Category: Scholarly Journals

"Setting the Record Straight about Elsevier"

Kevin Smith has published "Setting the Record Straight about Elsevier" in Scholarly Communications @ Duke.

Here's an excerpt:

Each [article] version is a revision of the original, and the copyright is the same for all these derivatives. When copyright is transferred to a publisher, the rights in the entire set of versions, as derivatives of one another, are included in the transfer. Authors are not allowed to use their post-prints because the rights in that version are not covered in the transfer; they are allowed to use post-prints only because the right to do so, in specified situations, is licensed back to them as part of the publication agreement.

Once a copyright transfer has been signed, all of the rights that the author may still have are because of specific contractual terms, which are usually contained in the transfer document itself. In short, these agreements usually give all of the rights under copyright to the publisher and then license back very small, carefully defined slivers of those rights back to the author. One of those slivers is often, but not always, the right to use a submitted version, or post-print, in carefully limited ways.

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John Willinsky Gets SPARC Innovator Award

John Willinsky has received a SPARC Innovator Award.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In the late 1990s, Willinsky founded the Public Knowledge Project and developed Open Journal Systems (OJS), a free, open source platform that allows journals to be more easily and affordably published online. The results speak for themselves—today, more than 1.5 million articles are published in journals using the OJS platform. In 2012 alone, over 5,000 journals published at least 10 articles using the software Willinsky and his team pioneered.

Because Willinsky is both a visionary and pragmatist who brings effective business teams together, SPARC honors Willinsky with its January 2014 Innovator Award.

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"Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: The Elsevier Article of the Future Project"

The LIBER Quarterly has released a future article: "Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: The Elsevier Article of the Future Project."

Here's an excerpt:

In 2009, Elsevier introduced the"Article of the Future" project to define an optimal way for the dissemination of science in the digital age, and in this paper we discuss three of its key dimensions. First we discuss interlinking scientific articles and research data stored with domain-specific data repositories—such interlinking is essential to interpret both article and data efficiently and correctly. We then present easy-to-use 3D visualization tools embedded in online articles: a key example of how the digital article format adds value to scientific communication and helps readers to better understand research results. The last topic covered in this paper is automatic enrichment of journal articles through text-mining or other methods. Here we share insights from a recent survey on the question: how can we find a balance between creating valuable contextual links, without sacrificing the high-quality, peer-reviewed status of published articles?

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Université de Montréal Will Cancel about 75% of Wiley Online Library Periodicals

The Université de Montréal will cancel about 75% of its Wiley Online Library periodicals.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Out of 1510 periodicals in the Wiley Online Library, the Université de Montréal is cancelling subscriptions to 1142 titles at the end of January. As a result, and from this point on, the articles found in the cancelled titles will no longer be available on-line. However, access to earlier issues will be entirely maintained.

This action results from a process that started a long while ago. The financial cut-backs imposed by the Québec government only accelerated the decision process. The result of the analysis is simple: libraries have been driven to the wall because of the yearly rise of subscriptions to periodicals that hover between 3% and 6%. They cannot go on cutting back the acquisition of monographs to compensate for such price increases. As a result, this conclusion, as well as the adopted solution, would have been the same a few years down the line, independently of the financial context.

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"Do Altmetrics Correlate with Citations? Extensive Comparison of Altmetric Indicators with Citations from a Multidisciplinary Perspective"

Rodrigo Costas, Zohreh Zahedi, Paul Wouters have self-archived "Do Altmetrics Correlate with Citations? Extensive Comparison of Altmetric Indicators with Citations from a Multidisciplinary Perspective" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

