Category Archives: oa.case.journals

Rewarding open practices in research publishing | Research Information

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“Monica Moniz explains how an innovative ‘question-led’ journal series can address issues of demoralisation among academic authors, as well as advancing knowledge

Before I was a publisher, I was a researcher. This was almost 10 years ago – and, although much has changed in science publishing since then, the pressures and incentives remain the same.

I am particularly concerned that, according to a recent study by The University of Bristol and Octopus, and reported in Research Information, around a third of academics said they saw no benefit to their careers in sharing work quickly and openly – and that many are ‘demoralised by a culture that disincentivises sharing and collaboration, encourages questionable research practices, and increases the risk of bias’….

Open access: evolution not revolution | The Annals of The Royal College of Surgeons of England

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“Thus, following discussion and vote of the editorial board, the [The Annals of The Royal College of Surgeons of England] will become a fully gold open access journal from January 2024….

Why should the Annals change to gold OA?

• Over half of academic journal publishers currently report decreasing institutional subscriptions and the Annals reflects this trend.1

• There has been an exponential increase in OA with 60% of journal publishers reporting increased demand from authors, and 36% reporting OA downloads outperforming subscription content.1

• Research funders (including Wellcome Trust and UKRI) and many universities now stipulate OA deposit of accepted manuscripts in their institutional repositories.

• OA publishing is compliant with Plan S, supported by cOAlition S, which requires research funded by public grants to be published in OA journals or platforms….

 

The APC is fully waived for accepted manuscripts where the lead or senior author is a current fellow, member or affiliate of RCS England. Of note, annual membership fees are lower than the APC for one publication….”

The changing face of MedEdPublish | MedEdPublish

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Abstract:  MedEdPublish has come a long way since it was launched in 2016 by AMEE as an independent academic e-journal that supports scholarship in health professions education. Beginning as a relatively small, in-house publication on a web platform adapted for the purpose, we invited members of our community of practice to submit articles on any topic in health professions education, and encouraged a wide range of article types. All articles were published so long as they met editing criteria and where within scope. Reviews were welcomed from both members of our Review panel and the general readership, all published openly with contributors identified. Many articles attracted several reviews, responses and comments, creating interactive discussion threads that provided learning opportunities for all. The outcome surpassed our expectations, with over 500 articles submitted during 2020, beyond the capacity of our editing team and platform to achieve our promise of rapid publishing. We have now moved to a much larger and powerful web platform, developed by F1000 Research and within the Taylor and Francis stable, the home of AMEE’s other journal, Medical Teacher. Most of our innovations are supported by the new platform and there is scope for further developments. We look forward to an exciting new phase of innovation, powered by the F1000 platform.

 

Open Access Journal Editors Panel: Fostering Community – LibCal – The University of Oklahoma Libraries

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“The 2023 International Open Access (OA) Week will take place October 23 – 29, and OU Libraries invites faculty, staff, and students to join us in celebrating and learning more about the work of open access journal editors. OU Libraries partners with our editors to publish seven open access journals, which make high quality research on a variety of topics freely available to a global audience. This year’s OA Week theme is “Community Over Commercialization” and is an opportunity to collectively engage in conversations about approaches to open access publishing with respect to the best interests of the public and academic communities.

This event will include a panel discussion featuring the following speakers, followed by a question and answer period during which the audience will have the opportunity to learn more about the panelists’ experiences with open access.

Cristóbal Salinas Jr., Ph.D., co-editor-founder of the Journal Committed to Social Change on Race and Ethnicity (JCSCORE)

In this presentation, Dr. Salinas will provide an overview of the history and impact of the Journal Committed to Social Change on Race and Ethnicity (JCSCORE) will be discussed. Scimago Journal & Country Rank and the Directory of Open Access Journals confirmed that there is a lack of journals with a primary focus on research related to race and ethnicity, and JCSCORE is the only international journal that aims primarily to publish scholarship with a focus on race and ethnicity in education. Although many peer-reviewed journals use the terms diversity, multiculturalism, social justice, and inclusion in an effort to demonstrate a commitment to these words, there is still a need for peer-reviewed journals that focus on race and ethnicity….”

No Journal is an Island

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“This paper presents a case study of the John Donne Journal (JDJ) as a means of examining the state of open access journal publication in the humanities (with a focus on Renaissance studies) and the current models available for moving a print journal not only into electronic access, but diamond (sometimes called “platinum”) level open access. Of particular concern are the resourcing options for open access publishing in a sector where material and financial supports have long been in decline….”

