Not even an abstract is free online.
Category Archives: oa.ta
How publishing in open access journals threatens science and what we can do about it – Romesburg – 2016 – The Journal of Wildlife Management – Wiley Online Library
Abstract: The last decade has seen an enormous increase in the number of peer-reviewed open access research journals in which authors whose articles are accepted for publication pay a fee to have them made freely available on the Internet. Could this popularity of open access publishing be a bad thing? Is it actually imperiling the future of science? In this commentary, I argue that it is. Drawing upon research literature, I explain why it is almost always best to publish in society journals (i.e., those sponsored by research societies such as Journal of Wildlife Management) and not nearly as good to publish in commercial academic journals, and worst—to the point it should normally be opposed—to publish in open access journals (e.g., PLOS ONE). I compare the operating plans of society journals and open access journals based on 2 features: the quality of peer review they provide and the quality of debate the articles they publish receive. On both features, the quality is generally high for society journals but unacceptably low for open access journals, to such an extent that open access publishing threatens to pollute science with false findings. Moreover, its popularity threatens to attract researchers’ allegiance to it and away from society journals, making it difficult for them to achieve their traditionally high standards of peer reviewing and of furthering debate. I prove that the commonly claimed benefits to science of open access publishing are nonexistent or much overestimated. I challenge the notion that journal impact factors should be a key consideration in selecting journals in which to publish. I suggest ways to strengthen the Journal and keep it strong. © 2016 The Wildlife Society.
Elsevier defends its value after Open Access disputes | The Bookseller
Not even the opening paragraph is OA. [Note that the paywall is from The Bookseller, not Elsevier.]
Update (May 3, 2016): The article is now OA. Excerpt:
“Elsevier has sought to set aside public criticism of its Open Access (OA) and pricing policies and to restate its value for the academy, emphasising how, as a profit-generating company, it has the means to invest in innovation to serve researchers’ fast-changing needs.
The publisher’s record of success is clear: 2015 results from parent company RELX Group show Elsevier with operating profits of £760m on revenue of £2,070m, with underlying revenue growth of 2% and underlying profit up 3%. The prediction for 2016 is of further profit growth. But public perceptions of Elsevier have been dogged by accusations of profiteering through excessive charges and reluctance to make its material available through OA, most notably from the online academic protest group The Cost of Knowledge (www.thecostofknowledge.com) which has racked up 16,000 signatories to its Elsevier boycott over five years.
Other widely aired disputes—a year-long deadlock with Dutch universities over institutional subscriptions; the departure of the entire editorial board of journal Lingua in 2015 in a row over OA—have added fuel to the fire for Elsevier’s critics. But director of access and policy Alicia Wise, vice-president of global corporate relations Tom Reller and policy director Gemma Hersh say criticism from a vocal minority is unrepresentative of the publisher’s regular contact with millions of researchers. The trio say that detractors obscure a key fact: that Elsevier is seeking to negotiate the new landscapes of OA and content-sharing in such a way that its economic sustainability, and therefore ability to maintain quality, is not compromised….”
Elsevier defends its value after Open Access disputes [paywalled]
Not even the opening paragraph is OA. [Note that the paywall is from The Bookseller, not Elsevier.]
Open access meta-analysis for psychotherapy research
Use the link to access pay-per-view options for the article published in PsycNET. [Abstract] Meta-analysis has played a key role in psychotherapy research for nearly 40 years. There is now an opportunity for technology to assist with transparent and open meta-analyses. The authors describe an open-access database of effect sizes and a corresponding web application for performing meta-analyses, viewing the database, and downloading effect sizes. The initial databases provide effect sizes for family therapy for delinquency studies and for alliance-outcome correlations in individual psychotherapy. Disciplinary norms about data sharing and openness are shifting. Furthermore, meta-analyses of behavioral interventions have been criticized for lacking transparency and openness. The database and web application are aimed at facilitating data sharing and improving the transparency of meta-analyses. The authors conclude with a discussion of future directions for the database. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Do we want to pay to publish? The Open Access model for scientific journals. – PubMed – NCBI
A letter to the editor behind a paywall. Apparently it assumes that all or most OA journals charge publication fees.
