“On April 19, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released their draft plan for updating the agency’s policy for public access and requested public feedback.
SPARC submitted comments praising the no-cost manuscript deposit compliance option and offered additional steps for AHRQ to consider to further strengthen the plan and address rights retention to minimize burden on researchers.
Read SPARC’s Comments: Response to AHRQ RFI on Draft Public Access Plan…”
Abstract: Purpose
This study aims to analyze Open Access (OA) publishing trends and policy perspectives in India. Different aspects, such as the growth of OA journals digital repositories, the proportion of OA availability to research literature and the status of OA mandates and policies are studied.
Design/methodology/approach
Data for analyzing OA trends were gathered from multiple data sources, including Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), OpenDOAR, SCImago and Web of Science (WoS) databases. DOAJ and OpenDOAR were used for extracting OA journals and digital repository data. SCImago Journal and Country ranking portal and WoS database were used to obtain Indian publication data for assessing the proportion of OA to research literature. ROARMAP was used to study OA mandates and policies adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders in India. OA mandates and policies of major regulatory bodies and funding agencies were also reviewed using secondary sources of information and related websites.
Findings
India ranks number 15 and 17 globally for OA journals and OA repositories, with 317 journals and 98 repositories. Although India’s proportion to OA publications is 23% (7% below the world average of 30%), the annual growth rate of OA publications is around 18%. Although the governing bodies and institutions have made efforts to mandate researchers to adopt OA publishing and self-archiving, its implementation is quite low among Indian researchers, as only three institutions (out of 18 listed in the ROARMAP) are defined the embargo period. Funding agencies in India do not provide financial assistance to authors for the payment of Article Processing Charges despite mandates that research is deposited in OA repositories. India lacks a national OA policy but plans to implement a “one nation one subscription” formula to provide OA to scientific literature to all its citizens.
Research limitations/implications
The study has certain limitations. Because much of India’s research output is published in local journals that are not indexed in WoS, the study recommends conducting further analyses of publications using Scopus and other databases to understand the country’s OA publishing proportion better. A further study based on feedback from different stakeholders through a survey may be conducted for formulating a national OA policy.
Originality/value
The study is the first that used multiple data sources for investigating different facets of OA publishing in India, including OA journals, digital repositories, OA research output and OA mandates and policies for publicly funded research. The findings will be helpful for researchers and policymakers interested in promoting OA adoption among researchers worldwide.
“For Higher Education Institutions
Publish a Knowledge Equity Statement for your institution by 2025, incorporating tangible commitments aligned with the principles and objectives below.
Commit to institutional action(s) to support a sustained increase of published educational material being open and freely accessible for all to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research.
Commit to institutional action(s) to support a sustained increase of new research outputs being transparent, open and freely accessible for all, and which meet the expectations of funders.
Use openness as an explicit criteria in reaching hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions. Reward and recognise open practices across both research and research-led education. This should include the importance of interdisciplinary and/or collaborative activities, and the contribution of all individuals to activities.
Define Equity, Diversity and Inclusion targets that will contribute towards open and inclusive Higher Education practices, and report annually on progress against these targets.
To create new mechanisms in and between Higher Education Institutions that allow for further widening participation and increased diversity of staff and student populations.
Review the support infrastructure for open Higher Education, and invest in the human, technical, and digital infrastructure that is needed to make open Higher Education a success.
Promote the use of open interoperability principles for any research or education software/system that you procure or develop, explicitly highlighting the option of making all or parts of content open for public consumption.
Ensure that all research data conforms to the FAIR Data Principles: ‘findable’, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable.
For Funding Agencies
Publish a statement that open dissemination of research findings is a critical component in evaluating the productivity and integrity of research.
Incorporate open research practices into assessment of funding proposals.
Incentivise the adoption of Open Research through policies, frameworks and mandates that require open access for publications, data, and other outputs, with as liberal a licence as possible for maximum reuse.
Actively manage funding schemes to support open infrastructures and open dissemination of research findings, educational resources, and underpinning data.
Explicitly define reward and recognition mechanisms for globally co-produced and co-delivered open educational resources that benefit society….”
The days of the traditional, subscription-based scholarly journal seem to be numbered. Around the world, research funders are adopting ever-more expansive policies requiring the researchers they fund to make the results of their work freely accessible to the public. Canada, once a leader in this area, risks falling behind its peers unless it moves to keep pace with the latest developments.
