Category Archives: oa.case

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?…”

ICOR’s Inaugural Public Meeting: Evidence-based implementation of open collaborative research | 17 May 2023 | Incentivizing Collaborative Open Research

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“We are pleased to announce that ICOR’s inaugural public webinar is scheduled for May 17, 10:30am – 12pm ET;  please join us by registering here.  Incentivizing Collaborative Open Research (ICOR) was founded in early 2020 with a small gathering of open science advocates, funders, practitioners and institutional leaders interested in taking constructive and immediate action to increase research transparency and accelerate scientific breakthroughs. The ‘Strategic Circle’ agreed that use of publications and associated metrics was incentivizing the wrong behaviors, leading competition over collaboration. To shift incentives, the strategists mapped out changes needed throughout the research lifecycle, as illustrated on our home page from early proposal of a research project to assessment of its outcomes….”

LSU Libraries Announces New Government Publications and Open Scholarship Department | LSU Libraries News & Notes

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“In the latter half of 2022, the Government Documents and Open Scholarship & Affordable Learning departments combined into a new LSU Libraries department named Open Scholarship & Government Publications. This new department aims to combine the uncopyrighted materials in Government Publications with openly licensed resources available via Open Scholarship to provide students and faculty with free access to research materials….”

Summer of migration: consolidating institutional repositories into a redesigned singular platform | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to describe a state mandated merger of two institutional repositories from two separate campuses of a university into one new institutional repository. Due to a State Legislature mandate, the University of South Florida was required to merge institutional repositories from two campus into one new institutional repository.

Design/methodology/approach

USF Libraries formed a committee, planned for the migration and executed of the migration.

Findings

The authors discovered many unforeseen issues during the process of the migration such as difficulties with site redirects and hidden collections.

Originality/value

This project was a large-scale migration of institutional repositories, under a tight deadline due to a legislative mandate, that has not been discussed in detail in the literature.

“Zayed University Library, Open Access and the Place of the University ” by Lekoko Kenosi

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Abstract:  Zayed University Library, like most academic libraries the world over, subscribes to the principle of open access to knowledge. Open access works to removes barriers to information, advocates unrestricted use of electronic resources, and strives to facilitate readers with readily available information. This approach plays a critical role in supporting universities’ core mission of teaching, faculty and student research, and community outreach engagements. Similarly, the Archives, like its library counterpart, is home to a rich array of information capable of supporting teaching, research and community outreach initiatives. However, due to the confidential nature of materials in the archives, many archival repositories do not champion unfettered access to their content. This paper will deliberate on conditions governing access to archival content by reviewing provisions of the UAE Federal Law No 7 of 2008 on the National Archives, the UAE Federal law No 13 of 2021 amending some provisions of the Federal Law No 7 of 2008, and international best practice standards, rules and regulations spelling out the place of the archives in an academic library set-up.

 

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.

 

Guest Post – Open Access for Monographs is Here. But Are we Ready for It? – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“At the University of North Carolina Press, we recently completed a four-year initiative to support the publication of open access (OA) monographs by university presses in the discipline of history. Through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot (SHMP)—generously funded by the Mellon Foundation — we published fifty-nine titles with nineteen different presses. SHMP was unique among OA initiatives in that it did more than simply provide offset funding. It required an intervention in publication workflows where university presses and their authors had to submit to a standardized process with templated outputs that aligned with the requirements of digital platforms. The pilot recorded successes and challenges indicative of ongoing and future needs, some of them general to all OA publishing and some specific to OA monograph publishing.

There were several areas of encouraging news. The titles we published are being accessed and used exponentially more than digital editions that are behind paywalls. And standardization significantly reduced the costs required to create a high-quality university press monograph. But there were also discouraging results. Authors and presses remain deeply cautious about OA as a legitimate, sustainable mode of publishing. They are even more skeptical about the trade-offs associated with standardization. And we learned that there are serious gaps in the infrastructure needed to disseminate open scholarship efficiently and measure its impact….”

When the Big Deal Gets Smaller: Use of ScienceDirect after Cancellations

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Abstract:  This study investigates how article downloads from ScienceDirect changed after Temple University Libraries downsized its all-inclusive Elsevier big deal bundle to a selective custom package. After the libraries lost current-year access to nearly half of Elsevier’s active journals, the total downloads from Elsevier journals declined by 16.2 percent over three years. Combined use of still-subscribed and open access journals fell 10.6 percent in the same three years, suggesting that the drop in total use is due not only to the loss of journals but also to factors that would affect the remaining journals, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and a slight decrease in enrollment. Patrons may have substituted articles from still-subscribed and open access journals for those that were canceled, though the data are not conclusive. Reliance on open access appears to have increased.

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….”

Editors’ note: On rent extraction in academic publishing and its alternatives | Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society

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Abstract:  In this editorial we introduce new members of our editorial team and the contents of this issue. In addition we discuss open access developments of the journal, namely our new license policy, which allows authors to choose a Creative Common license that best suits their needs or the requirements of their funders. This change in licenses makes our journal also compliant with the Plan S programme, which several large European research funders have signed, in order to promote open access publishing. We support such initiatives, but note that they are designed mainly to push large commercial publishers to publish publicly funded research in open access. While the Plan S is a welcome program, commercial for-profit publishers charge exorbitant charges for open access, usually paid for by the researchers’ institutions. We note that these charges are a form of rent extraction, which produces little added value, as the commercial publishers rely on the free labor of researchers and publicly funded research to fill their journals’ pages. More so, due to these charges the public ends up paying again for the research it funded in the first place. We argue that public support for both institutional and independent non-profit open access publishing is a socially more just and sustainable model.

Cephalalgia – The early history – Stefan Evers, 2023

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Abstract:  The journal Cephalalgia was founded in 1980 and was first published in 1981. The foundation was mainly laid by Ottar Sjaastad who also served as the first Editor-in-Chief. In the early years, Cephalalgia was published in Scandinavia and was owned by the Norwegian Migraine Society. It became the official journal of the International Headache Society in 1984 and in 1993 ownership of Cephalalgia was transferred to International Headache Society. The publisher changed in 2000 and then again in 2009. The success of Cephalalgia can be seen by the almost continuous rising of its impact factor and by the increasing number of issues including supplements and special issues. In the future, Cephalagia will become more digital and open access.