“International research and education leaders will come together today to discuss the accessibility and visibility of research in the MENA region.
The free symposium Towards a more knowledgeable world: Open Access research in MENAis being held during the annual global Open Access week. It will consist of a series of talks by leading regional stakeholders and global organisations about the implementation and benefits of open research practices. …”
“Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers.[1] With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright….”
Abstract: In recent years, increased stakeholder pressure to transition research to Open Access has led to many journals converting, or ‘flipping’, from a closed access (CA) to an open access (OA) publishing model. Changing the publishing model can influence the decision of authors to submit their papers to a journal, and increased article accessibility may influence citation behaviour. In this paper we aimed to understand how flipping a journal to an OA model influences the journal’s future publication volumes and citation impact. We analysed two independent sets of journals that had flipped to an OA model, one from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and one from the Open Access Directory (OAD), and compared their development with two respective control groups of similar journals. For bibliometric analyses, journals were matched to the Scopus database. We assessed changes in the number of articles published over time, as well as two citation metrics at the journal and article level: the normalised impact factor (IF) and the average relative citations (ARC), respectively. Our results show that overall, journals that flipped to an OA model increased their publication output compared to journals that remained closed. Mean normalised IF and ARC also generally increased following the flip to an OA model, at a greater rate than was observed in the control groups. However, the changes appear to vary largely by scientific discipline. Overall, these results indicate that flipping to an OA publishing model can bring positive changes to a journal.
“The Open Scholarship Knowledge Base (OSKB) is a collaborative initiative to curate and share knowledge about the what, why, and how of open scholarship. This includes reviewing, organizing, and improving the discoverability of content to support the education and application of open practices for all aspects of the research lifecycle….”
Abstract: Our proposal of an Open Science definition as a political and legal framework where research outputs are shared and disseminated in order to be rendered visible, accessible, reusable is developed, standing over the concepts enhanced by the Budapest Open Science Initiative (BOAI), and by the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) and Open data movements. We elaborate this proposal through a detailed analysis of some selected EC policies, laws and the role of research evaluation practices.
“What are we doing? And why?
The Problem
It is difficult for people new to open scholarship ideas and practices to find and apply existing materials.
It is difficult for educators to bring open scholarship concepts and exercises into their courses.
The open scholarship landscape changes quickly, so materials can become outdated.
Our Solution
Our Project Roadmap outlines our approach: Build a knowledge base platform and a community of contributors to organize information on the what, why, and how of open scholarship so it is easy to find and apply. Contributors keep the information up-to-date and curate modules for self-learning or teaching….”
“What are we doing? And why?
The Problem
It is difficult for people new to open scholarship ideas and practices to find and apply existing materials.
It is difficult for educators to bring open scholarship concepts and exercises into their courses.
The open scholarship landscape changes quickly, so materials can become outdated.
Our Solution
Our Project Roadmap outlines our approach: Build a knowledge base platform and a community of contributors to organize information on the what, why, and how of open scholarship so it is easy to find and apply. Contributors keep the information up-to-date and curate modules for self-learning or teaching….”
Abstract: Background: Journals with high impact factors (IFs) are the “coin of the realm” in many review, tenure, and promotion decisions, ipso facto, IFs influence academic authors’ views of journals and publishers. However, IFs do not evaluate how publishers interact with libraries or academic institutions. Goal: This provisional system introduces an evaluation of publishers exclusive of IF, measuring how well a publisher’s practices align with the values of libraries and public institutions of higher education (HE). Identifying publishers with similar values may help libraries and institutions make strategic decisions about resource allocation. Methods: Democratization of knowledge, information exchange, and the sustainability of scholarship were values identified to define partnership practices and develop a scoring system evaluating publishers. Then, four publishers were evaluated. A high score indicates alignment with the values of libraries and academic institutions and a strong partnership with HE. Results: Highest scores were earned by a learned society publishing two journals and a library publisher supporting over 80 open-access journals. Conclusions: Publishers, especially nonprofit publishers, could use the criteria to guide practices that align with mission-driven institutions. Institutions and libraries could use the system to identify publishers acting in good faith towards public institutions of HE.
Abstract: Background: Journals with high impact factors (IFs) are the “coin of the realm” in many review, tenure, and promotion decisions, ipso facto, IFs influence academic authors’ views of journals and publishers. However, IFs do not evaluate how publishers interact with libraries or academic institutions. Goal: This provisional system introduces an evaluation of publishers exclusive of IF, measuring how well a publisher’s practices align with the values of libraries and public institutions of higher education (HE). Identifying publishers with similar values may help libraries and institutions make strategic decisions about resource allocation. Methods: Democratization of knowledge, information exchange, and the sustainability of scholarship were values identified to define partnership practices and develop a scoring system evaluating publishers. Then, four publishers were evaluated. A high score indicates alignment with the values of libraries and academic institutions and a strong partnership with HE. Results: Highest scores were earned by a learned society publishing two journals and a library publisher supporting over 80 open-access journals. Conclusions: Publishers, especially nonprofit publishers, could use the criteria to guide practices that align with mission-driven institutions. Institutions and libraries could use the system to identify publishers acting in good faith towards public institutions of HE.
