Category: Scholarly Journals

James M. Donovan et al. have self-archived "The Open Access Advantage for American Law Reviews."

Here's an excerpt:

Articles available in open access formats enjoy an advantage in citation by subsequent law review works of 53%. For every two citations an article would otherwise receive, it can expect a third when made freely available on the Internet. This benefit is not uniformly spread through the law school tiers. Higher tier journals experience a lower OA advantage (11.4%) due to the attention such prestigious works routinely receive regardless of the format. When focusing on the availability of new scholarship, as compared to creating retrospective collections, the aggregated advantage rises to 60.2%. While the first tier advantage rises to 16.8%, the mid-tiers skyrocket to 89.7%. The fourth tier OA advantage comes in at 81.2%.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Margot Wehrmeijer has self-archived "Exposing the Predators: Methods to Stop Predatory Journals."

Here's an excerpt:

This thesis looks at three possible methods to stop predatory journals: black-and white-lists, open peer review systems and new metrics. Black- and white-lists have set up rules and regulations that credible publishers and journals should follow. Open peer review systems should make it harder for predatory publishers to make false claims about their peer review process. Metrics should measure more aspects of research impact and become less liable to gaming. The question is, which of these three methods is the best candidate to stop predatory journals.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Curt Rice has published "Wall Street Analysts Say Open Access Has Failed Due to Lack of Focus, but Their Analysis Might Help It Succeed" in The LSE's Daily Blog on American Politics and Policy.

Here's an excerpt:

The absence of clear leadership at the helm of the open access movement is made painfully clear in a recent report about Elsevier's value as a company, entitled Goodbye to Berlin—The Fading Threat of Open Access. Why could the authors of this report at Bernstein Research let go of their earlier concerns and now upgrade their predictions about Elsevier's stock? "The rise of OA," they write, "has inflicted little or no damage on the leading subscription publishers."

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Formerly a born-digital hybrid journal, Nature Communications will now be an open access only journal.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Nature Communications is to become the first Nature-branded open access only journal. The number one open access journal in multidisciplinary sciences, Nature Communications is Nature Publishing Group's (NPG) flagship open access title. Nature Communications will only accept open access research submissions from 20th October 2014. . . .

NPG is also making further policy moves with this development. Nature Communications now offers the CC BY 4.0 license as default, with other Creative Commons (CC) licenses available upon request. There is no price difference for the choice of CC license. APC waivers will be available for HINARI countries, and to others on a case-by-case basis.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

American Physical Society and The European Organization for Nuclear Research have formed a partnership to make CERN-authored articles published in APS journals open access.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Articles in APS' Physical Review Letters, Physical Review D, and Physical Review C in 2015 and 2016 will be covered by this agreement.

Thanks to this partnership, articles will be available free of charge for everyone to read. Copyright will remain with the authors and permissive Creative Commons CC-BY licences will allow re-use of the information (e.g. in books, review articles, conference proceedings and teaching material) as well as text- and data-mining applications.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Clifford Lynch has published "The Need for Research Data Inventories and the Vision for SHARE" in Information Standards Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

There is a major movement calling for public access to the results of funded research, both in the US and globally. In parallel with these developments has been a growing focus on the importance of research data management across all fields of scholarship- essentially the idea that appropriate stewardship of data used in or arising from research is essential to preserving, communicating, and replicating scholarship. SHARE (Shared Access Research Ecosystem) is a joint project of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the two key higher education presidential associations, the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU); ARL, with generous grant funding from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation and the US Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), is leading the implementation effort. This article briefly summarize the potential role of SHARE in the overall scheme of managing research data, with some emphasis on the importance of standards (both existing and to be developed) for making this vision a reality.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Pippa Smart has published "The Big Picture: Scholarly Publishing Trends 2014" in Science Editing.

Here's an excerpt:

Technical solutions have attempted to address the growth in research but have sometimes added to the tsunami of information and increased the need to manage quality. To this end experiments with the traditional quality control and dissemination systems have been attempted, but news of improvements are frequently overshadowed by alarms about ethical problems. There is particular concern about some of the new publishers who are not adhering to established quality control and ethical practices. Within a potentially fragmenting system, however, there are also emerging collaborative projects helping to knit together the different elements of the publishing landscape to improve quality, linkages and access.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Angela Cochran has published "Implementing CHORUS: Big Decisions Loom for Publishers" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

The implementation is not without complications. Publishers need to make some pretty serious decisions on how to proceed. The biggest decision may be exactly what to expose in order to comply with any forthcoming public access mandates. The options are to make the accepted manuscripts (AM) publicly available for papers derived from federal funds or to allow access to the final PDF or version of record (VoR). Either is acceptable under federal requirements.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³) has published 2,000 articles.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Two thousand Open Access articles have been published with SCOAP³ funding since January 2014 in 10 journals from 11 publishers and learned societies. These articles are released under a CC-BY license, and openly accessible on publishers websites. In addition, articles are also immediately available on the SCOAP³ repository at repo.scoap3.org in several formats, including PDF/A and XML for text-mining and other purposes. Scientists from over 80 countries have freely published in SCOAP journals so far.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Taylor & Francis has released the Taylor & Francis Open Access Survey June 2014.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In the first few months of 2014 Taylor & Francis carried out a worldwide survey, with the aim of exploring journal authors' views on open access.

Having previously conducted a survey on open access in 2013, we have been able to see how authors' opinions have developed, and whether the discussion and debate on open access has helped to inform and shape views.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"