Category Archives: oa.south

Frontiers | Access to scholarly publications in the global North and the global South—Copyright and the need for a paradigm shift under the right to science

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“The suggestions made in this contribution ultimately propose that the right to science should serve to properly realize access to scholarly publications for all, in the global North and the global South, by moving toward a world where commercialized science, economic copyright, and commercial scientific publishers play a reduced role. As it were, a paradigmatic shift is required under the right to science.”

Knowledge and experience of Zambian teaching faculties with scholarly communication and dissemination practices | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose

This paper aims to investigate the knowledge and experience of Zambian teaching faculties with scholarly communication and dissemination practices.

Design/methodology/approach

The researchers used a survey to quickly obtain information about a large sample of individuals of interest. The study population consisted of faculties from two Zambian public universities with research and publication experience. The researchers used random sampling techniques. A total of 125 valid responses were received from the selected population.

Findings

The findings show that most respondents agreed that publishing in open-access journals increased visibility and readership, had a more significant impact, facilitated collaboration and interdisciplinary research, was cost-effective and provided accessibility. Google Scholar was the most commonly used platform, followed by ResearchGate and ORCID.

Research limitations/implications

This study’s limitations focus on only two Zambian public universities. This study’s practical implications include improving the universities’ open-access policies and educating faculties on the benefits of open access.

Originality/value

This study’s originality lies in exploring the Zambian teaching faculties’ perceptions of open access and academic social networking sites. The results of this study can help universities and researchers in Zambia to understand the importance of scholarly communication and dissemination practices and help them implement effective policies for promoting open-access publishing, institutional repositories and academic social networking sites.

Does openness of articles get higher attention in altmetric? An investigation of medical discipline | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose

This paper aimed to explore the presence of altmetric data across the sub-categories of the medical science discipline and also explore whether the openness of articles results in (dis)advantage for altmetrics mentions.

Design/methodology/approach

The research implies data carpentry methods for gathering bibliographic data related to narrow fields of medical science discipline from the Scopus database with at least one Indian author affiliation during 2012–2021. The corresponding data were also collected from three different sources: Altmetric.com, Mendeley.com and Unpaywall.org, using OpenRefine and REST/API calls. Further, the authors observed open access altmetric advantages (OAAA) and categorical OAAA (COAAA) across seven altmetric platforms for all articles as well as discipline-wise.

Findings

The result shows that the overall coverage of altmetric events is still low, but it shows an increasing trend from the past. Mendeley has the largest coverage; almost 97.12% of publications are covered. The health policy discipline has extensive coverage across altmetric platforms (nearly 57.40% of publications in altmetrics and 99.23% in Mendeley), whereas the drug guides has the lowest (almost 0.92% in Altmetrics and 77.05% in Mendeley). Moreover, the OA articles have been highly covered in altmetrics than those of non-OA articles, and bronze OA articles covered mostly compared to others. News registered with the significant OA altmetric advantages across disciplines. Categorically, bronze and hybrid OA have the largest altmetric advantages.

Originality/value

This research is a unique attempt to apply OAAA and COAAA to explore OA altmetric advantages of narrow subject categories of medical science disciplines.

Findability and Accessibility of Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repositories of Newly Established Central Universities in India

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Abstract:  As professionals and academicians, we are all aware of ETDs (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) ‘ impact on the discourse, communication, and dissemination of research in our respective fields. ETDs are more widely used and advantageous than their conventional equivalents. ETDs, which are academic works that students submit as a requirement for their degree programs, provide various advantages made possible by technological improvements. One significant benefit is the simplicity with which digital research materials may be accessed and distributed, making knowledge easy to share and retrieve. This paper discusses the ETDs’ importance, aim, and initiatives in India. In addition, it discusses the Central universities and their role and contribution to ETDs. The study’s primary objective is to evaluate the ETDs platform aspect of newly established central universities in India. ETDs offer several advantages over their traditional counterparts. They provide easy and convenient access to research work, and their accessibility enhances the visibility and usability of the research. We will try to evaluate the Findability and Accessibility of ETDs that are really easily discoverable and accessible.

