Scholarly Journals – Page 7

"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

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"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

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"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

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"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

NASA’s Public Access Plan for Increasing Access to the Results of Scientific Research

This section highlights the significant changes to this document since the original plan was released in 2014. To wit:

There shall be no publication embargo period for peer-reviewed publications

Data that support peer-reviewed publications shall be made available in a public archive at the time of publication

Software should be included as part of Open Access, subject to NASA software release requirements

Software used to generate research findings/results should be made available in a public archive at the time of publication

Other data products beyond peer-reviewed publications and software should be considered as part of Open Access

https://tinyurl.com/4h9ezkk8

"The Rights of UC Authors Are at Stake. Here’s What We Are Doing about It."

"We have learned that many publishers are requiring UC authors to sign misleading License to Publish agreements, which undermine the spirit and intent of [UC’s open access policies]," wrote Susan Cochran, Chair of the faculty Academic Senate PDF.

By purporting to restrict an author’s abilities to reuse their own work, "these agreements essentially turn faculty authors into readers, as opposed to creators and owners of their own work," the Academic Senate chair concludes.

The team that leads negotiations with scholarly publishers on behalf of the university, including representatives from UC’s California Digital Library, the 10 campus libraries, and the Academic Senate, is now taking up the charge, making author rights the next frontier in advocating for the UC research community.

https://tinyurl.com/mry3hczw

"Generative AI, ChatGPT, and Google Bard: Evaluating the Impact and Opportunities for Scholarly Publishing"

My group within Wiley Partner Solutions designs and develops intelligent services that leverage advanced AI, big data, and cloud technologies to support publishers and researchers in open access and open science environments. To identify both benefits and risks of generative AI for our industry, we tested ChatGPT and Google Bard for authoring, for submission and reviews, for publishing, and for discovery and dissemination. I hope that our findings will inspire you to find fresh ideas for using Generative AI, and will stimulate further conversation about this new and controversial but potentially beneficial tool.

https://tinyurl.com/2y2ue6zr

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Paywall: "Identification and Portraits of Open Access Journals Based on Open Impact Metrics Extracted from Social Activities "

This study finds that open access journals strengthen international academic communication and cooperation, build cross-border and cross-regional knowledge-sharing projects, realize the knowledge of interdisciplinary sharing and exchange, and, most importantly, provide a one-stop service for readers. This research indicates that through the use of open impact metrics, it is possible to identify the portraits of open access journals, thus providing a new method to construct and reform open access journal evaluation systems.

https://tinyurl.com/3hvs2y8v

"Data Journals: Where Data Sharing Policy Meets Practice"

Data journals incorporate elements of traditional scholarly communications practices—reviewing for quality and rigor through editorial and peer-review—and the data sharing / open data movement—prioritizing broad dissemination through repositories, sometimes with curation or technical checks. Their goals for dataset review and sharing are recorded in journal-based data policies and operationalized through workflows. In this qualitative, small cohort semi-structured interview study of eight different journals that review and publish research data, we explored (1) journal data policy requirements, (2) data review standards, and (3) implementation of standardized data evaluation workflows. Differences among the journals can be understood by considering editors’ approaches to balancing the interests of varied stakeholders. Assessing data quality for reusability is primarily conditional on fitness for use which points to an important distinction between disciplinary and discipline-agnostic data journals.

https://doi.org/10.17615/nqtz-b568

"The Emergence of Preprints: Comparing Publishing Behaviour in the Global South and the Global North"

Purpose: The recent proliferation of preprints could be a way for researchers worldwide to increase the availability and visibility of their research findings. Against the background of rising publication costs caused by the increasing prevalence of article processing fees, the search for other ways to publish research results besides traditional journal publication may increase. This could be especially true for lower-income countries. Design/methodology/approach: Therefore, we are interested in the experiences and attitudes towards posting and using preprints in the Global South as opposed to the Global North. To explore whether motivations and concerns about posting preprints differ, we adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining a quantitative survey of researchers with focus group interviews. Findings: We found that respondents from the Global South were more likely to agree to adhere to policies and to emphasise that mandates could change publishing behaviour towards open access. They were also more likely to agree posting preprints has a positive impact. Respondents from the Global South and the Global North emphasised the importance of peer-reviewed research for career advancement. Originality: The study has identified a wide range of experiences with and attitudes towards posting preprints among researchers in the Global South and the Global North. To our knowledge, this has hardly been studied before, which is also because preprints only have emerged lately in many disciplines and countries.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04186

"Will Building LLMs [AI Large Language Models] Become the New Revenue Driver for Academic Publishing?"

