"Spain Adopts National Open Access Strategy"


Spain has approved a four-year national strategy for open science, under which all outputs of publicly financed research will made available free upon publication.

Under the strategy open access will become the default mode for all research funded directly or indirectly, with public funds. . . .

A budget of €23.8 million in 2023 will be maintained annually until 2027.

https://bit.ly/414w2gY

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"What Can I Do with This? Indicators of Usage Rights in the User Interface "


With the continued push towards open access (OA) and the complicated nature of copyright law, users are often left wondering what they can do with the scholarly articles they find. Creative Commons (CC) licenses are the predominant mechanism for communicating usage rights; however, finding the CC license information — or being confident that there is not any — can be a challenge. Today we report on a project to investigate how publisher platforms represent CC licenses for OA and non-OA journal articles. We looked at how publishing platforms indicate usage rights for articles in results displays as well as in full-text formats.

https://bit.ly/3HwTZq1

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Good, Better, Best: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs


Good, Better, Best: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs brings together the project’s growing knowledge and understanding around this community of practice, as well as reports on the Work Package’s research and development over the course of the project.

Following an introduction chapter giving a brief background landscape summary alongside employed methodologies, Chapter 2, "A basic guidebook for the small and scholar-led press" considers good, better, and best practices around file formats, metadata, content packaging, existing routes to digital publication archives, archiving and preservation workflows, and challenges surrounding copyright, reuse, and licensing. Additional chapters detail the repository workflow experimentations, both manual and automated, as well as successful proof-of-concept archiving in two online repositories: one, and institutional repository, and the other, the Internet Archive. Along with a chapter (Chapter 6) that explores the current understanding around implications for archiving and preserving complex and experimental monographs, two further chapters (7 and 8) look at future work: the expansion and development of the Thoth Archiving Network and the new Open Book Futures project, beginning May 2023. Appendices include signposting to toolkits, guides, and resources, as well as a brief glossary that provides links to more comprehensive archiving and preservation glossaries already in existence. We hope this will be a useful resource for the small and scholar-led press community and beyond.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7876047

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"The Scholarly Fingerprinting Industry"


Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, Wiley, and SAGE: Many researchers know that the five giant firms publish most of the world’s scholarship. Fifty years of acquisitions and journal launches have yielded a stunningly profitable oligopoly, built up from academics’ unpaid writing-and-editing labor. Their business is a form of IP rentiership—collections of title-by-title prestige monopolies that, in the case of Nature or The Lancet, underwrite a stable of spinoff journals on the logic of the Hollywood franchise. Less well-known is that Elsevier and its peers are layering a second business on top of their legacy publishing operations, fueled by data extraction. They are packaging researcher behavior, gleaned from their digital platforms, into prediction products, which they sell back to universities and other clients. Their raw material is scholars’ citations, abstracts, downloads, and reading habits, repurposed into dashboard services that, for example, track researcher productivity. Elsevier and the other oligopolist firms are fast becoming, in other words, surveillance publishers. And they are using the windfall profits from their existing APC-and-subscription business to finance their moves into predictive analytics.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/yu34t

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"Searching for the Right Ebook Business Models"


Part of the problem is that ebook models have been tied to the traditional concept of the book for too long, which has failed to recognize the potential added value of both ebooks and textbooks. As Ashcroft put it: "We’ve always had a policy of pricing our ebooks for institutional use at the same price as our print books. So, a PDF licence to an institution for use by everybody with no limits to usage or downloads, simultaneous usage, has always cost the same as a print book. We asked ourselves whether that was actually the right approach and came to the conclusion that an electronic format made available in that way does actually deliver an additional value versus the print book, so for our own books we have decoupled the ebook prices from the print prices and ebook prices for institutions have increased as a result, just to reflect the additional value that they represent to an institution."

https://bit.ly/3oMzD5B

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"Z-Library Plans to Let Users Share Physical Books through ‘Z-Points’"


Z-Library appears to be shrugging off a criminal investigation as if nothing ever happened. The site continues to develop its shadow library and, following a successful fundraiser, now plans to expand its services to the physical book market. Z-Library envisions a book "sharing" market, where its millions of users can pick up paperbacks at dedicated "Z-Points" around the globe.

https://cutt.ly/i7bAHGU

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Essential Reading: Walt Crawford’s Books on Open Access

For over a decade, Walt Crawford been writing books about open access. With one exception published by ALA, they are all freely available as PDF files. What makes Crawford’s books stand apart is his in-depth, incisive investigation of key global open access trends. Some of the recent books were sponsored by SPARC. These books belong in every academic library’s cataloged collection.

