Scholarly Journals – DigitalKoans

“A Master Class in Destroying Trust”

Clarivate’s dismissal of one-time purchases is alarming, but when you consider the company’s larger strategy, it makes sense. On the Q4 earnings call, Shem Tov refers to one-time purchases as “a drain.” He also says that Clarivate has “retained financial advisers to help us in evaluating strategic alternatives to unlock value. This may include divesting business units or an entire segment.” He goes on to say, “There is no guarantee that anything actionable will arise from this process,” but considering Clarivate will no longer sell books, Clarivate’s furthering its investment in data should make us wary.

https://tinyurl.com/y57tdkz3

“What Are Journals and Reviewers Concerned about in Data Papers? Evidence From Journal Guidelines and Review Reports”

The evolution of data journals and the increase in data papers call for associated peer review, which is intricately linked yet distinct from traditional scientific paper review. This study investigates the data paper review guidelines of 22 scholarly journals that publish data papers and analyses 131 data papers’ review reports from the journal Data. Peer review is an essential part of scholarly publishing. Although the 22 data journals employ disparate review models, their review purposes and requirements exhibit similarities. Journal guidelines provide authors and reviewers with comprehensive references for reviewing, which cover the entire life cycle of data. Reviewer attitudes predominantly encompass Suggestion, Inquiry, Criticism and Compliment during the specific review process, focusing on 18 key targets including manuscript writing, diagram presentation, data process and analysis, references and review and so forth. In addition, objective statements and other general opinions are also identified. The findings show the distinctive characteristics of data publication assessment and summarise the main concerns of journals and reviewers regarding the evaluation of data papers.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2001

“De Gruyter Brill Accelerates Open Access Transformation, Making 58 Journals Freely Available via Subscribe to Open”

De Gruyter Brill is expanding its Subscribe to Open program, DG2O, by immediately switching 37 additional journals to open access. In total, 58 journals from the De Gruyter portfolio will be published open access via DG2O in 2025, making approximately 2,300 research articles freely available to the global scholarly community. The transition is made possible through the continued commitment of libraries and institutions, whose renewed subscriptions helped meet the necessary funding threshold.

https://tinyurl.com/5n7z8z7k

“Springer Nature Achieves Revenue and Profit Targets and Projects Further Growth for 2025”

Revenue grew by 5% on an underlying[1] basis to €1,847 million and adjusted operating profit rose by 7% on an underlying[1] basis to €512 million

Research was main growth driver, posting underlying[1] 6% revenue increase following strong performance of the Open Access (OA) Journals portfolio

For the first time, Springer Nature published 50% of its primary research articles

https://tinyurl.com/bdd7umwm

“Cambridge to Conduct ‘Radical’ Review of Open Research ”

Cambridge University Press is to conduct a “radical, community-led” review of the open research publishing ecosystem. The review aims to identify bold and workable solutions that support innovation and researchers’ needs in a manner that’s sustainable for all major stakeholders.

The project will focus on four areas crucial to the future of open research:

The link between publishing, reward and recognition

Equity in research dissemination

Research integrity

Technological change and the future of research publishing

https://tinyurl.com/2879upe8

“Are Data Papers Cited as Research Data? Preliminary Analysis on Interdisciplinary Data Paper Citations”

Introduction. Research data sharing and reuse have become increasingly important in modern science, and data papers represent a new academic publication genre aimed at enhancing the visibility, sharing, and reuse of research data. However, whether citations to data papers reflect actual data reuse remains largely unexplored. This paper presents preliminary findings from a project designed to address this gap.

Method. we conducted a content analysis to manually annotate 437 citation sentences from 309 research articles referencing 50 data papers published in Data in Brief, a chief academic journal that only publishes data papers. The data papers were sampled from five knowledge domains based on a paper-level classification system.

Results. Our results show that most citations to all selected data papers (89%) are unrelated to the research data being described in the paper, instead focusing on the research findings or methodologies. This suggests that data papers are being cited similarly to traditional research articles, despite their unique purpose and content.

