Scholarly Journals – Page 9

"The Oligopoly’s Shift to Open Access. How the Big Five Academic Publishers Profit from Article Processing Charges"

This study aims to estimate the total amount of article processing charges (APCs) paid to publish open access (OA) in journals controlled by the five large commercial publishers Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley between 2015 and 2018. Using publication data from WoS, OA status from Unpaywall and annual APC prices from open datasets and historical fees retrieved via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, we estimate that globally authors paid $1.06 billion in publication fees to these publishers from 2015–2018. Revenue from gold OA amounted to $612.5 million, while $448.3 million was obtained for publishing OA in hybrid journals. Among the five publishers, Springer-Nature made the most revenue from OA ($589.7 million), followed by Elsevier ($221.4 million), Wiley ($114.3 million), Taylor & Francis ($76.8 million) and Sage ($31.6 million). With Elsevier and Wiley making most of APC revenue from hybrid fees and others focusing on gold, different OA strategies could be observed between publishers.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00272

"Dissemination Effect of Data Papers on Scientific Datasets"

This study aims to investigate the citation practices associated with data papers and to explore the role of data papers in disseminating scientific datasets. . . . The findings indicate a consistent growth in the number of biomedical data journals published in recent years, with data papers gaining attention and recognition as both publications and data sources. Although the use of data papers as citation sources for data remains relatively rare, there has been a steady increase in data paper citations for data utilization through formal data citations.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24843

Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect

Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect documents a variety of data privacy practices that directly conflict with library privacy standards, and raises important questions regarding the potential for personal data collected from academic products to be used in the data brokering and surveillance products of RELX’s LexisNexis subsidiary. By analyzing the privacy practices of the world’s largest publisher, the report describes how user tracking that would be unthinkable in a physical library setting now happens routinely through publisher platforms. The analysis underlines the concerns this tracking should raise, particularly when the same company is involved in surveillance and data brokering activities. Elsevier is a subsidiary of RELX, a leading data broker and provider of "risk" products that offer expansive databases of personal information to corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies.

https://zenodo.org/records/10078610

"Reclaiming (Parts of) Scholarly Communication"

Regardless of these differences, "scholar-led" and "community-driven" publishing projects are an integral part of a diverse publishing ecosystem and fulfill two main functions within academia. First, they contribute to a culture of experimental, collaborative, and community-owned approaches to disseminating knowledge. This culture facilitates, for example, the creation of new output formats that lie beyond the standardized peer-reviewed article and make the research process more transparent and participatory (Steiner, 2022b). They also take part in the ongoing publishing movement of developing and implementing more inclusive processes of quality control, paradigmatically displayed by the idea of either or both open and collaborative peer review systems (Knöchelmann, 2019). With these new forms of research assessment, it seems possible to become aware of biases while making the review process more instructive and helpful. Much of this extends to editorial work in general, with workflows digitized to meet the needs of remote work and diverse editorial teams, such as by using open-source editorial management software and collaborative editing tools. Of course, these developments are inherently connected to advancements in electronic publishing in general and are not limited to the community-driven publishing segment.

Second, community-driven publishing projects have a protective function in the sense that they enable self-determined and autonomous decision-making at a time and in an age where the "digital sovereignty" of consumers and researchers is at stake (see Pohle & Thiel, 2020). Because many such projects use open-source software and applications (see Open Journal Systems), they can control the flows of publishing (meta) data and be transparent about its usage. At the same time, many community-driven journals question the widespread and nontransparent system of assessing impact using the over-simplified interpretation of bibliometrics and instead consider other evaluation forms, such as alt metrics (Sugimoto et al., 2017). This open approach extends to the use of licensing models that are approved for the creation of "Free Cultural Works" (see Creative Commons). Acknowledging that research benefits society as a whole and must be available for reuse, we find community-driven publishing projects widely applying the most open licenses to their publications.

https://tinyurl.com/ywzcyk5n

"The Gray Zone between Legitimate and Predatory Open Access Scientific Publishing"