Gold Open Access by Country 2016-2021: The Long Tail

This book looks at the long tail of gold OA—for 2021, the 13,714 DOAJ-listed journals that are not published by one of what I call the Big Eleven: eleven publishers or publishing groups, including two university presses and one society, that dominate fee-based OA. You could think of them as Corporate OA, except for the society and universities, and the fact that several traditional publishers such as De Gruyter are included in the long tail.

Chapter 6 of Gold Open Access 2016-2021: Articles in Journals (GOA7) discusses the Big Eleven and the Long Tail; the Big Eleven are named on page 45. The group publishes 17% of the serious journals, but 55% of the 2021 articles and 89% of potential fee (APC) revenues.

Gold Open Access by Country 2015-2020

Gold Open Access by Country 2014-2019

Gold Open Access Journals by Country 2012-2017

Gold Open Access 2016-2021: Articles In Journals (GOA7)

Gold OA continues to grow: by around 1,500 active journals, 170,000 articles, and nearly half a billion dollars in fees in 2021. This study attempts to answer questions about the state of serious gold OA publishing in 2021 (and how it’s changed over the past few years).

The overall picture in 2021:

  • 1,275,212 articles, up from 1,104,179 in 2020 (for the current set of journals), an increase of 15.5%. My estimate is that around 2,200 journals were added to DOAJ during 2021 and around 700 were deleted during the year.
  • 16,620 fully-analyzed journals, of which 15,643 published articles in 2021, for an average of 82 articles per journal (up from 75 in last year’s report).
  • The usual articles-vs.-journals split continues: 68% of active journals are no-fee, but 69% of articles appeared in fee journals The average cost per article was $1,374 in 2021, up around $170 from 2020.

The rest of this book provides more detail and ways of looking at gold OA. The book is patterned after previous editions.

While some discussions and tables involve the full 16,620 journals, most—where 2021 article counts are fundamental—address only 15,643, ignoring 977 journals with no 2021 articles when checked.

Gold Open Access 2015-2020: Articles in Journals (GOA6)

Gold Open Access 2014-2019: Articles in Journals (GOA5)

Gold Open Access 2013-2018: Articles in Journals (GOA4)

Gold Open Access Journals 2012-2017 (GOA3)

Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2016 (GOAJ2)

Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015

Gray OA 2012-2016: Open Access Journals Beyond DOAJ

Open Access: What You Need to Know Now

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Governing Scholar-Led OA Book Publishers: Values, Practices, Barriers


This report develops and focuses on some of the issues we have previously explored within COPIM with regard to community governance, such as the challenges of governing a collective and the relationship of governance to common resources, to explore how these apply in practice to the publication of books by small-to-medium Open Access publishers, as well as what barriers they have faced in implementing their governance models. It presents and discusses the results of six interviews with the small and medium Open Access publishers which make up the ScholarLed consortium. It then offers some recommendations and insights into how other small and medium Open Access publishers might set up and/or improve their governance practices, including how the Open Book Collective might support them in doing so.

https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.e6fcb523

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With Open Source Software: "How to Build a Publishers’ Catalogue"


As a consortium of six open access presses, ScholarLed had a use case for a publishers’ catalogue that would present all their recent book publications in one catalogue. . . . Fortunately all the presses have included the metadata for their monograph publications in Thoth, the open metadata management and dissemination platform that has been produced as another COPIM [Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs] output. This made it possible to easily conceive of a catalogue published as both a website and a PDF that pulls in and arranges the bibliographic metadata automatically and that can be updated on a regular basis without manual intervention. . . .

Our computational publishing model and workflow allowed us to put together this catalogue prototype very easily using only a few pieces of readily-available open source software: Quarto, Jupyter Notebook, and Git. This provided us an instant framework for web publication that didn’t require editing any HTML or CSS. . . .

