On X, well-known independent journalist and blogger Richard Poynder said: "The movement has failed and is being rebranded in order to obscure the failure. Time to move on."
In a second post, he provided a further explanation (this is an JPEG file).
Richard Poynder has made 71,000 posts on X/Twitter.
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Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is an open textbook and practitioner’s guide that collects theory, practice, and case studies from nearly 80 experts in scholarly communication and open education. Divided into three parts:
- What is Scholarly Communication?
- Scholarly Communication and Open Culture
- Voices from the Field: Perspectives, Intersections, and Case Studies
The book delves into the economic, social, policy, and legal aspects of scholarly communication as well as open access, open data, open education, and open science and infrastructure. Practitioners provide insight into the relationship between university presses and academic libraries, defining collection development as operational scholarly communication, and promotion and tenure and the challenge for open access.
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- AI can generate more complete and disambiguated metadata to enhance discovery and move search from the traditional keyword-based model to semantic and conversation-based searches.
- AI can also help publishers improve accessibility, to make content available to a broader audience.
- AI as a reader and consumer will become as important a consideration as the human reader and consumer. Publications should consider machines as consumer and provide machine readable and consumable formats.
- AI can create personalized recommendations and news feeds, simultaneously helping researchers find the answers they need and allowing publishers to target specific audiences for specific publications.
- Even better, AI can perform reverse engineering to measure the contribution of each source to the final answers. And publishers can charge based on the contribution. This could be new business model in the future. Many AI researchers are currently working on enabling explainable and transparent AI, but this research will take time.
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During its peak years, C&I had quite a substantial readership–as many as 55,000 downloads for one particular essay. There were more than 600,000 downloads from 2013 through 2015 and (maybe) 800,000 downloads from 2016 through 2019. But only about 38,000 in 2019. I had sponsorship for five years, and never charged for access.
I always hoped that a few people or institutions would find C&I worth preserving—and the annual print volumes even had indexes (of a sort). No print volume has ever sold more than four copies. Four have sold none at all.
But I would like to trim my Lulu catalog. (To see the list, just go to lulu.com and search for "walt crawford." I see 51 results.) So here’s the deal: The Lulu (trade paperback) versions of any C&I volumes that have no sales between now and November 12, 2024 will be deleted.
Also see: "Essential Reading: Walt Crawford’s Books on Open Access."
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Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect documents a variety of data privacy practices that directly conflict with library privacy standards, and raises important questions regarding the potential for personal data collected from academic products to be used in the data brokering and surveillance products of RELX’s LexisNexis subsidiary. By analyzing the privacy practices of the world’s largest publisher, the report describes how user tracking that would be unthinkable in a physical library setting now happens routinely through publisher platforms. The analysis underlines the concerns this tracking should raise, particularly when the same company is involved in surveillance and data brokering activities. Elsevier is a subsidiary of RELX, a leading data broker and provider of "risk" products that offer expansive databases of personal information to corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies.
https://zenodo.org/records/10078610
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Open access (OA) book platforms, such as JSTOR, OAPEN Library or Google Books, have been available for over a decade. Each platform shows usage data, but this results in confusion about how well an individual book is performing overall. Even within one platform, there are considerable usage differences between subjects and languages. Some context is therefore necessary to make sense of OA books usage data. A possible solution is a new metric — the Transparent Open Access Normalized Index (TOANI) score. It is designed to provide a simple answer to the question of how well an individual open access book or chapter is performing. The transparency is based on clear rules, and by making all of the data used visible. The data is normalized, using a common scale for the complete collection of an open access book platform and, to keep the level of complexity as low as possible, the score is based on a simple metric. As a proof of the concept, the usage of over 18,000 open access books and chapters in the OAPEN Library has been analysed, to determine whether each individual title has performed as well as can be expected compared to similar titles.
https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.627
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Edinburgh University Library launched a journal hosting service in 2009, initially to support two journals. The service has since grown into a portfolio of 19 journals and a handful of conference proceedings. The purpose of this case study is to review the 2021 launch of our book hosting service and our service rebrand to Edinburgh Diamond, looking at the reasons for launching, the timeline and challenges, and offering recommendations for those wishing to launch their own service.
https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.13745
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While the goal of the OA movement remains good, it appears the epistemic disbalance in global knowledge creation and access has not abated. However, the promise of OA, the motivation on which it stands, its consequence and current state are reviewed in this paper with particular focus on the contribution of Africa to the global OA movement. It has been reported that the emergence of OA on the continent is albeit slow but with a mixed fortune of both progress and challenges. Notwithstanding, open access is seen as a development imperative for Africa that offers tremendous opportunities to the continent to actively contribute to global knowledge. It was reported that a number of universities and research institutions in Africa have adopted open access policies that require their researchers to publish their work in open access journals or repositories. The paper presented a number of open access initiatives and platforms that are actively being deployed to achieve OA mandate in the continent and concluded with recommendations.
