Webinar: Learning from national open access platforms Tickets, Tue 25 Apr 2023 at 14:00 | Eventbrite

“Publish OA, co-led by the Royal Irish Academy and Trinity College Dublin, is pleased to announce a webinar which will focus on the founding and evolution of national open access (OA) platforms.

Publish OA was created in response to the Government of Ireland’s target of achieving 100% open access to publicly funded scholarly publications by 2030 and is funded by the National Open Research Forum (NORF). The project will run until November 2024. The project’s key objective is to evaluate the feasibility of establishing a national OA platform for journals and books for Ireland.

Existing national OA platforms have been successful in helping publishers comply with OA requirements and have agreed to share their experiences through this webinar. The presentations will cover the creation of the platforms, principles adhered to, technical requirements, business models used to sustain these platforms and any lessons learnt.

These presentations are open to the public, with the Q&A at the end of the webinar being closed to the Publish OA Working Groups.

Panellists include Jan Willem Wijnen (openjournals.nl) and Antti-Jussi Nygård and Sami Syrjämäki (journal.fi). Openjournals.nl is a diamond open access platform for scientific journals, which was launched in 2021. It now hosts 24 journals with a new journal being added almost every month. Journal.fi is a journal management and publishing service provided by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. It features 130 Finnish scholarly journals.”

Registered report: Survey on attitudes and experiences regarding preregistration in psychological research | PLOS ONE

Abstract:  Background

Preregistration, the open science practice of specifying and registering details of a planned study prior to knowing the data, increases the transparency and reproducibility of research. Large-scale replication attempts for psychological results yielded shockingly low success rates and contributed to an increasing demand for open science practices among psychologists. However, preregistering one’s studies is still not the norm in the field. Here, we conducted a study to explore possible reasons for this discrepancy.

Methods

In a mixed-methods approach, we conducted an online survey assessing attitudes, motivations, and perceived obstacles with respect to preregistration. Respondents (N = 289) were psychological researchers that were recruited through their publications on Web of Science, PubMed, PSYNDEX, and PsycInfo, and preregistrations on OSF Registries. Based on the theory of planned behavior, we predicted that positive attitudes (moderated by the perceived importance of preregistration) as well as a favorable subjective norm and higher perceived behavioral control positively influence researchers’ intention to preregister (directional hypothesis 1). Furthermore, we expected an influence of research experience on attitudes and perceived motivations and obstacles regarding preregistration (non-directional hypothesis 2). We analyzed these hypotheses with multiple regression models and included preregistration experience as a control variable.

Results

Researchers’ attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and the perceived importance of preregistration significantly predicted researchers’ intention to use preregistration in the future (see hypothesis 1). Research experience influenced both researchers’ attitudes and their perception of motivations to preregister, but not the perception of obstacles (see hypothesis 2). Descriptive reports on researchers’ attitudes, motivations and obstacles regarding preregistration are provided.

Discussion

Many researchers had already preregistered and had a rather positive attitude toward preregistration. Nevertheless, several obstacles were identified that may be addressed to improve and foster preregistration.

The Internet Archive has lost its first fight to scan and lend e-books like a library – The Verge

“A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit brought against it by four book publishers, deciding that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them out like a library.

Judge John G. Koeltl decided that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create “derivative works,” and so would have needed authorization from the books’ copyright holders — the publishers — before lending them out through its National Emergency Library program….

The Internet Archive says it will appeal. “Today’s lower court decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve,” Chris Freeland, the director of Open Libraries at the Internet Archive, writes in a blog post. “This decision impacts libraries across the US who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.”

The two sides went to court on Monday, with HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House joining Hachette as plaintiffs….”

The Fight Continues – Internet Archive Blogs

“Today’s lower court decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve. This decision impacts libraries across the US who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.

But it’s not over—we will keep fighting for the traditional right of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books. We will be appealing the judgment and encourage everyone to come together as a community to support libraries against this attack by corporate publishers….”