Our ScholarLed publishers’ catalogue offers a working prototype of an automatically-updated book that retrieves the data for its content directly from an API. It does so with readily available open source software that can be installed with relative ease by anyone who wants to use this model to create a publication with computational elements.

http://bit.ly/3m1exzz

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"Controlled Digital Lending Takes a Blow in Court"


The implications of this ruling are potentially profound, and, given the strong lean in the publisher’s favor, they are potentially troubling for libraries and the rights of those who seek to engage with content in our evermore digital and digitized world if the decision stands through the forthcoming appeals. For the significant amount of content that exists in print form and for which there is no publisher-sanctioned digital version available, that content has become effectively walled off from the digital world until it passes into the public domain—essentially for longer than anyone reading this blog is alive. Those who live in close proximity to and have access to world-class institutions with sizable print collections can get access to much of this content. For the vast majority of library users, this will not be the case. Their access will be significantly curtailed, but to paraphrase the ruling, this public interest is secondary to the interests of publishers in exercising their monopoly.

http://bit.ly/40GaNC4

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"Society and University Journal Publishers Gradually Progressing Towards New OA Models"


Overall, there’s no question that society and university publishers are progressing in the race to OA. It appears they’re just doing so at a slow and steady pace, likely to avoid stumbling over ongoing sustainability challenges, as revealed in Part 1 of "The OA Diamond Journals Study" from cOAlition S, based on a survey of 1,619 fully-OA journals. Respondents to that survey reported mixed degrees of OA publishing program sustainability, with a little over 40% breaking even and 25% operating at a loss.

http://bit.ly/42UFeqr

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Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, Version 3

Digital Scholarship has released the Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, version 3. This bibliography includes over 300 selected English-language articles, books, and technical reports about academic libraries’ digital publishing programs from 1989 though 2022. While academic libraries have published a variety of digital publications during this period, this bibliography primarily covers the open access publishing of scholarly books, journals, and other serials. It provides a brief narrative overview of the early development of these publishing efforts. It covers the establishment of new university presses by academic libraries, especially all-digital open access presses, and the merger or cooperative efforts of libraries and university presses. It also covers the technical publishing infrastructures used by library publishing programs. It includes full abstracts for works under certain Creative Commons Licenses. It is available as a website and a PDF file (52 pages). It includes a Google Translate link.

The bibliography has the following major sections:

https://digital-scholarship.org/alsp/alsp.htm

Digital Scholarship’s website bibliographies have been reformatted as single-page files and a PDF file designed for printing has been made available for each one. They include a Google Translate link.

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"In a Swift Decision, Judge Eviscerates Internet Archive’s Scanning and Lending Program"


"At bottom, IA’s fair use defense rests on the notion that lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book entitles the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it in place of the print book, so long as it does not simultaneously lend the print book," Koeltl wrote in a March 24 opinion granting the publisher plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and denying the Internet Archive’s cross-motion. "But no case or legal principle supports that notion. Every authority points in the other direction."

https://cutt.ly/54AdZfY

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Millions of Digitized Books May Be Destroyed: "Press Conference Statement: Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive"


Here’s what’s at stake in this case: hundreds of libraries contributed millions of books to the Internet Archive for preservation in addition to those books we have purchased. Thousands of donors provided the funds to digitize them.

The publishers are now demanding that those millions of digitized books, not only be made inaccessible, but be destroyed.

This is horrendous. Let me say it again—the publishers are demanding that millions of digitized books be destroyed.

And if they succeed in destroying our books or even making many of them inaccessible, there will be a chilling effect on the hundreds of other libraries that lend digitized books as we do.

This could be the burning of the Library of Alexandria moment—millions of books from our community’s libraries mdash;gone.

http://bit.ly/3JHMjli

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"Guest Post — Open Access for Monographs Is Here. But Are We Ready for It?"


For our next step at UNC Press, we have been helping to develop a new initiative that is essentially a compromise between the legacy model of university press publishing and a fully -funded OA model. Path to Open is a concept modeled on the NEH Fellowship Open Book Program which provides for a three-year embargo period during which presses can participate in conventional cost-recovery activities, including selling print and consumer (e.g., Kindle) eBooks. During this time, JSTOR will be offering the digital versions of these titles to academic libraries and institutions in an exclusive subscription collection. JSTOR will pay presses an estimated $5,000 for each title put into the program.

http://bit.ly/3K4wO88

"Book Publishers with Surging Profits Struggle to Prove Internet Archive Hurt Sales"


