Category: Publishing

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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"The Open Access Movement Grows Up: Taking Stock of a Revolution"

Heather Joseph has published "The Open Access Movement Grows Up: Taking Stock of a Revolution" in a special issue on open access of PLOS Biology.

Here's an excerpt:

Overall, the story of the OA movement over the past ten years has been one of demonstrable progress. To be sure, the road has not been a smooth one. There have been stumbles, wrong turns, false starts, and bruising battles, particularly in the policy arena. But if we weigh the indicators of progress made by the OA movement against the intensity and complexity of the obstacles it has faced in the first decade, there's reason for great optimism as we head into the next ten years.

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"Publishing Priorities of Biomedical Research Funders"

Ellen Collins has published "Publishing Priorities of Biomedical Research Funders" in BMJ Open.

Here's an excerpt:

Publicly funded and large biomedical research funders are committed to open access publishing and are pleased with recent developments which have stimulated growth in this area. Smaller charitable funders are supportive of the aims of open access, but are concerned about the practical implications for their budgets and their funded researchers. Across the board, biomedical research funders are turning their attention to other priorities for sharing research outputs, including data, protocols and negative results. Further work is required to understand how smaller funders, including charitable funders, can support open access.

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Open Access Clauses in Publishers’ Licenses: Current State and Lessons Learned

COAR has released Open Access Clauses in Publishers' Licenses: Current State and Lessons Learned.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

As Open Access (OA) policies and laws are being adopted world-wide, the scholarly community is shifting its efforts from advocacy towards practical implementation and support. One of the major routes for making articles open access is through OA repositories. However the variety and lack of clarity of publishers' policies regarding article deposit can be a significant barrier to author compliance of OA policies.

In order to overcome this barrier, some organizations have successfully negotiated authors' or deposit rights with publishers in the context of purchasing content licenses. This report documents the existing OA licensing language that has been implemented by organizations around the world and presents some suggestions for their successful adoption. The report concludes that OA clauses offer a feasible option for institutions to address some of the obstacles to article deposit into repositories.

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Library Publishing Directory

The Library Publishing Coalition has released the Library Publishing Directory.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Published in October 2013, the Library Publishing Directory provides a snapshot of the publishing activities of 115 academic and research libraries, including information about the number and types of publications they produce, the services they offer authors, how they are staffed and funded, and the future plans of institutions that are engaged in this growing field. . . .

Specifically it is hoped that this Directory will:

  • Introduce all readers to the emerging field of library publishing and help articulate its unique characteristics as a distinctive "publishing field."
  • Facilitate collaboration among library publishers and other publishing entities, especially the university presses and learned societies that share their values.
  • Alert authors of scholarly content to a range of potential publishing partners dedicated to supporting their experimentation with new forms of scholarly communication and open access business models.

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OAPEN-NL: A Project Exploring Open Access Monograph Publishing in the Netherlands

SURF has released OAPEN-NL: A Project Exploring Open Access Monograph Publishing in the Netherlands.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Between June 2011 and November 2012, fifty Open Access monographs in various subject areas were published in Open Access by nine participating publishers. For every Open Access title, the publishers provided a similar title that was published in the conventional way. Data were collected about usage, sales and costs, to study the effect of Open Access on monographs. OAPEN-NL consisted of a quantitative and a qualitative research component, measuring the effects of Open Access publishing and the perceptions and expectations of publishers and authors.

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"Mandates and the Contributions of Open Genomic Data"

Jingfeng Xia has published "Mandates and the Contributions of Open Genomic Data" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

This research attempts to seek changing patterns of raw data availability and their correlations with implementations of open mandate policies. With a list of 13,785 journal articles whose authors archived datasets in a popular biomedical data repository after these articles were published in journals, this research uses regression analysis to test the correlations between data contributions and mandate implementations. It finds that both funder-based and publisher-based mandates have a strong impact on scholars' likelihood to contribute to open data repositories. Evidence also suggests that like policies have changed the habit of authors in selecting publishing venues: open access journals have been apparently preferred by those authors whose projects are sponsored by the federal government agencies, and these journals are also highly ranked in the biomedical fields. Various stakeholders, particularly institutional administrators and open access professionals, may find the findings of this research helpful for adjusting data management policies to increase the number of quality free datasets and enhance data usability.

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"A Cross Disciplinary Study of Link Decay and the Effectiveness of Mitigation Techniques"

Jason Hennessey and Steven Xijin Ge have published "A Cross Disciplinary Study of Link Decay and the Effectiveness of Mitigation Techniques" in BMC Bioinformatics.

Here's an excerp:

We accessed 14,489 unique web pages found in the abstracts within Thomson Reuters' Web of Science citation index that were published between 1996 and 2010 and found that the median lifespan of these web pages was 9.3 years with 62% of them being archived. Survival analysis and logistic regression were used to find significant predictors of URL lifespan. The availability of a web page is most dependent on the time it is published and the top-level domain names. Similar statistical analysis revealed biases in current solutions: the Internet Archive favors web pages with fewer layers in the Universal Resource Locator (URL) while WebCite is significantly influenced by the source of publication. We also created a prototype for a process to submit web pages to the archives and increased coverage of our list of scientific webpages in the Internet Archive and WebCite by 22% and 255%, respectively.

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"The Seer of Science Publishing"

Tania Rabesandratana has published "The Seer of Science Publishing" in a special issue of Science on "Communication in Science: Pressures and Predators".

Here's an excerpt:

"Nobody reads journals," says science publisher Vitek Tracz, who has made a fortune from journals. "People read papers." Tracz sees a grim future for what has been the mainstay of scientific communication, the peer-reviewed print journal.

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Altmetrics Bibliography

Digital Scholarship has released the Altmetrics Bibliography, which includes over 50 selected English-language articles and technical reports that are useful in understanding altmetrics.

The "altmetrics" concept is still evolving. In "The Altmetrics Collection," Jason Priem, Paul Groth, and Dario Taraborelli define altmetrics as follows:

Altmetrics is the study and use of scholarly impact measures based on activity in online tools and environments. The term has also been used to describe the metrics themselves—one could propose in plural a "set of new altmetrics." Altmetrics is in most cases a subset of both scientometrics and webometrics; it is a subset of the latter in that it focuses more narrowly on scholarly influence as measured in online tools and environments, rather than on the Web more generally.

Sources have been published from January 2001 through September 2013.

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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"Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Sciences?"

College & Research Libraries has released a preprint of "Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Sciences?"

Here's an excerpt:

In academia, there is a growing acceptance of sharing the final electronic version of graduate work, such as a thesis or dissertation, in an online university repository. Though previous studies have shown that journal editors are willing to consider manuscripts derived from electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), faculty advisors and graduate students continue to raise concerns that online discoverability of ETDs negatively impact future opportunities to publish those findings. The current study investigated science journal policies on open access ETDs and found that more than half of the science journals contacted (51.4%) reported that manuscripts derived from openly accessible ETDs are welcome for submission and an additional 29.1% would accept revised ETDs under certain conditions.

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"Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations"

Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert, and Lawrence Lessig have self-archived "Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

We document a serious problem of reference rot: more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs found within U.S. Supreme Court opinions do not link to the originally cited information.

Given that, we propose a solution for authors and editors of new scholarship that involves libraries undertaking the distributed, long-term preservation of link contents.

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