As an Open-Access Megajournal Cedes Some Ground, a Movement Gathers Steam – The Chronicle of Higher Education
“The world’s largest scientific journal, the open-access giant PLOS ONE, is feeling some pullback. Last year the free site published 10 percent fewer papers than it did two years ago. Its impact factor — a measure that uses citations to track its influence — has been on a five-year slide.
Rather than signaling a failure of the open-access movement, however, the declines are looking like the byproduct of a broader victory in a hard-fought campaign. More and more, major publishers are creating their own open-access journals, with articles freely available to anyone. And in many other cases they’re offering hybrid models that let authors pay for open access. An increasingly common version of author-paid open access is the “megajournal,” copying the PLOS ONE innovation of publishing a large volume of papers online across various disciplines.
In short, PLOS ONE — now consistently publishing around 30,000 articles a year — has attracted much more company in its mission to build huge stocks of freely available scientific research. “Since PLOS ONE’s tremendous success, everyone and their grandmother has created a megajournal,” said David J. Solomon, an emeritus professor of medicine at Michigan State University who studies open-access economics….
Officials with the library say the end of PLOS ONE’s rapid growth is not indicative of an underlying problem. Instead, it is due largely to the increased competition in open-access publishing and the finite supply of scientist-authors, especially at a time of tighter research budgets, said Elizabeth Marincola, chief executive officer of PLOS….”
Recognition for open science and reproducibility. The +Chronicle of Higher E…
“The +Chronicle of Higher Education just named +Brian Nosek one of the top 10 influencers of 2015. http://chronicle.com/specialreport/The-2015-Influence-List/22 Nosek is the Director of the Center for Open Science. Kudos to him and the COS. Unfortunately the Chronicle articles on the individual influencers are behind paywalls. In case you have a subscription, here’s the link to the piece of Nosek http://chronicle.com/article/Research-Watchdog-Brian-Nosek/234574
As Academia.edu Grows, Some Scholars Voice Concerns – The Chronicle of Higher Education
“For Academia.edu, numbers matter. Numbers are how the website promotes itself — more than 29 million registered users have posted more than eight million academic papers to the site, the “about” page boasts — and numbers are how the site makes money. Despite its domain name, Academia.edu is not an educational institution. It is a for-profit company, but it doesn’t charge academics to post or read research. So far, it has been funded by venture capital and job ads, and its success depends on its large user base. But its business model makes some academics uncomfortable. “Academia.edu and platforms like that are kind of piggybacking off a public university system, but they’re doing nothing to sustain it,” said Gary Hall, a professor of media and performing arts at Coventry University and co-founder of Open Humanities Press. Mr. Hall is part of a small but influential group of doubters. He’s concerned that Academia.edu is profiting from academics’ free labor, and he worries that one company controls access to so much scholarly research….”
Rights & Reproductions: The Handbook for Cultural Institutions
“Rights & Reproductions: The Handbook for Cultural Institutions is the first comprehensive resource to focus solely on the rights and reproductions guidelines, established standards and emerging best practices at cultural institutions. This publication was co-published in 2015 by the Indianapolis Museum of Art and American Alliance of Museums. With intellectual property laws and rights and reproductions methodologies ever-changing with new technologies, this digital publication, produced using the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) Toolkit platform, will be a living document that can be updated to remain current with trends and best practices….”
Librarians Leap to the Aid of Researchers Whose Funding Will Soon Depend on Open Access
“As more federal agencies begin requiring grant recipients to make research results freely available to the public, college librarians have taken on a new role: helping researchers comply with open-access rules.
A February 2013 memorandum from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said federal agencies with more than $100 million in research-and-development expenditures would have to require that results be available within a year of publication.
New open-access rules will take effect in October at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, among other agencies. Researchers will risk losing grant support from those sources if they don’t make their findings freely available to the public. Several private funders, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are also shifting to public-access requirements. In response, many college libraries are working with institutional research offices and others to let researchers know what’s expected of them….”
