Scholarly Journals – DigitalKoans

Reviewed Preprints Published Change: "eLife New Model at Six Months: An ICOR analysis"

Submissions are steady, and the proportion of papers sent for review is similar in the two models.

Reviewed Preprints are visible earlier than traditionally peer-reviewed articles, which provides a middle ground between unreviewed preprints and published VORs.

Author demographics have not changed significantly with regard to discipline or geography.

Authors, Senior Editors, and Reviewing Editors are reporting largely favorable experiences with the new model, with some concerns about quality and suggestions regarding process being voiced.

https://tinyurl.com/3u9w46fe

"A Critical Examination of the Ethics of AI-Mediated Peer Review"

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, including large language models like ChatGPT, offer promise and peril for scholarly peer review. On the one hand, AI can enhance efficiency by addressing issues like long publication delays. On the other hand, it brings ethical and social concerns that could compromise the integrity of the peer review process and outcomes. However, human peer review systems are also fraught with related problems, such as biases, abuses, and a lack of transparency, which already diminish credibility. While there is increasing attention to the use of AI in peer review, discussions revolve mainly around plagiarism and authorship in academic journal publishing, ignoring the broader epistemic, social, cultural, and societal epistemic in which peer review is positioned. . . . The discussion here emphasizes the need to critically assess the legitimacy of AI-driven peer review, addressing the benefits and downsides relative to the broader epistemic, social, ethical, and regulatory factors that sculpt its implementation and impact.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12356

Ebook from SciELO: We So Loved Open Access

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.

https://tinyurl.com/4v2f9dzk

"Supporting Open Access for 20 Years: Five Issues That Have Slowed the Transition to Full and Immediate OA"

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.

https://tinyurl.com/2s396wh7

"The Impact of Open Access Mandates on Scientific Research and Technological Development in the U.S."

Scientific articles subject to the mandate were utilized on average 42% more in patents
Articles subject to the mandate were not cited more frequently by other academic papers
Small firms were the primary beneficiaries of the increased knowledge diffusion
Scientific articles subject to the mandate were utilized on average 42% more in patents
Articles subject to the mandate were not cited more frequently by other academic papers
Small firms were the primary beneficiaries of the increased knowledge diffusion

https://tinyurl.com/bdekuf2j

Knowledge Exchange Report: "Alternative Publishing Platforms. What Have We Learnt?"

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.

https://tinyurl.com/59eknvy6

"Promoting Open Access in Research-Performing Organizations: Spheres of Activity, Challenges, and Future Action Areas "

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.

https://tinyurl.com/s3xepnhh

"Guest Post — Reputation and Publication Volume at MDPI and Frontiers"

Until recently, MDPI and Frontiers were known for their meteoric rise. At one point, powered by the Guest Editor model, the two publishers combined for about 500,000 papers (annualized), which translated into nearly USD $1,000,000,000 annual revenue. Their growth was extraordinary, but so has been their contraction. MDPI has declined by 27% and Frontiers by 36% in comparison to their peak.

https://tinyurl.com/ysn26san

"ACS, Elsevier, and Researchgate Resolve Litigation, with Solution to Support Researchers"

ACS and Elsevier, members of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, have agreed to a legal settlement with ResearchGate that ensures copyright-compliant sharing of research articles published with ACS or Elsevier on the ResearchGate site. The lawsuits pending against ResearchGate in Germany and the United States are now resolved. The specific terms of the parties’ settlement are confidential.

Background: "Munich Court Ruling Sides with Elsevier, ACS over ResearchGate."

https://tinyurl.com/mrr9xywj

"Scopus Introduces the Author Position Metric — A New Researcher Signal"

Most publications are created with the input from multiple co-authors. Traditional citation metrics give each co-author the same citation impact, even though the actual contribution of each researcher will not have been even. . . .