In this study, a webometric method is utilized for the evaluation of the websites of ETDs. Webometrics is the quantitative study of developing and using web-based information resources, structures, and technologies. As is common knowledge, a website serves as a digital representation of the ETDs themselves, reflecting the discoverability and accessibility of the ETDs’ content. Using webometrics tools Google PageSpeed Insights, we assess the discoverability and accessibility of the websites of ETDs. We also used a manual approach for findability and accessibility; a simple Google search for findability and for accessibility, we check whether ETDs provide contents openly, full-text availability, and how many platforms a university uses for content dissemination. The present work is limited to newly established central universities. The data were acquired and analyzed using the methods as mentioned above and instruments.

This study’s findings shed light on the applicability of webometrics in assessing the ETDs’findability and accessibility. It also sheds light on the significance of other parameters affecting discoverability and accessibility in ETDs. The study attempts to justify using a webometric approach to evaluate the platform aspect of ETDs. By focusing on discoverability, and accessibility, we provide a comprehensive website-evaluation approach to ETDs, which will aid in assessing the quality, influence, and standing of ETDs. This method will apply to other ETDs Platforms, and similar methods can also be developed in the future.

Practices for enhancing research visibility, citations and impact: review of literature | Emerald Insight

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“Institutional and subject repositories are excellent locations to make research outputs publicly accessible. Researchers can share their research with the public through a variety of alternative dissemination mechanisms, including Research Gate, Academia.edu and others. One of the best effective techniques to boost a research paper’s visibility and number of citations is through open-access (OA) publication, because it makes the study publicly accessible from the very beginning. Researchers can boost their visibility, preserve their work and make it available for use in the future by making all of their outputs publicly accessible. Ogunleye (2019) made a study on “Some determinants of visibility boost for research publications among early career educational researchers in southwest, Nigeria”. In this study, he described that the early career of educational researchers in Southwest Nigeria looked into some determinants (shared reference databases, research profiles, publishing in OA, self-archiving, publication metadata, researcher profiles and social media platforms) for boosting visibility of the publication. A structured questionnaire on factors determining publication boost (r = 0.81) was utilised to collect data, and multiple regression analysis and the Pearson’s correlation approach were employed to evaluate the data. A significant positive correlation between each of the following was discovered in the results: joint reference databases (r = 0.17), Publication metadata (r = 0.23), result profiles (r = 0.44), open-access publishing (r = 0.27), self-archiving (r = 0.52), social media networks (r = 0.43) and accessibility of published work are all positively correlated with each other. The six variables had a positive correlation with the publication visibility (R = 0.60), and they were responsible for 32.9% of the gains invisibility of early career researchers’ publications. Norman (2012) conducted a research on “Maximizing Journal Article Citation Online: Readers, Robots, and Research Visibility”. Then he explained that online academic publications with peer review provide numerous advantages for researchers. They can enhance an article’s popularity and publicity, connect someone’s research to the relevant web of existing literature rapidly and add other scholars’ attention who will use it, increasing the likelihood of it being used. Also provided five basic areas to make the literature more popular which are choosing a search engine-friendly title, writing of abstracts and introductions, making the article easy to find, using of media and links, dissemination of articles after publication and emphasised on increasing a piece of content’s prospects of future downloads, citations and visibility.”

Indian researchers paid $17mn to publish in open access journals in 2020 — 57% of global total

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“Indian researchers paid a whopping $17 million in 2020 to publish their research articles in open access formats, with over 80 percent of it going to commercial publishers including MDPI, Springer Nature and Elsevier, a new study has revealed.”

Publications in gold open access and article processing charge expenditure: evidence from Indian scholarly output

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“Article processing charges (APCs) ensure the financial viability of open access (OA) scholarly journals. The present study analyses the number of gold OA articles published in the Web of Science (WoS)- indexed journals by Indian researchers during 2020, including subject categories that account for the highest APC in India. Besides, it evaluates the amount of APC expenditure incurred in India. The findings of this study reveal that Indian researchers published 26,127 gold OA articles across all subjects in WoS-indexed journals in 2020. Researchers in the field of health and medical sciences paid the highest APC, amounting to USD 7 million, followed by life and earth sciences (USD 6.9 million), multidisciplinary (USD 4.9 million), and chemistry and materials science (USD 4.8 million). The study also reveals that Indian researchers paid an estimated 17 million USD as APC in 2020. Furthermore, 81% of APCs went to commercial publishers, viz. MDPI, Springer–Nature, Elsevier and Frontier Media. As there is a growing number of OA publications from India, we suggest having a central and state-level single-window option for funding in OA journals and backing the Plan S initiative for OA publishing in India”.