Conclusion. These findings raise questions about the effectiveness of data papers as representations of research data within the scholarly communication system, as well as their utility in quantitative studies on data reuse.

https://tinyurl.com/3f5u33fs

“Investing in the Future: A New Strategic Agreement for Diamond Open Access in Canada”

The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and Érudit are proud to announce a new five-year agreement (2025–2029) for the Partnership for Open Access, with 57 participating libraries. . . .

Thanks to the ongoing engagement of participating libraries, the Partnership for Open Access (POA) provides financial support to 260 scholarly journals. Independent and diverse, these journals reflect the linguistic diversity and the impactful research conducted in Canada and beyond. They are also deeply rooted in their academic communities, as over 1,500 Canadian researchers publish their work in these journals annually, which are often based on Canadian university campuses. . . .

Through its 10+ years, the POA has established itself as a successful and sustainable model: it enables the distribution of over 2,000 articles per year without APCs, and has already helped 40 journals make the transition to open access.

https://tinyurl.com/yrwz2pkp

Royal Society at 71% OA: “Our Open Access Transition Enters the 70’sEra”

Looking back on the Royal Society journals’ progress over 2024, I am pleased to report that we have increased our open access output from 66% in 2023 to 71% across the research journals. . . .

Data from articles published in our Transformative Journals in 2022 shows that open access papers received on average 100% more citations and 116% more downloads than subscription articles. Of all articles published in 2022, 99 of the top 100 articles by Altmetric score were open access.

https://tinyurl.com/5a84jt5d

“News & Views: Open Access Charges – Price Increases Back on Trend”

Going into 2025, we have seen APC pricing increasing but falling back to long-term trends.

Fully OA APC list prices across our sample have risen by around 6.5% compared with 9.5% this time last year.

Hybrid APC list prices have risen by an average of 3% compared with 4.2% this time last year.

Maximum APCs for fully OA journals remain at $8,900.

Maximum APCs for hybrid journals now top out at $12,690 (up $400 from last year).

https://tinyurl.com/mpdmd7vy

“Elsevier Launches Sciencedirect AI to Transform Research with Rapid Mission-Critical Insights from Trusted Content”

ScienceDirect AI includes the following features:

Ask ScienceDirect AI – search and summaries of full-text articles and book chapters

Users can search and get answers from within the full-text of 14 million articles and book chapters, using their own words to describe what they need and why. ScienceDirect AI will search across the millions of documents in its index to provide a Summary Response with references, Source Snippets for each reference, and short Related Insights summaries while linking back to the original document.

Reading Assistant – chat with a document in ScienceDirect

This conversational feature answers questions about the content of a specific full-text article or book chapter and allows researchers to ask further questions of the document. Users can click on references within the summaries to jump to locations in the article where the answer comes from, it also suggests research questions.

Compare Experiments – experiment summary table

Comparing and synthesizing literature can be very time-consuming. ScienceDirect AI’s unique Compare Experiments tool takes a set of articles and creates a table breaking down each experiment within them, drawing out the key aspects of each including goals, methods and results.

https://tinyurl.com/mwnkar8u

“openRxiv Launch to Sustain and Expand Preprint Sharing in Life and Health Sciences”

Since their launches in 2013 and 2019, respectively, preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv have transformed how scientific findings are communicated. They have hosted more than 325,000 reports of new discoveries, enabling scientists worldwide to collaborate, iterate, and build upon each other’s work at an unprecedented pace. . . .

