Category: Scholarly Journals

"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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"Serials Price Projections for 2014"

EBSCO has released its "Serials Price Projections for 2014."

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

For 2014, the overall effective publisher price increases for academic and academic/medical libraries are expected to be in the range of 6 to 8 percent (before currency impact).

The projected mid-single digit serial price increases indicate that the ongoing initiatives and debates in the academic publishing world are having very little impact on fundamental business models and pricing strategies. Librarians and smaller publishers will continue to face difficult choices as the renewal of individual journal titles and other non-bundled content is balanced with the ongoing obligations of e-journal package or "Big Deal" content.

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"Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations"

Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert, and Lawrence Lessig have self-archived "Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

We document a serious problem of reference rot: more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs found within U.S. Supreme Court opinions do not link to the originally cited information.

Given that, we propose a solution for authors and editors of new scholarship that involves libraries undertaking the distributed, long-term preservation of link contents.

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"A Look at Altmetrics and Its Growing Significance to Research Libraries"

Emily Puckett Rodgers and Sarah Barbrow have self-archived "A Look at Altmetrics and Its Growing Significance to Research Libraries" in Deep Blue.

Here's an excerpt:

This document serves as an informational review of the emerging field and practices of alternative metrics or altmetrics. It is intended to be used by librarians and faculty members in research libraries and universities to better understand the trends and challenges associated with altmetrics in higher education. It is also intended to be used by research libraries to offer guidance on how to participate in shaping this emerging field.

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"The Diamond Model of Open Access Publishing: Why Policy Makers, Scholars, Universities, Libraries, Labour Unions and the Publishing World Need to Take Non-Commercial, Non-Profit Open Access Serious"

Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval have published "The Diamond Model of Open Access Publishing: Why Policy Makers, Scholars, Universities, Libraries, Labour Unions and the Publishing World Need to Take Non-Commercial, Non-Profit Open Access Serious" in tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique: Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society.

Here's an excerpt:

In the Diamond Open Access Model, not-for-profit, non-commercial organizations, associations or networks publish material that is made available online in digital format, is free of charge for readers and authors and does not allow commercial and for-profit re-use.

The fact that Diamond Open Access (DOA) has a digital format does not hinder that it is also made available in the form of printed publications in addition. We consider it as part of the model that publishers can charge for the actual printing costs without making monetary profits, but provide the digital version without charges. Publication "free of charge" means that neither authors nor individual readers nor institutions such as libraries have to pay for obtaining access to the literature published under the Diamond Open Access Model. Also authors or their institutions do not have to pay publication fees, article processing charges or other fees for getting articles published.

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"The Publishing Delay in Scholarly Peer-Reviewed Journals"

Bo-Christer Björk and David Solomon have self-archived "The Publishing Delay in Scholarly Peer-Reviewed Journals."

Here's an excerpt:

Using a stratified random sample we studied average publishing delays in 2700 papers published in 135 journals sampled from the Scopus citation index. The shortest overall delays occur in science technology and medical (STM) fields and the longest in social science, arts/humanities and business/economics. Business/economics with a delay of 18 months took twice as long as chemistry with a 9 month average delay. Analysis of the variance indicated that by far the largest amount of variance in the time between submission and acceptance was among articles within a journal as compared with journals, disciplines or the size of the journal. For the time between acceptance and publication most of the variation in delay can be accounted for by differences between specific journals.

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"The Inevitability of Open Access: Update One"

David W. Lewis has self-archived "The Inevitability of Open Access: Update One" in IUPUIScholarWorks.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper updates the author's 2012 article, "The Inevitability of Open Access" with recently published data. As a result it is possible to predict that Gold OA could account for 50 percent of the scholarly journal articles sometime between 2018 and 2020, and 90 percent of articles as soon as 2021 and more conservatively by 2024.

