Category: Scholarly Journals

"‘Anna’s Archive ’ Opens the Door to Z-Library and Other Pirate Libraries"


Anna’s Archive is basically a meta-search engine that can find content from third-party ‘pirate’ sources. . . . The Z-Library links rely on the Tor version of the site, which remains online. However, the goal is to ultimately make all content available through IPFS [InterPlanetary File System] as well. This would make it pretty much impossible to take down, similar to the Library Genesis forks, which also use IPFS.

https://cutt.ly/pMZYb6Y

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Oregon State University: "Elsevier Negotiations Suspended — Library Plans and Alternative Ways to Access Articles"


You have probably just read the Provost’s announcement that we are suspending our negotiations with Elsevier for the remainder of this year. We did not make this decision lightly. Our Elsevier contract represents more than one-fifth of our entire collections budget at OSU, and we know that this decision will be disruptive. . . .Our primary strategy will be article-level fulfillment. We will build on our already outstanding Interlibrary Loan service (ILL), and add some additional tools that should improve those workflows and provide a more seamless user experience. . . . In the summer of 2023 we will develop a timeline and goals for access to Elsevier content in 2024. At that point, we will be looking to secure access to a curated list of titles, informed by the assessment I described above, and by the ongoing conversations we have been having with our OSU community about open and sustainable scholarly communication.

https://cutt.ly/sMZWsgs

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University of Washington: "Elsevier Negotiation Update 11/2/2022"


At $2.6M per year and an annual 2.5% increase, the Elsevier journal package is the most expensive annual expenditure for the University of Washington (UW) Libraries. For context, the total UW Libraries collections budget for the Seattle campus is approximately $16 million, and we spend about $13 million on ongoing subscriptions. Immediate access to 2,500 Elsevier journal titles published in the current year represent about 15% of the Libraries annual collections budget. . . .The Elsevier journal package reinforces the scholarly publishing model based on paywalls and rationing of access, inequitable opportunities for publishing, and excessive pricing and annual price increases that undermines a scholarly ecosystem where the open sharing of knowledge is critical to accelerating change for the public good. . . .As a result, the Libraries will be unable to maintain immediate access for all titles in our current list of 2,500 Elsevier journal titles on ScienceDirect. There is no choice but to begin identifying which journals need to be available for immediate access to meet patient care needs as well as long term use for research, teaching, and learning. The Libraries will continue to provide faculty, students and staff access to published articles through alternative access options such as PubMed Central, Google Scholar, and interlibrary loan — most requested articles are delivered within a few hours or business days.

https://cutt.ly/bMZQwIf

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"eLife Reviewed Preprints: Interview with Fiona Hutton"


How is the new publishing model similar to or different from older publishing models based on preprints combined with peer review (e.g. Copernicus, F1000)? There are three main differences. 1) Peer review and assessment at eLife continues to be organised by an editorial team made up of academic experts and led by an Editor-in-Chief, Deputy Editors, Senior Editors, and a Board of Reviewing Editors via a consultative peer-review model already known as one of the most constructive for authors in the industry. 2) The addition of an eLife assessment is a further crucial part of our model, distinctive from what others are doing—it is a key addition to our public peer reviews and it enables readers to understand the context of the work, the significance of the research and the strength of the evidence. 3) We are no longer making accept/reject decisions based on peer review—authors will choose if and when to produce a Version of Record at any point following the review process.

https://cutt.ly/gMPfonI

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"Authors Guild Applauds Arrest, Indictment of Major E-Book Pirates"


"While we are heartened by the takedown and the resulting reduction in harm to authors, we are not unsympathetic to the plight of those college and other students who have perhaps felt forced to resort to such illegal pirate websites and other free sources of textbooks to help them manage the extremely high cost of higher education," Rasenberger [Authors Guild CEO] said. "However, these students’ anger is misdirected. The exorbitant cost of education should not be borne by authors and publishers but by the universities, and it should not be used to justify reliance on foreign criminals for textbooks or to trivialize the immense personal and economic harm Z-Library was causing authors who are trying to make a living under increasingly difficult and hostile economic circumstances."

https://cutt.ly/hMPgka5

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"Nature Authors Can Now Seamlessly Share Their Data"


In April of this year, Springer Nature and Figshare announced a new integrated route for data deposition at Nature Portfolio titles to help address this problem and encourage researchers to share data rather than seeing it as a hurdle to article publication.