Canada’s three federal research-funding agencies – the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) – adopted a joint open access policy in 2015. The policy requires grant recipients to ensure that any peer-reviewed journal publications arising from Tri-Agency funding are made publicly available to read for free within 12 months of publishing. Researchers may opt to make their published research accessible either through an online repository (essentially a free digital archive hosted by an institution or an organization) or by publishing in a journal that offers content without a direct cost to readers. But the landscape of scholarly publishing has evolved significantly in the eight years since the Tri-Agency decision, and the open science movement has gained steam. Now, many in the scientific community say Canada’s open access policies are due for a rewrite.
From Google’s English: “Finally, in 2023, the Federal Constitutional Court wants to decide in the dispute over the right of secondary publication. The core question is whether scientists can be required to publish their articles freely accessible a second time after twelve months. What makes the regulation so offensive that law professors complained about it? …
In the open letter, the new statutes are described as “legally encroaching”, as a “violation of the fundamental right to academic freedom” and as “a violation of the guarantee of intellectual property”. Although one is “not against the idea of ??open access itself”, as the letter says literally, “but against the path taken by the university of converting the possibility of secondary publication into a compulsory instrument that is discredited in this way.” The new The regulation is therefore unanimously ignored by the professors of the law faculty. They would not republish their publications in the Open Access repository of the University of Konstanz….”
“In this moment of success for their open access advocacy, it is healthy for libraries to pause and consider the path forward. Today, I advance the proposal that the academic library should not take responsibility for implementing open access mandates. This is first of a series of posts reviewing strategies for university engagement with funder mandates….”
“Funding Agencies can expedite public access to research results through the distribution of electronic preprints of results in open repositories, in particular existing preprint distribution servers such as arXiv,2 bioRxiv,3 and medRxiv.4 Distribution of preprints of research results enables rapid and free accessibility of the findings worldwide, circumventing publication delays of months, or, in some cases, years. Rapid circulation of research results expedites scientific discourse, shortens the cycle of discovery and accelerates the pace of discovery.5
Distribution of research findings by preprints, combined with curation of the archive of submissions, provides universal access for both authors and readers in perpetuity. Authors can provide updated versions of the research, including “as accepted,” with the repositories openly tracking the progress of the revision of results through the scientific process. Public access to the corpus of machine readable research manuscripts provides innovative channels for discovery and additional knowledge generation, including links to the data behind the research, open software tools, and supplemental information provided by authors.
Preprint repositories support a growing and innovative ecosystem for discovery and evaluation of research results, including tools for improved accessibility and research summaries. Experiments in open review and crowdsourced commenting can be layered over preprint repositories, providing constructive feedback and alternative models to the increasingly archaic process of anonymous peer review….”
“Agencies can enable free public access to research results simply by mandating that reports of federally funded research are made available as “preprints” on servers such as arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and chemRxiv, before being submitted for journal publication. This will ensure that the findings are freely accessible to anyone anywhere in the world. An important additional benefit is the immediate availability of the information, avoiding the long delays associated with evaluation by traditional scientific journals (typically around one year). Scientific inquiry then progresses faster, as has been particularly evident for COVID research during the pandemic.
Prior access mandates in the US and elsewhere have focused on articles published by academic journals. This complicated the issue by making it a question of how to adapt journal revenue streams and led to the emergence of new models based on article-processing charges (APCs). But APCs simply move the access barrier to authors: they are a significant financial obstacle for researchers in fields and communities that lack the funding to pay them. A preprint mandate would achieve universal access for both authors and readers upstream, ensuring the focus remains on providing access to research findings, rather than on how they are selected and filtered.
Mandating public access to preprints rather than articles in academic journals would also future-proof agencies’ access policies. The distinction between peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed material is blurring as new approaches make peer review an ongoing process rather than a judgment made at a single point in time. Peer review can be conducted independently of journals through initiatives like Review Commons. And traditional journal-based peer review is changing: for example, eLife, supported by several large funders, peer reviews submitted papers but no longer distinguishes accepted from rejected articles. The author’s “accepted” manuscript that is the focus of so-called Green Open Access policies may therefore no longer exist. Because of such ongoing change, mandating the free availability of preprints would be a straightforward and strategically astute policy for US funding agencies.
A preprint mandate would underscore the fundamental, often overlooked, point that it is the results of research to which the public should have access. The evaluation of that research by journals is part of an ongoing process of assessment that can take place after the results have been made openly available. Preprint mandates from the funders of research would also widen the possibilities for evolution within the system and avoid channeling it towards expensive APC-based publishing models. Furthermore, since articles on preprint servers can be accompanied by supplementary data deposits on the servers themselves or linked to data deposited elsewhere, preprint mandates would also provide mechanisms to accomplish the other important OSTP goal: availability of research data.”