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As part of an innovative experiment, Springer Nature has become the first publisher to create a whole new academic book by empowering authors to use GPT as part of the integrated workflow. Developed during a —Hack Day— in the Spring which brought together authors, editors and experts from across Springer Nature, the German-language book Einsatzmöglichkeiten von GPT in Finance, Compliance und Audit (Applications of GPT in finance, compliance and audit) has now been published. It took less than five months from inception to publication — about half the time normally taken. . . .
The process was as follows:
- Working simultaneously on six screens, the team defined commands which GPT then executed chapter by chapter to create the first version of the manuscript
- At each stage of the process, the content generated by the Large Language Model (LLM) was reviewed by the authors, who then asked the machine to adapt the text
- This "prompt ping pong" ensured that the knowledge expertise of the authors renowned in their field was combined with the language expertise of the LLM
- After the Hack Day, the authors and Springer Nature’s editorial team further checked, corrected and supplemented the text
- The team then linked the relevant data sources to ensure proper attribution
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The health of the research enterprise is closely tied to the effectiveness of the scientific and scholarly publishing ecosystem. Policy-, technology-, and market-driven changes in publishing models over the last two decades have triggered a number of disruptions within this ecosystem:
- Ongoing increases in the cost of journal publishing, with dominant open access models shifting costs from subscribers to authors
- Significant consolidation and vertical (supply chain) integration in the publishing industry, and a decline in society-owned subscription journals that have long subsidized scientific and scholarly societies
- A dramatic increase in the number of "predatory" journals with substandard peer review
- Decline in the purchasing power of academic libraries relative to the quantity and cost of published research
To illustrate how researcher behavior, funder policies, and publisher business models and incentives interact, this report presents an historical overview of open access publishing. The report also provides a list of key questions for further investigation to understand, measure, and best prepare for the impact of new policies related to open access in research publishing, categorized into six general areas: access and business models, research data, preprint publishing, peer review, costs to researchers and universities, and infrastructure.
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/152414
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More broadly, generative AI tools have the potential to change how research is published and disseminated, says Patrick Mineault, a senior machine-learning scientist at Mila — Quebec AI Institute in Montreal, Canada. That could mean that research will be published in a way that can be easily read by machines rather than humans. "There will be all these new forms of publication," says Mineault.
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03144-w
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All videos and slides from this August IFLA Academic & Research Libraries Section (ARL) Satellite conference to the 2023 WLIC in Rotterdam IFLA conference are now available:
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Launched as a pilot in January 2023, Path to Open is a delayed open access model where new books are made available to supporting libraries upon publication and become open access after three years. Thirty-seven university presses have joined the initiative along with over sixty academic libraries, including consortia like the Big Ten Academic Alliance who are looking to develop sustainable open access solutions. . . .
JSTOR recently released forty-three of the first 100 Path to Open titles. These books, all peer-reviewed, were selected by the participating university presses and JSTOR, and explore topics in thirty-six subjects like Public Health, Religion, Education, Communications, Literature, Conflict Resolution, and Film Studies.
