Group items tagged

"A new economic model for analysis of scholarly publishing-journal publishing in particular-is proposed that draws on club theory. The standard approach builds on market failure in the private production (by research scholars) of a public good (new scholarly knowledge). In that model publishing is communication, as the dissemination of information. But a club model views publishing differently: namely as group formation, where members form groups in order to confer externalities on each other, subject to congestion. A journal is a self-constituted group, endeavouring to create new knowledge. In this sense 'a journal is a club'. The knowledge club model of a journal seeks to balance the positive externalities due to a shared resource (readers, citations, referees) against negative externalities due to crowding (decreased prospect of publishing in that journal). A new economic model of a journal as a 'knowledge club' is elaborated. We suggest some consequences for the management of journals and financial models that might be developed to support them. "

"Journal.fi is a new journal management and publishing service provided by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. The site features 40 Finnish scholarly journals, with more to come. Journal.fi is designed to meet the needs of authors, readers, publishers and funders in the age of Open Access journals. The service is using the Open Journal Systems 3.0 software."

"64% of the journals added to DOAJ after March 2014 do not have article processing charges, while 36% have article processing charges. As of today, the total is 1,123 journals of which 720 do not have article processing charges (based on an ISSN count of journals with no charges supplied by DOAJ) and 403 have charges (from the DOAJ website / advanced search / journals / expand article processing charges). However, this does support the statement that two-thirds of fully open access journals do not have article processing charges."

"Frustrated with the slow transition toward open access (OA) in scientific publishing, 11 national funding organizations in Europe turned up the pressure today. As of 2020, the group, which jointly spends about €7.6 billion on research annually, will require every paper it funds to be freely available from the moment of publication. In a statement, the group said it will no longer allow the 6- or 12-month delays that many subscription journals now require before a paper is made OA, and it won't allow publication in so-called hybrid journals, which charge subscriptions but also make individual papers OA for an extra fee.  "

"Citizen science (CS) terms the active participation of the general public in scientific research activities. With increasing amounts of information generated by citizen scientists, best practices to go beyond science communication and publish these findings to the scientific community are needed. This letter is a synopsis of authors' personal experiences when publishing results from citizen science projects in peer-reviewed journals, as presented at the Austrian Citizen Science Conference 2018. Here, we address authors' selection criteria for publishing CS data in open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journals as well as barriers encountered during the publishing process. We also outline factors that influence the probability of publication using CS data, including 1) funding to cover publication costs; 2) quality, quantity and scientific novelty of CS data; 3) recommendations to acknowledge contributions of citizen scientists in scientific, peer-reviewed publications; 4) citizen scientists' preference of the hands-on experience over the product (publication) and 5) bias among scientists for certain data sources and the scientific jargon. These experiences show that addressing these barriers could greatly increase the rate of CS data included in scientific publications."

"Open access (OA) is advocated by science funders, policymakers and researchers alike. It will most likely be the default way of publishing in the not-so-distant future. Nonetheless, the dominant approach to achieve OA at the moment - journal flipping - could have adverse long-term effects for science. To try to stir debate, we here present two dichotomic scenarios for open access in 20 years' time. Our approach is collaborative and open - we recognise that our position is not uncontroversial and welcome engagement from those who would advocate otherwise. What is missing in the scenarios presented below? Which scenario would be better? Which is most realistic?"

"Why aren't articles on arXiv -or any other open access repository- formally credited as publications? What is it exactly that separates open access repositories from publishers? The simple answer is that publications in journals come with an amorphous quality indicator associated with the journal's perceived prestige. Articles posted on a repository on the other hand, are considered to be "provided at the reader's own risk", as they are not accompanied by any measurable guarantee of their scientific merit. We think the time has come to change all that."

"In this article two scholars engage in a conversation about open access and open science in research communication with a specific focus on the Humanities.  The two scholars have very different points of departure. Whereas Jean-Claude Guedón has been a professor of Literature in North-America for many years and part of the open access movements since its beginning, Thomas Wiben Jensen is in the early part of his carreer and fairly new to the concept of open access.  The conversation begins with a focus on the Danish national strategy for open access and this strategy's consquenses for the journal NyS where Thomas Wiben is part of the editorial board. However, the conversation brings the reader on an unexpected journey through the history of science communication and through alternative ways of understanding knowledge production as frozen moments or crystals in the Great Conversation of science. It is the hope of the editor and the contributors that the conversation can lead to a debate about innovative ways of communicating and distributing scientific results. "

"SciPost is a complete scientific publication portal. It is purely online-based, and offers freely, openly, globally and perpetually accessible science. Being managed by professional scientists, and making use of editor-solicited and contributed reviews, its Journals aim at the highest achievable standards of refereeing. SciPost Commentaries allow Contributors to seamlessly comment on all existing literature."

"The UK-SCL is an open access policy mechanism which ensures researchers can retain re-use rights in their own work, they retain copyright and they retain the freedom to publish in the journal of their choice (assigning copyright to the publisher if necessary) Re-use rights retention enables early public communication of research findings and use in research and teaching, including online courses. Increased visibility of research outputs greatly improves opportunities for increased impact and citations. A single deposit action under the model policy ensures eligibility for REF2021 and compliance with most funder deposit criteria. Researchers retain copyright and remain free to assign it to the publisher"

"Simply adding an 'open access' option to the existing prestige-based journal system at ever increasing costs is not the fundamental change publishing needs, says Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman "

"Open peer review (OPR) is a cornerstone of the emergent Open Science agenda. Yet to date no large-scale survey of attitudes towards OPR amongst academic editors, authors, reviewers and publishers has been undertaken. This paper presents the findings of an online survey, conducted for the OpenAIRE2020 project during September and October 2016 that sought to bridge this information gap in order to aid the development of appropriate OPR approaches by providing evidence about attitudes towards and levels of experience with OPR. The results of this cross-disciplinary survey, which received 3,062 full responses, show the majority of respondents to be in favour of OPR becoming mainstream scholarly practice, as they also are for other areas of Open Science, like Open Access and Open Data. We also observe surprisingly high levels of experience with OPR, with three out of four (76.2%) respondents reporting having taken part in an OPR process as author, reviewer or editor. There were also high levels of support for most of the traits of OPR, particularly open interaction, open reports and final-version commenting. Respondents were against opening reviewer identities to authors, however, with more than half believing it would make peer review worse. Overall satisfaction with the peer review system used by scholarly journals seems to strongly vary across disciplines. Taken together, these findings are very encouraging for OPR's prospects for moving mainstream but indicate that due care must be taken to avoid a "one-size fits all" solution and to tailor such systems to differing (especially disciplinary) contexts. More research is also needed. OPR is an evolving phenomenon and hence future studies are to be encouraged, especially to further explore differences between disciplines and monitor the evolution of attitudes. "

"his study tries to systematically identify claims about societal benefits of Open Access by analyzing different documents written by Open Access supporters. Three types of documents are used: key declarations and statements in support of Open Access, Open Access policies issued by public funding agencies and journal editorials announcing the adoption of Open Access. Analysis shows these three types emphasize different benefits for Open Access as they address different audience. There is strong support of the idea that Open Access has benefits to different groups of people outside side the university/credentialed research institutes. It is not clear how much evidence is available to support these claims, but identifying them would suggest new stakeholders to involve in the conversation and perhaps also inform the ongoing debate about who should bear the cost of Open Access."

"The academic reward structure focuses heavily on the publication of novel results in high impact journals. This talk considers the problems this narrow focus is creating in research and its dissemination and how these activities go against some of the basic tenets of science itself. It suggests that Open Research offers a way to improve the veracity of scientific claims and then looks at some of the recent examples of a move away from the status quo over the past 18 months."

"Today, we announced a new project collaboration between Substance, Stencila and eLife, to support the development of an open technology stack that will enable researchers to publish reproducible manuscripts through online journals. In this blogpost, we outline the background and remit of this project. We welcome feedback and contributions: please comment publicly on the article using Hypothes.is or email innovation@elifesciences.org."

"On the 22nd August 2017 - some nine months after the platform was first launched - Wellcome Open Research published its 100th article. To mark this milestone, we provide an overview of the type of research that has been published since launch including how it has been used; give an analysis of the datasets underlying these publications; and provide information about the speed of publication and volume of peer review activity. We conclude by looking at how the number of publications on this platform compared with other journals used by Wellcome-funded researchers."

"In April 2016, Heidelberg University's newly founded open access publisher heiUP launched the first volume of the new book series Heidelberg Studies in Transculturality. This article reports on the challenges, accomplishments, and setbacks that informed the entire editorial production process, not only of the first volume but also of the series and the publishing enterprise overall. The authors offer insights on crucial issues that any new open access publishing endeavour at an institution might face, namely acquiring manuscripts, designing and building workflows, and collaborating with partners to build an outlet for hosting the finished product. This article also illustrates how the goal of providing a new digital reading experience through an innovative HTML format, in addition to print-on-demand and PDF versions of each manuscript, affected the progress of the entire project. Finally, we report on what it took to deliver results."

"Cette étude a pour objet d'évaluer le bien-fondé de la mise en œuvre d'un principe de libre accès aux recherches en sciences humaines et sociales (SHS) en France, à partir d'une étude de ses effets sur la consultation des articles. Il s'agit de savoir si une politique de libre accès améliore effectivement ou non la visibilité des recherches, et dans quelle mesure. L'étude apporte des éclairages indispensables à la prise de décision au sujet de la diffusion des résultats de la recherche et sur l'effet observé des restrictions d'accès sur l'accès des publics (chercheurs et grand public) à ces résultats. Les enjeux du débat sont le choix de la « barrière mobile », c'est-à-dire la durée après la publication pour la mise en libre accès par la revue elle-même, et la durée de « l'embargo », c'est-à-dire la durée minimale avant l'autorisation donnée par la revue à l'auto-archivage par le chercheur de ses articles. L'étude a consisté à quantifier l'impact de la durée de la barrière mobile sur l'audience de la revue et de la recherche. Les résultats obtenus indiquent que l'existence d'une barrière à la diffusion fait perdre de l'audience à la revue, et ce dès une durée d'un an. Dans la mesure où les coûts de marginaux de diffusion des articles sur les plateformes numériques sont très faibles, voire nuls, cette perte d'audience représente ce que l'on appelle une perte « de poids mort ». Nos résultats objectivent donc la mise en place d'une durée de barrière mobile relativement courte (moins d'un an) en comparaison aux durées évoquées dans le débat public pour les SHS (2 à 3 ans)."

"With Open Access and the Humanities, Martin Paul Eve offers a slender, but surprisingly thorough, volume engaging many of the major preoccupations of the open access movement in scholarly communication. In fact, the book's strongest virtue may be the clarity and economy with which Professor Eve gathers and presents the benefits, risks, and feasible means of adapting Humanities disciplines to open access licensing, distribution, and funding models. Much of this gathering and presenting can feel fairly familiar to anyone already immersed in the slightly more mature conversation associated with STEM publishing (many of the "contexts" and "controversies" to which the book's subtitle alludes). There really is much to review, however, and as a primer for the open-access curious humanist, Eve's review should come across as congenial, convenient, and in many cases even demystifying."