We have now added a new feature to capture the following authorship positions or types:

First author: The first author mentioned in the publication

Last author: The last author mentioned in the publication

Corresponding author: An author is marked as the corresponding author in the publication. Since June 2020, newly released documents in Scopus can contain more than one corresponding author. . .

Co-author: For documents with more than one author, co-authors are any author that is not a first, last or corresponding author

Single author: An author is the only author of a publication

https://tinyurl.com/45ynjmr7

"Tracing Data: A Survey Investigating Disciplinary Differences in Data Citation"

Data citations, or citations in reference lists to data, are increasingly seen as an important means to trace data reuse and incentivize data sharing. Although disciplinary differences in data citation practices have been well documented via scientometric approaches, we do not yet know how representative these practices are within disciplines. Nor do we yet have insight into researchers’ motivations for citing — or not citing — data in their academic work. Here, we present the results of the largest known survey (n = 2,492) to explicitly investigate data citation practices, preferences, and motivations, using a representative sample of academic authors by discipline, as represented in the Web of Science (WoS). We present findings about researchers’ current practices and motivations for reusing and citing data and also examine their preferences for how they would like their own data to be cited. We conclude by discussing disciplinary patterns in two broad clusters, focusing on patterns in the social sciences and humanities, and consider the implications of our results for tracing and rewarding data sharing and reuse.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00264

"USC Press and University Libraries Launch Open-Access Publishing Platform"

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.

https://tinyurl.com/yn7zd3ta

"Never Mind Predatory Publishers… What about "Grey" Publishers?"

The Harbingers project, which studied the working lives and scholarly communication behaviour of early career researchers (ECRs) over 6 years, found evidence of changing attitudes to questionable (grey) publishing. Thus, whilst predatory publishers have come to be treated with equanimity, as a problem easily dealt with, there was growing concern with the high volume of low-grade research being generated, some of which by "grey" open access publishers for want of a better name (questionable and non-standard have also been used). With the recent announcement (2023) that the government of Malaysia (a Harbinger case country) is not providing Article Processing Charges (APCs) for articles published by MDPI, Frontiers and Hindawi on quality and cost grounds, we set out to see what lay behind this decision and whether other countries exhibited similar concerns. Information was obtained by asking Harbinger country leads, mostly embedded in research universities, from Australia, China, France, Israel, Malaysia, Poland, Spain, UK, and the US to conduct desk research to establish what is happening. It was found that countries, like ECRs, appear to have formed into two different camps, with China, Poland, France, and Spain joining Malaysia in the camp of those who felt concerned about these publishers and the UK, US, Israel, and Australia belonging to the camp of the unconcerned. Explanations for the split are furnished and whether the Malaysian position will prevail elsewhere is considered. Finally, in this paper, we have aired issues/concerns, rather than provided robust, systematic data. For a systematic study we shall have to wait for the fuller study we are hoping to conduct.

https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2023.sep.09

"A Case for Open Peer Review Podcasting in Academic Librarianship"

One model of open peer review that aligns well with the work of information professionals, particularly those with information literacy instruction duties, is an open peer review podcast. This type of podcast, recorded before a manuscript is submitted for publication, brings an informal peer review process into the open as a host facilitates critical discussion of a research output between the researcher and a reviewer. This approach fosters a supportive community with shared values while utilizing the affordances of podcasting to make invisible labor visible and bring whole personhood into scholarship and scholarly communication.

https://tinyurl.com/wuz9dyta

"Transforming Scholarly Communications: The Part Played by the Pandemic and the Contribution of Early Career Researchers"

Investigates whether junior researchers believe that the scholarly communication system is changing in a significant way, whether they have contributed to the changes they envisaged, whether the pandemic has fast-forwarded change and what they thought a transformed system might look like. The data are drawn from the Harbingers-2 project, which investigated the impact of the pandemic on the scholarly communications attitudes and behaviours of early career researchers (ECRs). . . . A majority of ECRs thought that there had been significant changes in the scholarly system, and a large minority thought that the pandemic was responsible. Most of them wanted a system that was more open in terms of open access and open data, with a third taking personal action to bring about change.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1576

