Measuring Back: Bibliodiversity and the Journal Impact Factor brand. A Case study of IF-journals included in the 2021 Journal Citations Report. | Zenodo

Abstract:  Little attention has been devoted to whether the Impact Factor (IF) can be considered a responsible metric in light of bibliodiversity. This paper critically engages with this question in measuring the following variables of IF journals included in the 2021 Journal CItation Reports and examining their distribution: publishing models (hybrid, Open Access with or without fees, subscription), world regions, language(s) of publication, subject categories, publishers, and the prices of article processing charges (APC) if any. Our results show that the quest for prestige or perceived quality through the IF brand poses serious threats to bibliodiversity. The IF brand can indeed hardly be considered a responsible metric insofar as it perpetuates publishing concentration, maintains a domination of the Global North and its attendant artificial image of mega producer of scholarly content, does not promote linguistic diversity, and de-incentivizes fair and equitable open access by entrenching fee-based OA delivery options with rather high APCs.

 

Guest Post – Scholarly Publishing as a Global Endeavor: Leveraging Open Source Software for Bibliodiversity – The Scholarly Kitchen

“The scale of the adoption of PKP’s open source publishing software around the world may be surprising, but the numbers should be a cause of celebration, for they are a demonstrable improvement in global knowledge exchange. They reflect an increase in engagement, participation, and diversity of contribution to the global scholarly knowledgebase, in origin, language, purpose, and the generation of research and data to find solutions to local and global issues from a new perspective and through a different lens….”

Beyond Web of Science and Scopus there is already an open bibliodiverse world of research – We ignore it at our peril | Impact of Social Sciences

“This analysis of the geographic, linguistic, and disciplinary dimensions of these journals speaks to how recent calls for greater bibliodiversity in the research literature can be met through the existing literature. The challenge, however, is with the underrepresentation of this literature in leading indexes, such as the Web of Science, where less than 2% of these journals are indexed, and Scopus, where less than 8% are included. It is not that this literature is invisible, as 88% of it is found in Google Scholar due to its deliberate efforts to be globally inclusive. And it is not that this literature is, as many assume, “predatory,” as less than 2% of these journals are found on the prominent, if questionable, lists associated with Beall and Cabells. Rather, this robust body of work represents an example and an opportunity to realise the ambitious decolonizing agenda of knowledge redistribution called for by the philosopher Achille Mbembe.

All told, this body of journals demonstrate that research is far more of a global and diverse enterprise than is commonly credited or indexed. Studies, such as this one, can assist and encourage researchers to consult the full breadth of the literature that bears on their work. Our hope is, as well, that this work will also help us reflect on whose knowledge guides our understanding of the world.”

Open Science Conference 2023 | United Nations

“Since 2019, when the Dag Hammarskjöld Library held the 1st Open Science Conference at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the global open movement has been significantly enriched with new national and international policies and frameworks as well as daring and visionary initiatives, both private and public.

At the 2nd Global Open Science Conference, From Tackling the Pandemic to Addressing Climate Change, in July 2021 more than a year into the pandemic that had upturned daily lives globally, participants from around the world engaged in a public dialogue focusing on what open science has learned from COVID-19 and how this can be applied into actions addressing the global climate crisis, at the interface of science, technology, policy and research. The Conference took stock of actions undertaken nationally and internationally, collected lessons learned and identified directions for the way forward. Open science was recognized as the keystone to assert everyone’s right “to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”. Speakers and audience asked for the complete overhaul of outdated scientific processes, publishing and research assessment practices that oppose open science principles, proposed global curation infrastructures for the record of science and platform-agnostic discovery services, as well as enhanced bibliodiversity, inclusivity, and multilingualism….”

OpenAIRE, LIBER, SPARC Europe and COAR Launch Joint Strategy to Strengthen the European Repository Network – COAR

“Open science is ushering in a new paradigm for research; one in which all  researchers have unprecedented access to the full corpus of research for analysis, text and data mining, and other novel research methods. A prerequisite for achieving this vision is a strong and well-functioning network of repositories that provides human and machine access to the wide range of valuable research outputs. Repositories also support much needed bibliodiversity in the system as they collect a diverse range of content types, domains and languages, and are fundamental for achieving Europe’s desired changes to research evaluation, whereby “assessment of research, researchers and research organisations recognises the diverse outputs, practices and activities that maximise the quality and impact of research”.

