Category: Scholarly Journals

Knowledge Exchange Consensus on Monitoring Open Access Publications and Cost Data

The Knowledge Exchange has released Knowledge Exchange Consensus on Monitoring Open Access Publications and Cost Data .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The report gives a great deal of detail on the presentations from the different countries, as well as the keynote address from Stuart Lawson on the true costs of publishing, which coincides significantly with the excellent work he and Katie Shamash have done with the Total Cost of Ownership project in Jisc Collections. In addition, Kai Geschuhn from the Max Planck Digital Library spoke about the idea of moving from offsetting deals to pay-as-you-publish; Rachel Lammey discussed CrossREF and open access meta-data; and Graham Stone, from Jisc, focused on collecting information on APC cost data.

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"Journal Publishers’ Big Deals: Are They Worth It?"

Stéphani Gagnon has self-archived "Journal Publishers' Big Deals: Are They Worth It?."

Here's an excerpt:

Following the initial Wiley's unbundling based on quantitative indicators, Université de Montréal refined its analysis methodology to incorporate qualitative indicators; i.e., the voice of its community. That methodology allowed identification of 5,893 periodicals deemed essential out of a possible 50,000 subscriptions. We realized that, at best, barely more than a third of the periodicals included in most Big Deals are truly of use.

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"Making Progress Toward Open Data: Reflections on Data Sharing at PLOS ONE"

Meg Byrne has published "Making Progress Toward Open Data: Reflections on Data Sharing at PLOS ONE" in the EveryONE Blog

Here's an excerpt:

PLOS ONE has published over 65,000 papers with a DAS in the three years since the open data policy was put in place. We were initially concerned we would not be able to consider a significant number of submissions because authors could not share data, but this did not turn out to be the case. Since the implementation of the updated policy, we estimate staff have rejected less than 0.1% of submissions due to authors’ unwillingness or inability to share data. What we have seen is a growing acceptance of data sharing and evolution of data sharing practices. For instance, there has been a steady growth in datasets available directly via public data repositories such as the NCBI databases, Figshare or Dryad. While the proportion of articles with a data availability statement linking to one of these repositories is still relatively low, at around 20% in 2016, the growth is encouraging.

Another 60% of articles include data in the main text and supplementary information. While we strongly recommend discipline-specific open repositories where they exist, we also deposit the supporting information files, figures, and tables included with every article to Figshare and give each of these its own DOI. Thus, in addition to being available via the PLOS ONE article, this content is also available through an external data repository. The remaining 20% of papers have data available upon request due to restrictions acceptable under our policy, including restrictions related to sensitive data or because the data are owned by and available from a third party.

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"From the Ground Up: A Group Editorial on the Most Pressing Issues in Scholarly Communication"

Nicky Agate et. al have published "From the Ground Up: A Group Editorial on the Most Pressing Issues in Scholarly Communication" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately about the future of scholarly communication in libraries (for an example, see Clifford Lynch's guest editorial in the February issue of C&RL), and we wanted to give our board a chance to weigh in. They were asked to share their take on the most pressing issues in scholarly communication today, in their capacity as Editorial Board members (rather than as representatives of their respective institutions), and the following six short pieces are the result.

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A System That Prioritises Publications Means Early Career Researchers’ Scholarly Attitudes and Behaviours Remain Conservative

Dave Nicholas has published "A System That Prioritises Publications Means Early Career Researchers' Scholarly Attitudes and Behaviours Remain Conservative" in the LSE Impact Blog.

Here's an excerpt:

Reporting the first-year findings of a longitudinal study of an international panel of ECRs, Dave Nicholas reveals that many remain conservative in their scholarly attitudes and practices. ECRs are concerned by "risky" open peer review, regard archiving their work in repositories as a non-priority, and display little interest in open science or altmetrics. Many ECRs see opportunities for change, but do not feel able to grasp them as they are shackled to a reputational system that promotes publication record and citation scores above all else.

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"It Takes a Village: One Year of Journals Requiring ORCID iDs"

Alice Meadows has published "It Takes a Village: One Year of Journals Requiring ORCID iDs" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Today, well over 1,500 journals published by 16 publishers and societies, require iDs for at least their corresponding authors and, from our conversations with leaders of organizations across all sectors, we know that similar approaches are actively being considered by organizations in other sectors.