"Global Visibility of Publications through Digital Object Identifiers"

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

"Finding the Right Platform: A Crosswalk of Academy-Owned and Open-Source Digital Publishing Platforms"

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/

"Citation Beneficiaries of Discipline-Specific Mega-Journals: Who and How Much"

The emergence of mega-journals (MJs) has influenced scholarly communication. One concrete manifestation of this impact is that more citations have been generated. Citations are the foundation of many evaluation metrics to assess the scientific impact of journals, disciplines, and regions. We focused on searching for citation beneficiaries and quantifying the relative benefit at the journal, discipline and region levels. More specifically, we examined the distribution and contribution to citation-based metrics of citations generated by the five discipline-specific mega-journals (DSMJs) categorized as Environmental Sciences (ES) on Web of Science (WoS) from Clarivate Analytics in 2021: Sustainability, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Environmental Science and Pollution Research, Journal of Cleaner Production and Science of the Total Environment. Analysis of the distribution of citing data of the five DSMJs shows a pattern with wide coverage but skewness by region and the WoS category; that is, papers in the five DSMJs contributed 26.66% of their citations in 2021 to Mainland China and 22.48% to the ES. Moreover, 15 journals within the ES had their JIFs boosted by more than 20%, benefitting from the high citing rates of the five DSMJs. More importantly, the analysis provides clear evidence that DSMJs can contribute to JIF scores throughout a discipline through their volume of references. Overall, DSMJs can widely impact scholarly evaluation because they contribute citation benefits and improve the evaluation index performance of different scientific entities at different levels. Considering the important application of citation indicators in the academic evaluation system and the increase in citations, it is important to reconsider the real research impact that citations can reflect.

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02050-w

"Frontiers Pilots ‘Flat Fee’ Publishing Partnership with the University of California"

Gold open access publisher Frontiers has announced its first consortium partnership in North America with the University of California (UC). The one-year agreement will also pilot a novel partnership model: UC will receive unlimited publishing in 20 specified Frontiers journals for a pre-agreed annual flat fee.

The eligible journals have been selected by UC from Frontiers’ Humanities and Social Sciences and Sustainability titles as being from underrepresented and under-funded disciplines. The deal will allow corresponding UC authors at any of the University of California’s 10 campuses, including the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), to publish in these journals without limit and without APC.

https://tinyurl.com/yxuhb3fs

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"The Effect of Publishing Peer Review Reports on Referee Behavior in Five Scholarly Journals"

To increase transparency in science, some scholarly journals are publishing peer review reports. But it is unclear how this practice affects the peer review process. Here, we examine the effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals involved in a pilot study at Elsevier. By considering 9,220 submissions and 18,525 reviews from 2010 to 2017, we measured changes both before and during the pilot and found that publishing reports did not significantly compromise referees’ willingness to review, recommendations, or turn-around times. Younger and non-academic scholars were more willing to accept to review and provided more positive and objective recommendations. Male referees tended to write more constructive reports during the pilot. Only 8.1% of referees agreed to reveal their identity in the published report. These findings suggest that open peer review does not compromise the process, at least when referees are able to protect their anonymity.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-08250-2

"The Experiences of COVID-19 Preprint Authors: A Survey of Researchers about Publishing and Receiving Feedback on Their Work during the Pandemic"