Certain open access publishers based on the article processing charges model have found it highly profitable to operate within a gray zone that encompasses both legitimate and predatory publishing practices. In this context, maximum profits can be obtained by adequate combinations of journal acceptance rates and elevated article processing charges. Considering that the gray zone can be particularly challenging to identify and that it poses risks for authors aiming to establish academic careers, we believe it is important to provide a comprehensive description of it.

https://doi.org/10.24875/RIC.23000191

"Project MUSE Accelerates Move to Open Access with Publisher S2O Commitments"

Leading humanities and social sciences platform Project MUSE announces that many of our university press and related scholarly publisher partners have already committed to participate in the launch of our Subscribe to Open (S2O) program for journals in 2025. Fifty journals from more than 20 publishers are confirmed for participation to date, with more expected to join before the end of the year.

https://tinyurl.com/2h95xs2f

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"The Impacts of Changes in Journal Data Policies: A Cross-disciplinary Survey"

This discipline-specific survey of journal DSP and SMP highlighted the increasing adoption rates and rankings of DSP over time. Furthermore, the findings suggest that DSP adoption may have a notable impact on the increase in JIF. The adoption of DSP by journals may be associated with the increased attention and credibility of the articles.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.924

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Quantifying Consolidation in the Scholarly Journals Market"

Overall, the market has significantly consolidated since 2000 — when the top 5 publishers held 39% of the market of articles to 2022 where they control 61% of it. Looking at larger sets of publishers makes the consolidation even more extreme, as the top 10 largest publishers went from 47% of the market in 2000 to 75% in 2023, and the top 20 largest publishers from 54% to controlling 83% of the corpus.

https://tinyurl.com/4xmt5zeu

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Octopus Publishing Platform: A Snapshot of the Academic Research Culture in 2023 and How It Might Be Improved

Our evaluation revealed a wide variety of barriers to more open sharing of research. While some are related to perceived or experienced biases based on personal characteristics such as gender or inequitable access to support, most result from a research culture that primarily assesses achievement and quality through traditional, peer-reviewed papers. This focus, and the resulting competition, encourages researchers to hide their work at least until a traditional journal paper is published. In some situations, these pressures lead to questionable research practices, such as data manipulation to achieve an "interesting" or statistically significant result more likely to appeal to a journal with higher impact metrics or perceived "impact". In general, open research practices are viewed as not beneficial, or even detrimental, to job security and career advancement. This is especially true given competing demands and the need for academics to prioritise their time on outputs that count in assessments that they are subject to.

https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.8165703

$2,500 Fee: "COAR’s response to the American Chemical Society’s New Fee or Repository Deposit"

COAR strongly objects to this charge for the following reasons:

Authors own their manuscripts and should retain their rights. Authors typically hold the copyright to their research, but too often transfer those rights to publishers when publishing their manuscript. When authors retain the copyright to their manuscript, they have the right to disseminate and use their own manuscript as they choose. If authors’ rights are retained, publishers do not own an article accepted manuscript (AAM) and researchers should not be duped into paying a fee to exercise a right they already have.

This fee is in direct contravention with the ethos of open science and scholarship and equity. . .

ACS is charging $2,500 while providing no added value. There is not a fee for an extra service offered. It requires no extra work on the side of the publisher, but rather is an attempt to develop a new revenue stream, while at the same time they will be receiving funds from subscriptions and pay-to-access for this same article.

ACS is creating a false impression about compliance with funder policies. . . . A fee is only required if you want to publish in an ACS journal and sign over your rights.

