Category Archives: oa.switzerland

scholar-led Open Access: Manifesto for fair publishing in German-speaking countries

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Scholar-led.network points out problematic issues in the current publishing system and wants to initiate a debate on the role of scholar-led Open Access

In its scholar-led.network manifesto, the focus group scholar-led.network, which was established within the framework of the open-access.network project, criticises the current scholarly publishing system in the German-speaking world and, at the same time, provides fields of action for the development of a fair, planned and bibliodiverse publishing culture.

The authors of the text identify a journal crisis in the course of the Open Access transformation. This is reflected, among other things, in the monopoly position of major publishers who demand high publication fees from authors – so-called APCs (Article Processing Charges) and BPCs (Book Processing Charges). According to the Manifesto, this leads to new inequalities and exclusions. In order to make the Open Access transformation fairer and more diverse, scholar-led publishing models that do not charge such fees can be strengthened (Diamond Open Access). However, the current situation of scholar-led projects is deficient, partly due to a lack of funding.

Based on its critique, the focus group formulates concrete fields of action in which scholars, research institutions, libraries, research funding institutions, professional societies and other parts of the scholarly community must jointly get involved in to strengthen a diverse, independent and fair publication ecosystem. The fields of action are:

Networking, collaboration and strategic frameworks.
Sustainable funding structures for Diamond Open Access
Promotion of bibliodiversity in academia

You can access the scholar-led.network manifesto via this link: https://graphite.page/scholar-led-manifest/

Open Science | Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences

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Science and research are the building blocks connecting us with knowledge. As these are chiefly financed by the public sector, their results should be accessible to as many people as possible. Open Science describes the various efforts and activities which aim to reach this goal of bringing science to all.

Update Swiss Elsevier R&P Agreement – June 2021 | Open Access Monitoring

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“After a first disillusioning analysis of the Swiss Elsevier Read & Publish Agreement (2020-2023) in August 2020, it is time for another update after 18 months of contract duration….

The low degree of exploitation is not due to the fact that Swiss authors publish less with Elsevier. Rather, many publications that could/should actually be Open Access by agreement remain Closed Access. My monitoring now shows 560 such Swiss Corresponding Author Papers, whose total APC list price amounts to €1.5 million. Publications for which Elsevier does not publish the submission date and therefore the eligibility cannot be determined with certainty are not even included in this number. Example: 10.1016/j.cagd.2021.102003

Why so many papers are closed access seems to have several reasons. I have received feedback from two authors that the option to OA was not displayed in the submission process, leading to suspicion that the affiliation identification at Elsevier is not working reliably.

 

Other authors apparently deliberately chose not to use the OA option because they feared hybrid costs. Since the Swiss OA community (and the SNSF) has been making researchers aware of hybrid and double-dipping for the past 15 years, this is actually good news….

An increase to 61% OA is without doubt a clear improvement over subscription-only. But the cost of this step is extremely high. Currently, the PAR fee for 2020 is over 6000€. If the quota is fully utilised, the PAR fee will come to 4500€ EUR….

Unfortunately, my conclusion from last year does not change much. Those responsible for this deal have quite unnecessarily embarked on something half-baked that no one can really be satisfied with (except Elsevier). It is true that the increase to 61% OA is positive, but only as long as one does not know the price. When I also learn that Swiss OA responsibles now have to chase authors when the submission did not work out with OA, we are actually at the point where we could have reached the 61% via Green Road OA without embargo with the same effort, but much less money. The millions could have been put into more worthwhile alternatives….”

#GLAMhack 2021 – Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon – Working Groups / Open GLAM – Open Knowledge Forums

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“The yearly Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon is a fun, collaborative and innovative event dedicated to our digital heritage. This year, we are being hosted by the ETH Library in Zurich and will meet online on April 16 & 17. New data sets are being made available as is custom for this event, such as an exciting new compilation of historical photographs of Zürich by the photographer Friedrich Ruef-Hirt (via @OpenDataZurich)….”

9500 euros pour publier dans «Nature», le séisme du plan S – Le Temps

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From Google’s English:  “And in Switzerland? “The National Scientific Fund supports plan S but our strategy towards open access was decided before, in 2017, it’s a bit unfortunate,” explains Angelika Kalt, director of the SNSF. Our goal was to get 100% open access to the publications we funded by the end of 2020, we’ll probably get to 80%. The national objective is 100% free access by 2024. Where Switzerland differs from plan S is on the issue of immediate access; this big step did not seem possible to us, we accept a period of six months ”. The SNSF has been relaunched several times to join plan S, “this year we will position ourselves in consultation with SwissUniversities and researchers”….