“We all share the goal of open access for taxpayer-funded research. However, the current OSTP proposal fails to address the crucial funding mechanism which allows for the peer-reviewed publication of vital research. We are eager to work with OSTP and Congress on an equitable solution which provides the necessary funding streams while ensuring the American public has open access to taxpayer-funded research….”
Abstract: To encourage the sharing of research, various entities—including public and private funders, universities, and academic journals—have enacted open access (OA) mandates or data sharing policies. It is unclear, however, whether these OA mandates and policies increase the rate of OA publishing and data sharing within the research communities impacted by them. A team of librarians conducted a systematized review of the literature to answer this question. A comprehensive search of several scholarly databases and grey literature sources resulted in 4,689 unique citations. However, only five articles met the inclusion criteria and were deemed as having an acceptable risk of bias. This sample showed that although the majority of the mandates described in the literature were correlated with a subsequent increase in OA publishing or data sharing, the presence of various confounders and the differing methods of collecting and analyzing the data used by the studies’ authors made it impossible to establish a causative relationship.
“In August, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a new policy requiring that all federally funded scholarly research be accessible to the public immediately upon publication. While this open access policy will ultimately benefit society by increasing the availability of data and research outputs, it could place a heavy burden on researchers due to the relatively high cost of open access alongside an academic culture that tends to favor publishing in high impact subscription journals. We examine the complexities of the traditional publishing landscape and offer recommendations for agencies, universities, and publishers to mitigate the impacts on researchers. Specifically, we recommend a short-term increase in funding to cover higher publishing costs, but contributions from all stakeholders are needed to facilitate a long-term solution.”
“Last summer, the White House mandated that any research based on federally funded studies must be made freely available to the public without an embargo. The new requirement, which updates an existing policy that allowed a 12-month embargo for making research freely available, will take effect by the end of 2025.
At the time, many open-access advocates celebrated the decision, but some scholars wondered who would fund the policy, given the high cost to researchers who publish open access….”
“Some time ago, Archivos de Bronconeumología reported on a radical turnabout by the ICMJE: after announcing in 2016 that they would require clinical trial researchers to share individual-level anonymized participant data with third parties, in 2017 they decided that such transfer would be voluntary.4 The news had a precedent in the Recommendations published a few years earlier, to the effect that some journal editors “ask authors to say whether the study data are available to third parties to view and/or use/reanalyze, while still others encourage or require authors to share their data with others for review or reanalysis”.1 It would be interesting to know which Spanish journals have included this requirement in their ‘instructions for authors’ and whether they comply with it.
To answer this question, we reviewed the portals of 24 Spanish journals with an impact factor greater than 1, on the understanding that they have greater influence than those with an impact factor ?1 and those with no impact factor. Of these 24, 14 are included in the list of ICMJE Recommendations (Supplementary material A). Of these, only 5 (Archivos of Bronconeumología, Atención Primaria, Enfermedades Infecciosas y Microbiología Clínica, Gaceta Sanitaria, and Medicina Intensiva) include a specific section, that we shall call “link to data repository”, that recommends, supports and encourages authors to share raw data from their studies with other researchers, and gives instructions on how to go about it. A sixth journal, the Revista de Neurología, recommends this procedure only for clinical trials (Supplementary material B). To determine the frequency with which authors report how data can be accessed compared to other requirements requested by the same journals, 2 control requirements were selected: reporting on conflicts of interest and study funding, that were included in the Recommendations much earlier. It is also of interest to determine whether supplementary material may be included online, as this is sometimes a way of including raw study data….
Sharing data from quantitative studies is much easier than from qualitative studies. Researchers performing qualitative studies frequently cite the lack of authorization of the participants, the sensitive nature of the data, and loss of confidentiality as reasons for not sharing data.6 However, qualitative studies are the exception among Spanish medical publications. By 2011, most researchers were already sharing their data, although this was challenging for more than a third of them; in the case of clinical trials, it has recently been reported that access7 to data is difficult despite authors’ commitment to share.8 Ideally, Spanish medical journals should require authors to share them in all the articles they publish, and if data sharing is impossible, to explain why.”
“In this blog post, Symplectic‘s Kate Byrne and Figshare‘s Andrew Mckenna-Foster start to unpack what the Nelson Memo means, along with some of the impacts, considerations and challenges that research institutions and librarians will need to consider in the coming months….”
“I write regarding concerns about the lack of compliance by medical product sponsors with requirements to report certain clinical trial results information to the ClinicalTrials.gov database. The law requires that certain clinical trial sponsors report results to ClinicalTrials.gov to expand the knowledge base, support additional research, and provide important safety and efficacy information to health care providers and researchers. These important goals depend on adequate compliance with applicable requirements and appropriate enforcement.”