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"A Century of Science: Globalization of Scientific Collaborations, Citations, and Innovations"

Yuxiao Dong, Hao Ma, Zhihong Shen, and Kuansan Wang have self-archived "A Century of Science: Globalization of Scientific Collaborations, Citations, and Innovations."

Here's an excerpt:

In this work, we study the evolution of scientific development over the past century by presenting an anatomy of 89 million digitalized papers published between 1900 and 2015. We find that science has benefited from the shift from individual work to collaborative effort, with over 90% of the world-leading innovations generated by collaborations in this century, nearly four times higher than they were in the 1900s. We discover that rather than the frequent myopic- and self-referencing that was common in the early 20th century, modern scientists instead tend to look for literature further back and farther around. Finally, we also observe the globalization of scientific development from 1900 to 2015, including 25-fold and 7-fold increases in international collaborations and citations, respectively, as well as a dramatic decline in the dominant accumulation of citations by the US, the UK, and Germany, from 95% to 50% over the same period.

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"The Influence of Journal Submission Guidelines on Author’s Reporting of Statistics and Use of Open Research Practices"

David Giofrè et al. have published "The Influence of Journal Submission Guidelines on Author's Reporting of Statistics and Use of Open Research Practices" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

From January 2014, Psychological Science introduced new submission guidelines that encouraged the use of effect sizes, estimation, and meta-analysis (the "new statistics"), required extra detail of methods, and offered badges for use of open science practices. We investigated the use of these practices in empirical articles published by Psychological Science and, for comparison, by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, during the period of January 2013 to December 2015. The use of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) was extremely high at all times and in both journals. In Psychological Science, the use of confidence intervals increased markedly overall, from 28% of articles in 2013 to 70% in 2015, as did the availability of open data (3 to 39%) and open materials (7 to 31%). The other journal showed smaller or much smaller changes. Our findings suggest that journal-specific submission guidelines may encourage desirable changes in authors’ practices.

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"New World, Same Model: Periodicals Price Survey 2017"

Stephen Bosch and Kittie Henderson have published "New World, Same Model: Periodicals Price Survey 2017" in Library Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Since e-journal package prices are often based on custom publisher quotes, we analyzed the 2017 price increases of more than 6,300 e-journal packages handled by EBSCO and found that the average inflationary increase for 2017 was in the 4.5%–4.9% range. Reflecting the percentage of library orders dedicated to electronic format, approximately 78% of the 2017 orders placed by EBSCO on behalf of academic libraries were for either e-only or print plus online combinations.

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"The Stars Are Aligning for Preprints"

Judy Luther has published "The Stars Are Aligning for Preprints" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Significant events have occurred in rapid succession in the last year signaling that preprints, the author’s original manuscript before submission to a journal, will play a much larger role in the landscape. Developments with DOIs, changes in funder expectations, and the launch of new services indicate that preprints will no longer be limited to the hard sciences and social sciences.

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"What Are the Barriers to Post-Publication Peer Review?"

Jon Tennant has published "What Are the Barriers to Post-Publication Peer Review?" in the LSE Impact Blog.

Here's an excerpt:

Post-publication peer review emerged in response to increased calls for continuous moderation of the published research literature, consistent questioning of the functionality of the traditional peer review model, and a recognition that scientific discourse does not stop at the point of publication. However, uptake remains low overall. Jon Tennant sets out what the barriers to more widespread adoption of post-publication peer review have been and proposes potential solutions for each.

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"Ready for the Future? A Survey on Open Access with Scientists from the French National Research Center"

Joachim Schöpfel et al. have self-archived "Ready for the Future? A Survey on Open Access with Scientists from the French National Research Center."

Here's an excerpt:

The CNRS senior research managers (laboratory directors) globally share the positive opinion towards OA revealed by other studies with researchers from the UK, Germany, the USA and other countries. However, they are more supportive of open repositories (green road) than of OA journal publishing (gold). The response patterns reveal a gap between generally positive opinions about OA and less supportive behaviours, principally publishing articles with article processing charges (APCs). A small group of senior research managers does not seem to be interested in green or gold OA and reluctant to self-archiving and OA publishing.

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"The World’s Approach towards Publishing in Springer and Elsevier’s APC-Funded Open Access Journals "

College & Research Libraries has released an e-print of "The World's Approach towards Publishing in Springer and Elsevier's APC-Funded Open Access Journals.