In fact, like Germany in 2019, Switzerland in transition to open access signed “transformative” agreements in 2020 with two of the three largest publishers, Elsevier (up to 15 million francs) and  Springer (13 million francs). ) ; negotiations (led by SwissUniversities) continue with Wiley (the three publishers represent 60% of the articles consulted in Switzerland). These Read and Publish  agreements  allow unlimited access to journals and the possibility for researchers to publish in open access at no additional cost. That they include 80 to 100 pages of conditions clearly shows how complex and sensitive the subject is . Four others entered into force in early 2021 , adds Marie Fuselier, the director of the scientific information division at the University of Geneva.

But the devil is in the details: “We must not be naive, publishing houses know very well what is more and less read, recalls Angelika Kalt, they do not include their entire portfolio of newspapers in the Read agreements. and Publish, and the duration of agreements is often longer than desired. ” The contract with Elsevier, for example, runs for four years. Will the colossal sums of Read and Publish, which correspond to fixed prices, be amortized by a significant number of publications?”

 

9500 euros pour publier dans «Nature», le séisme du plan S – Le Temps

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From Google’s English:  “And in Switzerland? “The National Scientific Fund supports plan S but our strategy towards open access was decided before, in 2017, it’s a bit unfortunate,” explains Angelika Kalt, director of the SNSF. Our goal was to get 100% open access to the publications we funded by the end of 2020, we’ll probably get to 80%. The national objective is 100% free access by 2024. Where Switzerland differs from plan S is on the issue of immediate access; this big step did not seem possible to us, we accept a period of six months ”. The SNSF has been relaunched several times to join plan S, “this year we will position ourselves in consultation with SwissUniversities and researchers”….

In fact, like Germany in 2019, Switzerland in transition to open access signed “transformative” agreements in 2020 with two of the three largest publishers, Elsevier (up to 15 million francs) and  Springer (13 million francs). ) ; negotiations (led by SwissUniversities) continue with Wiley (the three publishers represent 60% of the articles consulted in Switzerland). These Read and Publish  agreements  allow unlimited access to journals and the possibility for researchers to publish in open access at no additional cost. That they include 80 to 100 pages of conditions clearly shows how complex and sensitive the subject is . Four others entered into force in early 2021 , adds Marie Fuselier, the director of the scientific information division at the University of Geneva.

But the devil is in the details: “We must not be naive, publishing houses know very well what is more and less read, recalls Angelika Kalt, they do not include their entire portfolio of newspapers in the Read agreements. and Publish, and the duration of agreements is often longer than desired. ” The contract with Elsevier, for example, runs for four years. Will the colossal sums of Read and Publish, which correspond to fixed prices, be amortized by a significant number of publications?”

 

Who Does What? – Research Data Management at ETH Zurich

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Abstract:  We present the approach to Research Data Management (RDM) support for researchers taken at ETH Zurich. Overall requirements are governed by institutional guidelines for Research Integrity, funders’ regulations, and legal obligations. The ETH approach is based on the distinction of three phases along the research data life-cycle: 1. Data Management Planning; 2. Active RDM; 3. Data Publication and Preservation. Two ETH units, namely the Scientific IT Services and the ETH Library, provide support for different aspects of these phases, building on their respective competencies. They jointly offer trainings, consulting, information, and materials for the first phase.

The second phase deals with data which is in current use in active research projects. Scientific IT Services provide their own platform, openBIS, for keeping track of raw, processed and analysed data, in addition to organising samples, materials, and scientific procedures.

ETH Library operates solutions for the third phase within the infrastructure of ETH Zurich’s central IT Services. The Research Collection is the institutional repository for research output including Research Data, Open Access publications, and ETH Zurich’s bibliography.

Journal- or article-based citation measure? A study… | F1000Research

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Abstract:  In academia, decisions on promotions are influenced by the citation impact of the works published by the candidates. The Medical Faculty of the University of Bern used a measure based on the journal impact factor (JIF) for this purpose: the JIF of the papers submitted for promotion should rank in the upper third of journals in the relevant discipline (JIF rank >0.66). The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) aims to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics in academic promotion. We examined whether the JIF rank could be replaced with the relative citation ratio (RCR), an article-level measure of citation impact developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). An RCR percentile >0.66 corresponds to the upper third of citation impact of articles from NIH-sponsored research. We examined 1525 publications submitted by 64 candidates for academic promotion at University of Bern. There was only a moderate correlation between the JIF rank and RCR percentile (Pearson correlation coefficient 0.34, 95% CI 0.29-0.38). Among the 1,199 articles (78.6%) published in journals ranking >0.66 for the JIF, less than half (509, 42.5%) were in the upper third of the RCR percentile. Conversely, among the 326 articles published in journals ranking <0.66 regarding the JIF, 72 (22.1%) ranked in the upper third of the RCR percentile. Our study demonstrates that the rank of the JIF is a bad proxy measure for the actual citation impact of individual articles. The Medical Faculty of University of Bern has signed DORA and replaced the JIF rank with the RCR percentile to assess the citation impact of papers submitted for academic promotion.