Establishing openRxiv aims to accelerate the value of these preprint servers, making it easier for these resources to grow and adapt. Created as services of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in partnership with other institutions, bioRxiv and medRxiv now move under openRxiv’s researcher-driven governance, ensuring that preprint sharing remains independent, sustainable, and responsive to researchers’ evolving needs.

https://tinyurl.com/2auerw5t

“Elsevier’s Pre-proof Policy Blocks Google Scholar Indexing”

Google Scholar is a vital tool for engineering scholars, enabling efficient literature searches and facilitating academic dissemination. Elsevier, as one of the largest publishers of engineering journals, produces essential research that scholars rely on. The pre-proof policy, adopted by Elsevier for certain journals, allows articles to be published online in their accepted draft form before final proofreading and formatting. However, this study empirically demonstrates that the pre-proof publication policy hinders comprehensive indexing by Google Scholar. Articles published under this policy are only partially indexed, often limited to titles and abstracts, while crucial sections such as introductions, methods, results, discussions, conclusions, appendices, and data availability statements remain unsearchable. This problem has persisted for years, resulting in reduced visibility and accessibility of certain Elsevier articles. To improve academic dissemination, both Elsevier and Google Scholar must address this problem by modifying publishing policies or enhancing indexing practices. Additionally, this paper explores strategies that authors can use to mitigate the issue and ensure broader discoverability of their research.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05550

“The Academic Impact of Open Science: A Scoping Review”

Open Science seeks to make research processes and outputs more accessible, transparent and inclusive, ensuring that scientific findings can be freely shared, scrutinized and built upon by researchers and others. To date, there has been no systematic synthesis of the extent to which Open Science (OS) reaches these aims. We use the PRISMA scoping review methodology to partially address this gap, scoping evidence on the academic (but not societal or economic) impacts of OS. We identify 485 studies related to all aspects of OS, including Open Access (OA), Open/FAIR Data (OFD), Open Code/Software, Open Evaluation and Citizen Science (CS). Analysing and synthesizing findings, we show that the majority of studies investigated effects of OA, CS and OFD. Key areas of impact studied are citations, quality, efficiency, equity, reuse, ethics and reproducibility, with most studies reporting positive or at least mixed impacts. However, we also identified significant unintended negative impacts, especially those regarding equity, diversity and inclusion. Overall, the main barrier to academic impact of OS is lack of skills, resources and infrastructure to effectively re-use and build on existing research. Building on this synthesis, we identify gaps within this literature and draw implications for future research and policy.

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241248

“An APC Trap?: Privilege and the Perception of Reasonableness in Open Access Publishing”

Four institutions from the U.S. participated in this research: The University of Colorado Boulder (CUB), the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass), the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), and the University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK). . . .

Grants were the largest source of APC funding across all institutions, with well over half (56%)of respondents who paid an APC using grant funding to pay for at least part of their APC (Figure 2). Eighty-six percent of respondents used grants, departments, and/or other university funding towards their APC. Overall, libraries were not a significant source of funding for paying these fees. In fact, fees were just as likely to be waived than to come from library funding sources 10% of respondents, each), and the library was ranked 5th overall out of 8 funding source options. . . .

Overall, more than two-thirds of respondents across institutions thought that fees less than or equal to US$1.5K were reasonable, with an additional 16% responding that no fees were reasonable (Figure 6).

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/55542

“The Economic Impact of Open Science: A Scoping Review”

This paper summarised a comprehensive scoping review of the economic impact of Open Science (OS), examining empirical evidence from 2000 to 2023. It focuses on Open Access (OA), Open/FAIR Data (OFD), Open Source Software (OSS), and Open Methods, assessing their contributions to efficiency gains in research production, innovation enhancement, and economic growth. Evidence, although limited, indicates that OS accelerates research processes, reduces the related costs, fosters innovation by improving access to data and resources and this ultimately generates economic growth. Specific sectors, such as life sciences, are researched more and the literature exhibits substantial gains, mainly thanks to OFD and OA. OSS supports productivity, while the very limited studies on Open Methods indicate benefits in terms of productivity gains and innovation enhancement. However, gaps persist in the literature, particularly in fields like Citizen Science and Open Evaluation, for which no empirical findings on economic impact could be detected. Despite limitations, empirical evidence on specific cases highlight economic benefits. This review underscores the need for further metrics and studies across diverse sectors and regions to fully capture OS’s economic potential.

https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/kqse5_v1

“AI Is Reigniting Decades-Old Questions Over Digital Rights, but Fair Use Prevails”

A publisher recently provided UC Berkeley’s Library with an elusive explanation for their AI ban on a subset of their licensed materials, claiming that they would “require new and different AI terms [that] would be significantly higher in price,” and that “individual client requests [would] need to be evaluated [to] determine whether or not they will be permitted.” However, when prompted to provide said new terms and price, the publisher was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to provide any additional information, noting that there is “no set pricing model or terms to share.” . . .