In a world where peer-reviewed content holds value for Generative AI companies, the question arises whether content that is locked behind a paywall has greater value than OA content. . . . Will publishers who still have a lot of content locked up, such as IEEE or NEJM, retain the most valuable assets? Will publishers that limit licensing to more restrictive terms such as CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-ND have revenue streams denied to those exclusively using CC BY licenses? . . . Could authors receive income from their work via a CMO (Collective Management of Copyright) license, regardless of the agreement they have with the publisher?

https://tinyurl.com/zm6u5spc

Paywall: "Another Wiley Journal Loses Editorial Board"

At least two-thirds of the editorial board of Wiley’s Journal of Biogeography have resigned, citing the publisher’s push towards "exorbitant" open access fees and what they claimed was a policy to steer rejected manuscripts to other titles.

https://tinyurl.com/2bhf6ppp

"How Many Preprints Have Actually Been Printed and Why: A Case Study of Computer Science Preprints on arXiv"

In this paper, a case study of computer science preprints submitted to arXiv from 2008 to 2017 is conducted to quantify how many preprints have eventually been printed in peer-reviewed venues. Among those published manuscripts, some are published under different titles and without an update to their preprints on arXiv. In the case of these manuscripts, the traditional fuzzy matching method is incapable of mapping the preprint to the final published version. In view of this issue, we introduce a semantics-based mapping method with the employment of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). With this new mapping method and a plurality of data sources, we find that 66% of all sampled preprints are published under unchanged titles and 11% are published under different titles and with other modifications. A further analysis was then performed to investigate why these preprints but not others were accepted for publication. Our comparison reveals that in the field of computer science, published preprints feature adequate revisions, multiple authorship, detailed abstract and introduction, extensive and authoritative references and available source code.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01899

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"To Preprint or Not to Preprint: A Global Researcher Survey"

Open science is receiving widespread attention globally, and preprinting offers an important way to implement open science practices in scholarly publishing. To develop a systematic understanding of researchers’ adoption of and attitudes toward preprinting, we conducted a survey of authors of research papers published in 2021 and early 2022. Our survey results show that the US and Europe lead the way in the adoption of preprinting. US and European respondents reported a higher familiarity with and a stronger commitment to preprinting than their colleagues elsewhere in the world. The adoption of preprinting is much stronger in physics and astronomy as well as mathematics and computer science than in other research areas. Respondents identified free accessibility of preprints and acceleration of research communication as the most important benefits of preprinting. Low reliability and credibility of preprints, sharing results before peer review and premature media coverage are the most significant concerns about preprinting, emphasized in particular by respondents in the life and health sciences. According to respondents, the most crucial strategies to encourage preprinting are integrating preprinting into journal submission workflows and providing recognition for posting preprints.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/k7reb

"Powering Research with Dimensions AI Assistant"

Imagine using AI to leverage the power of Dimensions with the click of a button. That’s exactly what you can do with Dimensions AI Assistant: your interaction with the world’s research knowledge is assisted by a powerful AI that takes you beyond keywords to a semantically rich summary with references, fully contextualizing the results and linking them with the literature. Digital Science has announced a closed beta release of Dimensions AI Assistant, which will allow users to achieve their goals quicker by helping them find the most relevant research and receive relevant synposes, leveraging the power of the Dimensions large language model, Dimensions General Science-BERT, and Open AI’s GPT models.

https://tinyurl.com/4w2jfukt

"Elsevier takes Scopus to the Next Level with Generative AI"

Scopus AI will help early-career researchers and seasoned academics alike through:

Summarized views based on Scopus abstracts: Researchers obtain a concise and trustworthy snapshot of any research topic, complete with academic references, reducing lengthy reading time and the risk of hallucinations.

Easy navigation to “Go Deeper Links” for extended exploration: Scopus AI provides relevant queries for further exploration, leading to hidden insights in various research topics.

Natural language queries: Researchers can ask questions about a subject in a natural, conversational manner.

