This conference is organised by the OPERAS-PLUS project to support the development of the OPERAS Research Infrastructure, supporting open scholarly communication for Social Sciences and Humanities in the European Research Area […]
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The first National Diamond Open Access Conference in Switzerland seeks to raise awareness for scholar-led and community-owned scholarly publishing and to bring together the Swiss Diamond Open Access community around issues […]
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by Kristin Biesenbender and Ralf Toepfer
At the Open Access Days 2023, which took place at the FU Berlin at the end of September, Kristin Biesenbender and Ralf Toepfer from the ZBW presented selected results of their new study in a poster session and discussed them with the conference participants. Their study deals with the changing publication behaviour of researchers in the life sciences.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a veritable flood of preprints of manuscripts, especially in the life sciences, which were made Open Access on so-called preprint servers (Fraser, N., Brierley, L., Dey, G., Polka, J. K., Pálfy, M., Nanni, F., & Coates, J. A. (2021). The evolving role of preprints in the dissemination of COVID-19 research and their impact on the science communication landscape. PLOS Biology, 19(4) and Puebla, I., Polka, J., & Rieger, O. Y. (2022). Preprints: Their Evolving Role in Science Communication. Against the Grain (Media), LLC). The reason was the urgent need to quickly publicise the findings on the impact of the virus and the development of vaccines. Many researchers used the pre-publication of their research results to bypass the often lengthy publication processes of traditional journals. This was enabled by preprint repositories such as bioRxiv, medRxiv or ResearchSquare, which had only been slowly adopted by the scientific community before the pandemic.
With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a rapid increase in preprints on these repositories from April 2020 (Fraser, Brierley et al., 2021). Unlike in economics or physics, where a distinct preprint culture exists, this was a new phenomenon for the life sciences. We wanted to find out whether the increase in preprints in the life sciences is a one-off, quasi-crisis-related phenomenon or the beginning of a permanent (cultural) change in the publication behaviour of researchers.
In order to investigate our research question as to whether the observable increase in preprints is a temporary phenomenon or the beginning of a permanent change in the publication behaviour of researchers, we first conducted a survey and then underpinned this with a bibliometric output analysis.
The survey questionnaire, which contained 25 questions on experiences, motivation, concerns, the role of research funders and future developments, was sent to 24,219 authors of COVID-19 preprints, of which we received 1,131 fully completed responses. On our Open Access Days poster, we have documented the answers to two questions that provide clues for the future publication of preprints
In the bibliometric output analysis, we compared the number of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 preprints from 2020-2022 from eight repositories using the Dimensions database.
The results of our survey show that 67% of respondents agree with the statement that the pre-publication of research results in the form of preprints will continue to be a common practice in the future. Of those surveyed, 56% stated that they would continue to publish some of their work as preprints in the future and 23% even stated that they would publish all of their work as preprints in the future.
Figure 1: “What do you think of the following statements?” (n=1,131)
Figure 2: “Do you intend to post your scholarly work on preprint servers in the future?”
In the bibliometric output analysis, we found that the number of COVID-19 preprints decreased continuously from 2020 to 2022, while the number of non-COVID-19 preprints increased over the same period.
Figure 3: Preprints count 2020 – 2022
Figure 3: Covid-19 preprints (n=73,839)
Figure 3: Non-covid-19-preprints (n=1,122,456)
Although it is certainly still too early to make a final judgement, it can already be stated that COVID-19 has led to a significant increase in the number of preprints and there are initial signs that preprints have become established as a publication type in the life sciences. The “Ingelfinger rule” which has been followed in the life sciences for decades and is intended to ensure that medical research reports should first undergo peer review before being published, is therefore no longer strictly applied these days and is taking a back seat in favour of the rapid publication of research results.
Further information:
Ralf Toepfer works in the Publication Services department of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, where he is responsible for discipline-specific services for the management of economic research data, prepares publication analyses in the context of the Open Access transformation and supports the development of the Open Library Economics (OLEcon). He can also be found on Mastodon.
Portrait: ZBW©, Photographer: Sven Wied
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By invitation, SPARC Europe recently attended the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access. Participants reflected on the current diamond OA publishing system and how to develop and sustain a solid scholar-led […]
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Themes for the conferences have always been some aspect of scholarly/scientific publishing and communication, with “open” as an important aspect. The Munin audience has partly been librarians working on OA and […]
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The purpose of the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access is to bring together the Diamond OA community of journal editors, organizations, experts, and stakeholders from the Global South and North, […]
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An appeals court has ruled that it is unconstitutional for the government to require deposit of published works in the Library of Congress
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The DIAMAS project has just launched a survey which is of high relevance to the future of Open Access! DIAMAS supports Open Access Diamond and institutional publishing by setting new standards, […]
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Robert Harington talks to Antonia Seymour, CEO of IOP Publishing, in this new series of perspectives from some of Publishing’s leaders across the non-profit and profit sectors of our industry.
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Did you know that over 60 European higher education institutions have policies covering the copyright of research publications and almost 45 institutions either have or will soon have rights retention policies […]
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The institutional OA diamond publishing sector can be challenged by fragmentation; its visibility can be limited, its service of varying quality, and its sustainability is not always secure. A new European […]
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This episode of SSP’s Early Career Development Podcast serves as a primer on the marketing role within scholarly publishing- what marketing professionals do, how they amplify the customer voice through products and services, and the various contexts and conversations this work can happen within.
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SPARC Europe has been selected to deliver the first project sponsored under the Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) programme. KR21 seeks to strengthen access to knowledge in particular through libraries and archives. […]
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We ask the 2022 Society for Scholarly Publishing Fellows to offer their thoughts on this year’s Annual Meeting.
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In March 2022, the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access was launched, upon initiative of Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS, and the French National Research Agency (ANR). The objective of the Action Plan is to further develop and expand a sustainable, community-driven Diamond OA scholarly communication ecosystem.
YERUN is among the numerous organisations supporting the Action Plan and is eager to actively contribute to its implementation. This is why we are organising an online event on 20th June (10:30 – 12:30 CEST) aiming to contribute to the ongoing discussions and complement the intentions laid out in the Action Plan with a more hands-on perspective: what are universities doing to promote this yet under-exploited publication format? What are the obstacles that are preventing it from reaching its full potential? What can the research sector do to overcome these obstacles?
Through presentations and discussions in breakout rooms, a fruitful dialogue will be fostered to better define the role that every actor can play in promoting Diamond Open Access.