Category Archives: oa.declarations_of_independence

‘Stop Congratulating Colleagues for Publishing in High-Impact Factor Journals’ – The Wire Science

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The current scholarly publishing system is detrimental to the pursuit of knowledge and needs a radical shift. Publishers have already anticipated new trends and have tried to protect their profits.
Current publishers’ power stems from the historical roots of their journals – and researchers are looking for symbolic status in the eye of their peers by publishing in renowned journals.
To counter them effectively, we need to identify obstacles that researchers themselves might face. Journals still perform some useful tasks and it requires effort to devise working alternatives.
There have already been many attempts and partial successes to drive a new shift in scholarly publishing. Many of them should be further developed and generalised.
In this excerpt from a report prepared by the Basic Research Community for Physics, the authors discuss these successes and make recommendations to different actors….”

Dr. h.c. Johan Rooryck – an in-depth interview | Open Science Talk

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Abstract:  On 1 September 2022, professor of linguistics and director of cOAlition S Johan Rooryck was created a doctor honoris causa at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. In this in-depth interview, Rooryck reflects on his career so far and shares his vision of a future where scholar-led, fair and equitable open access prevails over commercial publishing structures.

Johan Rooryck starts out by explaining how he became the editor-in-chief of the high-ranking journal Lingua in 1999, how his relations with the publisher Elsevier became increasingly strained, and how he succeeded in bringing all his co-editors along in a sensational break with Elsevier. Instead, they launched the fully open access journal Glossa (now a high-ranking journal of general linguistics) at the platform Open Library of Humanities, in 2015. Rooryck in particular dwells on the non-commercial model known as Diamond Open Access, with no charges facing either readers or authors. Speaking on behalf of Plan S and the cOAlition S, whose executive director he became in 2019, Rooryck also broadens the view to all forms of open access, including open access to books and research data. At the end, he looks ahead to the future, when faced with the final, fundamental question: are you an optimist?

Glossa: how a journal took matters into their own hands to make research available | Plan S

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“[Q]When did you first engage with open access and why is it important for you as an academic, also considering the different roles you have in the scholarly communication system (reader, editor(-in-chief), advisory board member)?

[A] I became actively interested in open access around 2011/2012, when Timothy Gowers launched the Elsevier boycott and the Cost of Knowledge protest against Elsevier’s expensive subscriptions and journal bundling. A number of very good reviewers informed me that they would no longer review for Lingua, the Elsevier journal I had been an editor for since 1999. This was worrisome, because without access to the right reviewers, a journal cannot maintain its peer review processes. So I started to think about alternatives. In 2011, I had also met Saskia de Vries, who at that time was director of Amsterdam University Press, and who provocatively asked me if I was not interested in flipping Lingua to open access, and what would be required to do so. That conversation led to many more contacts, including Natalia Grygierszyk, director of the Radboud University Library in Nijmegen, and we jointly decided to look into possibilities to make Lingua open access….”

Glossa: how a journal took matters into their own hands to make research available. – Background – Utrecht University

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“Another challenge was governance: what does it mean to have a journal owned and led by scholars How does that work? How do we imagine ownership in such a way that the journal cannot be bought by a commercial entity in the future? That is a process that we laid down in the Glossa Constitution, a document that specified that the Glossa title is in the hands of the community, and represents no monetary value. Recently, we were offered 300k to sell the journal title. We made that simply impossible via this Constitution, so there cannot even be a temptation. And you can easily understand why someone would want to offer 300k for a journal like ours: we publish between 120 and 150 articles a year. If a commercial publisher were to charge 2,000 euros per article, that could mean a gross income of 300k per year. Deduct costs of about 500 euros per article for production and manuscript handling, and you are left with a tidy profit of 225k. …”

Combinatorial Theory Publishes First Issue! – Office of Scholarly Communication

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“The eScholarship Publishing program at the University of California is delighted to announce the publication of the first issue of Combinatorial Theory, a new open access journal focused on mathematical research in Combinatorics, with applications throughout the mathematical, computational and natural sciences. As described by its editors, Combinatorial Theory is “owned by mathematicians, dedicated to Diamond Open Access publishing with no fees for authors or readers, and committed to an inclusive view of the vibrant worldwide community in Combinatorics.”