Following the success of the pilot, this streamlined integration is now being extended. Authors submitting to the Nature Portfolio journals, including Nature, in the fields of life, health, chemical and physical sciences will now be able to easily opt into data sharing, via Figshare, as part of one integrated submission process.

https://cutt.ly/RMTKcpo

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"Elsevier and Council of Australian University Librarians Sign Agreement to Support Transition to Open Access Publishing Alongside Continued Research Access for Australia and New Zealand Researchers"


The three-year agreement addresses CAUL’s goals for a rapid and sustainable transition to open access publishing and represents the largest transformative agreement for both countries.

Under the agreement, which takes effect from January 2023, ANZ researchers at CAUL-affiliated academic institutions that participate in the agreement can make their research articles immediately available via open access publishing in Elsevier’s journals.

https://cutt.ly/BMQRgeL

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"How Often Do Cancer Researchers Make Their Data and Code Available and What Factors Are Associated with Sharing"


One in five studies declared data were publicly available (59/306, 19%, 95% CI: 15–24%). However, when data availability was investigated this percentage dropped to 16% (49/306, 95% CI: 12–20%), and then to less than 1% (1/306, 95% CI: 0–2%) when data were checked for compliance with key FAIR principles. While only 4% of articles that used inferential statistics reported code to be available (10/274, 95% CI: 2–6%), the odds of reporting code to be available were 5.6 times higher for researchers who shared data.

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-022-02644-2

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Paywall: "Expanding Your Institutional Repository: Librarians Working with Faculty"


Since a successful institutional repository will contain a higher percentage of the contributors’ materials, we implemented a system to upload faculty publications more effectively to our academic library’s institutional repository.. . . The success of this method is indicated by the increase in articles that have been uploaded to our institutional repository; as a result of the implementation of this program, the number of publications in our university’s institutional repository by these authors has increased 174 %.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2022.102628

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"The Rise of Open Access Journals in Radiation Oncology: Influence on Resident Research, 2015 – 2019"


The residents in this study published 2,637 first-author, PubMed-searchable manuscripts, 555 (21.0%) of which appeared in 138 OA journals. The number of publications in OA journals per resident increased from 0.47 for the class of 2015 to 0.79 for the class of 2019. Publications in OA journals garnered fewer citations than those in non-OA journals (8.9 versus 14.9, p < 0.01). 90.6% of OA journals levy an APC for original research reports (median $1,896), which is positively correlated with their 2019 impact factor (r = 0.63, p < 0.01). Aggregate APCs totaled $900,319.21 and appeared to increase over the study period.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adro.2022.101121

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Investments in Open: Association of Research Libraries US University Member Expenditures on Services, Collections, Staff, and Infrastructure in Support of Open Scholarship


In total, 46 of the 102 institutions provided full or partial results. Summary results are divided into the following categories: read-and-publish or transitional agreements, article processing charges (APC) or OA funds, non-APC-based OA publishing models, institutional repository services, OA journal hosting and publishing services, and open monographs.

The survey found that the total aggregate spending on open access for all 46 responding libraries was $32 million USD, with an average expenditure per institution of $785,940. This represents an average of 2.26% of the total library budget spent on open, ranging from 0.19% to 11.02% across respondent libraries. As a portion of the total amount of expenses spent on OA infrastructure, the majority of funds are invested in read-and-publish agreements (~$20 million) followed by institutional repository infrastructure with investments of 17% of total OA expenses (~$5 million) across the 46 institutions.

https://cutt.ly/nMuAMbT

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"Gender and Country Biases in Wikipedia Citations to Scholarly Publications"


We investigate gender- and country-based biases in Wikipedia citation practices using linked data from the Web of Science and a Wikipedia citation dataset. . . . we show that publications by women are cited less by Wikipedia than expected, and publications by women are less likely to be cited than those by men. Scholarly publications by authors affiliated with non-Anglosphere countries are also disadvantaged in getting cited by Wikipedia. . . . The level of gender- or country-based inequalities varies by research field, and the gender-country intersectional bias is prominent in math-intensive STEM fields.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24723

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"The Digital First Sale Doctrine in a Blockchain World: NFTs and the Temporary Reproduction Exception"