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a rise in preprinting, triggered by the need for open and rapid dissemination of research outputs. We surveyed authors of COVID-19 preprints to learn about their experiences with preprinting their work and also with publishing their work in a peer-reviewed journal. Our research had the following objectives: 1. to learn about authors’ experiences with preprinting, their motivations, and future intentions; 2. to consider preprints in terms of their effectiveness in enabling authors to receive feedback on their work; 3. to compare the impact of feedback on preprints with the impact of comments of editors and reviewers on papers submitted to journals. In our survey, 78% of the new adopters of preprinting reported the intention to also preprint their future work. The boost in preprinting may therefore have a structural effect that will last after the pandemic, although future developments will also depend on other factors, including the broader growth in the adoption of open science practices. A total of 53% of the respondents reported that they had received feedback on their preprints. However, more than half of the feedback was received through "closed" channels–privately to the authors. This means that preprinting was a useful way to receive feedback on research, but the value of feedback could be increased further by facilitating and promoting "open" channels for preprint feedback. Almost a quarter of the feedback received by respondents consisted of detailed comments, showing the potential of preprint feedback to provide valuable comments on research. Respondents also reported that, compared to preprint feedback, journal peer review was more likely to lead to major changes to their work, suggesting that journal peer review provides significant added value compared to feedback received on preprints.

https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.15864

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"The Cost Profiles of Alternative Approaches to Journal Publishing"

The digital era is having a substantial impact on journal publishing. In order to assist in analysing this impact, a model is developed of the costs incurred in operating a refereed journal. Published information and estimates are used to apply the model to a computation of the total costs and per–article costs of various forms of journal publishing. Particular attention is paid to the differences between print and electronic forms of journals, to the various forms of open access, and to the differences between not–for–profit and for–profit publishing undertakings.

Insight is provided into why for–profit publishing is considerably more expensive than equivalent activities undertaken by unincorporated mutuals and not–for–profit associations. Conclusions are drawn concerning the current debates among conventional approaches and the various open alternatives.

https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v12i12.2048

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Open Access Mirror Journals: An Experiment in Brand Loyalty"

Open access (OA) mirror journals have been launched by Elsevier as an alternative or supplement to original non-OA journals [1]. These OA mirror journals have the same title, aims and scope, editorial board, and peer-review process as their parent journal, and are distinguished by an "X" after the name. However, because the OA mirror journals have their own ISSNs (International Standard Serial Numbers), they are completely separate journals, which does not fit with Harrison’s [1] assertion that by publishing OA mirror journals, Elsevier is responding to authors’ need to publish in OA journals while simultaneously not wanting to sacrifice their association with the leading journal brands in their field. Asai [2] compared 22 pairs of Elsevier’s OA mirror journals with their parent journals and found that the parent journals were more preferred by authors. This essay analyses Elsevier’s OA mirror journals as an experiment of one publisher, which has a dominant position in the scientific publishing market. Elsevier has set an ambitious price level for article processing charges (APCs) in these OA mirror journals. The evolution of the price level for mirror journals, compared with the evolution of the price level for APCs for other Elsevier’s journals, is used to assess the success of Elsevier’s experiment.

https://doi.org/10.6087/kcse.308

"IOP Publishing and the University of Texas System Drive Forward Open Access to North American Research with New Transformative Agreement"

The University of Texas System (UT System) — one of the US’s largest public university systems — have established a three-year transformative agreement (TA) with society publisher IOP Publishing (IOPP). The agreement between IOPP and the UT System allows affiliated researchers to publish unlimited OA articles in IOPP’s journals and most partner journals with the costs to publish already covered. . . .

The TA will help to widen the readership and increase visibility of research published by authors affiliated with all 14 UT System Institutions. IOPP user data shows that OA content is downloaded 80% more and cited 30% more than paywalled content, demonstrating the substantial advantages of publishing research OA.

https://tinyurl.com/5n6t3z5u

"Article Processing Charges in Gold Open Access Journals: An Empirical Study"

This study focuses on analyzing the trends in article processing charges (APCs) levied by open access journals. . . . Among the 17,379 journals included in the DOAJ, only 5,122 journals were found to charge APCs. Through the examination of the collected data, it was discovered that the highest APC amount recorded was INR 518,334.95 (equivalent to USD 6680.46), while the lowest APC observed was INR 1.04 (equivalent to USD 0.013).

https://doi.org/10.1080/15424065.2023.2243801