Open Science Policies as Regarded by the Communities of Researchers from the Basic Sciences in the Scientific Periphery

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Abstract:  This paper explores the different open science policy effects on the knowledge generation process of researchers in basic sciences: biology, chemistry, and physics.

This paper uses a qualitative methodology with a content analysis approach. It uses seventeen semi-directed interviews.

The main perceived effect of open science is access to research inputs, with open access, open research data and code reuse as primary sources. Another issue is the increase of collaboration with other colleagues in terms of the ability to collaborate faster and the encouraging the exchange of ideas. However, this benefit does not translate to the division of labor in large transnational teams. Time spent on tasks like cleaning up data and code, scooping and other ethical issues are unfavorable aspects noted.

Policymakers could use it to enhance current open science policies in the countries.

It analyzes perspectives of basic sciences researchers from two countries about open science policies. The main conclusion is the fact that open science policies should focus on the research process itself -rather than research outputs- in order to effectively tackle inequalities in science.

Exploring Metadata Quality for Scientific Data in Indian Research Data Repositories: A Survey

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Abstract:  The study aims to trace the development of Indian Research Data repositories (RDRs) indexed in Registry of Research Data Repositories(re3data.org) with their types, subject coverage, software tools, standards and specification used for implementation. The study strives to achieve the following objectives such as: to analyze different aspects of Indian Research Data Repositories(RDRs), to identify data licenses, data upload and access restriction policies and to ascertain quality of scientific metadata being used in RDRs in India. The result of the survey is presented by examining the collected data from the libraries of Research Data Repositories. The result of the study will help to find the effective and qualitative research data in various discipline in Indian subcontinent.

 

IR @ INFLIBNET: Open Access Repository and Availability of ETDs in Nepal

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Abstract:  Most of the research work done around the globe as an academic mandate does not get published. Some of the researchers who publish their work in academic journals are not easily accessible to the general public due to their high subscription costs. Very few of them get published in an open-access repository accessible to all interested. Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are very important to the university students and other researchers because of their academic value. Despite its importance, the archived ETDs in the institutional repository of the universities abroad (western countries) are not accessible to the public. To fulfill this gap in scholarly communication, Nepali universities and some other institutions in Nepal have initiated digital archiving in an open-access medium. This paper tries to show the situation of digital repositories in Nepal. Ten major digital repositories of universities, research institutions, the United Nations Resource Centre in Nepal, and the digital repositories run by the organisations of Nepal government, as well as non-government organisations, have been selected for this study. They archive a variety of items including books, journal articles, book chapters, ETDs, reports, conference papers, and images while major collections in the university repositories are ETDs. Most of these repositories are open-access.

 

IOP Publishing and Manipal Academy of Higher | EurekAlert!

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“IOP Publishing (IOPP) and the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India have finalised a Read and Publish agreement as they work towards breaking down barriers to publishing open access (OA) for researchers from lower and lower middle-income countries.”

Introduction | Open Text Collections

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“Next to grammars and dictionaries, text collections are one of the three elements of the Boasian trilogy of language description. The platform Open Text Collections will host a selection of the best text collections. Texts will undergo peer review in the regional boards (currently Africa, South America, North America, Eurasia, Caucasus, Oceania). Accepted text collections will be available in HTML, PDF and print-on-demand books. Additionally, a data dump of the entirety of collections will be available.

We will produce at least 10 text collections during the funding period, but hope to be able to deliver many more….”