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"Mining for Gold: Identifying the Librarians’ Toolkit for Managing Hybrid Open Access"

Jill Emery has published "Mining for Gold: Identifying the Librarians' Toolkit for Managing Hybrid Open Access" in the latest issue of Insights: the UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

In 2012, the author and colleagues surveyed eight publishers that had been involved with the Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project to learn about the state of hybrid journal publishing. At the same time, one of the key questions asked to a panel of librarians at the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers May 2012 Meeting was what role librarians would play if scholarly publishing shortly went open access (OA) across the board? From the survey of the market, and the rapid OA developments in the UK and EU that include hybrid OA, a picture has begun to emerge of what roles librarians can play with regard to supporting hybrid OA publishing at their institutions. This article focuses on developing new partnerships within a given institution, looks at new budgetary models and the tracking of local scholarship creation. Current pertinent standards are highlighted.

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Science-Metrix Releases Three Reports on Open Access

Science-Metrix has released three reports on open access: Proportion of Open Access Peer-Reviewed Papers at the European and World Levels—2004-2011, Open Data Access Policies and Strategies in the European Research Area and Beyond, and Open Access Strategies in the European Research Area.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The first report measures the availability of scholarly publications in 22 fields of knowledge across the European Research Area, Brazil, Canada, Japan, and the United States, between 2004 and 2011. . . .

The second report, focusing on open access policies, showed a growing trend in the adoption of such policies by governments and other funding bodies. . . .

The third report found that open access to scientific data is less developed and more difficult to implement than open access to scholarly publications, both in terms of policies and infrastructure.

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"A Framework for Systematic Analysis of Open Access Journals and its Application in Software Engineering and Information Systems"

Daniel Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, and Pekka Abrahamsson have self-archived "A Framework for Systematic Analysis of Open Access Journals and its Application in Software Engineering and Information Systems" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

This study empirically demonstrated that high publication charges are not sufficiently justified by the publishers, which often lack transparency and may prevent authors from adopting Open Access. It showed that there are no features provided by journals with publication fees, which are not offered by those not requiring charges to authors. The article warned the authors to investigate which agreements have been signed by the journal publisher in order to ensure visibility to accepted papers. It also raised important concerns like that the articles of three fourths of Open Access journals in Software Engineering and Information Systems may be in danger of disappearing if the journals lose their content. Last but not least, this study showed that Open Access journals and publishers in the fields of Software Engineering and Information Systems have a significant margin of improvement regarding the perceived trustworthiness.

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e-InfraNet: ‘Open’ as the Default Modus Operandi for Research and Higher Education

The the e-InfraNet project has released e-InfraNet: 'Open' as the Default Modus Operandi for Research and Higher Education.

Here's an excerpt:

The basis for the policy framework is an overview of the current 'Open' landscape outlining contexts, drivers, achievements and effects of the various 'opens', as well as a number of common issues. Because of this commonality, coordinating the vision and approach can benefit all 'opens' individually, and contribute to the development of 'Open' as the default modus operandi for the research and higher education sectors. A pragmatic approach to the implementation of the vision will ensure the necessary flexibility to adjust for the diversity in the various 'opens' themselves and in their geographic and disciplinary contexts.

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"Correlation between Article Download and Citation Figures for Highly Accessed Articles from Five Open Access Oncology Journals"

Carsten Nieder, Astrid Dalhaug, and Gro Aandahl have published "Correlation between Article Download and Citation Figures for Highly Accessed Articles from Five Open Access Oncology Journals" in SpringerPlus.

Here's an excerpt:

Different approaches can be chosen to quantify the impact and merits of scientific oncology publications. These include source of publication (including journal reputation and impact factor), whether or not articles are cited by others, and access/download figures. When relying on citation counts, one needs to obtain access to citation databases and has to consider that results differ from one database to another. Accumulation of citations takes time and their dynamics might differ from journal to journal and topic to topic. Therefore, we wanted to evaluate the correlation between citation and download figures, hypothesising that articles with fewer downloads also accumulate fewer citations. Typically, publishers provide download figures together with the article. We extracted and analysed the 50 most viewed articles from 5 different open access oncology journals. For each of the 5 journals and also all journals combined, correlation between number of accesses and citations was limited (r=0.01-0.30). Considerable variations were also observed when analyses were restricted to specific article types such as reviews only (r=0.21) or case reports only (r=0.53). Even if year of publication was taken into account, high correlation coefficients were the exception from the rule. In conclusion, downloads are not a universal surrogate for citation figures.