Shifts to open access with high article processing charges hinder research equity and careers

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“We, as Associate Editors (AEs) for the Journal of Biogeography, have serious concerns about the widespread shifts by John Wiley & Sons Ltd (Wiley) and other academic publishers to full Open Access (OA), which appears to be imminent for journals in the Wiley portfolio (Rieseberg et al., 2023) and has been discussed as a possibility for the Journal of Biogeography itself. We commend the philosophy of OA—to make research freely available online, but for many journals that shift to full OA, article publication is accompanied by expensive article processing charges (APCs) payable by the authors (see Laakso et al., 2011; Tennant et al., 2016). This creates a financial burden that falls heaviest on early career scientists and scientists from low- to middle-income countries, erecting barriers to equity in publishing. The typical APC fees for OA range from 2000 to 3500 USD but can even surpass 11,000 USD, while the Journal of Biogeography APC is currently 4800 USD per article. A shift from subscription-based to full OA-based business models with APCs also clearly shifts the economic incentives for journals away from quality and toward quantity. High-throughput and high-output publishing models in academia severely risk lowering research standards and jeopardise the reputation of journals that adopt this practice.

As a way of signalling the depth of our concerns, 85% of the AEs of the Journal of Biogeography recently carried out a work stoppage, during which we refused to handle any new manuscript submissions. We view this as a temporary measure, as a way of encouraging further dialogue between Wiley, the publisher of the Journal of Biogeography, and the chief editorial team charged with ensuring journal quality….

Wiley, the owner and publisher of the Journal of Biogeography, has had a reported annual revenue in recent years of over 2 billion USD per annum with a gross profit margin averaging nearly 70%….”

No-pay publishing: use institutional repositories

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“The European Council’s recommended open, equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing system, free to readers and authors, has been dismissed as unsustainable and too costly (see Nature https://doi.org/kjwj; 2023). However, institutional repositories run by research institutions offer an inexpensive and sustainable route to realizing this aspiration.

Such non-profit repositories are ubiquitous and capable of hosting ‘diamond’ open-access academic journals, which are free to publish and to read. In Spain, for example, the journal Psicológica is owned by the Spanish Society for Experimental Psychology and published on DIGITAL.CSIC, the institutional repository of the Spanish National Research Council (see go.nature.com/3jxaw9z).

Transferred in 2022 from a commercial publisher, Psicológica publishes about 50 articles, preprints and peer reviews annually. Publication costs are shared between the journal — which is financially supported by the society — and the publicly funded repository, which provides services such as archiving, DOI assignation and metadata curation. At an estimated cost of €30 (US$34) per publication, Psicológica can increase its output without incurring substantial extra costs. This underscores the sustainability of such models.”

Who Guards the Gates? Feminist Methods of Scholarly Publishing · IDEAH

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“In this essay, we explore how digital publishing can intervene in these processes and serve as a form of feminist activism. We take as our focus the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP), founded in 2011 to expand the perspectives and standpoints that count as scholarly knowledge production and provide graduate students with editorial experience. As three long-standing members of the journal’s editorial collective, we have firsthand knowledge of how JITP’s publishing methods were developed through debate, struggle, and dialogue, including many missteps and failures along the way. We argue that JITP’s collaborative knowledge practices of inclusive editorial governance, open access, and open peer review are fundamentally feminist, as they diversify scholarly voices and increase access to the material channels in and through which knowledge circulates. At stake in our reflective analysis is a broader claim that extends beyond the parameters of our work with one particular journal: that feminist digital publishing methods can expand what counts as knowledge production….”

A Milestone for OJSM – Bruce Reider, 2023

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“Ten years later, the scientific publishing landscape had changed. Online publishing of medical journals had expanded tremendously and become the norm. Many readers, especially “digital natives,” primarily or exclusively accessed journal content electronically. Thus, a journal that was published solely online had the potential to be read widely and to enjoy reduced production costs. Outside of orthopaedics, open access journals in medicine and other scientific fields had demonstrated that a journal could be successfully financed via article processing charges (APCs) paid by the research sponsors, foundation grants, the authors’ institutions, or the authors themselves. Prominent journals such as Nature had begun to establish open access affiliates. I thought that the time was right to introduce the open access publishing model to the orthopaedic sports medicine community.

Together with our publishing consultant Morna Conway, I developed a plan for an open access affiliate for AJSM. Our publisher, Sage, was just entering the world of open access publishing in other fields and was enthusiastic about the idea….

If there was any skepticism about the open access concept in the orthopaedic community when OJSM first appeared, it seems to have evaporated. OJSM has received over 8000 submissions in its first decade, and the number continues to increase annually. More than 200,000 OJSM full-text articles are now downloaded monthly, clear evidence of the popularity of its content and the benefit of free, immediate access….”

Increasing agility and visibility in scientific publishing – Archives of Endocrinology and Metabolism

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“Since its inception, AE&M aimed to establish itself as a leading source of high-quality scienti?c information in the areas of endocrinology and metabolism ( 1 ). In that sense, maintaining open access to our articles was paramount to amplify the reach of such information in a globalized, albeit inequitable, world ( 2 ). Aiming to continue to serve the community of readers, authors, and reviewers in the best possible way, two new implementations are underway: AE&M has joined PubMed Central (PMC), and from May 2023, AE&M will adopt the continuous publication model.