An extensive analysis of the presence of different altmetric indicators provided by Altmetric.com across scientific fields is presented, particularly focusing on their relationship with citations. Our results confirm that the presence and density of social media altmetric counts are still very low and not very frequent among scientific publications, with 15%-24% of the publications presenting some altmetric activity and concentrating in the most recent publications, although their presence is increasing over time. Publications from the social sciences, humanities and the medical and life sciences show the highest presence of altmetrics, indicating their potential value and interest for these fields. The analysis of the relationships between altmetrics and citations confirms previous claims of positive correlations but relatively weak, thus supporting the idea that altmetrics do not reflect the same concept of impact as citations. Also, altmetric counts do not always present a better filtering of highly cited publications than journal citation scores. Altmetrics scores (particularly mentions in blogs) are able to identify highly cited publications with higher levels of precision than journal citation scores (JCS), but they have a lower level of recall. The value of altmetrics as a complementary tool of citation analysis is highlighted, although more research is suggested to disentangle the potential meaning and value of altmetric indicators for research evaluation.

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Transforming Peer Review Bibliography

Digital Scholarship has released the Transforming Peer Review Bibliography, which includes selected English-language articles that are useful in understanding significant transformations to the peer review process.

It is concerned with major changes to peer review, such as open peer review (excluding just revealing the identity of traditional peer reviewers) and post-publication review.

Most sources have been published from January 2010 through December 2012; however, a limited number of earlier key sources are also included. The bibliography includes links to freely available versions of included works. If such versions are unavailable, italicized links to the publishers' descriptions are provided.

It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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Altmetrics in Context

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) has released Altmetrics in Context.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

As scholarly communication takes on new forms and moves increasingly to digital and open access venues, the value of new types of metrics is increasingly important for the research community. It is causing discussion and, in some camps, heated debate.

Altmetrics report the impact of a wide range of research outputs, including data sets, articles and code. This document, available on the CARL Website, provides a quick introduction to this new field of research impact assessment and encourages researchers to use altmetrics in their work.

Want more information on altmetrics? Try the Altmetrics Bibliography.

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"Multidimensional Journal Evaluation of PLOS ONE"

Christel Fein has published "Multidimensional Journal Evaluation of PLOS ONE" in Libri: International Journal of Libraries and Information Services.

Here's an excerpt:

All 28,852 documents published in PLOS ONE during the 5-year-period between 2007 and 2011 have been extracted from Web of Science. This data provides the basis for the evaluation. The data concerning the conducted evaluation has been collected as well as analysed multidimensionally, to demonstrate more fully the complex structures and aspects of the impact, prestige and position of PLOS ONE, and to assess the information and data obtained as specifically as possible. Based on Juchem, Schlögl, and Stock (2006) and Haustein (2012), a framework of five dimensions of journal evaluation has been applied, in which each contains several metrics to analyse scientific periodicals from various perspectives, i.e. journal output,journal content, journal perception, journal citations, and journal management.

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SCOAP3 High-Energy Physics Open Access Publishing Initiative Launches on 1/1/2014

The SCOAP3 High-Energy Physics open access publishing initiative will launch on 1/1/2014.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

After intense preparations and consensus building, CERN1 has today confirmed that the SCOAP3 Open Access publishing initiative will start on 1 January 2014. With the support of partners in 24 countries2, a vast fraction of scientific articles in the field of High-Energy Physics will become Open Access at no cost for any author: everyone will be able to read them; authors will retain copyright; and generous licenses will enable wide re-use of this information.

Convened at CERN this is the largest scale global Open Access initiative ever built, involving an international collaboration of over one thousand libraries, library consortia and research organizations. SCOAP3 enjoys the support of funding agencies and has been established in co-operation with leading publishers. . . .

The objective of SCOAP3 is to grant unrestricted access to scientific articles appearing in scientific journals, which so far have only been available to scientists through certain university libraries, and generally unavailable to the wider public. Open dissemination of preliminary information, in the form of pre-peer-review articles known as preprints, has been the norm in High-Energy Physics and related disciplines for two decades. SCOAP3 sustainably extends this opportunity to high-quality peer-review service, making final version of articles available, within the Open Access tenets of free and unrestricted dissemination of science with intellectual property rights vested in the authors and wide re-use opportunities. In the SCOAP3 model, libraries and funding agencies pool resources currently used to subscribe to journals, in co-operation with publishers, and use them to support the peer-review system directly instead.

