"The Influence of Journal Publisher Characteristics on Open Access Policy Trends"

Elizabeth Gadd, Jenny Fry, and Claire Creaser have published "The Influence of Journal Publisher Characteristics on Open Access Policy Trends" in Scientometrics.

Here's an excerpt:

Examines SHERPA/RoMEO publisher open access (OA) policy information for 100 publishers over a 13 year period (2004–2016) to consider whether their size, type or country (UK or US) affected the development of their OA policy over time. A publisher's RoMEO colour code, whether they offered a Gold OA option, and the mean number of restrictions as to when, how and where papers may be self-archived, were all mapped. Kruskal–Wallis tests were run to assess whether the differences between their 2004 and 2016 positions were statistically significant. Finds that the growth of Green and Gold OA policy approaches has not been evenly distributed amongst publishers with some significant differences amongst publishers of different size, types and country (UK and US).

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"Converting the Literature of a Scientific Field to Open Access through Global Collaboration: The Experience of SCOAP3 in Particle Physics"

Alexander Kohls and Orcid and Salvatore MeleOrcid have published "Converting the Literature of a Scientific Field to Open Access through Global Collaboration: The Experience of SCOAP3 in Particle Physics" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

Gigantic particle accelerators, incredibly complex detectors, an antimatter factory and the discovery of the Higgs boson—this is part of what makes CERN famous. Only a few know that CERN also hosts the world largest Open Access initiative: SCOAP3. The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics started operation in 2014 and has since supported the publication of 20,000 Open Access articles in the field of particle physics, at no direct cost, nor burden, for individual authors worldwide. SCOAP3 is made possible by a 3000-institute strong partnership, where libraries re-direct funds previously used for subscriptions to 'flip' articles to 'Gold Open Access'. With its recent expansion, the initiative now covers about 90% of the journal literature of the field. This article describes the economic principles of SCOAP3, the collaborative approach of the partnership, and finally summarizes financial results after four years of successful operation.

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"Data Policies of Highly-Ranked Social Science Journals"

Mercè Crosas et al. have self-archived "Data Policies of Highly-Ranked Social Science Journals."

Here's an excerpt:

By encouraging and requiring that authors share their data in order to publish articles, scholarly journals have become an important actor in the movement to improve the openness of data and the reproducibility of research. But how many social science journals encourage or mandate that authors share the data supporting their research findings? How does the share of journal data policies vary by discipline? What influences these journals’ decisions to adopt such policies and instructions? And what do those policies and instructions look like?

We discuss the results of our analysis of the instructions and policies of 291 highly-ranked journals publishing social science research, where we studied the contents of journal data policies and instructions across 14 variables, such as when and how authors are asked to share their data, and what role journal ranking and age play in the existence and quality of data policies and instructions. We also compare our results to the results of other studies that have analyzed the policies of social science journals, although differences in the journals chosen and how each study defines what constitutes a data policy limit this comparison. We conclude that a little more than half of the journals in our study have data policies. A greater share of the economics journals have data policies and mandate sharing, followed by political science/international relations and psychology journals.

Finally, we use our findings to make several recommendations: Policies should include the terms "data," "dataset" or more specific terms that make it clear what to make available; policies should include the benefits of data sharing; journals, publishers, and associations need to collaborate more to clarify data policies; and policies should explicitly ask for qualitative data.

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"Malware in OA"

Walt Crawford has published "Malware in OA" in Walt at Random.

Here's an excerpt:

I've finished the first pass. There are a lot of journals with malware problems: 410, as compared to 67 in last year's run.

Yes, Indonesia makes up the bulk of them–but by no means all.

See also the spreadsheet of infected journals.

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Open Divide? Critical Studies on Open Access

Litwin Books has released Open Divide? Critical Studies on Open Access.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This book brings together seventeen short critical studies of scientists and librarians from different continents, all interested in open access, most of them supporting and accompanying the open access projects and initiatives since many years, each one with the motivation to better understand (and make understood) the ongoing transformation of scientific communication.

With the agreement of Litwin Books, some authors have made open access versions of their papers available.