Today, the Internet Archive (IA) defended its practice of digitizing books and lending those e-books for free to users of its Open Library. In 2020, four of the wealthiest book publishers sued IA, alleging this kind of digital lending was actually "willful digital piracy" causing them "massive harm." But IA’s lawyer, Joseph Gratz, argued that the Open Library’s digitization of physical books is fair use, and publishers have yet to show they’ve been harmed by IA’s digital lending.

bit.ly/3JTMDP2

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"ChatGPT and a New Academic Reality: Artificial Intelligence-Written Research Papers and the Ethics of the Large Language Models in Scholarly Publishing"


The history and principles behind ChatGPT and similar models are discussed. This technology is then discussed in relation to its potential impact on academia and scholarly research and publishing. ChatGPT is seen as a potential model for the automated preparation of essays and other types of scholarly manuscripts. Potential ethical issues that could arise with the emergence of large language models like GPT-3. . . and its usage by academics and researchers, are discussed and situated within the context of broader advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing for research and scholarly publishing.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24750

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"Is Writing a Book Chapter Still a Waste of Time?"


How has digital open access transformed academic communication for the better? LSE Press’s Editor in Chief, Patrick Dunleavy, explores the impact of chapters in edited books. Once the Cinderella of academic publishing, doomed to obscurity under paywall books’ formal and de facto access restrictions, chapters in books are, thanks to digital open access, once again rivalling journal articles in their visibility to academic communities, their usefulness as teaching resources, and in their ability to tackle innovative and state of-the-art topics.

bit.ly/3KYRMq6

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"The Future of the Monograph in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences: Publisher Perspectives on a Transitioning Format"


A web-based survey of academic publishers was undertaken in 2021 by a team at Oxford International Centre for Publishing into the state of monograph publication in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. 25 publishing organisations responded, including many of the larger presses, representing approximately 75% of monograph output. Responses to the survey showed that the Covid 19 pandemic has accelerated the existing trend from print to digital dissemination and that Open Access (OA) titles receive substantially greater levels of usage than those published traditionally. Responses also showed that for most publishers OA publication stands at under 25% of output and that fewer than 10% of authors enquire about OA publication options. Continuing problem areas highlighted by respondents were the clearing of rights for OA publication and the standardisation of title and usage metadata. All responding organisations confirmed that they expect to be publishing monographs in ten years’ time, but that they anticipate the format and/or the model will be different, with open access expected to play a key part in the future, perhaps in the context of a mixed economy of OA and ‘toll access’ publication.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-023-09937-1

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"Impact and Perceived Value of the Revolutionary Advent of Artificial Intelligence in Research and Publishing among Researchers: A Survey-Based Descriptive Study"


Purpose:

This study was conducted to understand the perceptions and awareness of artificial intelligence (AI) in the academic publishing landscape.

Method:

We conducted a global survey entitled "Role and impact of AI on the future of academic publishing" to understand the impact of the AI wave in the scholarly publishing domain. This English-language survey was open to all researchers, authors, editors, publishers, and other stakeholders in the scholarly community. Conducted between August and October 2021, the survey received responses from around 212 universities across 54 countries.

Results:

Out of 365 respondents, about 93% belonged to the age groups of 18–34 and 35–54 years. While 50% of the respondents selected plagiarism detection as the most widely known AI-based application, image recognition (42%), data analytics (40%), and language enhancement (39%) were some other known applications of AI. The respondents also expressed the opinion that the academic publishing landscape will significantly benefit from AI. However, the major challenges restraining the large-scale adoption of AI, as expressed by 93% of the respondents, were limited knowledge and expertise, as well as difficulties in integrating AI-based solutions into existing IT infrastructure.

Conclusion:

The survey responses reflected the necessity of AI in research and publishing. This study suggests possible ways to support a smooth transition. This can be best achieved by educating and creating awareness to ease possible fears and hesitation, and to actualize the promising benefits of AI.

https://doi.org/10.6087/kcse.294

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"Long-Term Preservation and Reusability of Open Access Scholar-Led Press Monographs"


This brief report outlines some initial findings and challenges identified by the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project when looking to archive and preserve open access books produced by small, scholar-led presses. This paper is based on the research conducted by Work Package 7 in COPIM, which has a focus on the preservation and archiving of open access monographs in all their complexity, along with any accompanying materials.

http://www.ijdc.net/article/view/826

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