 

AE&M’s incorporation into PMC re?ects its growth and scienti?c relevance in the ?eld. PMC is a free full-text repository of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM), directly linked to its preeminent search engine. Created in 2000, it houses more than 7.6 million records and, like SciELO, PMC-indexed journals make their issues and articles available in full format. Its global reach will certainly bring even more visibility and prominence to the research ?ndings published in AE&M….”

DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Reference Rot in the Digital Humanities Literature: An Analysis of Citations Containing Website Links in DHQ

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Abstract:  The ubiquity of the web has dramatically transformed scholarly communication. The shift toward digital publishing has brought great advantages, including an increased speed of knowledge dissemination and a greater uptake in open scholarship. There is also an increasing range of scholarly material being communicated and referenced. References have expanded beyond books and articles to include a broad array of assets consulted or created during the research process, such as datasets, social media content like tweets and blogs, and digital exhibitions. There are, however, numerous challenges posed by the transition to a constantly evolving digital scholarly infrastructure. This paper examines one of those challenges: link rot. Link rot is likely most familiar in the form of “404 Not Found” error messages, but there are other less prominent obstacles to accessing web content. Our study examines instances of link rot in Digital Humanities Quarterly articles and its impact on the ability to access the online content referenced in these articles after their publication.

 

Internationalization of the Moroccan Journal of Chemistry: A bibliometric study: Heliyon

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Abstract:  In this research paper, we analyzed the bibliographic data of the research publications issued by the Moroccan Journal of Chemistry between 2013 and 2021. As an open-access country-based research journal with a narrow area of interest and international online exposure, it will be interesting to see how it affects the local chemical research community through the comparison of the characteristics of the research outputs of the journal as retrieved from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) with the features of Moroccan chemical research from 2014 to 2021 in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS). In this context, we generated scientometric networks using Gephi, a tool for large-scale data visualization, to reveal the patterns of the publications in the Moroccan Journal of Chemistry. When performing our analysis, we found a significant alignment between the research topics featured in the Moroccan Journal of Chemistry and the main research areas of the Moroccan chemical scholarly outputs, particularly Multidisciplinary Chemistry, Physical Chemistry, and Analytical Chemistry. We also identified that the Moroccan Journal of Chemistry functions as an incubator for establishing new traditions of research collaboration between Moroccan institutions and target nations such as Asian and African countries. As well, it is clear that the Moroccan Journal of Chemistry is an interesting venue for the most productive chemical researchers in Morocco for sharing preliminary research findings and discussing trendy topics.

 

The future of scholarly publishing – 2023 – Journal of Food Science – Wiley Online Library

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“Take-up of Open Access (OA) publication in the Journal of Food Science (JFS) has increased substantially in the past year, and we continue to monitor this. In JFS, we published about 10% of our manuscripts as OA last year, but it’s significantly higher in Comprehensive Reviews (CRFSFS). We’ve heard of publishers pushing society journals to switch to Gold OA (fully-OA publications), but our near-term future will still be hybrid publishing with authors deciding if they want to pay for OA.

Another concern in the move to OA is the risk that underfunded researchers will not be able to pay the OA fees. We participate in Research4Life, so authors in low-income nations can get waivers, but will APC be an obstacle for researchers from middle-income nations not on the Research4Life list?…”

Is open science a double-edged sword?: data sharing and the changing citation pattern of Chinese economics articles | SpringerLink

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Abstract:  Data sharing is an important part of open science (OS), and more and more institutions and journals have been enforcing open data (OD) policies. OD is advocated to help increase academic influences and promote scientific discovery and development, but such a proposition has not been elaborated on well. This study explores the nuanced effects of the OD policies on the citation pattern of articles by using the case of Chinese economics journals. China Industrial Economics (CIE) is the first and only Chinese social science journal so far to adopt a compulsory OD policy, requiring all published articles to share original data and processing codes. We use the article-level data and difference-in-differences (DID) approach to compare the citation performance of articles published in CIE and 36 comparable journals. Firstly, we find that the OD policy quickly increased the number of citations, and each article on average received 0.25, 1.19, 0.86, and 0.44 more citations in the first four years after publication respectively. Furthermore, we also found that the citation benefit of the OD policy rapidly decreased over time, and even became negative in the fifth year after publication. In conclusion, this changing citation pattern suggests that an OD policy can be double edged sword, which can quickly increase citation performance but simultaneously accelerate the aging of articles.

 

A new approach to peer review or scholarly publishing – 2023 – Journal of Food Science – Wiley Online Library

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“In last month’s column, I spoke about preprint sites as a possible future direction of note for our journals. At the end of that editorial, I said I would talk about eLife since this journal is doing several things quite different, some of which may be of interest to JFS….

eLife editors argue that the “new model combines the immediacy and openness of preprints with the scrutiny of peer review by experts.” Will this approach to scholarly publication take root? There are certainly some interesting concepts for us to consider….”