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The book consists of three parts. Part I offers definitions of scholarly communication and scholarly communication librarianship and provides an introduction to the social, economic, technological, and policy/legal pressures that underpin and shape scholarly communication work in libraries. These pressures, which have framed ACRL’s understanding of scholarly communication for the better part of the past two decades, have unsettled many foundational assumptions and practices in the field, removing core pillars of scholarly communication as it was practiced in the twentieth century. These pressures have also cleared fresh ground, and scholarly communication practitioners have begun to seed the space with values and practices designed to renew and often improve the field. Part II begins with an introduction to "open," the core response to the pressures described in part I. This part offers a general overview of the idea of openness in scholarly communication followed by chapters on different permutations and practices of open, each edited by a recognized expert of these areas with authors of their selection. Amy Buckland edited chapter 2.1, "Open Access." Brianna Marshall edited chapter 2.2, "Open Data." Lillian Hogendoorn edited chapter 2.3, "Open Education." Micah Vandegrift edited chapter 2.4, "Open Science and Infrastructure." Each of them brought on incredible expertise through contributors whom they identified, through both original contributions and repurposing existing openly licensed work, which is something we want to model where possible. Part III consists of twenty-four concise perspectives, intersections, and case studies from practicing librarians and closely related stakeholders, which we hope will stimulate discussion and reflection on theory and implications for practice. In every single case, we’re really excited by the editors and authors and the ideas they bring to the whole. Each contribution features light pedagogical apparatuses like suggested further reading, discussion or reflection prompts, and potential activities. It’s all available for free and openly licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) license, so anyone is encouraged to grab whatever parts are useful and to adapt and repurpose and improve them to meet specific course goals and student needs within the confines of the license.
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In this book, the origins and evolution of the open access movement are explored from the perspective of individuals who actively participated. These pioneers of open access shared their experiences, successes, collaborations, and visions for the future on the occasion of SciELO’s 25th anniversary. The book pays tribute to their pioneering efforts and the crucial role played by SciELO in supporting open access and spotlighting regions of the world that were previously underrepresented in global academic communication. This celebration demonstrates how SciELO firmly placed these regions on the map of global academic communication and contributed to strengthening the open access movement throughout its successful journey.
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Current estimates suggest that more than 50% of the world’s research articles are published open access and that there are around 20,000 fully OA journals. Data also indicates that publishing OA is, on average, cheaper than publishing in subscription journals. For example, an analysis by Delta Think shows that around 45% of all scholarly articles were published as paid-for open access in 2021, but this accounted for just under 15% of the total journal publishing revenue.
However, after two decades of discussions, advocacy, policy development and strategy, can this level of OA be considered a success, particularly when half of all research articles published today is hidden behind a paywall? I think not.
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- From our sample, no pattern emerged of any discipline appearing to be more innovative than any others, and indeed most alternative platforms seemed to be open to use by all fields.
- Most platforms within this survey were replacing the function of existing publishers in publishing research articles, books and conference proceedings. There was some innovation around peer review. Considering both of these aspects, only a small group of fewer than 10 of the 45 platforms should probably be described as truly exploring "alternative ways" of doing things.
- Only 11 of the platforms said that they solely concentrated on the methodological quality of the work, 2 solely on the impact of the work. Most said it was up to the editors to decide on criteria for assessment — the platforms themselves were agnostic. This is an area where further work might help elucidate the philosophies of different platforms when it comes to research assessment.
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Open access (OA) has become a critical issue in science policy and affects a wide range of activities in universities and research labs. Research-performing organizations (RPOs), defined as publicly funded universities and research institutions, face significant challenges in shaping the OA transformation. This article examines the spheres of activity available to RPOs for shaping the OA transformation, using a categorization of 22 spheres of activity related to OA. These spheres of activity include strategy and communication, services and infrastructures, business relationships with publishers, and collaborations. Current challenges and future action areas in promoting OA are also described, providing support for RPOs in handling OA and highlighting key issues. The categorization can serve as a tool for systematically assessing OA activities at RPOs and shows that OA is a cross-cutting issue in these organizations. Collaboration on OA activities, both within and beyond organizations, presents a challenge. To effectively promote OA, it is crucial to strengthen the interaction between funding agencies and RPOs. Libraries are critical stakeholders, playing a vital role in advancing OA at the local, national, and international levels in partnership with RPO management and other partners in faculty, administration, and information technology.
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Key Insights
- OA titles can generate significant print revenue. While there may be some tradeoff between OA editions and print sales, publishers can produce print sales revenue from their OA lists. Publishers may wish to take such revenue into account in considering business models for OA publication today.
- OA titles can generate meaningful digital revenue. When made available through consumer channels such as Kindle, ebooks that are available openly on other platforms can in parallel generate meaningful consumer sales. Publishers may benefit from giving focused consideration specific to OA monographs to their pricing and windowing tactics for such channels.