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"Push Versus Pull"

Sheldon H. Jacobson has published "Push Versus Pull" in Communications of the ACM.

Here's an excerpt:

The access subscription fee model represents a "Push Model" for financing publications, whereby publishers push access onto institutions, for an access subscription fee. An alternative "Pull Model" positions publishers to pull submissions to their journals. In such a model, no access subscription fees are paid, and hence, anyone can access research publications. What institutions would pay are submission subscription fees, an institution-wide fee that permits their entire faculty to submit papers to a particular journal or a publisher's portfolio of journals.

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"Predator in the Pool? A Quantitative Evaluation of Non-indexed Open Access Journals in Aquaculture Research"

Jeff C. Clements et al. have published "Predator in the Pool? A Quantitative Evaluation of Non-indexed Open Access Journals in Aquaculture Research" in Frontiers in Marine Science.

Here's an excerpt:

Predatory open access (OA) journals can be defined as non-indexed journals that exploit the gold OA model for profit, often spamming academics with questionable e-mails promising rapid OA publication for a fee. In aquaculture—a rapidly growing and highly scrutinized field—the issue of such journals remains undocumented. We employed a quantitative approach to determine whether attributes of scientific quality and rigor differed between OA aquaculture journals not indexed in reputable databases and well-established, indexed journals. Using a Google search, we identified several non-indexed OA journals, gathered data on attributes of these journals and articles therein, and compared these data to well-established aquaculture journals indexed in quality-controlled bibliometric databases. We then used these data to determine if non-indexed journals were likely predatory OA journals and if they pose a potential threat to aquaculture research. On average, non-indexed OA journals published significantly fewer papers per year, had cheaper fees, and were more recently established than indexed journals. Articles in non-indexed journals were, on average, shorter, had fewer authors and references, and spent significantly less time in peer review than their indexed counterparts; the proportion of articles employing rigorous statistical analyses was also lower for non-indexed journals. Additionally, articles in non-indexed journals were more likely to be published by scientists from developing nations. Worryingly, non-indexed journals were more likely to be found using a Google search, and their articles superficially resembled those in indexed journals. These results suggest that the non-indexed aquaculture journals identified herein are likely predatory OA journals and pose a threat to aquaculture research and the public education and perception of aquaculture. Several points of reference from this study, in combination, may help scientists and the public more easily identify these possibly predatory journals, as these journals were typically established after 2010, publishing <20 papers per year, had fees <$1,000, and published articles <80 days after submission. Subsequently checking reputable and quality-controlled databases such as the Directory of Open Access Journals, Web of Science, Scopus, and Thompson Reuters can aid in confirming the legitimacy of non-indexed OA journals and can facilitate avoidance of predatory OA aquaculture journals.

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"Understanding and Supporting Researchers’ Choices in Sharing Their Publications: The Launch of the FairShare Network and Shareable PDF"

Charlie Rapple has published "Understanding and Supporting Researchers' Choices in Sharing Their Publications: The Launch of the FairShare Network and Shareable PDF" in Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

Researchers have for many years had access to new platforms and channels for networking and sharing resources, but the pace of growth in their usage of these networks has substantially increased recently. This has led to full-text sharing on a scale that concerns publishers and libraries, because of the proportion of such sharing that infringes copyright. This article summarizes key findings of a 2017 survey that explored researchers’ awareness of and behaviours in relation to scholarly collaboration networks and other emerging mechanisms for discovering and gaining access to content, along with their views on copyright. The article also describes 'Shareable PDF', a new approach to PDF-based sharing that better enables such sharing to be measured and contextualized, and which has recently been successfully launched with authors and readers.

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"The Open Access Big Deal: Back to the Future"

Richard Poynder has published "The Open Access Big Deal: Back to the Future" in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

One obvious problem with the OA Big Deal is that it allows large legacy publishers to lock their high prices into the new OA environment, while marginalising and excluding the new-entrants that were supposed to disrupt the market. Unless something changes, therefore, the affordability problem will only be perpetuated.