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"The Characteristics of Journal Editorial Boards in Library and Information Science"

Peter Willett has published "The Characteristics of Journal Editorial Boards in Library and Information Science" in the latest issue of the International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology.

Here's an excerpt:

A study of the members of the editorial boards of 16 leading LIS journals shows that the boards vary markedly in size, in diversity (in terms of both gender and nationality) and in the experience and publication/citation profiles (based on Web of Science data) of their board-members. A typical editorial board member will be male, work in the USA, have published their first LIS article in 1995, and have 9.5 publications and 39 non-self citations to those publications, with the publication/citation profiles differing significantly from those of non-board-member contributors to the 16 journals

.

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"Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities? Findings from a 2011 Survey of Academic Publishers"

Marisa L. Ramirez et al. have published "Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities? Findings from a 2011 Survey of Academic Publishers" in the latest issue of College & Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

An increasing number of higher education institutions worldwide are requiring submission of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) by graduate students and are subsequently providing open access to these works in online repositories. Faculty advisors and graduate students are concerned that such unfettered access to their work could diminish future publishing opportunities. This study investigated social sciences, arts, and humanities journal editors' and university press directors' attitudes toward ETDs. The findings indicate that manuscripts that are revisions of openly accessible ETDs are always welcome for submission or considered on a case-by-case basis by 82.8 percent of journal editors and 53.7 percent of university press directors polled.

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"How Institutionalized Are Model License Use Terms? An Analysis of E-Journal License Use Rights Clauses from 2000 to 2009"

Kristin R. Eschenfelder, Tien-I Tsai, Xiaohua Zhu and Brenton Stewart have published "How Institutionalized Are Model License Use Terms? An Analysis of E-Journal License Use Rights Clauses from 2000 to 2009" in the latest issue of College & Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper explored the degree to which use terms proposed by model licenses have become institutionalized across different publishers' licenses. It examined model license use terms in four areas: downloading, scholarly sharing, interlibrary loan, and electronic reserves. Data collection and analysis involved content analysis of 224 electronic journal licenses spanning 2000-2009. Analysis examined how use terms changed over time, differences between consortia and site license use terms and differences between commercial and noncommercial publisher license use terms. Results suggest that some model license use terms have become institutionalized while others have not. Use terms with higher institutionalization included: allowing ILL, permitting secure e-transmission for ILL, allowing e-reserves with no special permissions, and not requiring deletion of e-reserves files. Scholarly sharing showed lower institutionalization with most publishers not including scholarly sharing allowances. Other use terms showing low institutionalization included: recommendations to avoid printing requirements related to ILL and recommendations to allow hyperlinks for e-reserves. The results provide insight into the range of use terms commonly employed in e-journal licenses.

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Debating Open Access

The British Academy has released Debating Open Access.

Here's an excerpt:

We decided at an early stage when thinking about putting these papers together, in January 2013, that we needed to have as contributors people who thought open access was a good thing, the way forward; people who thought it was a good thing but fraught with practical problems which were ill-understood by some of its advocates; and people who thought it was a bad thing in principle. This is what we have indeed commissioned. We have not got the full spectrum of views about open access, for sure, which would have required very many more articles . . .There is also diversity in the contributors: academics and publishers, representatives of learned societies, natural and social scientists as well as historians and literary critics, although the important perspective of university librarians is one that is missing.

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"Publishers and Universities Respond to the OSTP Mandate"

Denise Troll Covey has self-archived "Publishers and Universities Respond to the OSTP Mandate" in SelectedWorks.

Here's an excerpt:

Brief summary and comparison of the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States (CHORUS) announced by the Association of American Publishers and the Shared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) announced by the American Association of Universities, Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and Association of Research Libraries.

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