Cultivating sustainable in-house scholarly publishing programs: Community conversation PT 2

“Gaynor Redvers-Mutton, Associate Director of Business Development and Sales at the Biochemical Society, and Maxine Aldred, Director of Publications Production at the American Society of Civil Engineers, respond to the questions:

What factors do you consider essential for scholarly societies and institutes to sustainably operate in-house publishing programs like yours?
How is your team working to increase publishing efficiencies, promote research equity, and provide more value to the academy?…

We acknowledge that the scientific communities must adapt to changing scholarly norms and develop new dissemination models that address open and equitable access. However, this must be done in a way that preserves the scholarly value of the peer-reviewed version of research. This must be fixed at the time of publication without any possibility of historical rewriting –– meaning that the original work cannot be altered by the author or anyone else. ASCE also believes that learned societies, acting in accordance with their educational mission, should be able to recover their costs of investing in managing the peer review process, editing, publishing, disseminating, and maintaining an ever-growing archive in perpetuity.”

IEEE – IEEE and HEAL-Link Sign Three-Year Transformative Agreement to Accelerate Open Access Publishing in Greece

“IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, announced today that it has reached a three-year open access agreement with Hellenic Academic Libraries Link (HEAL-Link), a consortium of Greek universities that includes 43 institutions.

With this new agreement, all researchers belonging to participating Greek institutions are now able to publish open access articles in approximately 200 leading journals and magazines published by IEEE, making them instantly available and free to read by the public, supporting HEAL-Link’s mission to help make their authors’ publications open to the world. Under the terms of the agreement, the costs of accessing subscription content and the article processing charges (APCs) required to publish open access are covered by the license fees paid by consortium members, making the process easier and more convenient for authors.

Participating members of the HEAL-Link consortium will have:

Open access publishing rights in over 160 hybrid IEEE journals and all IEEE fully open access journals, making articles instantly available and free to read by the general public

Publication of all open access IEEE journal articles with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license unless otherwise requested by the author

Read access rights to peer-reviewed journals, access to approximately 200,000 new conference papers added each year from approximately 2,000 expert conferences, as well as IEEE standards (totaling more than 4.8 million articles overall)…”

On International Open Access Week, IBEC is launching its virtual Open Science space – Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia

“Taking advantage of the renewal of its website, IBEC has created a new virtual space dedicated to Open Science. This space is a public demonstration of IBEC’s commitment to Open Science, in accordance with its own values ??and mission, which has been realized with various initiatives and positions that the new virtual space gathers and makes visible. 

Due to its own conviction and due to the growth of the practical requirements of Open Science in the European, Spanish and Catalan research environments, the IBEC is articulating in recent years its alignment with this movement by including its principles in its own strategic plans, the approval in September 2021 of the research data management policy, the creation of an Open Science pillar with the Strategic Initiatives and Communication departments, and the incorporation of a new Knowledge Manager profile as support staff for researchers. 

These measures have made possible to carry out an internal training plan in aspects of Open Science; the improvement in the support and promotion of the publication in open access; the revision of the own research evaluation processes following the principles established in the DORA declaration; initiate the internal improvement process of research data management and facilitate its open publication, adopting the CSUC Research Data Repository (CORA), as an institutional repository; organize the didactic materials generated in the collaboration programs with the educational world, so that they are Open Educational Resources; development of citizen science projects and days for patients, or the reformulation of the Commission for Research Integrity which explicitly adds among its attributions monitoring the deployment of the Open Science strategy at IBEC; etc. …”

Editorial Does the Scientific Community Need Another Open-Access Journal? | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

“If you are looking at the first papers published in the IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology (OJEMB) and you are wondering if the scientific community truly needed another open-access journal, you are not alone. I asked myself the same question when I was approached to serve as the Founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE OJEMB. In fact, over the past two decades, we have witnessed the launch of a multitude of open-access journals, often lacking a well-defined scope and focus on publishing high-quality manuscripts….”

Open Access and conference papers in engineering disciplines

“In February 2020, CESAER published a position paper (CESAER, 2020) expressing its support for further strengthening of Open Science and Open Access in Horizon Europe. The importance of Open Access publishing of conference materials was explicitly mentioned due to its importance to universities of science & technology (S&T). As a follow-up to this position, this paper explores the current workflows around making conference papers in the Engineering disciplines openly available at a number of CESAER Member institutions. Recent initiatives aimed to make Open Access the default scholarly communications standard (e.g. the Plan S initiative) have mostly put emphasis on journal research articles, but conference papers and proceedings are also a key research output at the universities of S&T united in CESAER. This papers explores how large the fraction of conference papers is against the total number of research outputs, how often they are being published Open Access and what actions may be envisioned to increase their accessibility and mid- and long-term visibility….”

PKP Publishing Services Welcomes OPS Hosted Client: Engineering Archive | Public Knowledge Project

“PKP Publishing Services (PKP|PS) is happy to welcome our first Open Preprint Systems (OPS) hosted client, Engineering Archive (engrXiv).