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"Engaging and Supporting a University Press Scholarly Community"

Megan Taylor and Kathrine S. H. Jensen have published "Engaging and Supporting a University Press Scholarly Community" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper we explore how the development of The University of Huddersfield Press, a publisher of open access scholarly journals and monographs, has enabled the sharing of research with a wider online audience. We situate the development of the Press within a wider research environment and growing community of New University Presses (NUPs) where there is an increasing demand for demonstrating research impact, which drives the need for improved analysis and reporting of impact data, a task that often falls within the remit of library and academic support services. We detail the benefits of the University Press Manager role in terms of ensuring professional service that delivers consistency and sustainability. We go on to outline the experiences of engaging with different online spaces and detail the extensive support for student authors. We argue that in order for the Press to support building a strong and engaged scholarly community and provide new spaces for emerging research, continued investment in both platform development and infrastructure is required.

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"Releasing 1.8 Million Open Access Publications from Publisher Systems for Text and Data Mining"

Petr Knoth, Nancy Pontika and Lucas Anastasiou have published "Releasing 1.8 Million Open Access Publications from Publisher Systems for Text and Data Mining" in LSE Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

Text and data mining offers an opportunity to improve the way we access and analyse the outputs of academic research. But the technical infrastructure of the current scholarly communication system is not yet ready to support TDM to its full potential, even for open access outputs. To address this problem, Petr Knoth, Nancy Pontika and Lucas Anastasiou have developed the CORE Publisher Connector, a toolkit service designed to assist text miners in accessing content though a single machine interface. The Connector aims to solve the heterogeneity among publisher APIs and assist text miners with data collection, provide a centralised point of access to all openly available scientific publications, and provide a high-performance, constantly updated access interface.

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Pathways to Open Access

The University of California has released Pathways to Open Access.

Here's an excerpt:

Pursuant to the University of California (UC) Council of University Librarian’s (CoUL) 1 3 August 2017 charge, this Pathways to OA Working Group 2 has identified the current universe of Open Access (OA) approaches, and has analyzed the suite of strategies available for effectuating those approaches. Each approach described within this Pathways document offers unique and, in some cases, overlapping challenges, opportunities, and room for experimentation. The strategies examined here create space and freedom for the campuses to pursue both individualized and connected paths toward a large-scale transition to OA—though as we highlight below, collective action on implementing the strategies is likely to bear greater fruit.

See also: "Chart Summarizing OA Approaches and Strategies."

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"Evidence of Open Access of Scientific Publications in Google Scholar: A Large-Scale Analysis"

Alberto Martín et al. have self-archived "Evidence of Open Access of Scientific Publications in Google Scholar: A Large-Scale Analysis."

Here's an excerpt:

This article uses Google Scholar (GS) as a source of data to analyse Open Access (OA) levels across all countries and fields of research. All articles and reviews with a DOI and published in 2009 or 2014 and covered by the three main citation indexes in the Web of Science (2,269,022 documents) were selected for study. The links to freely available versions of these documents displayed in GS were collected. To differentiate between more reliable (sustainable and legal) forms of access and less reliable ones, the data extracted from GS was combined with information available in DOAJ, CrossRef, OpenDOAR, and ROAR. This allowed us to distinguish the percentage of documents in our sample that are made OA by the publisher (23.1%, including Gold, Hybrid, Delayed, and Bronze OA) from those available as Green OA (17.6%), and those available from other sources (40.6%, mainly due to ResearchGate). The data shows an overall free availability of 54.6%, with important differences at the country and subject category levels. The data extracted from GS yielded very similar results to those found by other studies that analysed similar samples of documents, but employed different methods to find evidence of OA, thus suggesting a relative consistency among methods.

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After 28 Years of Open Access Publishing, the Bryn Mawr Classical Review Needs Your Support

The Bryn Mawr Classical Review has released "A Request to Support BMCR."

Here's an excerpt:

However, BMCR also relies on a publishing platform that was designed and built in the 1990s. We now desperately need to update this platform, and we seek at the same time to modernize BMCR's extraordinary archive of data on the history of classical scholarship. We have already contracted for proposals to do this work—which was itself an expensive process!—and would be happy to discuss our plans with any interested parties.