The SCOAP3 initiative looks forward to establishing further partnerships in the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, where scientists will enjoy the advantages of Open Access and many libraries and library consortia will benefit from reductions in their subscription costs. . . .

More information–publishers and scientific societies participating in SCOAP3:
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft
Elsevier
Hindawi
Institute of Physics Publishing
Jagellonian University
Oxford University Press
Physical Society of Japan
SISSA Medialab
Springer
Società Italiana di Fisica

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"PeerJ—A Case Study in Improving Research Collaboration at the Journal Level"

Peter Binfield has published "PeerJ—A Case Study in Improving Research Collaboration at the Journal Level" in the latest issue of Information Services & Use.

Here's an excerpt:

PeerJ Inc. is the Open Access publisher of PeerJ (a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal) and PeerJ PrePrints (an un-peer-reviewed or collaboratively reviewed preprint server), both serving the biological, medical and health sciences.

The Editorial Criteria of PeerJ (the journal) are similar to those of PLOS ONE in that all submissions are judged only on their scientic and methodological soundness (not on subjective determinations of impact, or degree of advance). PeerJ's peer-review process is managed by an Editorial Board of 800 and an Advisory Board of 20 (including 5 Nobel Laureates).

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Peer Review: An Introduction and Guide

The Publishing Research Consortium has released Peer Review: An Introduction and Guide.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The reader of this short Guide will be left with a coherent and forward-looking overview of the processes, the shortcomings, and the innovations around peer review, and a deeper understanding of why peer review is such a vital element of effective scholarship.

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"Open Access Publishing from the Legal Point of View. Why Freedom of Information Rules and Other Legal Principles Matter. Towards A New Fair Open Access Model."

Jiří Kolman and Petr Kolman have published "Open Access Publishing from the Legal Point of View. Why Freedom of Information Rules and Other Legal Principles Matter. Towards A New Fair Open Access Model." in tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society.

Here's an excerpt:

This article focuses on aspects that, as far as we know, have never been discussed in previous debates dealing with open access. The EU and national competition legal rules ensuring fair competition are a rather neglected aspect of open access. Another crucial topic is the unfairness of the current publication system. Why should commercial publishers be paid by publicly supported research such as EU or national research programmes? In the article a new publication model is suggested. The proposed model is trying to keep high research standards, to be fair to researchers and the public and to take into account the actual costs of the new open access model.

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"Identifying the Effect of Open Access on Citations Using a Panel of Science Journals"

Mark J. McCabe and Christopher M. Snyder have self-archived "Identifying the Effect of Open Access on Citations Using a Panel of Science Journals." in SSRN

Here's an excerpt:

An open-access journal allows free online access to its articles, obtaining revenue from fees charged to submitting authors or from institutional support. Using panel data on science journals, we are able to circumvent problems plaguing previous studies of the impact of open access on citations. In contrast to the huge effects found in these previous studies, we find a more modest effect: moving from paid to open access increases cites by 8% on average in our sample. The benefit is concentrated among top-ranked journals. In fact, open access causes a statistically significant reduction in cites to the bottom-ranked journals in our sample, leading us to conjecture that open access may intensify competition among articles for readers' attention, generating losers as well as winners.

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"Going for Gold: An Investigation into Financial Models of Open Access Publishing in Biology"

Lucy van Dorp has self-archived her master's thesis "Going for Gold: An Investigation into Financial Models of Open Access Publishing in Biology"

Here's an excerpt:

Using the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as an entry point, this study considers the numbers of OA journals in the life and biological sciences along with the proportion using an author-pays model. It considers how impact factor is related to business model, in particular author fees2, using data from the 2011 Journal Citation Reports (JCR, 2011) and SCImago Journal and Country Rank (SCImago); data for year 2011; retrieved in 2012. The most prominent publishing organisations are considered in depth looking explicitly at the income sources making up revenue. The study concludes with comments from three industry specialists on their views on the future of academic publishing, the place of subscription-based journals and what their own organisation is doing to allow sustainable, barrier-free literature dissemination.