See ACS’ "Open Access Pricing for Authors: The Power of Choice" for more fee details.

https://tinyurl.com/4u4dfxsk

"On the Culture of Open Access: The Sci-Hub Paradox"

Based on a large randomized sample, this study first shows that OA publications, including those in fully OA journals, receive more citations than their subscription-based counterparts. However, the OACA has slightly decreased over the seven last years. The introduction of a distinction between those accessible or not via the Sci-hub platform among subscription-based suggest that the generalization of its use cancels the positive effect of OA publishing. The results show that publications in fully OA journals are victims of the success of Sci-hub. Thus, paradoxically, although Sci-hub may seem to facilitate access to scientific knowledge, it negatively affects the OA movement as a whole, by reducing the comparative advantage of OA publications in terms of visibility for researchers

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04792-5

Delta Think Open Access Journals Report: "Market Sizing Update 2023"

2022’s OA market grew by a little over 24% from 2021. This is around two thirds of the growth we saw in 2021. . . .

Given the exceptionally high growth in 2020 and 2021, a correction in 2022 was expected. . . .

Growth in hybrid revenues was a major factor driving growth in OA, although all types of OA saw improved revenues per article, which helped to drive growth.

Currency effects contributed to reduced growth. Many publishers operate in non-USD currencies, which lost value against the US dollar in 2022. . . .

Just over 49% of all scholarly articles were published as paid-for open access in 2022, accounting for just under 20% of the total journal publishing market value.

We anticipate a 2022-2025 CAGR (average growth each year) of 13% in OA output and 13% in OA market value.

https://tinyurl.com/5n7m6n5k

"Researchers Express Growing Enthusiasm About Open Access, New Wiley Survey Reports"

Open access is quickly becoming the preferred publishing choice among researchers, according to new research from Wiley. 75% of respondents who have published research articles in the past three years have published open access, up from 44% just two years ago.

The survey of more than 600 scholars around the globe revealed the following insights:

Growing enthusiasm for open access. In addition to the increase in authors publishing open access, 75% of respondents agree that transformative agreements (TAs) are the right solution at this time to make research findings more openly available.

At least half of researchers engage in open research practices such as open data, open peer review and self-archiving. This demonstrates that researchers are embracing all the practices that will lead to a fully open research landscape, and are not limiting their activities to open access publishing.

Researchers who are publishing open access are motivated more by the benefits than by requirements. Respondents chose "visibility and impact" (65%) and "public benefit" (54%), followed by “transparency and reuse” (33%), when asked why they engage in open access publishing, significantly more often than journal requirements (25%) and institutional requirements (22%).

Lack of funding presents the most prominent roadblock for publishing open access. The top barrier, reported by 58% of respondents, is no or limited funds available to pay fees for open access publishing. 77% of respondents said they were likely to very likely to publish open access if their APCs were paid by their funder or institution. In addition, more than half of authors who publish open access are not clear on the license requirements from their funder (51%) or institution (55%).

https://tinyurl.com/bdetnz7y

"Preprint Review Services: Disrupting the Scholarly Communication Landscape?"

The most important tension that we identified relates to anonymisation of reviewers and authors. In line with the ideas of the Democracy & Transparency school, preprint review services promote more open forms of peer review in which authors and reviewers participate on a more equal basis. However, from the perspective of the Equity & Inclusion school, this raises concerns. To make peer review processes more equitable and inclusiv e, this school emphasises the importance of enabling anonymisation of reviewers and possibly also authors, which is in tension with the focus on openness and transparency of preprint review services.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/8c6xm

"Wiley and German DEAL Consortium to Sign New 5-Year Agreement "

Wiley (NYSE: WLY) today announced its intent to enter a new five-year agreement with the DEAL Consortium, a countrywide consortium representative of more than 1,000 academic institutions in Germany, commencing January 2024. Wiley and DEAL are creating a blueprint for the next phase of open access publishing to better meet the evolving needs of the scholarly community.

Wiley and DEAL will build on the unprecedented success achieved in their first five years of partnership, which has resulted in:

Nearly 100% of eligible hybrid DEAL articles published open access across Wiley’s portfolio.

90% of Wiley’s article output from Germany published open access. Increased usage of research content in Germany by 83%, resulting in nearly 20 million full text downloads in 2022 alone.