In short, to see this process through, we urgently need $80,000. The expense is beyond the scale of our very limited resources. We cannot continue to operate with our current platform, nor can we update it on the basis of our modest endowment.

Donate here.

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"Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to the Internet Archive for Long Tail Journal Preservation"

The Internet Archive has released "Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to the Internet Archive for Long Tail Journal Preservation."

Here's an excerpt:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a research and development grant to the Internet Archive to address the critical need to preserve the "long tail" of open access scholarly communications. The project, Ensuring the Persistent Access of Long Tail Open Access Journal Literature, builds on prototype work identifying at-risk content held in web archives by using data provided by identifier services and registries. Furthermore, the project expands on work acquiring missing open access articles via customized web harvesting, improving discovery and access to this materials from within extant web archives, and developing machine learning approaches, training sets, and cost models for advancing and scaling this project’s work.

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"Collectivity and Collaboration: Imagining New Forms of Communality to Create Resilience in Scholar-Led Publishing"

Janneke Adema and Samuel A. Moore have self-archived "Collectivity and Collaboration: Imagining New Forms of Communality to Create Resilience in Scholar-Led Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

The Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access (OA) projects. The collective promotes a progressive vision for open access based on mutual alliances between the 45+ member presses and projects seeking to offer an alternative to commercial and legacy models of publishing. This article presents a case study of the collective, highlighting how it harnesses the strengths and organizational structures of not-for-profit, independent and scholar-led publishing communities by 1) further facilitating collective efforts through horizontal alliances, and by 2) enabling vertical forms of collaboration with other agencies and organizations within scholarly publishing. It provides a background to the origins of the ROAC, its members, its publishing models on display and its future plans, and highlights the importance of experimenting with and promoting new forms of communality in not-for-profit OA publishing.

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"Funding Community Controlled Open Infrastructure for Scholarly Communication: The 2.5% Commitment Initiative"

David W. Lewis, Lori Goetsch, Diane Graves, and Mike Roy have published "Funding Community Controlled Open Infrastructure for Scholarly Communication: The 2.5% Commitment Initiative" in College and Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

In August 2017, a short paper, "The 2.5% Commitment," was distributed on several email lists. The paper proposed that every academic library should commit to invest 2.5% of its total budget to support the common infrastructure needed to create the open scholarly commons. Somewhat to our surprise, the paper and the ideas it contained have generated widespread discussions and interest.

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"Converting the Literature of a Scientific Field to Open Access Through Global Collaboration: the Experience of SCOAP3 in Particle Physics"

Alexander Kohls and Salvatore Mele have self-archived "Converting the Literature of a Scientific Field to Open Access Through Global Collaboration: the Experience of SCOAP3 in Particle Physics."

Here's an excerpt:

The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) started operation in 2014 and has since supported the publication of 19,000 Open Access articles in the field of particle physics, at no direct cost, nor burden, for individual authors worldwide. SCOAP3 is made possible by a 3,000-institute strong partnership, where libraries re-direct funds previously used for subscriptions to 'flip' articles to 'gold Open Access'. With its recent expansion, the initiative now covers about 90% of the journal literature of the field. This article describes the economic principles of SCOAP3, the collaborative approach of the partnership, and finally summarizes financial results after four years of successful operation.

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"Open Access: EUA 2016-2017 Survey Results Released, New Survey Launched"

The European University Association has released "Open Access: EUA 2016-2017 Survey Results Released, New Survey Launched."

Here's an excerpt:

EUA has published its Open Access Survey Report 2016-2017. It tracks European universities' progress towards Open Access by looking at the degree to which they have implemented institutional policies and practices in the field. At the same time, EUA is launching its 2017-2018 Open Access Survey.

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The Role of Hybrid Open Access in Extending Author Choice

Research Consulting has released The Role of Hybrid Open Access in Extending Author Choice.

This study interviewed 33 authors who published in Gold open access journals to determine their attitudes about publishing in such journals.

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UW Press Joins UW Libraries

https://uwpressblog.com/2018/02/21/uw-press-joins-uw-libraries/

Keywords: University of Washington Press, University of Washington Libraries

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