Currently, Europe has one of the most well-developed networks globally with hundreds of repositories hosted by universities, research centres, government departments, and not-for-profit organisations. However, there are significant variations across the European repository landscape with differing levels of support and funding; and, while some countries have strong national coordination, others do not. In a practical sense, this means that some repositories have access to the resources they need to provide a well-functioning service, while others find it a challenge to maintain up-to-date software platforms and suitable staffing levels….

To that end, today OpenAIRE, LIBER, SPARC Europe, and COAR are launching a joint strategy aimed at strengthening the European repository network. Through this strategy we are committed to working together – and with other relevant organisations – to develop and execute an action plan that will reinforce and enhance repositories in Europe. As a first step, we will undertake a survey that will enable us to have a better understanding of the current repository landscape and identify priority areas of action. The survey will be available in February 2023.”

Bringing efficiencies to tens of thousands of journals: The role of Open Source | PUBMET

Abstract:  In addition to the growing number of scholarly journals published by the so-called “big five”, there are tens of thousands of journals that are published by individual scholars or by academic institutions. These smaller operations are a source of great bibliodiversity that deserves to be encouraged but can also be seen as inefficiencies in the system as a whole. The use of a common software—Open Journal Systems (OJS)—is helping these journals take advantage of an economy of scale without needing to centralize or homogenize them. The key to promoting both efficiency and bibliodiversity is in OJS’s open source nature. This presentation will describe the ways in which PKP’s open source software is bringing efficacy to journal operations, to the discovery of their content, and, in the best of cases, to supporting a transformation of the system as a whole.

 

Open Access Research Outputs Receive More Diverse Citations | Zenodo

Huang, Chun-Kai (Karl), Neylon, Cameron, Montgomery, Lucy, Handcock, Rebecca N., & Wilson, Katie. (2022). Open Access Research Outputs Receive More Diverse Citations (Version 1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7081037

The goal of open access is to allow more people to read and use research outputs. An observed association between highly cited research outputs and open access has been claimed as evidence of increased usage of the research, but this remains controversial. A higher citation count also does not necessarily imply wider usage such as citations by authors from more places. A knowledge gap exists in our understanding of who gets to use open access research outputs and where users are located. Here we address this gap by examining the association between an output’s open access status and the diversity of research outputs that cite it. By analysing large-scale bibliographic data from 2010 to 2019, we found a robust association between open access and increased diversity of citation sources by institutions, countries, subregions, regions, and fields of research, across outputs with both high and medium-low citation counts. Open access through disciplinary or institutional repositories showed a stronger effect than open access via publisher platforms. This study adds a new perspective to our understanding of how citations can be used to explore the effects of open access. It also provides new evidence at global scale of the benefits of open access as a mechanism for widening the use of research and increasing the diversity of the communities that benefit from it.

 

Open access research repositories provide diversity and innovation publishers can’t match. They have a critical role in archiving, preserving and sharing the diverse content produced by universities. | Plan S

“Where there is a lack of consensus is in how open access should be achieved. The majority of governments, international bodies such as UNESCO, institutions, researchers, and publishers along with groups such as Open Access Australasia (the group I work for), and prominent international organisations such as COAR and SPARC are committed to a diverse ecosystem of open publishing supported through a variety of means, nicely summed up in the phrase “bibliodiversity”.

Yet a minority of commercial publishers, especially and most recently articulated by Springer Nature’s Steven Inchcoombe insist that the only route to open access should be through journals, and not just any journals, but specifically hybrid journals, which of course are the journals that make up the bulk of the journals that Springer Nature and other large publishers still rely on for revenue….

The consolidation of infrastructure and services that underpin scholarly communication is perhaps even more alarming. Whereas journals changing hands does not generally lead to them being shut down or amalgamated into other journals, for services the reverse is true….