Rapid growth in usage of German-authored content globally, especially in low-income countries.

https://tinyurl.com/3f8rvzd7

Paywall: "The Open Access Movement and its March in Africa"

While the goal of the OA movement remains good, it appears the epistemic disbalance in global knowledge creation and access has not abated. However, the promise of OA, the motivation on which it stands, its consequence and current state are reviewed in this paper with particular focus on the contribution of Africa to the global OA movement. It has been reported that the emergence of OA on the continent is albeit slow but with a mixed fortune of both progress and challenges. Notwithstanding, open access is seen as a development imperative for Africa that offers tremendous opportunities to the continent to actively contribute to global knowledge. It was reported that a number of universities and research institutions in Africa have adopted open access policies that require their researchers to publish their work in open access journals or repositories. The paper presented a number of open access initiatives and platforms that are actively being deployed to achieve OA mandate in the continent and concluded with recommendations.

https://tinyurl.com/f7zhss6m

"Elsevier Introduces Geographical Pricing Pilot to Support Authors in Low- And Middle-Oncome Countries with Equitable Open Access Publishing Options"

The GPOA [Geographical Pricing for Open Access] model, a publishing industry first, is set to take effect from January 2024. As part of the pilot, Elsevier will structure its article publishing charges for this subset of journals based on countries’ local economic conditions and average income. By tailoring pricing structures according to Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, a transparent and well-established measure used by many international organisations including Research4Life, Elsevier aims to reduce financial barriers that have traditionally hindered researchers and institutions from low and middle-income countries from publishing the latest research in Gold Open Access journals. Elsevier’s approach to GPOA and country banding based on GNI are outlined on our website. A full list of the journals taking part in this novel pilot can be found here. Elsevier will continue to waive APCs for authors in the lowest economic band and already provides affordable access to over 100,000 peer-reviewed resources for institutions in 120 low- and middle-income countries through Research4Life.

https://tinyurl.com/jxzt8d7e

Using Altmetric Data Responsibly: A Guide to Interpretation and Good Practice

This guide focuses specifically on data from the data provider and company, Altmetric, but other types of altmetrics are mentioned and occasionally used as a comparison in this guide, such as the Open Syllabus database to find the educational engagement with scholarly outputs. This guide opens with an introduction followed by an overview of Altmetric and the Altmetric Attention Score, Altmetrics and Responsible Research Assessment, Output Types Tracked by Altmetric, and the Altmetric Sources of Attention, which include: News and Mainstream Media, Social Media (X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Reddit, and historical data from Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Sina Weibo); Patents, Peer Review, Syllabi (historical data only), Multimedia, Public Policy Documents, Wikipedia, Research Highlights, Reference Managers, and Blogs; finally, there is a conclusion, a list of related resources and readings, two appendices, and references. This guide is intended for use by librarians, practitioners, funders, and other users of Altmetric data or those who are interested in incorporating altmetrics into their bibliometric practice and/or research analytics. It can also help researchers who are going up for annual evaluations and promotion and tenure reviews, who can use the data in informed and practical applications. It can also be a useful reference guide for research managers and university administrators who want to understand the broader online engagement with research publications beyond traditional scholarly citations, also known as bibliometrics, but who also want to avoid misusing, misinterpreting, or abusing Altmetric data when making decisions, creating policies, and evaluating faculty members and researchers at their institutions.

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/116448

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
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| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

"Springer Nature Introduces Curie, Its AI-powered Scientific Writing Assistant"

Springer Nature today announced a new AI-powered in-house writing assistant to support researchers, particularly those whose first language is not English, in their scientific writing. . . .