At time of writing, this is the first piece of legal scholarship on NFTs that examines their interaction with the first sale doctrine. This Note examines the rise of the NFT phenomenon and the historical articulation of the first sale doctrine in the digital era. As NFTs present challenges for the copyright owner’s reproduction right, this Note recommends legislative intervention to clarify the doctrine’s applicability within the digital marketplace. This Note proposes an addition to the Copyright Act of 1976 that expressly allows for a first sale to be effective upon a digital transfer, albeit under certain conditions. Amending the act in this manner promotes the Copyright Act’s purpose of balancing the interests of copyright owners and consumers in a dynamic digital marketplace, and serves as a guide that will be necessary to avoid legal ambiguities and increased litigation.

https://cutt.ly/DN3TV8v

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"Motivations, Concerns and Selection Biases When Posting Preprints: A Survey of bioRxiv Authors"


Since 2013, the usage of preprints as a means of sharing research in biology has rapidly grown, in particular via the preprint server bioRxiv. Recent studies have found that journal articles that were previously posted to bioRxiv received a higher number of citations or mentions/shares on other online platforms compared to articles in the same journals that were not posted. However, the exact causal mechanism for this effect has not been established, and may in part be related to authors’ biases in the selection of articles that are chosen to be posted as preprints. We aimed to investigate this mechanism by conducting a mixed-methods survey of 1,444 authors of bioRxiv preprints, to investigate the reasons that they post or do not post certain articles as preprints, and to make comparisons between articles they choose to post and not post as preprints. We find that authors are most strongly motivated to post preprints to increase awareness of their work and increase the speed of its dissemination; conversely, the strongest reasons for not posting preprints centre around a lack of awareness of preprints and reluctance to publicly post work that has not undergone a peer review process. We additionally find evidence that authors do not consider quality, novelty or significance when posting or not posting research as preprints, however, authors retain an expectation that articles they post as preprints will receive more citations or be shared more widely online than articles not posted.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274441

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"Scholarly Communication Competencies: An Analysis of Confidence among Australasia Library Staff"


Through a nationwide survey of universities and research organizations in Australia and New Zealand, this article investigates the level of confidence that librarians working in scholarly communication have in their current competencies. The results show that, while respondents were generally confident across seven competency areas (institutional repository management, publishing services, research practice, copyright services, open access policies and scholarly communication landscape, data management services, and assessment and impact metrics), the majority combined their scholarly communication tasks with other roles.

https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.6.966

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"Library Publishing Coalition Releases 2021-2022 Annual Report"


In addition to outlining the LPC’s finances, assets, and membership, the Annual Report highlights several programmatic milestones, including:

  • Deliverables from the Library Publishing Workflows project
  • A landscape scan undertaken by the Preservation Task Force
  • The launch of a joint project between LPC, ARL, and AUP to build connections between university-based publishing communities.

https://cutt.ly/eNDIWtC

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"Finding Your Way in Academic Librarianship: Introducing the Scholarly Communication Notebook"


The SCN (https://www.oercommons.org/hubs/SCN) is an extension of an earlier, related, effort to create an open textbook about scholarly communication librarianship. That book, Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge, is forthcoming from ACRL in 2023. . . . Even if openly licensed, a book remains a relatively static resource. Scholarly communication is not static at all. Far from it, as many will attest and recognize through hard-won experience. Our contribution is the SCN, an online collection of contributed, modular, open content scoped to scholarly communication topics, which might complement the book or find use independent of it.

https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.83.10.444

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"Guest Post – Wikipedia’s Citations Are Influencing Scholars and Publishers"


A well-written Wikipedia page will cite scholarly publications with links to the articles in those citations that can be accessed immediately by users. At the 2019 Charleston Conference keynote, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle claimed that 6% of Wikipedia readers click on a link in the footnotes (although another study found that it was more like 0.03%). In 2016, Wikipedia was the 6th-largest referrer for DOIs, with half of referrals successfully authenticating to access the article. External links on Wikipedia produce an estimated 7 million dollars of revenue per month. Given that Wikipedia is such a popular website, it’s unsurprising that academic publishers are actively pursuing ways to promote their work on Wikipedia.

https://cutt.ly/tNIZJtG

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First Issue of the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education Published


We are pleased to present the inaugural issue of the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (JOERHE). As academic librarians, the three of us intersect with Open Educational Resources, open access, and open publishing in a variety of ways. Drawing on our past experiences with both traditional and open publishing models, we saw a need to create a dedicated, open scholarly space for those who wish to engage in community and scholarly conversation about all things open. It is exciting to see this idea come to fruition. JOERHE’s vision is to reduce the barriers to publication and create a space where authors, reviewers, and readers can build a community that supports and encourages the growth of the profession through kindness to one another as scholars. We also seek to provide transparency in our publishing practices through clear and frequent communication with our authors, reviewers, and readers.