Authors: Nuria Bautista-Puig, Carmen Lopez-Illescas, Felix de Moya-Anegon, Vicente Guerrero-Bote, Henk F. Moed
Author copy of a manuscript accepted for publication in the journal Scientometrics (18 May 2020)
Abstract:
The effects of Open Access (OA) upon journal performance are investigated. The key research question holds: How does the citation impact and publication output of journals switching (‘flipping’) from non-OA to Gold-OA develop after their switch to Gold-OA? A review is given of the literature, with an emphasis on studies dealing with flipping journals. Two study sets with 119 and 100 flipping journals, derived from two different OA data sources (DOAJ and OAD), are compared with two control groups, one based on a standard bibliometric criterion, and a second controlling for a journal’s national orientation. Comparing post-switch indicators with pre-switch ones in paired T-tests, evidence was obtained of an OA Citation advantage but not of an OA Publication Advantage. Shifts in the affiliation countries of publishing and citing authors are characterized in terms of countries’ income class and geographical world region. Suggestions are made for qualitative follow-up studies to obtain more insight into OA flipping or reverse-flipping
“We are fortunate in our campus’s commitment to open access publishing. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is the only institution offering such funding in the state. The University of Wisconsin-Madison closed its fund in 2014 after spending its initial $50,000 seed money. For comparison of levels of open access initiatives at other universities, we reviewed 15 UWM peeruniversities and found that only three offer such funds: Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Temple University, and University of Illinois at Chicago. From our survey of their fund coordinators, we learned that only one fund (allocated annually at $20,000) was supported entirely from the library’s budget; and the two other funds included a partial contribution (one at $15,000) from the library’s budget along with money ($50,000-60,000 total per year) collected from schools, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. In writing this report (April 2020) we checked back on the status of OA funds at the three peer institutions and discovered that two were not currently active, either exhausted or being evaluated until the next fiscal year. After our survey of peer institutions in 2018, we added the UWM UOAP to two directories: Open Access Funds in Action hosted by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)1 and Open Access Directory hosted by the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College2 ….”
“One of JeSLIB’s goals is to contribute to the Open Access and Library Publishing communities. There are many open access resources maintained by organizations around the world that are community driven. This means they depend on community input and crowd-sourcing.
The editors planned an interactive workshop, or edit-a-thon, to teach forum participants how to contribute to one of these community-driven platforms, The Open Access Directory (OAD). The OAD was co-founded by Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project. OAD is hosted by the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, maintained by the OA community at large, and supervised by an independent editorial board….”
“Campus buildings across the country may be closed, but the quest for knowledge continues. Now more than ever, researchers and scholars are relying on access to digital materials. The Office of Scholarly Communications invites everyone, on the University of Arkansas campus and beyond, to submit their research to an open access repository.
The online tool How Can I Share It can help determine if a publishing agreement allows for an article to be posted, and will also suggest a few general repositories. However, publications may be found more readily by fellow researchers in a discipline-specific repository, such as the ones listed by The Open Access Directory. …”
“Harvard Library staff are working hard to support instructors’ needs for resources and information as they rapidly shift to an online teaching environment. Information presented here is meant to proactively address questions concerning copyright and teaching online.
Many pedagogical and technical issues make the shift from in-person to online teaching challenging, yet copyright is not an additional area of great concern. Many of the legal issues are the same in both contexts.
If it was okay to do in class, it is often okay to do in a fully online classroom environment, especially when your online access is limited to the same enrolled students.
In particular, please always take accessibility needs into account. Copyright law does not preclude creating transcripts or captions for course videos and audio. In fact, it normally allows for it….”
“Journal of Informetrics (JOI) was created in 2006 to serve the dynamic, interdisciplinary, and rapidly growing field of informetrics (Egghe, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2015). Leo Egghe, the founding Editor-in-Chief of JOI, attributed this growth to the increasing attraction of “scientists from fields such as mathematics, physics and computer sciences, thereby considerably increasing the number of researchers engaged in informetrics” (Egghe, 2006b, p. 4) as well as “the vast increase of the ways in which electronic information is created, distributed and used” (Egghe, 2006b, p. 3). Almost fifteen years later, the developments that Egghe observed have transformed not only the field of informetrics, but the entire scholarly dissemination ecosystem.
In 2006, green open access publishing was marginal outside of a few discrete disciplines, such as physics and mathematics, and gold and hybrid journals were still in their infancy (Piwowar et al., 2018). Scholarly publishing was just on the verge of moving from a more distributed, society-based ecosystem to one that was heavily consolidated in a few for-profit publishers (Larivière, Haustein, & Mongeon, 2015); it is no surprise that Elsevier was a natural partner for the establishment of JOI. Major publishers were heralding their ‘big deals’ to libraries and the negative financial and intellectual consequences of these deals had not yet reached a tipping point. By 2019, however, the misalignment in values between the scholarly community and large profit-driven publishers could no longer be ignored. This led to the collective resignation of the editorial board of JOI and the founding of Quantitative Science Studies (QSS).
The financial model of Elsevier has become untenable for the scientific community and, we argue, in violation of the scientific ethos. Its excessive subscription fees have caused journal cancellations across the globe—from California to Germany (SPARC, 2020)—and Elsevier’s article processing charges (APCs) for open access publishing (currently USD 2000 at JOI) do not represent a fair value for the cost. Publishing with Elsevier inevitably places major limits on scholarship: The expense of the subscription model places a restriction on who can be a reader of science, the expense of APCs restricts who can be an author. These restrictions on access are harmful to science and society….”