It has been specifically trained on academic literature, spanning 447+ areas of study, more than 2,000 field-specific topics and on over 1 million edits on papers published including those in leading Nature journals. It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with specialised AI digital editing developed in-house and designed specifically for scientific writing. Unlike generalist AI writing apps, Curie focuses on the unique pain points of researchers in their professional writing, including translation to English and English language editing to address grammatical errors and improve phrasing and word choice.

https://tinyurl.com/msvc28ra

"How ChatGPT and Other AI tools Could Disrupt Scientific Publishing"

In the age of LLMs, [Michael] Eisen pictures a future in which findings are published in an interactive, "paper on demand" format rather than as a static, one-size-fits-all product. In this model, users could use a generative AI tool to ask queries about the experiments, data and analyses, which would allow them to drill into the aspects of a study that are most relevant to them. It would also allow users to access a description of the results that is tailored to their needs. "I think it’s only a matter of time before we stop using single narratives as the interface between people and the results of scientific studies," says Eisen.

https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03144-w

Access to Science and Scholarship: Key Questions about the Future of Research Publishing

The health of the research enterprise is closely tied to the effectiveness of the scientific and scholarly publishing ecosystem. Policy-, technology-, and market-driven changes in publishing models over the last two decades have triggered a number of disruptions within this ecosystem:

Ongoing increases in the cost of journal publishing, with dominant open access models shifting costs from subscribers to authors

Significant consolidation and vertical (supply chain) integration in the publishing industry, and a decline in society-owned subscription journals that have long subsidized scientific and scholarly societies

A dramatic increase in the number of "predatory" journals with substandard peer review

Decline in the purchasing power of academic libraries relative to the quantity and cost of published research

To illustrate how researcher behavior, funder policies, and publisher business models and incentives interact, this report presents an historical overview of open access publishing. The report also provides a list of key questions for further investigation to understand, measure, and best prepare for the impact of new policies related to open access in research publishing, categorized into six general areas: access and business models, research data, preprint publishing, peer review, costs to researchers and universities, and infrastructure.

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/152414

"How ChatGPT and Other AI Tools Could Disrupt Scientific Publishing"

More broadly, generative AI tools have the potential to change how research is published and disseminated, says Patrick Mineault, a senior machine-learning scientist at Mila — Quebec AI Institute in Montreal, Canada. That could mean that research will be published in a way that can be easily read by machines rather than humans. "There will be all these new forms of publication," says Mineault.

https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03144-w

"IFLA ARL Section’s ‘Inclusiveness through Openness’ Conference Proceedings Now Available!"

All videos and slides from this August IFLA Academic & Research Libraries Section (ARL) Satellite conference to the 2023 WLIC in Rotterdam IFLA conference are now available:

https://tinyurl.com/4cywvp9h

"2024 EBSCO Serials Price Projection Report"

Each year, EBSCO strives to help its academic and academic medical library customers plan their library budgets by projecting publisher price increases for the upcoming year. We use recent information received from publishers, as well as historical price data to calculate these projections. As of now, we expect the overall effective publisher price increases for academic and academic medical libraries in 2024 to be in the range of three to four percent for individual titles and two to three percent for e-journal packages.

https://tinyurl.com/2s3akjmw

"A Large Scale Perspective on Open Access Publishing: Examining Gender and Scientific Disciplines in 38 OECD countries"

Gender inequality is a persistent issue in scientific publishing. Recent studies suggest that Open Access (OA) publishing can increase the visibility and impact of female scientists’ research. Despite the growing acceptance of OA as a means of disseminating research results, there is a notable gap in studies focusing on the role of gender in OA publishing trends. The presented research offers a comprehensive analysis of OA publishing with a focus on gender differences and specific scientific disciplines in 38 OECD countries. Our study using the OpenAlex database included over 20 million publications from 1990-2021 and revealed that 39.3 percent of these were freely available in some form of OA. Results showed, over time, a decline in Bronze OA and Green OA but also an increase in Gold OA and, as of 2018, a rapid increase in Hybrid OA. The results also showed that females are more likely to publish in gold OA than males, both in cases of female-only authorship and mixed-gender authorship. Disciplinary analysis showed that Biology, Physics and Mathematics had the most OA publications. The results also showed the influence of major OA initiatives on publication trends. This study highlights the need for a more inclusive scientific publishing system that promotes gender equality and wider accessibility.

https://doi.org/10.55835/6442b2f80dd9c5d18e7caff8