New Study by UMass Amherst Economist Examines the Misconceptions Doctoral Students Have of Scientific Publishing and Academic Labor Markets : UMass Amherst

Graduate students are excessively optimistic about both the state of the academic job market in their field and their likelihood to publish their research in top journals, according to a new study led by University of Massachusetts Amherst economist Ina Ganguli.

Using a survey of 1330 chemistry doctoral students and tracking the participants’ jobs and publications for more than four years, Ganguli and her co-authors found that while two-thirds of their study’s respondents rated their chance of publishing as lead author in the journals Nature, Science and Cell by the end of their doctoral studies as above 10% – and sometimes much higher – less than 1% of respondents actually managed to do so four years later.

UW Joins ACM Transformative Open Access Agreement

Starting January 2022 the University of Washington (UW) entered into a transformative open access agreement with ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery. UW joins over a hundred other institutions participating in the ACM Open agreement. Under this agreement research articles by UW corresponding authors in all ACM journals, conference proceedings, and magazines will be made open access immediately at no cost to the author.

In 2020, UW ranked third in the world for institutions publishing research in ACM Digital Library publications. This agreement will allow all of those articles going forward to be made available open access supporting not just UW authors but researchers around the world.

 

Researching the researcher – responding to Open Access and publishing needs

In July 2021 Cambridge University Press worked with an external research agency to explore a number of key areas around researcher awareness and needs in open access (OA), impact and pain points.

In total over 4,000 Academics from around the world responded, of mixed career stages and spanning over 20 subjects in the Humanities, Social Sciences and STM.

 

Why Open Access: Economics and Business Researchers’ Perspectives

Abstract:  Public research policies have been promoting open-access publication in recent years as an adequate model for the dissemination of scientific knowledge. However, depending on the disciplines, its use is very diverse. This study explores the determinants of open-access publication among academic researchers of economics and business, as well as their assessment of different economic measures focused on publication stimulus. To do so, a survey of Spanish business and economics researchers was conducted. They reported an average of 19% of their publications in open-access journals, hybrids or fully Gold Route open access. Almost 80% of the researchers foresee a future increase in the volume of open-access publications. When determining where to publish their research results, the main criterion for the selection of a scientific journal is the impact factor. Regarding open access, the most valued aspect is the visibility and dissemination it provides. Although the cost of publication is not the most relevant criterion in the choice of a journal, three out of four researchers consider that a reduction in fees and an increase in funding are measures that would boost the open-access model.

 

University of Iowa: Sunsetting of the Open Access Fund

“For several years, UI Libraries has maintained an Open Access (OA) Fund to help researchers pay for the article processing charges (APCs) on open access publications. This fund supports authors choosing to make their publications open for anyone to read, broadening their audience and providing wide access to important research. We have decided to sunset the OA Fund for APCs within two years due to budget constraints. We found that the fund did nothing to offset our rapidly increasing journal subscription costs. In fact, the fund largely supports the same publishers to which we pay our pricey subscriptions. Given this reality, the final year that funding will be available is 2020, and the amount of funding for 2019 has been reduced from $3,000 per article to $2,000 per article. Additionally, each author will only be eligible to receive funding from the OA fund one time per fiscal year in 2019….”