Combinatorial Theory was founded in September 2020, when most of the editorial board for one of the oldest and most prestigious journals in Combinatorics, the Elsevier-owned Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Ser. A (JCTA), announced their intention to resign and start a new, open access journal. Learn more about the founding of this journal.

Combinatorial Theory is fully funded through 2025, thanks to institutional investments via the Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP), including substantial funding from the University of California systemwide libraries. See the full list of journal sponsors….”

Dear Colleague Letter

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“We would like to inform you about an upcoming major transition for the Journal of Field Robotics.

After 15 years of service, John Wiley and Sons, the publisher has decided not to renew the contract of the Editor in Chief (Sanjiv Singh) and the Managing Editor (Sanae Minick) and hence our term will expire at the end of 2020.

This comes after two years of discussions between new Wiley representatives and the  Editorial Board have failed to converge to a common set of principles and procedures by which the journal should operate. The Editorial Board has unanimously decided to resign….

While this moment calls for creativity and collaboration with the scholarly community to find new models, Wiley is intent on making broad changes to the way that the Journal of Field Robotics is operated, guided mostly by an economic calculation to increase revenue and decrease costs. To do this, they have unilaterally decided to change the terms of the contract that has been constant since the JFR was started in 2005. Wiley has confronted a similar case (European Law Journal) with similar effect— the entire editorial board has resigned in January of 2020….”

Coronavirus may be encouraging publishers to pursue open access

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“The unrestricted sharing of scientific papers during the coronavirus pandemic may have hastened the shift toward more open-access publishing, scientists believe, as several leading journals move to make content publicly available….

That move has prompted the editorial board of a leading Elsevier title, Neuron, to demand a similar switch to open access.

“The writing is on the wall for journals with a paywall, and many of us can no longer serve in good faith on the board of such journals,” says the letter calling for the change, which was signed by more than 75 leading scientists….”

Letter to Elsevier re Neuron.pdf – Google Drive

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“Elsevier’s flagship journal in neuroscience, Neuron, has played a vital role in contemporary neuroscience. As members of its Board, we have done our best to help it succeed, and we have collectively contributed over 1,550 papers to the journal. The times, however, have changed. Many neuroscientists in California and in Germany no longer access Neuron because their institutions will not renew their Elsevier subscription. Many neuroscientists across Europe will no longer submit to Neuron because of Plan S. A few days ago, Springer Nature agreed to comply with Plan S, setting Neuron’s key competitor Nature Neuroscience on the path to Open Access. We want Neuron to continue to thrive in the next decades. For this to happen, it must go full Open Access. If not immediately, we urge that it does so at least gradually, but with a clear timetable agreed with Plan S, and one that does not lag behind Nature Neuroscience. Otherwise, Neuron will wither. We hope you will be able to lead Elsevier to make the right decision, and make Neuron and its sister journals Open Access, just like Springer Nature has agreed to do. The writing is on the wall for journals with a paywall, and many of us can no longer serve in good faith on the Board of such journals.”

Opening science: The rebirth of a scholarly journal | Quantitative Science Studies | MIT Press Journals

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“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….”

Mass resignations at Wiley journal over academic independence | Times Higher Education (THE)

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“The resignation of all members of a journal’s editorial and advisory boards in a row over academic independence raises fundamental questions about “who owns” academic publications, scholars have claimed.

The mass resignations at the European Law Journal – in which a total of 20 academics linked to the Wiley publication quit – follow more than a year of negotiations with the US publisher in the wake of its alleged effort to appoint new editors-in-chief in 2018 without consulting either its board of editors or its advisory board….”