https://cutt.ly/lNRWsd7

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ARL: "Two-Page Table Compares 2013 and 2022 Public-Access Guidance from US Office of Science and Technology Policy"


In an effort to highlight the significant differences between the 2013 [OSTP] memorandum and the 2022 guidance, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published a comparison table of the two documents. This table breaks down the 2013 and 2022 OSTP public-access guidance into sections for a quick side-by-side comparison of 10 key components, including embargo period, data policies, formats, and metadata expectations.

https://cutt.ly/jNm0OeT

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"Lessons Learned from Reevaluating Big Deals with Unsub"


The value of big deals is increasingly unclear. This article briefly discusses factors others have considered in evaluating big deals and covers the four factors that should be considered moving forward: open access, interlibrary loan, post-termination access, and a-la-carte costs. Unsub, a tool for reevaluating big deals created by the nonprofit OurResearch, is introduced. Lessons learned are shared from two years of helping libraries reevaluate big deals to provide insight into the complexities and tradeoffs involved in evaluating big deals across many libraries.

https://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2022.2132090

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"AAAS Survey: Many Researchers Face Difficulties Paying Open Access Fees"


The ability of researchers to obtain funding for APCs varied based on institution size, the survey found. Researchers at institutions with a student body between 3,000 and 9,999 students were three times as likely to find it very difficult to obtain funds for APCs as their counterparts at larger institutions with more than 10,000 students, adjusting for gender, race, and length of time conducting research. The survey also found gender disparities in funding for APCs: women were three times as likely to use grant funds to pay for APCs than their male counterparts, adjusting for race, length of time conducting research, and institution size.

https://cutt.ly/lNkyZCf

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"Impact of the 2022 OSTP Memo: A Bibliometric Analysis of U.S. Federally Funded Publications, 2017-2021"


Therefore, this study seeks to more deeply investigate the characteristics of U.S. federally funded research over a 5-year period from 2017-2021 to better understand the updated guidance’s impact. It uses a manually created custom filter in the Dimensions database to return only publications that arise from U.S. federal funding. Results show that an average of 265,000 articles were published each year that acknowledge U.S. federal funding agencies, and these research outputs are further examined by publisher, journal title, institutions, and Open Access status.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14871

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"The Changing Landscape of Open Access Compliance"


Globally, the past decade has seen a move from 70% of all publishing being closed access to 54% being open access. . . . Figure 1 shows a dramatic 10x increase of OA policies adopted between 2005 and 2022 by institutions, according to ROARMAP. Numbers of policies adopted by funders increased from 19 in 2005 to 142 to 2022. . . . On top of the divergent paths for making research output "open" or "publicly available" (which are not always clearly defined), many policies also mention requirements about metadata and/or research data. However, clearer guidance on these areas are yet to be published.

https://cutt.ly/TNjHhl0

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"How Open Is the U15? A Preliminary Analysis of Open Access Publishing in Canadian Academic Libraries"


Introduction: This study offers insight into open access (OA) culture at Canadian university libraries by detailing the degree to which librarians working at Canada’s U15 (a collective of research-intensive institutions in Canada) make their research OA, as well as exploring the depth and reach of any OA mandates these institutions have. Method: This study uses a combination of bibliometric analysis and a review of institutional OA policies, beginning with an examination of a six-year span (2014–2019) of librarian-authored publications, searching four key library and information science databases, followed by a systematic search for a university-wide or library OA statement, policy, or mandate on each of the U15 websites. Results & Discussion: The data suggest that Canadian academic librarians are personally motivated to self-archive and make their research open. The high rate of publication in Gold OA journals, combined with the fact that several of the key library and information science journals for Canadian librarians are already OA, points to the importance of OA publishing for librarians as a community, as does the high number of expressions of commitment to OA publishing. Given the lack of variance comparatively between schools with an expression and without, the authors cannot comment on whether the expressions of support correlate to higher proportions of OA articles. Conclusion: This article provides a snapshot of a positive OA publishing culture at 15 Canadian university libraries by presenting data that show that most libraries have an expression of commitment to OA principles and most Canadian academic librarians working at U15 schools ensure that their research is OA.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.13831

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