Charging extra to secure AI rights is likely to be cost-prohibitive due to increased financial burdens on libraries and institutions of higher education; if publishers are successful, it could lead to less academic output as researchers may have to independently foot the bill for the right to conduct research using AI.

https://tinyurl.com/42nmfwm2

Paywall: “Implementing Read and Publish Agreements at the College of Charleston Libraries”

Focusing primarily on the Read and Publish agreements with Cambridge, Wiley, and Springer Nature, this article gives insight into managing Read and Publish agreements, specifically for academic libraries with no designated scholarly communications librarians.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2025.2471077

Clarivate Change Reactions: “Library Database Providers Clash Over Subscription Models”

Lo [Leo Lo, president of the Association of College and Research Libraries] predicted that “as libraries adjust to leasing-only arrangements, they are likely to become more selective, prioritizing high-demand or core resources while potentially overlooking materials in emerging fields, niche subject areas, or interdisciplinary research.” He also thought the change could strain the relationship between librarians and publishers, hasten a shift to open-access initiatives, or “drive libraries to negotiate more aggressively” for favorable licensing terms.

https://tinyurl.com/yahhr9kd

“Data and Code Availability in Political Science Publications from 1995 to 2022”

In this paper, we assess the availability of reproduction archives in political science. By “reproduction archive,” we mean the data and code supporting quantitative research articles that allows others to reproduce the computations described in the published paper. We collect a random sample of quantitative research articles published in political science from 1995 to 2022. We find that—even in 2022—most quantitative research articles do not point a reproduction archive. However, practices are improving. In 2014, when the DA-RT symposium was published in PS, about 12% of quantitative research articles point to the data and code. Eight years later, in 2022, that has increased to 31%. This underscores a massive shift in norms, requirements, and infrastructure. Still, only a minority of articles share the supporting data and code.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/a5yxe_v2

“Peer Review of Data Papers: Does It Achieve Expectations for Facilitating Data Sharing and Reuse?”

This paper presents a qualitative study of open peer review reports of data papers in a data journal Earth System Science Data. We examine to what extent the actual review practices of data papers align with identifying the most valuable datasets and promoting data reuse. We conclude that peer reviewers adopted a variety of criteria to evaluate data papers, but it is still challenging for reviewers to identify the most valuable datasets that should be reused. In addition, our findings demonstrate the correlation between data paper evaluations and subsequent reuse of the underlying datasets.

https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5130257

“Clarivate Unveils Transformative Subscription-Based Access Strategy for Academia”

The new strategy includes the introduction of two market-leading solutions that are now available.

ProQuest Ebooks offers. . . .

Over 700,000 Ebooks, across 10 core disciplines, plus additional essential interdisciplinary titles. . . .

The addition of Ebook Central Research Assistant, a powerful new AI tool designed to enhance student learning and streamline research.

ProQuest Digital Collections offers . . . .

Over 160 million primary source items complemented by over 2,500 full-text scholarly journals, more than 24,000 video titles, and 15 million audio tracks. . . .

[A]ccess to nine ProQuest One discipline solutions including Anthropology, Entertainment & Popular Culture, Global Studies & International Relations, History, Literature, Performing Arts, Visual Arts & Design. . . .

As part of this transformative strategy and following changes in demand from libraries, Clarivate will also phase out one-time perpetual purchases of digital collections, print and digital books for libraries. These transitions will take place throughout 2025, in close co-operation with customers.

https://tinyurl.com/3mtsr3kr

“California Universities and Oxford University Press Sign Landmark Open Access Agreement”

The 10-campus University of California system (UC), 20 of 23 California State University (CSU) campuses, and 30 private academic and research institutions represented by the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) have reached a comprehensive four-year transformative open access agreement with Oxford University Press (OUP). The agreement begins this month and will provide affiliated researchers with access to OUP’s world-leading journals and support for publishing their work open access. . . .