What a Journal Makes: As we say goodbye to the European Law Journal | Verfassungsblog

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“On January 31st, the Editorial and Advisory Boards of the European Law Journal resigned en masse from their positions in protest after the publisher, Wiley, decided that it was not willing to ‘give away’ control and authority over editorial appointments and decisions to the academics on the journal’s Boards. We recount our small act of resistance here because we think there may be lessons for the wider academic community. We are not looking to portray ourselves as martyrs for academic freedom or principled radicals looking to overhaul the entire system of academic publishing. Indeed, the most significant aspect of our rupture with Wiley lies in the modesty of the demands they were unwilling to meet. …”

How flipping a journal became about more than just open access – Digital Scholarship @ Leiden

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“On January 14, 2019 the entire editorial board of Elsevier’s Journal of Informetrics (JOI) resigned. The editorial board wanted a journal with the same scope and same scientific standards, but owned by the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) (and not by the publisher), open access (instead of toll access) and with open citations. That is why, after resigning from JOI, they launched the new journal Quantitative Science Studies (QSS) with MIT Press [see news of the resignations and launch of the journal at the CWTS website and ISSI website respectively]. MIT Press participates in the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC).

I interviewed Ludo Waltman (professor of Quantitative Science Studies and deputy director at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University) and Paul Wouters (Dean of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, former director of CWTS and Open Science Coordinator at Leiden University) about the reasons for their decision and their views on the future of scholarly communication in general. …”

Open-Access Is Going Mainstream. Here’s Why That Could Transform Academic Life. – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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“That may soon change. Smaller-scale efforts are mixing with top-down decisions — through universities’ subscription negotiations and a major European plan that mandates open-access publication for certain research — to put unusual pressure on publishers.

Don’t think these battles are confined to the library or an individual discipline. The changes have the potential to alter nearly everything about how research is disseminated — and therefore how departments spend money, researchers collaborate, and faculty careers advance….”

Editorial board mutinies: are they what’s needed or are they part of the problem?

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“However, what I find striking is that the combined number of articles published by Lingua and Glossa has doubled since 2014, far outpacing the annual 4% growth in scholarly articles.

Does this mean linguistics is a burgeoning field? Or that these journals have won share from others? Or are we, perhaps, observing induced demand in action?

(Induced demand is a phenomenon where adding supply capacity prompts increased demand. A common example is new roads increasing traffic levels.) …

Twenty year ago, the authors of the Budapest Open Access Declarationthought that new, digital, forms of publishing would cost less than the traditional analogue methods. Unfortunately, as the financial travails at PLoSillustrate, we now know that digital publishing is far from low-cost. Worse, despite two decades of investment costs are increasing.

This latter point was brought home to me when I saw a tweet about arXiv’s costs. In 2010, arXiv had 4 staff and total expenses of $420,000. For 2019, arXiv has budgeted 10 staff and $2,070,000 in expenses. So, expenses have grown five-fold over the past decade, a period which saw postings double. To put it another way, the cost per posting has risen to $14.40 from $5.80 over the past decade, a 247% increase….

One reason costs continue to climb is because digital makes possible desirable things that were impossible before. For example, digital makes it possible to publish associated datasets and to disambiguate authors, funders, and institutions and digital has led to new, complex, standards for things like content capture and metadata to improve discoverability and machine readability.

Many of these new digital things have become standard fixtures in any quality scholcom solution, setting expectations for the future. cOAlition S’ Plan S doesn’t just seek to flip journals to open access, it sets mandatory standards on how they should be published, about which many researchers agree. It’s hardly a surprise that the original 60 things publishers did in 2012 had grown to 102 by 2018, many of the additions things digital….”

Transitioning journals to open access: Guidance from and for the field – Office of Scholarly Communication

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“One key objective of University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) is to coordinate and offer educational resources related to scholarly publishing. On the OSC website, authors can find guides to copyright, open access (OA), research impact, peer review, and more. In real life, OSC members are also “out in the field” at our respective libraries and university presses, offering consultations and support for UC scholars and authors on a multitude of publishing issues.

Over the past two years, we have engaged in an increasing number of discussions with journal editors interested in transitioning their journals to open access. We have also learned a few lessons in the process–particularly regarding the specific issues that any OA-aspiring journal must address, e.g., choosing publishing platforms, funding models, copyright and licensing policies, and communications strategies.

Given OSC’s mission to make educational materials about publishing more widely available, we are excited to have distilled these recent experiences into a practical toolkit aimed at supporting journal editors and publishers and the organizations or libraries that work with them. This toolkit, which you can find on our new OSC page Transitioning Journals to OA, includes a variety of resources for those interested in the OA transitioning process…”