Here's an excerpt:

The Netherlands, Norway and Poland ranked highest in terms of their OA shares. This can be attributed to the financial resources allocated to publication in general, and publishing in OA journals, in particular, by the countries. All developed countries and a large number of scientifically lagging and developing nations were found to publish OA articles in the APC journals. The OA papers have been exponentially growing across all the country scientific groups annually. Although the advanced nations published the lion share of the OA-APC papers and exhibited the highest growth, the under-development groups have been displaying high OA growth rates.

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"Open Data, [Open] Access: Linking Data Sharing and Article Sharing in the Earth Sciences"

Samantha Teplitzky has published "Open Data, [Open] Access: Linking Data Sharing and Article Sharing in the Earth Science" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION The norms of a research community influence practice, and norms of openness and sharing can be shaped to encourage researchers who share in one aspect of their research cycle to share in another. Different sets of mandates have evolved to require that research data be made public, but not necessarily articles resulting from that collected data. In this paper, I ask to what extent publications in the Earth Sciences are more likely to be open access (in all of its definitions) when researchers open their data through the Pangaea repository. METHODS Citations from Pangaea data sets were studied to determine the level of open access for each article. RESULTS This study finds that the proportion of gold open access articles linked to the repository increased 25% from 2010 to 2015 and 75% of articles were available from multiple open sources.

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"What Constitutes Peer Review of Data: A Survey of Published Peer Review Guidelines"

Todd A. Carpenter has self-archived "What Constitutes Peer Review of Data: A Survey of Published Peer Review Guidelines."

Here's an excerpt:

Since a number of journals specifically focus on the review and publication of data sets, reviewing their policies seems an appropriate place to start in assessing what existing practice looks like in the 'real world' of reviewing and publishing data. This article outlines a study of the publicly available peer review policies of 39 scientific publications that publish data papers to discern which criteria are most and least frequently referenced. It also compares current practice with proposed criteria published in 2012.

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"Looking into Pandora’s Box: The Content of Sci-Hub and Its Usage"

Bastian Greshake has self-archived "Looking into Pandora's Box: The Content of Sci-Hub and Its Usage."

Here's an excerpt:

By utilizing the recently released corpus of Sci-Hub and comparing it to the data of ~28 million downloads done through the service, this study tries to address some of these questions. The comparative analysis shows that both the usage and complete corpus is largely made up of recently published articles, with users disproportionately favoring newer articles and 35% of downloaded articles being published after 2013. These results hint that embargo periods before publications become Open Access are frequently circumnavigated using Guerilla Open Access approaches like Sci-Hub.

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"European Commission Considering Leap into Open-Access Publishing"

Martin Enserink has published "European Commission Considering Leap into Open-Access Publishing" in Science.

Here's an excerpt:

The European Commission, which spends more than £10 billion annually on research, may follow two other big league funders, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and set up a “publishing platform” for the scientists it funds, in an attempt to accelerate the transition to open-access publishing in Europe.

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Towards a Competitive and Sustainable Open Access Publishing Market in Europe

OpenAIRE has released Towards a Competitive and Sustainable Open Access Publishing Market in Europe.

Here's an excerpt:

Without intervention, immediate OA to just half of Europe's scientific publications will not be achieved until 2025 or later. Readers in academia have greater access, to more content, than ever before. Despite this, the majority of publications arising from public investments in research remain in accessible to the public, and the growth of OA appears to be slowing.

This study considers the economic factors contributing to the current state of the open access publishing market, and evaluates the potential for European policymakers to enhance market competition and sustainability in parallel to increasing access.

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"Emerging Trends In Peer Review—A Survey"

Richard Walkerand Pascal Rocha da Silva have published "Emerging Trends In Peer Review—A Survey" in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Here's an excerpt:

"Classical peer review" has been subject to intense criticism for slowing down the publication process, bias against specific categories of paper and author, unreliability, inability to detect errors and fraud, unethical practices, and the lack of recognition for unpaid reviewers. This paper surveys innovative forms of peer review that attempt to address these issues. Based on an initial literature review, we construct a sample of 82 channels of scientific communication covering all forms of review identified by the survey, and analyze the review mechanisms used by each channel. We identify two major trends: the rapidly expanding role of preprint servers (e.g., ArXiv) that dispense with traditional peer review altogether, and the growth of "non-selective review," focusing on papers' scientific quality rather than their perceived importance and novelty. Other potentially important developments include forms of "open review," which remove reviewer anonymity, and interactive review, as well as new mechanisms for post-publication review and out-of-channel reader commentary, especially critical commentary targeting high profile papers.