FASTR to be Considered by Senate Committee | SPARC
“After a month of intense conversations and negotiations, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) will bring the ‘Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act’ up for mark-up on Wednesday, July 29th. The language that will be considered is an amended version of FASTR, officially known as the ‘Johnson-Carper Substitute Amendment,’ which was officially filed by the HSGAC leadership late on Friday afternoon, per committee rules. There are two major changes from the original bill language to be particularly aware of. Specifically, the amendment Replaces the six month embargo period with ‘no later than 12 months, but preferably sooner’ as anticipated; and Provides a mechanism for stakeholders to petition federal agencies to ‘adjust’ the embargo period if the12 months does not serve ‘the public, industries, and the scientific community.’ We understand that these modifications were made in order accomplish a number of things: Satisfy the requirement of a number of Members of HSGAC that the language more closely track that of the OSTP Directive; Meet the preference of the major U.S. higher education associations for a maximum 12 month embargo; Ensure that, for the first time, a number of scientific societies will drop their opposition for the bill; and Ensure that any petition process an agency may enable is focused on serving the interests of the public and the scientific community …”
Impact of Social Sciences – Rather than narrow our definition of impact, we should use metrics to explore richness and diversity of outcomes.
“Impact is multi-dimensional, the routes by which impact occur are different across disciplines and sectors, and impact changes over time. Jane Tinkler argues that if institutions like HEFCE specify a narrow set of impact metrics, more harm than good would come to universities forced to limit their understanding of how research is making a difference. But qualitative and quantitative indicators continue to be an incredible source of learning for how impact works in each of our disciplines, locations or sectors.”
Wellcome Trust Launches Guide for Publishing Open Access Monographs and Book Chapters – OASPA
“Open access for monographs and book chapters is a relatively new area of publishing, and there are many ways of approaching it. With this in mind, a recent publication from the Wellcome Trust aims to provide some guidance for publishers to consider when developing policies and processes for open access books. The Wellcome Trust recognises that implementation around publishing monographs and book chapters open access is in flux, and invites publishers to email Cecy Marden at c.marden@wellcome.ac.uk with any suggestions for further guidance that would be useful to include in this document. ‘Open Access Monographs and Book Chapters: A practical guide for publishers’ is available to download as a pdf from the Wellcome Trust website.”
Library support in the transition to open access: membership cancellations | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs
“The purpose of this post is to shed some light on a specific issue in the transition to open access that particularly affects small and low-cost publishers and to suggest one strategy to address this issue. In the words of one Resource Requirements interviewee: ‘So the other set of members that we used to have about forty library members , but when we went to open access online, we lost the whole bunch of libraries. Yeah, so basically we sent everybody ,you know, a letter saying we are going to open access online, the annual membership is only $30, we hope you will continue to support us even though there are no longer print journals, and then a whole flu of cancellations came in from a whole bunch of libraries, which we had kind of thought might happen but given how cheap we are, I have to say I was really disappointed when it indeed did happen especially from whole bunch of [deleted] libraries [for which our journal is extremely relevant]. I was going, seriously $30?’ Comments: for a university library, a society membership fee, when not required for journal subscriptions, may be difficult to justify from an accounting perspective. $30 is a small cost; however, for a university the administrative work of tracking such memberships and cutting a check every year likely exceeds the $30 cost. With 40 library members at a cost of $30, the total revenue for this journal from this source was $1,200. A university or university library could sponsor this amount at less than the cost of many an article processing charge. The university and library where the faculty member is located have a support program for open access journals; clearly the will, and some funding, is there. One of the challenges is transitioning subscription dollars to support for open access, as I address in my 2013 First Monday article. Following is one suggestion for libraries, or for faculty to suggest to their libraries: why not engage your faculty who are independent or society publishers to gain support for cancellations or tough negotiations and lower prices for the big deals of large, highly profitable commercial publishers that I argue are critical to redirect funding to our own publishing activities? Here is one scenario that may help to explain the potential …”