retracted papers, the fraction of their papers acted on was 62% of those initially flagged, whereas in the private set this fraction was 27%. Such clustering of actions suggests a pattern in which correction/retraction of one paper from a group correlates with more corrections/retractions from the same group, with this pattern being stronger in the public set. It is therefore concluded that online discussion enhances levels of corrective action in the scientific literature. Nevertheless, anecdotal discussion reveals substantial room for improvement in handling of such matters.

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"Ethics and Access 2: The So-Called Sting"

Walt Crawford has published "Ethics and Access 2: The So-Called Sting" in Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

John Bohannon wrote a news article in Science that either shows that many open access journals with APC charges have sloppy (or no) peer review…or shows almost nothing at all. This story discusses the article itself, offers a number of responses to it—and then adds something I don't believe you'll find anywhere else: A journal-by-journal test of whether the journals involved would pass a naive three-minute sniff test as to whether they were plausible targets for article submissions without lots of additional checking. Is this really a problem involving a majority of hundreds of journals—or maybe one involving 27% (that is, 17) of 62 journals? Read the story; make up your own mind.

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"Measuring the Value of Research Data: A Citation Analysis of Oceanographic Data Sets"

Christopher W. Belter has published "Measuring the Value of Research Data: A Citation Analysis of Oceanographic Data Sets" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

Evaluation of scientific research is becoming increasingly reliant on publication-based bibliometric indicators, which may result in the devaluation of other scientific activities—such as data curation—that do not necessarily result in the production of scientific publications. This issue may undermine the movement to openly share and cite data sets in scientific publications because researchers are unlikely to devote the effort necessary to curate their research data if they are unlikely to receive credit for doing so. This analysis attempts to demonstrate the bibliometric impact of properly curated and openly accessible data sets by attempting to generate citation counts for three data sets archived at the National Oceanographic Data Center. My findings suggest that all three data sets are highly cited, with estimated citation counts in most cases higher than 99% of all the journal articles published in Oceanography during the same years. I also find that methods of citing and referring to these data sets in scientific publications are highly inconsistent, despite the fact that a formal citation format is suggested for each data set. These findings have important implications for developing a data citation format, encouraging researchers to properly curate their research data, and evaluating the bibliometric impact of individuals and institutions.

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HEFCE and Three Other UK Funding Bodies Enact Open Access Mandate

The Higher Education Funding Council for England and three other UK funding bodies (the Scottish Funding Council, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and the Department for Employment and Learning) have enacted an open access mandate.

Here's an excerpt:

5. The core of this policy is as follows: to be eligible for submission to the post-2014 REF, outputs must have been deposited in an institutional or subject repository on acceptance for publication, and made open-access within a specified time period. This requirement applies to journal articles and conference proceedings only; monographs and other long-form publications, research data and creative and practice-based research outputs are out of scope. Only articles and proceedings accepted for publication after 1 April 2016 will need to fulfil these requirements, but we would strongly urge institutions to implement the policy now. The policy gives a further list of cases where outputs will not need to fulfil the requirements.

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"Response to Elsevier’s Text and Data Mining Policy: A LIBER Discussion Paper"

LIBER has released "Response to Elsevier's Text and Data Mining Policy: A LIBER Discussion Paper."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

LIBER believes that the right to read is the right to mine and that licensing will never bridge the gap in the current copyright framework as it is unscalable and resource intensive. Furthermore, as this discussion paper highlights, licensing has the potential to limit the innovative potential of digital research methods by:

  1. restricting the tools that researchers can use
  2. limiting the way in which research results can be made available
  3. impacting on the transparency and reproducibility of research results.

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ARL Awarded $1 Million Grant for Shared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE)

ARL has been awarded a $1 million grant for the Shared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has been awarded a joint $1 million grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop and launch the Shared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) Notification Service. SHARE is a collaborative initiative of ARL, the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) to ensure the preservation of, access to, and reuse of research findings and reports.

SHARE aims to make research assets more discoverable and more accessible, and to enable the research community to build upon these assets in creative ways. SHARE's first project, the Notification Service, will inform stakeholders when research results—including articles and data—are released.

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“The Demand for Out-of-Print Works and Their (Un)Availability in Alternative Markets”

Paul J. Heald has self-archived “The Demand for Out-of-Print Works and Their (Un)Availability in Alternative Markets.”

Here's an excerpt:

Prior studies demonstrate the shocking unavailability of most books published in the 20th Century, prompting The Atlantic Monthly headline: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish. The unavailability of new editions of older works would be less problematic, however, if little consumer demand existed for those works. In addition, the lack of new editions would be much less troubling if the works were easily available in alternative forms or markets. Newly collected data provides evidence of the demand for out-of-print books and then charts the availability of out-of-print works in digital form (eBooks and .mp3), in used book stores, and in public libraries. The situation with books remains dismal, although music publishers on iTunes seem to be doing a much better job of digitizing older works and making them available than do book publishers. Some theories for this discrepancy are offered.

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"Unwrapping the Bundle: An Examination of Research Libraries and the ‘Big Deal’"

Karla L. Strieb and Julia C. Blixrud have self-archived "Unwrapping the Bundle: An Examination of Research Libraries and the 'Big Deal'."

Here's an excerpt:

This study presents and analyzes the findings of a 2012 survey of member libraries belonging to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) on publishers' large journal bundles and compares the results to earlier surveys. The data illuminate five research questions: market penetration, journal bundle construction, collection format shifts, pricing models, and license terms. The structure of the product is still immature, particularly in defining content and developing sustainable pricing models. The typical "bundle" is something less than the full publishers list. Neither market studies nor market forces have produced a sustainable new strategy for pricing and selling e-journals. Finally, a complex history of managing license terms is revealed in the data.

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Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article Processing Charges

The Wellcome Trust has released Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article Processing Charges.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In their report, published in March 2014, Björk and Solomon set out a series of scenarios for how funders might develop their approaches for supporting APCs. These cover both full open access journals (which operate exclusively by this model) and so-called hybrid journals (which offer this service for individual articles, while continuing to operate via the subscription model). The authors appraised three combined scenarios, which they conclude to be the most promising for further consideration.

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MOOC Content Licensing Solution Launched

The Copyright Clearance Center has Launched the MOOC Content Licensing Solution.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The MOOC Content Licensing Solution uses the current per-page or per-article academic-based pricing rightsholders have established through CCC's Electronic Course Content pay-per-use service. CCC offers digital rights from over 5,000 rightsholders around the world to public, private not-for-profit, and private for-profit U.S.-based institutions of higher education that conduct academic MOOCs.

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