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SciELO—15 Years of Open Access: An Analytic Study On Open Access And Scholarly Communication (Preliminary version)

SciELO has relaeased SciELO—15 Years of Open Access: An Analytic Study On Open Access And Scholarly Communication (Preliminary version).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The 15 year path taken by the SciELO Program in bringing about the improvement of the academic journals which it indexes and publishes in Open Access—a path which it continues to follow to this day—is examined from various perspectives such as the rationale and objectives of the program, its origin in Brazil and expansion to 15 other countries, the results it has achieved, its quality control and production system, the technological platform and the impact that has been made by the Program.

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Preservation, Trust and Continuing Access for e-Journals

The Digital Preservation Coalition has released Preservation, Trust and Continuing Access for e-Journals.

Here's an excerpt:

This report discusses current developments and issues which libraries, publishers, intermediaries and service providers are facing in the area of digital preservation, trust and continuing access for e-journals. It also includes generic lessons and recommendations on outsourcing and trust learnt in this field of interest to the wider digital preservation community. It is not solely focused on technology, and covers relevant legal, economic and service issues.

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"The Open Access Movement Grows Up: Taking Stock of a Revolution"

Heather Joseph has published "The Open Access Movement Grows Up: Taking Stock of a Revolution" in a special issue on open access of PLOS Biology.

Here's an excerpt:

Overall, the story of the OA movement over the past ten years has been one of demonstrable progress. To be sure, the road has not been a smooth one. There have been stumbles, wrong turns, false starts, and bruising battles, particularly in the policy arena. But if we weigh the indicators of progress made by the OA movement against the intensity and complexity of the obstacles it has faced in the first decade, there's reason for great optimism as we head into the next ten years.

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"Publishing Priorities of Biomedical Research Funders"

Ellen Collins has published "Publishing Priorities of Biomedical Research Funders" in BMJ Open.

Here's an excerpt:

Publicly funded and large biomedical research funders are committed to open access publishing and are pleased with recent developments which have stimulated growth in this area. Smaller charitable funders are supportive of the aims of open access, but are concerned about the practical implications for their budgets and their funded researchers. Across the board, biomedical research funders are turning their attention to other priorities for sharing research outputs, including data, protocols and negative results. Further work is required to understand how smaller funders, including charitable funders, can support open access.

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Open Access Clauses in Publishers’ Licenses: Current State and Lessons Learned

COAR has released Open Access Clauses in Publishers' Licenses: Current State and Lessons Learned.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

As Open Access (OA) policies and laws are being adopted world-wide, the scholarly community is shifting its efforts from advocacy towards practical implementation and support. One of the major routes for making articles open access is through OA repositories. However the variety and lack of clarity of publishers' policies regarding article deposit can be a significant barrier to author compliance of OA policies.

In order to overcome this barrier, some organizations have successfully negotiated authors' or deposit rights with publishers in the context of purchasing content licenses. This report documents the existing OA licensing language that has been implemented by organizations around the world and presents some suggestions for their successful adoption. The report concludes that OA clauses offer a feasible option for institutions to address some of the obstacles to article deposit into repositories.

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Library Publishing Directory

The Library Publishing Coalition has released the Library Publishing Directory.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Published in October 2013, the Library Publishing Directory provides a snapshot of the publishing activities of 115 academic and research libraries, including information about the number and types of publications they produce, the services they offer authors, how they are staffed and funded, and the future plans of institutions that are engaged in this growing field. . . .

Specifically it is hoped that this Directory will:

  • Introduce all readers to the emerging field of library publishing and help articulate its unique characteristics as a distinctive "publishing field."
  • Facilitate collaboration among library publishers and other publishing entities, especially the university presses and learned societies that share their values.
  • Alert authors of scholarly content to a range of potential publishing partners dedicated to supporting their experimentation with new forms of scholarly communication and open access business models.