A soon-to-be-added graphical representation, offering new perspectives of interconnected research themes: Scopus AI visually maps search results, offering a comprehensive overview that allows researchers to navigate complex relationships easily.

https://tinyurl.com/27xxj465

"Does Double Dipping Occur? The Case of Wiley’s Hybrid Journals"

The number of open access articles published in hybrid journals has increased recently. However, there are concerns over the practice of double dipping, when hybrid journals charge for publishing the same article twice, once for subscription and once for open access. To determine whether double dipping occurs, this study examined the relationship between the subscription prices for hybrid journals and the proportions of open access articles in hybrid journals. . . . The findings suggest that article processing charges rise in tandem with increased subscription prices; therefore, university libraries and consortiums must exercise caution when making subscription contracts with publishers.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04800-8

"Data Sharing Implementation in Top 10 Ophthalmology Journals in 2021"

Background/Aims: Deidentified individual participant data (IPD) sharing has been implemented in the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors journals since 2017. However, there were some published clinical trials that did not follow the new implemented policy. This study examines the number of clinical trials that endorsed IPD sharing policy among top ophthalmology journals.

Method: All published original articles in 2021 in 10 highest-ranking ophthalmology journals according to the 2020 journal impact factor were included. Clinical trials were determined by the WHO definition of clinical trials. Each article was then thoroughly searched for the IPD sharing statement either in the manuscript or in the clinical trial registry. We collected the number of published clinical trials that implemented IPD sharing policy as our primary outcome.

Results: 1852 published articles in top 10 ophthalmology journals were identified, and 9.45% were clinical trials. Of these clinical trials, 44% had clinical trial registrations and 49.14% declared IPD sharing statements. Only 42 (48.83%) clinical trials were willing to share IPD, and 5 (10.21%) of these share IPD via an online repository platform. In terms of sharing period, 37 clinical trials were willing to share right after the publication and only 2 showed the ending of sharing period.

Conclusion: This report shows that the number of clinical trials in top ophthalmology journals that endorsed the IPD sharing policy and the number of registrations is lower than half even though the policy has been implemented for several years. Future updates are necessary as policy evolves.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjophth-2023-001276

An Index, a Publisher and an Unequal Global Research Economy

This is the story of how a publisher and a citation index turned the science communication system into a highly profitable global industry. Over the course of seventy years, academic journal articles have become commodities, and their meta-data a further source of revenue. . . . During the 1950s, two men — Robert Maxwell and Eugene Garfield — begin to experiment with their blueprint for the research economy. Maxwell created an ‘international’ publisher — Pergamon Press — charming the editors of elite, not-for-profit society journals into signing commercial contracts. Garfield invented the science citation index to help librarians manage this growing flow of knowledge. . . . Sixty years later, the global science system has become a citation economy, with academic credibility mediated by the currency produced by the two dominant commercial citation indexes: Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivates Web of Science. The reach of these citation indexes and their data analytics is amplified by digitisation, computing power and financial investment. . . . Non-Anglophone journals are disproportionately excluded from these indexes, reinforcing the stratification of academic credibility geographies and endangering long established knowledge ecosystems.

https://tinyurl.com/3x7try9p

"Sustainability of Open-Access Author Fund: A Case Study of Faculty Usage Patterns and APC Cost"

The California State University, Los Angeles Library established a pilot program on Open-Access (OA) Author Fund in 2018. This article presents information about the management of the University Library’s Open-Access Author Fund. Particularly, this article focuses on faculty usage of the OA Author Fund by colleges, disciplines, and publishers. Additionally, the authors examined the article processing charges (APCs) and self-archiving policies of the top open-access journals where Cal State LA faculty publish. This analysis will assist the University Library’s Open-Access Group to understand if the University Library needs to provide additional funding and explore new ways to sustain the funding. Our research also revealed that librarians in specific academic areas can be more proactive in educating, explaining, and initiating conversations with disciplinary faculty about the benefits of open-access publications.

https://tinyurl.com/35kprj6a

"eLife and PREreview to Enhance the ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ Ecosystem Through Adoption of COAR Notify"

The project will put in place the basic infrastructure and protocols needed for all-round and standardised connections between preprint repositories, community-led preprint review platforms, journals, and preprint review aggregation and curation platforms. The aim is to lower existing technological and cost barriers so that as many of these services as possible can more easily participate in the ‘publish, review, curate’ future for research.

https://tinyurl.com/36emyk9b