Research Organization Registry (ROR) | Case Study: ROR at Rockefeller University Press and Silverchair

“When we first implemented this workflow we were only collecting ROR IDs for the corresponding author’s current address, which was a problem because that’s not necessarily a manuscript affiliation. Since then we’ve improved the process, and I show that in this short video. EJP has its own instance of the ROR database in their system. When the author is filling out their submission and starts typing the institution name the typeahead is looking up the ROR record in the EJP database. The author chooses the correct institution from the results list and is then presented with a green checkmark next to the institution name, an indication that it has been validated. We also have a new section asking the corresponding author for all of their affiliations. It’s the same process as just described for each affiliation. The video shows what happens if the author does not select from the typeahead menu, and they just hit Save, or if they choose a name that’s not in ROR – they get this message that basically says, “Look, if you leave it this way, you’re not going to be eligible for any free publishing.” Authors can add as many affiliations as needed, and all of those will be checked against our deals to see if the article is eligible. Our policy is that any corresponding author affiliation on the manuscript is eligible….”

Survey on training in Open and Responsible Research and Innovation

“You are kindly invited to take part in this survey on learning opportunities for researchers in Open and Responsible Research and Innovation (Open RRI). Open RRI aims to bring research closer to the needs and values of society. Your answers will help us to identify the best available training programmes and resources for researchers. 

This survey is part of the PATTERN project funded under the Horizon Europe program (HORIZON-WIDERA-2022-ERA-01-44). The project will establish a platform for reuse and further development of training programmes, mutual learning and recommendations to authorities and institutions regarding Open RRI….”

The Cape Town Statement on fairness, equity and diversity in research

“Even the push towards openness and transparency in science publishing — which many have argued is a way to foster greater integrity in research — has created more barriers for investigators in low-resource environments.

Sharing data, for example, requires having enough institutional infrastructure and resources to first curate, manage, store and (in the case of data relating to people) encrypt the data — and to deal with requests to access them. Also, the pressure placed on researchers of LMICs by high-income-country funders to share their data as quickly as possible frequently relegates them to the role of data collectors for better-resourced teams. With enough time, all sorts of locally relevant questions that were not part of the original project could be investigated by local researchers. But, well-resourced investigators in high-income countries — who were not part of the original project — are often better placed to conduct secondary analyses.

Unforeseen difficulties are arising around publishing, too. Currently, the costs to publish an article in gold open-access journals (which typically range from US$500–$3,000) are prohibitive for most researchers and institutions in LMICs. The University of Cape Town, for example, which produces around 3,300 articles each year, has an annual budget of $180,000 for article-processing costs. This covers only about 120 articles per year.

Because of this, researchers in these countries frequently publish their papers in subscription-based journals. But scientists working in similar contexts can’t access such journals because the libraries in their institutions are unable to finance subscriptions to a wide range of journals. All this makes it even harder for researchers to build on locally relevant science….”

 

The Cape Town Statement on Fostering Research Integrity through Fairness and Equity advocates for fair practice from conception to implementation of research and provides 20 recommendations aimed at all involved stakeholders.

“The 7th World Conference on Research Integrity (7thWCRI) was held in Cape Town in May 2022 with the conference theme “Fostering Research Integrity in an unequal world”. Participants at this conference recognised that unfair and inequitable research practices remain prevalent at all stages of research from proposal development to funding application, data collection, analysis, sharing and access, reporting and translation. These practices can impact the integrity of research in many ways, including skewing research priorities and agendas with research questions that are irrelevant for local needs, power imbalances that undermine fair recognition of knowledge contributions within collaborations, including unfair acknowledgement of contributions to published work, lack of diversity and inclusivity in collaborations, and unfair data management practices that disadvantage researchers in low resource environments. Furthermore, a drive towards open science as a pillar of research integrity fails to recognise the financial burden placed on under-resourced researchers and institutions, and the reality that highly trained and well-resourced researchers in HIC may disproportionately benefit from reanalysing openly shared data by LMIC researchers. In response to these challenges the following statement of goals, values and recommendations aims to contribute to the growing global recognition that fairness and equity are essential requirements of integrity in all research contexts.