Institutional and disciplinary repositories offer a community-owned, robust alternative. Their very distributed state gives a degree of stability and flexibility of approach that publishers simply can’t replicate. Repositories provide access to publications, but also an array of unique content including theses, research reports, audiovisual-content, code and data. They also support the retention of rights by authors, as the recently updated UNSW OA policy enshrines. Yet, publishers decry repositories, claiming that “Green [repository based open access] doesn’t offer the benefits of higher citations and increased downloads that come with gold [journal based] open access; it isn’t the version that researchers want, and is not sustainable for publishers”. However, the facts simply don’t support these arguments and fail to recognise the huge use of and, increasingly, innovation happening within the repository system.

Repositories have a critical role in archiving, preserving and sharing the diverse content produced by universities so it can be used by others and have the greatest impact on our society. Repositories such as QUT’s, for example, see a huge volume of downloads of their content — more than 1.3 million downloads so far this year of its just over 122,000 items. In Latin America, there is a distributed network of national repositories, La Referencia which hold more than 2.3 million articles as well as more than 400,000 doctoral theses. And repositories are now at the forefront of non-commercial innovation in open access, aligning with services such as overlay journals that review and distribute content held by repositories, interoperability that links outputs across the whole research lifecycle, and open peer review….”

Open access books: A global preference for regional subjects | Impact of Social Sciences

For many research disciplines English functions as the global language for research. But, how far does this align with patterns of research use globally? Drawing on download evidence from the OAPEN library of open access books, Ronald Snijder explores this global demand for open research and finds significant demand for regional research and research published in languages other than English.

Preprints as a Language-Editing Funnel | Jeff Pooley

Preprint platform Research Square exists to drive business to English-language editing factory American Journal Experts (AJE), which launched the platform in 2018. Preprint authors receive a Language Quality Score, and are then shilled to spend hundreds of dollars on AJE services:

What does my Language Quality Score mean? AJE used machine learning to develop a tool that assesses your language quality. The model was trained using more than 100,000 academic papers in all areas of study that had been scored by professional editors based on the quality of English. Your Language Quality Score reflects how the quality of English in your paper compares to the other papers in our dataset. Scores take into account all aspects of readability in English, including grammar, consistency, and clarity.

This is grim stuff: leveraging English-language hegemony to squeeze Global South scholars, by way of preprinting’s corporate capture.

Exactly no one should be surprised that Springer Nature acquired a majority stake in Research Square/AJE in 2018, the year the preprint platform launched.

[…]

 

Council of the European Union welcomes the Helsinki Initiative | helsinki-initiative.org

On the 10th of June 2022, the Competitiveness Council approved the conclusions on research assessment and implementation of open science.

In the paragraph 2, the Council of the European Union “ACKNOWLEDGES that in order to accelerate the implementation and the impact of Open Science policies and practices across Europe, action has to be taken to move towards a renewed approach to research assessment, including incentive and reward schemes, to put in place a European approach in accordance with the Pact for Research and Innovation in Europe, and strengthen capacities for academic publishing and scholarly communication of all research outputs, and encourage where appropriate, the use of multilingualism for the purpose of wider communication of European research results”;

Accordingly, the conclusions address three areas:

I. Reform of research assessment systems in Europe
II. European approach and capacities for academic publishing and scholarly communication
III. Development of multilingualism for European scholarly publications

As regards multilingualism, in the paragraph 27 the Council “EMPHASISES that one of the main goals of Open Science is to increase the dissemination and impact of scientific research results; NOTES that English has become the lingua franca for international scientific cross-border collaboration and for communication in many scientific communities; CONSIDERS that reaching non-academic audiences may require dedicated publishing formats, written in less technical language, and ACKNOWLEDGES the important role of multilingualism in the context of science communication with society, in particular on the national and regional levels; in this respect, WELCOMES initiatives to promote multilingualism, such as the Helsinki initiative on multilingualism in scholarly communication”.