Open Engineering Inc launched engrXiv in 2016 with the mission of openly disseminating engineering knowledge and is now migrating from OSF Preprints, the Centre for Open Science’s preprint service, to OPS, an open-source system developed by PKP in partnership with SciELO, for managing and posting preprints online. The move will provide engrXiv with greater operational control and the support of a strong open source community. …”

Announcing engrXiv’s new host

“Engineering Archive is excited to announce that the server has moved from to a new hosting provider and server platform, Open Preprint Systems (OPS) hosted by PKP Publishing Services (PKP|PS).

Engineering Archive was launched in 2016 on the Open Science Framework (Center for Open Science). For the past five and a half years, we have seen strong growth of the server as an open access repository for engineering scholarship. We are grateful to the Center for Open Science for providing a home for the server in these first years of service.

Our new home with PKP|PS will provide Engineering Archive with greater financial security and improved user management and unites us with the vibrant open-source community developing OPS (built on the same framework as the popular Open Journal Systems software). We must also thank the staff at PKP for their assistance in preparing the server for migration to this new platform.”

Open access at ICE Publishing

“If your grant-funder requires that work funded by them be published open access, you may:

Post the accepted version on open, unrestricted websites or deposit it in an institutional repository, with a link to the version of record. This is the accepted version of the text that incorporates all revisions due to peer review or editorial comment, but before the article has been copyedited and typeset. It is the version that you resubmitted to the journal, rather than the PDF that is published on the journal website. The version of record is the final PDF.

If your research-funding body is a signatory of Plan S, there is no embargo period for you to deposit your accepted article. i.e. you may do so immediately with a CC-BY licence
If your research-funding body is not a signatory of Plan S, we ask that you please wait 12 months before depositing your article

Include a weblink to the version of record (the final PDF hosted on the journal webpage – see the full list of our journals).

ICE Publishing is happy to support grant-funded research through this initiative, raising the profile of our authors, employers and journals. If you have any questions about applying to place articles online, please contact us….”

Study Shows Ensuring Reproducibility in Research Is Needed – IEEE Spectrum

“About 60 percent of IEEE conferences, magazines, and journals have no practices in place to ensure reproducibility of the research they publish. That’s according to a study by an ad hoc committee formed by the IEEE Computer Society to investigate the matter and suggest remedies.

Reproducibility—the ability to repeat a line of research and obtain consistent results—can help confirm the validity of scientific discoveries, IEEE Fellow Manish Parashar points out. He is chair of the society’s Committee on Open Science and Reproducibility….

The goal of the ad hoc committee’s study was to ensure that research results IEEE publishes are reproducible and that readers can look at the results and “be confident that they understand the processes used to create those results and they can reproduce them in their labs,” Parashar says….

Here are three key recommendations from the report:

Researchers should include specific, detailed information about the products they used in their experiment. When naming the software program, for example, authors should include the version and all necessary computer codes that were written. In addition, journals should make submitting the information easier by adding a step in the submission process. The survey found that 22 percent of the society’s journals, magazines, and conferences already have infrastructure in place for submitting such information.
All researchers should include a clear, specific, and complete description of how the reported results were reached. That includes input data, computational steps, and the conditions under which experiments and analysis were performed.
Journals and magazines, as well as scientific societies requesting submissions for their conferences, should develop and disclose policies about achieving reproducibility. Guidelines should include such information as how the papers will be evaluated for reproducibility and criteria code and data must meet….”

IEEE Reaches a Transformative Open Access Read and Publish Agreement with Finnish Consortium FinELib

IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, and FinELib, a consortium of Finnish universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutes, and public libraries, have entered an Open Access Read and Publish agreement. For more information, see https://finelib.fi/iel-agreement. 

North Carolina invents math crimes against the state | Washington Examiner

“The math police told Nutt to keep his answers to himself. If he offers testimony that requires “engineering knowledge,” the state will bust him like a math outlaw because he lacks a professional engineering license — something he never needed during his career. Engineers at manufacturing firms such as DuPont have an exemption to the requirement….”

IEEE and IReL Expand Access To Irish Technology Research with New Transformative Open Access Agreement

“IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, announced today that it has reached an open access read and publish agreement with IReL, the Irish licensing consortium.

The transformative read and publish agreement enables corresponding IReL authors to publish open access articles in IEEE’s industry-leading journals and provides reading access to over five million documents from the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. The agreement also makes it more convenient for authors to publish open access articles with IEEE as eligible authors pay no article processing charges (APCs): these costs are covered by IReL under the agreement….”

IET and the Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST) agree to deepen cooperation on projects supporting scientific publishing and international research

“The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese Association of Science and Technology (CAST) to deepen cooperation in three aspects: the ‘Innovation China’ platform, impact assessment studies of Chinese scientific research output (including a focus on Open Access) and international knowledge exchange.

Under the agreement, the two parties will collaborate on activities to support the advancement of scientific research in China, sharing experiences in open access publishing and using the IET’s Inspec and Inspec Analytics solutions to deliver impact assessments of Chinese research outputs both domestically and internationally….”