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PubMed Launches LinkOut to Institutional Repository Full-Text Publications and Other Resources

PubMed has launched LinkOut.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

PubMed users can now see the icon that links to the full text deposited at an institutional repository (IR) using LinkOut. The LinkOut service allows you to link to full text, library holdings, and other relevant external resources from PubMed and other NCBI databases.

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"What Makes Papers Visible on Social Media? An Analysis of Various Document Characteristics"

Zohreh Zahedi et al. have self-archived "What Makes Papers Visible on Social Media? An Analysis of Various Document Characteristics."

Here's an excerpt:

In this study we have investigated the relationship between different document characteristics and the number of Mendeley readership counts, tweets, Facebook posts, mentions in blogs and mainstream media for 1.3 million papers published in journals covered by the Web of Science (WoS). It aims to demonstrate that how factors affecting various social media-based indicators differ from those influencing citations and which document types are more popular across different platforms. Our results highlight the heterogeneous nature of altmetrics, which encompasses different types of uses and user groups engaging with research on social media.

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"The Coverage of Microsoft Academic: Analyzing the Publication Output of a University"

Sven E. Hug and Martin P. Braendle have self-archived "The Coverage of Microsoft Academic: Analyzing the Publication Output of a University."

Here's an excerpt:

This is the first in-depth study on the coverage of Microsoft Academic (MA). The coverage of a verified publication list of a university was analyzed on the level of individual publications in MA, Scopus, and Web of Science (WoS). Citation counts were analyzed and issues related to data retrieval and data quality were examined. . . . MA surpasses Scopus and WoS clearly with respect to book-related document types and conference items but falls slightly behind Scopus with regard to journal articles. MA shows the same biases as Scopus and WoS with regard to the coverage of the social sciences and humanities, non-English publications, and open-access publications. Rank correlations of citation counts are high between MA and the benchmark databases. . . .Given the fast and ongoing development of MA, we conclude that MA is on the verge of becoming a bibliometric superpower. However, comprehensive studies on the quality of MA data are still lacking.

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"Who Support Open Access Publishing? Gender, Discipline, Seniority and Other Factors Associated with Academics’ OA Practice"

Yimei Zhu has published "Who Support Open Access Publishing? Gender, Discipline, Seniority and Other Factors Associated with Academics' OA Practice" in Scientometrics.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper presents the findings from a survey study of UK academics and their publishing behaviour. . . . The results are based on a survey study of academics at 12 Russell Group universities, and reflect responses from over 1800 researchers. . . . The results suggest that there were differences in the extent of OA practice between different universities, academic disciplines, age and seniorities. Academics’ use in OA publishing was also related to their awareness of OA policy and OA repositories, their attitudes towards the importance of OA publishing and their belief in OA citation advantage.

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"Open Access to Scientific Information in Emerging Countries"

Joachim Schöpfel has published "Open Access to Scientific Information in Emerging Countries" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

Access to information plays a critical role in supporting development. Open access to scientific information is one solution. Up to now, the open access movement has been most successful in the Western hemisphere. The demand for open access is great in the developing world as it can contribute to solving problems related to access gaps. Five emerging countries, called BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — play a specific and leading role with a significant influence on regional and global affairs because of their large and fast-growing national economies, their demography and geographic situation. In order to better understand open access in each of the five countries, in this paper we take a look at specific conditions in each country, relying on data from information professionals and scientists from BRICS, with an empirical approach focused on country-specific characteristics and challenges. The paper is an updated and enriched synthesis of a recent work on open access in the BRICS countries published by Litwin, Sacramento CA.

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"’Just Google It’—The Scope of Freely Available Information Sources for Doctoral Thesis Writing"

Vincas Grigas et al. have published "'Just Google It'—The Scope of Freely Available Information Sources for Doctoral Thesis Writing" in Information Research.

Here's an excerpt:

Library collections and subscribed databases could cover up to 80 per cent of all information resources used in doctoral theses. Among the most significant findings to emerge from this study is the fact that on average more than half (57 per cent) of all utilised information resources were freely available or were accessed without library support. We may presume that the library as a direct intermediator for information users is potentially important and irreplaceable only in four out of ten attempts of PhD students to seek information.

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