 

CoNOSC Member needs report published

SPARC Europe took on the facilitation of the Council for National Open Science Coordination (CoNOSC) late last year. To kick-start its efforts and plan the work ahead, it investigated the needs of CoNOSC members. We are pleased to publish this report today. 

The report investigates the needs of national policymakers, presenting key takeaways from interviews with CoNOSC members’ representatives – national OS coordinators, ministry officials, research funders and other policymaking decision-makers.

SPARC Europe conducted interviews with 30 representatives from 18 different European nations during January and February 2022, as well as with the Deputy Head of the Open Science Unit from the European Commission, which attends CoNOSC as an observer. The interviews were designed to identify what activities and areas would provide the most significant value through collaboration at CoNOSC without duplicating any current efforts. 

Based on responses, the report identifies the priority areas for CoNOSC as follows:

Data management
Policy monitoring
Research assessment
Copyright and licensing
Open Access funding
Bibliodiversity

 

Collective Funding to Reclaim Scholarly Publishing · Business of Knowing, summer 2021

“The open access movement has dropped barriers to readers only to erect them for authors. The reason is the article processing charge (APC), which typically runs $3,000 to $5,000. The APC model, with its tolled access to authorship, is the subscription model seen through a camera obscura: author paywalls in place of reading paywalls.

Most scholars cannot afford the steep fees, a fact masked by the privileged segment who can: scientists in the rich industrialized world, and scholars in a handful of wealthy European countries and North American universities. The fees are often paid via so-called “read-and-publish” deals, which fold APCs into the subscription contracts that libraries negotiate with publishers.

The emerging APC regime is also re-anointing the commercial oligopolists—the same five firms that fleece universities through usurious subscription charges. Springer Nature, Elsevier, and their peers are, with every read-and-publish deal, transitioning their enormous profit margins from tolled to open—and capturing the lion’s share of library spending in the process. Librarians continue to fund the tolled system, while also—at the richer institutions—picking up the tab for their faculty’s author fees. The result is an incumbent-publisher spending lockdown, one that ratifies the APC regime….

Collective funding is an appealing idea, versions of which have been circulating since at least 2006, with important variations on the theme published since. The challenge is getting the model to work beyond a handful of successful, single-resource experiments (including the ArXiv preprint server, the Open Library of Humanities, and the SCOAP3 particle physics journals, among others). The two main hurdles are coordination and funder participation. The academic communication system involves thousands of funders and hundreds of publishers, which makes for a nightmarish coordination challenge. A related obstacle, one made much worse with lots of actors, is the free rider problem. Fee-free open access is a public good that benefits everyone, even non-payers; if enough libraries opt out, the collective funding scheme is likely to collapse….”

scholar-led Open Access: Manifesto for fair publishing in German-speaking countries

Scholar-led.network points out problematic issues in the current publishing system and wants to initiate a debate on the role of scholar-led Open Access

In its scholar-led.network manifesto, the focus group scholar-led.network, which was established within the framework of the open-access.network project, criticises the current scholarly publishing system in the German-speaking world and, at the same time, provides fields of action for the development of a fair, planned and bibliodiverse publishing culture.

The authors of the text identify a journal crisis in the course of the Open Access transformation. This is reflected, among other things, in the monopoly position of major publishers who demand high publication fees from authors – so-called APCs (Article Processing Charges) and BPCs (Book Processing Charges). According to the Manifesto, this leads to new inequalities and exclusions. In order to make the Open Access transformation fairer and more diverse, scholar-led publishing models that do not charge such fees can be strengthened (Diamond Open Access). However, the current situation of scholar-led projects is deficient, partly due to a lack of funding.

Based on its critique, the focus group formulates concrete fields of action in which scholars, research institutions, libraries, research funding institutions, professional societies and other parts of the scholarly community must jointly get involved in to strengthen a diverse, independent and fair publication ecosystem. The fields of action are:

Networking, collaboration and strategic frameworks.
Sustainable funding structures for Diamond Open Access
Promotion of bibliodiversity in academia

You can access the scholar-led.network manifesto via this link: https://graphite.page/scholar-led-manifest/