Group items tagged

The wonderful blog, Hack Library School, has recently posted a piece on open access publishing. This piece is a great overview, which covers many of the basic concepts covered in Module 6. The article discusses what open access is (and what it isn't) and some of the biggest discussion points on the issue today. It's a great overview and well worth the read if you want an overview or a refresher on the topic!

This blog covers a lot of relevant concepts related to OA, but a finer point need to be clarified. Regarding Google Scholar, not everything retrieved from GS is OA. GS is a web crowler, it crows wherever it is allowed, including references and citations to articles behind paywalls. On the other hand, many librarians are working to make their paid journals subscriptions available to their faculty and students via Google Scholar. So when faculty/students are on their universities' network, they can search GS, find articles from journals. If their library subscribes to that journal, there is a good chance a link to the full text will be available.

I agree with the point that "findability" for green OA articles is a current problem. We need a PubMed or Web of Science for green OA articles!

This list is not to be taken at face value (many of the publishers on it do have legitimate journals), but it serves as a reminder that there are many predatory journals that ask scholars to pay a lot of money to share their work, and many that also skirt traditional peer review processes in order to get money from unwary authors.

Will show to some colleagues who sometimes are interesteed in publishing issues.

Lists by By Jeffrey Beall of predatory journals Released January 2, 2014

Information Research, is an open access, international, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, dedicated to making accessible the results of research across a wide range of information-related disciplines. It is privately published and edited by Professor T.D. Wilson. It is hosted, and given technical support, by Lund University Libraries, Sweden and editorial support by the University of Borås, Sweden.

This is a blog post from Pubpeer.com, a website that allows for crowd-sourced peer reviewing. This post details the website's insight about fake scientific evidence and sloppy science, and how open data can help mitigate these issues. It also mentions that after they allowed "anonymous" people to post, they received more "calling out" of bad science and poor methodology.

"EIFL enables access to knowledge through libraries in developing and transition countries to contribute to sustainable economic and social development."

EIFL-OA - free unrestricted access to peer-reviewed research literature

Roopika Risam puts forth an argument that digital publication is not merely a new platform in which to carry out traditional academic actives. Rather, Risam proposes three ways in which digital scholarship is distinct from print, fundamentally shifting the values potentially underlying the academy: (1) it tends towards more collaboration (2) it is an iterative process, rarely considered "finished", and (3) it is frequently more public. Risam notes that these new principles do not guarantee dramatic shifts in the academy, and there are efforts to systematize these features in order to make digital scholarship more closely reflect the principles in print scholarship. Yet, it is emphasized we are at a point in time where we have the opportunity to be clear enough about the ways digital scholarship differs from print scholarship in order to decent and uplift these qualities rather than try to transform them to better resemble print scholarship.

On data sharing in computational drug discovery and the need for data notes [v1; ref status: not peer reviewed, http://f1000r.es/4qi] Author affiliations Department of Life Science Informatics, B-IT, LIMES Program Unit Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Dahlmannstr, Bonn, D-53113, Germany Grant information: The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work.

It is an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journal

from website: "Bioline International is a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries. BI's goal of reducing the South to North knowledge gap is crucial to a global understanding of health (tropical medicine, infectious diseases, epidemiology, emerging new diseases), biodiversity, the environment, conservation and international development. By providing a platform for the distribution of peer-reviewed journals (currently from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda and Venezuela), BI helps to reduce the global knowledge divide by making bioscience information generated in these countries available to the international research community world-wide." The site offers a range of journals, with full text access. Areas include zoology, health, agriculture, and nutrition. There aren't a lot of journals so the site is manageable. Good source if you are a scientist seeking data/information from areas other than the west.

Compares the cost of articles from society and non-profit publishers to those of the major commercial publishers.

Its crazy. The numbers (of profit and control) for the publishing companies is astronomical!

Universities have received a poor deal from the system of private, subscription-based access to knowledge production since the port WW2 commercialization of the scientific publishing industry. It is absurd that the university or research funder supplies the content (the research), pays for the authoring (the time of the researcher writing the article), and provides and pays for the time of peer reviewers and academic editors. In addition, it often pays page charges or formatting charges to publishers. It then cedes copyright and finally buys back its own research at prices that have escalated at four times the rate of inflation in the past decade and a half! Considering most of this research is conducted using public funds, it becomes a moral argument when public resources are used once again to purchase access to the outputs of this research. The commercial model of disseminating research does not obey the rules of supply and demand. A relatively small number of 'core' journals occupy monopoly positions, in that university libraries have to subscribe to access their content, whatever the cost, because these journals have been established as 'must-have' resources. While the practice of 'bundling' offers the advantage of bulk pricing, it reduces room for choice, as bundles consume large chunks of library budgets, making it difficult to subscribe to smaller, individual titles. In addition, the inflexibility of indexing systems makes it difficult for new journals to establish themselves; thus compromising the potential for smaller niche subjects and newer interdisciplinary areas. Thankfully the global inequalities engendered by the commercialization of scholarly publishing are being challenged by open access.

ScienceOpen, is a next generation Open Access platform that builds on the premise that scholarly publishing is not an end in itself, but the beginning of a dialogue to move research forward. It combines over 1 million articles from all areas of modern science, the humanities and social sciences with collaborative pre-publication workspaces, immediate publication and post-publication peer-review.

Open Access Publishing is the free distribution of research, whether it is as a pre-print (working paper) or a peer-reviewed article. Since the creation of the web, more and more journal are choosing open access as their business model. One of them was recently Economic Analysis and Policy, published by the Economic Society of Australia...