This major agreement harnesses the resources of research institutions, private liberal arts colleges, comprehensive universities, and special libraries across California by redirecting existing library subscription funds to support authors publishing open access. The agreement enables authors at the participating institutions to publish articles using an open access license at reduced or no cost in more than 500 hybrid and fully open access OUP journals. Authors with grant funds available will pay a discounted open access publishing fee across OUP’s hybrid and fully open access journals. Authors who do not have grant funds available will be able to publish open access in hybrid journals at no cost to them.

https://tinyurl.com/f5tjynus

“How Will We Prepare for an Uncertain Future? The Value of Open Data and Code for Unborn Generations Facing Climate Change”

What is the unit of knowledge that we would most like to protect for future generations? Is it the scientific publication? Or is it our datasets? Datasets are snapshots in space and time of n-dimensional hypervolumes of information that are resources in and of themselves—each giving numerous insights into the measured world [134,135]. New publishing paradigms, such as Octopus, allow researchers to link multiple ‘Analysis’ and/or ‘Interpretation’ publications to a single ‘Results’ publication as alternative analyses and interpretations of the same data [159]. A more traditional research paper, on the other hand, is one realization of many possible assessments of the data that were originally collected, and a wide diversity of results can be obtained when many individuals analyse one dataset with the same research question in mind [160,161]. That is, publications are one version of an oversimplified projection through n-dimensional space which communicate stories that our human minds can comprehend. Manuscript narratives, by necessity, leave out information to craft such a story.

This is not to say that scientific publications in and of themselves are not useful. On the contrary, they frame our current and historical understanding of the world and put scientific inquiry into the relevant spatial and temporal context. Scientific articles offer analysis and interpretation of data which will allow future generations to understand why certain policies, management actions, or approaches were attempted and/or abandoned. However, if future researchers are not granted access to our (past) data, future humans will have to repeat costly (e.g. time and resources) experiments, laboriously extract information directly from figures, tables and text in the articles themselves (assuming the relevant information is available and detailed enough, although there is evidence that this is not the case in at least some disciplines [55,162]) or will have to trust our analytical procedures and our intuitions and perceptions about the data we collected [160,161].

https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.1515

“DeepGreen—A Data Hub for the Distribution of Scholarly Articles From Publishers to Open Access Repositories in Germany”

DeepGreen is an automated delivery service for open access articles. Originally conceived to take advantage of the so-called open access component—a secondary publication right in Alliance and National licences in Germany to promote green open access—it aims to streamline open access processes by automating the distribution of full-text articles and metadata from publishers to repositories.

The service, developed by a consortium and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in its initial phase, has successfully established itself as a national service, facilitating open access content distribution and contributing to Germany’s open access infrastructure.

As of December 2024, DeepGreen distributes articles from 14 publishers to 84 institutional repositories and 6 subject-specific repositories.

This article describes the role of the DeepGreen service in Germany, its collaboration with publishers and the potential of automated processes for storing articles in open access repositories, which, as publicly owned institutional infrastructures, ensure sustainable access and provide secure, redundant storage.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.70000

“Questioning the Predator of the Predatory Journals: How Fair Are Global Publishing Standards?”

What is concerning now is far from just publishing in predatory journals. It is the new emerging trend where academics and non-academics misuse the term ‘predatory’ by applying it to any lesser-known publishers or those publishers mentioned in blog lists of predatory journals. This oversimplification can blur the boundary between what is actually predatory and what is not. It prevents from having any possible scholarly discussions. It can delegitimise any legitimate emerging journal and even discourage researchers who lack funding from attaining any form of publication. Which means that this misuse of the term, even unintentionally, has the potential to marginalise academic communities. Considering this trend, it is vital to educate ourselves on the distinction between predatory journals and what is regarded as a new, lesser-known emerging journal.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1662