Maximizing Access and Minimizing Barriers to Research in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Open Access and Health Equity | Calcified Tissue International

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Abstract:  Access to published research has always been difficult for researchers and clinicians in low- and middle-income countries, because of the cost of and lack of access to the relevant publications. The dramatic recent increase in electronic research publications has resulted in a marked improvement in reader access to these publications through their mainly Open Access policies, however the costs of processing of submissions and publication have now become the burden of the researchers wishing to publish, rather than the readers. For many researchers working in LMIC, the Article Processing Charges (APC) are prohibitive, hampering the publication of research being conducted in and relevant to these countries. A number of grant funding agencies and international not-for-profit organizations are trying to address these issues by including funding for article publications in their grants, or by supporting publishing entities by subsiding the cost of publication, but more needs to be done by major journal publishers through markedly reducing the APC being charged to researchers in LMIC for open access facilities.

 

Open access movement in the scholarly world: Pathways for libraries in developing countries – Arslan Sheikh, Joanna Richardson, 2023

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Abstract:  Open access is a scholarly publishing model that has emerged as an alternative to traditional subscription-based journal publishing. This study explores the adoption of the open access movement worldwide and the role that libraries can play in addressing those factors which are slowing its progress within developing countries. The study has drawn upon both qualitative data from a focused literature review and quantitative data from major open access platforms. The results indicate that while the open access movement is steadily gaining acceptance worldwide, the progress in developing countries within geographical areas such as Africa, Asia and Oceania is quite a bit slower. Two significant factors are the cost of publishing fees and the lack of institutional open access mandates and policies to encourage uptake. The study provides suggested strategies for academic libraries to help overcome current challenges.

 

Call For Applications: Workshop ‘Towards Sustainable Open Access Book Publishing in the African Context’, Feb 07-09, 2024 | OBC Information Hub

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Dates: February 7th, 8th, 9th 2024

Location: University of Cape Town 

Partners: Association of African Universities, African Platform for Open Scholarship (formerly Continental Platform), Lancaster University, Open Book Collective, Thoth, OAPEN/DOAB

Language: English

Application deadline: 15th December 2023

This 3-day workshop explores challenges that inhibit a sustainable open access book publishing ecosystem with the remit of developing interventions that contribute and/or accelerate the growth of African scholarship. The event is designed to respond to barriers and needs related to Open Access book publishers and initiatives across the African continent. It provides a space for skills development, sharing experiences, expertise, and for learning about new developments in the support and funding of Open Access book publishing.

The event is open to authors/editors, publishers and infrastructure providers. This means initiatives involved in all aspects of Open Access book production and distribution, ranging from content development, producing and distributing open access books, to working on hosting and distributing them. This event is hosted by the University of Cape Town, developers of the African Platform for Open Scholarship (formerly Continental Platform) and the Open Book Futures project. Open Book Futures is an international consortium of stakeholders committed to developing a sustainable, equitable and diverse future for Open Access books led not by large commercial operations, but by communities of scholars, small-to-medium-sized publishers, not-for-profit infrastructure providers, and scholarly libraries. The project is committed to engaging with publishers, universities, and infrastructure providers in a diverse set of national and linguistic contexts beyond the Global North.

The event will have two focus areas: training and development. With regard to training:  

upskilling authors and/or editors on crafting academically strong manuscripts

upskilling infrastructure providers on managing the workflows for the production of open books

With regard to development:

skills sessions, in which publishers can learn from each other and participating initiatives

scoping sessions, to share experiences, learn about new developments, and challenges that need to be overcome

panel discussions, featuring discussions and debates on Open Access book publishing futures on the African continent

The event is free to attend, with places for around 30 delegates in total. Catering costs will be covered for all delegates. In addition, we expect that there will be funding available to pay for travel and accommodation costs for around 15 delegates from the following countries on the African continent: Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe. 

To apply to join the event, delegates are invited to contribute the following information by December 15 2023: 

Name: 

Affiliation: 

Email address: 

A description of your Open Access initiative, including aims and remit (up to 150 words): 

A brief summary of barriers and difficulties encountered in your work (up to 150 words):

Ideas for how these barriers could be overcome (up to 150 words): 

Details of either a manuscript for an Open Access book, or another project designed to build Open Access publishing capacity, that you could bring to introduce and discuss with colleagues (up to 250 words)

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