This statement advocates for fair practice from conception to implementation of research and provides 20 recommendations aimed at all involved stakeholders. These recommendations are grouped under values that were identified as important underpinning considerations in discussion groups at the 7th WCRI. These values include diversity, inclusivity, mutual respect, shared accountability, indigenous knowledge recognition and epistemic justice (ensuring that the value of knowledge is not based on biases related to gender, race, ethnicity, culture, socio-economic status etcetera)….”

Twitter turbulences and their impact on Altmetric… · Open Access @ Strathclyde

“So the most likely explanation one is able to fathom is that the ‘Twitter crisis’ may be hitting services largely based on social media impact. It’s not just that the desertion of large swathes of very active communicators in the scholarly comms domain to Mastodon has dried up the references (tweets) that should be there for Altmetric to catch. It’s – presumably – also that such a hit to the information-gathering workflow and to its associated business model has somehow rendered the Altmetric snapshot unreliable. The impact of this paper a week after release has surely been higher than 17 (as of Mar 21st, screenshot posted at the top)….”

Virtual Listening Session on the NIH Public Access Plan – Office of Science Policy

“NIH will host a virtual, public listening session to hear community feedback on the NIH Plan to Enhance Public Access to the Results of NIH-Supported Research (NIH Public Access Plan). The NIH Public Access Plan is currently available for public comment through a Request for Information that NIH issued in February 2023. Written RFI responses on the NIH Public Access Plan will continue to be accepted until April 24, 2023….”

Society and university journal publishers gradually progressing towards new OA models | Impact of Social Sciences

“Assessing the findings of a recent survey into the publishing practices of independent academic publishers, Danielle Padula, head of marketing and community development at Scholastica, finds these publishers to be moving incrementally towards fully open access models while still working to identify the options with the best long-term growth potential in the wake of recent funder initiatives, such as Plan S and the OSTP ‘Nelson Memo’….”

Electrochemical Society powers ahead with open science – Physics World

“In a bid to remove the cost barrier for more authors to make their work freely accessible, the society launched its forward-looking ECS Plus programme in 2016. This read-and-publish package not only provides institutions with full access to the ECS digital library, but also allows authors at those institutions to publish an unlimited number of open access articles in ECS journals for free. The uptake has been impressive, with more than 1000 research centres around the world now subscribing to the package….”

A global approach for natural history museum collections | Science

Abstract:  Over the past three centuries, people have collected objects and specimens and placed them in natural history museums throughout the world. Taken as a whole, this global collection is the physical basis for our understanding of the natural world and our place in it, an unparalleled source of information that is directly relevant to issues as diverse as wildlife conservation, climate change, pandemic preparedness, food security, invasive species, rare minerals, and the bioeconomy (1). Strategic coordination and use of the global collection has the potential to focus future collecting and guide decisions that are relevant to the future of humanity and biodiversity. To begin to map the aggregate holdings of the global collection, we describe here a simple and fast method to assess the contents of any natural history museum, and report results based on our assessment of 73 of the world’s largest natural history museums and herbaria from 28 countries.

From the body of the article:

“Natural history museums have generally operated independently, and no interoperable data structure exists to provide open access to their collective holdings. Because most natural history museum data are not digitally discoverable, the networks of data aggregators have not been able to access these “dark data” …”

 

Nearly 20 Hindawi journals delisted from leading index amid concerns of papermill activity – Retraction Watch

“Nineteen journals from the open-access publisher Hindawi were removed from Clarivate’s Web of Science Monday when the indexer refreshed its Master Journal List. 

The delistings follow a disclosure by Wiley, which bought Hindawi in 2021, that the company suspended publishing special issues for three months because of “compromised articles.” That lost the company $9 million in revenue….

Delisting 50 journals at once is more than usual for Clarivate, and may be the beginning of a larger culling. Quaderi wrote that the company developed an AI tool “to help us identify outlier characteristics that indicate that a journal may no longer meet our quality criteria.” The tool flagged more than 500 journals at the beginning of this year, according to her blog post, and Web of Science’s editors continue to investigate them….”