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"Mandates and the Contributions of Open Genomic Data"

Jingfeng Xia has published "Mandates and the Contributions of Open Genomic Data" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

This research attempts to seek changing patterns of raw data availability and their correlations with implementations of open mandate policies. With a list of 13,785 journal articles whose authors archived datasets in a popular biomedical data repository after these articles were published in journals, this research uses regression analysis to test the correlations between data contributions and mandate implementations. It finds that both funder-based and publisher-based mandates have a strong impact on scholars' likelihood to contribute to open data repositories. Evidence also suggests that like policies have changed the habit of authors in selecting publishing venues: open access journals have been apparently preferred by those authors whose projects are sponsored by the federal government agencies, and these journals are also highly ranked in the biomedical fields. Various stakeholders, particularly institutional administrators and open access professionals, may find the findings of this research helpful for adjusting data management policies to increase the number of quality free datasets and enhance data usability.

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"A Cross Disciplinary Study of Link Decay and the Effectiveness of Mitigation Techniques"

Jason Hennessey and Steven Xijin Ge have published "A Cross Disciplinary Study of Link Decay and the Effectiveness of Mitigation Techniques" in BMC Bioinformatics.

Here's an excerp:

We accessed 14,489 unique web pages found in the abstracts within Thomson Reuters' Web of Science citation index that were published between 1996 and 2010 and found that the median lifespan of these web pages was 9.3 years with 62% of them being archived. Survival analysis and logistic regression were used to find significant predictors of URL lifespan. The availability of a web page is most dependent on the time it is published and the top-level domain names. Similar statistical analysis revealed biases in current solutions: the Internet Archive favors web pages with fewer layers in the Universal Resource Locator (URL) while WebCite is significantly influenced by the source of publication. We also created a prototype for a process to submit web pages to the archives and increased coverage of our list of scientific webpages in the Internet Archive and WebCite by 22% and 255%, respectively.

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"The Seer of Science Publishing"

Tania Rabesandratana has published "The Seer of Science Publishing" in a special issue of Science on "Communication in Science: Pressures and Predators".

Here's an excerpt:

"Nobody reads journals," says science publisher Vitek Tracz, who has made a fortune from journals. "People read papers." Tracz sees a grim future for what has been the mainstay of scientific communication, the peer-reviewed print journal.

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2013 Study of Subscription Prices for Scholarly Society Journals

Allen Press has released the 2013 Study of Subscription Prices for Scholarly Society Journals.

Here's an excerpt:

This study aims to provide information to society and association publishers on pricing and library budget trends, strategies libraries use for cost containment, content selection and cancellation criteria, access preferences, and user behavior.

The Allen Press panel and several other studies done in 2012 highlight that librarians use a variety of strategies to work within budgets that are not improving significantly. The following is a review of scholarly journal price trends during the past year. The data presented in this study summarize historical prices of approximately 200 publications appearing in the Allen Press Buyer’s Guide to Scientific, Medical, and Scholarly Journals.

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Altmetrics Bibliography

Digital Scholarship has released the Altmetrics Bibliography, which includes over 50 selected English-language articles and technical reports that are useful in understanding altmetrics.

The "altmetrics" concept is still evolving. In "The Altmetrics Collection," Jason Priem, Paul Groth, and Dario Taraborelli define altmetrics as follows:

Altmetrics is the study and use of scholarly impact measures based on activity in online tools and environments. The term has also been used to describe the metrics themselves—one could propose in plural a "set of new altmetrics." Altmetrics is in most cases a subset of both scientometrics and webometrics; it is a subset of the latter in that it focuses more narrowly on scholarly influence as measured in online tools and environments, rather than on the Web more generally.

Sources have been published from January 2001 through September 2013.

The bibliography includes links to freely available versions of included works. If such versions are unavailable, italicized links to the publishers' descriptions are provided.

It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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