- Outliers are essential. A small number of OA titles sell particularly well, just as is historically the case in traditional monograph sales models. Publishers bearing this in mind will be thinking in terms of the sustainability and growth of their lists overall rather than each title individually.
- Titles with both hard and soft cover formats generate the most revenue. This may be the result of format choices publishers based on market forecasting, so from our data we cannot be sure that there is a causal relationship. Still, publishers may wish to give additional attention to their format strategy for OA books.
- Sales vary widely by field. History, arts, and humanities saw lower unit sales while social sciences saw higher unit sales and STEM fields saw the greatest. Publishers may need to pursue different sustainability models for OA books based on their field.
- An opportunity to increase print sales? There is currently significant friction for users in navigating from digital to print editions. Publishers and digital distribution platforms should work together to create a more seamless reader experience from digital discoverability of and engagement with the OA version to potential print sales.
https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.319642
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The University of South Carolina Press and University Libraries are embarking on a new collaborative venture: Open Carolina, an open-access publishing platform. . . .
Many ventures into open scholarly resources are planned as temporary pilot operations because they are funded by time-limited grant pools. Thanks to consistent funding from the Libraries, Open Carolina has a sustainable model that will allow scholars with limited publishing funds to share their research via the platform, partially or totally foregoing associated fees. In its inaugural year, the Libraries aim to fund four full-length books and support is in place to make the program sustainable for years to come and allow Open Carolina to grow steadily.
Open Carolina will offer opportunities to a wide range of scholars and researchers regardless of university affiliation.
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This brief research report analyzes the availability of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) worldwide, highlighting the dominance of large publishing houses and the need for unique persistent identifiers to increase the visibility of publications from developing countries. The study reveals that a considerable amount of publications from developing countries are excluded from the global flow of scientific information due to the absence of DOIs, emphasizing the need for alternative publishing models. The authors suggest that the availability of DOIs should receive more attention in scholarly communication and scientometrics, contributing to a necessary debate on DOIs relevant for librarians, publishers, and scientometricians.
https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2023.1207980
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A key responsibility for many library publishers is to collaborate with authors to determine the best mechanisms for sharing and publishing research. Librarians are often asked to assist with a wide range of research outputs and publication types, including eBooks, digital humanities (DH) projects, scholarly journals, archival and thematic collections, and community projects. These projects can exist on a variety of platforms both for profit and academy owned. Additionally, over the past decade, more and more academy owned platforms have been created to support both library publishing programs. Library publishers who wish to emphasize open access and open-source publishing can feel overwhelmed by the proliferation of available academy-owned or -affiliated publishing platforms. For many of these platforms, documentation exists but can be difficult to locate and interpret. While experienced users can usually find and evaluate the available resources for a particular platform, this kind of documentation is often less useful to authors and librarians who are just starting a new publishing project and want to determine if a given platform will work for them. Because of the challenges involved in identifying and evaluating the various platforms, we created this comparative crosswalk to help library publishers (and potentially authors) determine which platforms are right for their services and authors’ needs.
https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:59231/
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The paper will explore CDL modes by combing CDL practices and programs from research papers and official website documents of different library organizations. Then, based on legal frameworks of CDL in the US, Canada and the UK which are summarized, copyright issues of CDL modes are analyzed from perspectives of implementing institution, service resources, and usage mode. Finally, some copyright recommendations for sustainable development of CDL are proposed.
https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006231190654
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My group within Wiley Partner Solutions designs and develops intelligent services that leverage advanced AI, big data, and cloud technologies to support publishers and researchers in open access and open science environments. To identify both benefits and risks of generative AI for our industry, we tested ChatGPT and Google Bard for authoring, for submission and reviews, for publishing, and for discovery and dissemination. I hope that our findings will inspire you to find fresh ideas for using Generative AI, and will stimulate further conversation about this new and controversial but potentially beneficial tool.
| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |
The Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of University Presses published a final report assessing the success of the Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) project. The five-year pilot project engaged with more than 60 university presses and more than 150 open access scholarly works to encourage sustainable digital publication of and public access to scholarly books. The Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) project was launched in 2018 to publish humanities and social science scholarship on the internet, where these peer-reviewed works can be fully integrated into the larger network of scholarly and scientific research. The final report examines whether the pilot’s community of writers, institutions, libraries, and presses found it useful.
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