Going into fourth gear: SCOSS launches its 4th pledging round

The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), a part of SPARC Europe, has successfully supported three pledging rounds for Open Science Infrastructures (OSIs) helping them secure a sustainable future. […]

The post Going into fourth gear: SCOSS launches its 4th pledging round appeared first on SPARC Europe.

New Project. DIAMAS, building capacity for OA diamond publishing

The institutional OA diamond publishing sector can be challenged by fragmentation; its visibility can be limited, its service of varying quality, and its sustainability is not always secure. A new European […]

The post New Project. DIAMAS, building capacity for OA diamond publishing appeared first on SPARC Europe.

Supporting Ukrainian Editorial Staff: Crowdfunding Campaign

The invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 and the expansion of the war zone across the country have had a significant impact on the country’s scientific activity. Much civilian infrastructure has been destroyed, including higher education and research institutions.

Through a number of programmes, such as Science for Ukraine, support is being provided to Ukrainian researchers, but this support has not been extended to staff working alongside researchers in knowledge generation: the librarians, editors, technicians, and administrative staff at universities, research institutes, and other infrastructures.

Yet preserving the knowledge, expertise, and knowledge-sharing capabilities of these scientific communities is of vital importance.

What can we do to help?

Supporting Ukrainian Editorial Staff (SUES) is an initiative by various European institutions, infrastructures, and organizations (Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences [IBL-PAN], OPERAS, Directory of Open Access Journals [DOAJ], Directory of Open Access Books [DOAB], Electronic Information for Libraries [EIFL], Association of European University Presses [AEUP]), as well as a number of French scientific publishers, aimed at supporting scientific communication in Ukraine and helping scholarly journals and academic publishers to continue their publishing activities.

Did you know that there are more than 1,000 academic journals in Ukraine? Over 700 of these are open access journals published via the URAN platform. The publication of academic books is also extensive, with more than 20 Ukrainian university presses currently distributed via the CEEOL portal. These publications, in fields ranging from physics to literature via history, sociology, and biology, are key vehicles for the communication of knowledge generated by Ukrainian researchers. The editors, reviewers, typesetters, proofreaders, translators, and technical and administrative staff working in the various publishing centres need your support to continue their mission: to share and disseminate knowledge.

A questionnaire is being circulated around Ukrainian journals and publishers to help accurately identify their needs in terms of financial and technical support. The requests received so far relate primarily to remuneration for editorial work, to enable them to continue their work and to publish the next issue of their journal or their next book. The purpose of this campaign is to help 10 journals or publishers to keep publishing. In the long term, the project is also aimed at strengthening relationships and exchanging knowledge to ensure the international presence and visibility of Ukrainian academic publishers. Thanks to your contribution, Ukrainian scholarly journals and scientific publishers will be able to continue sharing knowledge.

A crowdfunding campaign is being run from Wednesday, 4 May to Monday, 6 June 2022, to raise money to help Ukrainian journals who have requested assistance from the coalition. Unique compensation will be offered in return for any financial support offered.

Link to the crowdfunding webpage: https://wemakeit.com/projects/support-to-ukrainian-editors

Contacts

Online Platforms for Recruiting and Motivating Reviewers

Authors and publishers have easily understandable motivations for participating in scholarly publishing, but there is less clear motivation for reviewers. This post highlights the need of recognizing and rewarding reviewers and describes how online platforms can ease achieving this objective at the time of being a source for recruiting reviewers and recording review activity. A description and a comparison of the main online platforms available today are also provided.

The academic publishing process is driven by four main actors: authors, editors, publishers and reviewers, each of whom play a vital role in ensuring that high standards are maintained throughout the process of preparing the article, reviewing it and finally publishing it. Each main actor needs to have some motivation that drives participation and the quality of their contribution to the publishing process. I would like to summarize what I think are the main motivations of each party in the review process. Authors are driven by their wish to make public the results of their investigations. Besides that, the production of high quality scientific content is a highly valued merit in academia and research. Researchers whose curricular vitae boast of a large list of high-quality publications are well respected and have easier access to funding.
When it comes to editors, becoming a member of editorial board of scientific journals is in itself considered to be a merit. Editors normally serve in an “altruistic” mode, without expecting financial reward. They view being an editor as a means by which they can give back to the scientific and academic community. However, some editors are perhaps not as altruistic as one may think since they also gain recognition from the role which enhances their reputations and therefore access to funding. In addition, it is noteworthy that some publishers do provide some sort of compensation to editors for their work, which can be an additional motivation.
Scientific publishers are mainly based on two models of publication: 1. The traditional model, in which access to the full text of the articles is only accessible to subscribers (individual or institutional) 2. Open access model, in which publishers charge authors a fee for publishing articles with the full text available to all readers. In one way or other, major publishers manage to generate large chunks of revenue from the publishing process. The scientific publishing industry alone generates billions of dollars every year (1-4). Besides this, there is also a large group of non-profit and association/institutional publishers who make very little (if any) financial gain from their journals, but publish them as part of their mission to serve members and academia. Thus, the motivation of this last type of non-profit journal is radically different of that of publishers working as traditional for-profit companies.
While the motivation for three of the four actors in the publishing process can be clearly identified, the reason why reviewers participate in the publishing process is not so clear. There is no “material” reward for reviewers. Rather, it is the scientific altruism or commitment to the scientific model that motivates them to work. Reviewers are encouraged by the belief that they play an important role in ensuring that good quality research work reaches the community. The fact that reviewers themselves are also authors makes them more aware of the importance of good reviewers. In recent decades the number of scientific journals and the number of published articles has multiplied with a growth rate of approximately 3%-10% per year depending on the research area  (5-8), resulting in a true “explosion” of manuscripts that are submitted to publishers. As journals receive more and more manuscripts and the number of journals continues to grow, reviewers get saturated with multiple requests and invitations.  Thus, it is easy to understand “reviewer fatigue”, although many other factors may influence the reviewer’s decision to decline invitations to review manuscripts   (9). As a consequence editors often cannot find appropriate reviewers for manuscripts and this may result in delayed times for the various phases of the review process, and authors often have to wait months until their manuscripts get reviewed.
Getting more reviewers and making them more committed with providing good review reports on time is the main reason why it is necessary to increase the motivation of the reviewers. And indeed it seems fair to reward authors for their work in a sector that generates significant benefits. Several voices insist on this need again and again worldwide (10-15). Some journals/publishers are experimenting with direct payment of reviewers, although this is an exception. Anyway several arguments can be made against direct monetary compensation, in particular because paying reviewers would break the independence between editors/publishers and reviewers, which is one of the pillars of the academic publishing process. Most publishers acknowledge reviewers in front-matter summary pages or lists of reviewers or in letters upon request. Some others, such as Frontiers, make public the names of reviewers (and the name of the editor in charge) of all published articles including the names of the reviewers in a footnote in every published article. Others, such as Elsevier, are launching their own recognition platforms providing their reviewers with a personalized profile page where their reviewing history is documented and where they can download certificates. Authors and editors can also evaluate the quality of reviews done, providing feedback that may result in better quality of the review process. Nature, for example, recognizes reviewers with payment in kind, where reviewers receive free journal access, tools and services or vouchers for research supplies (16).  
In recent years, independent communities have developed online platforms offering review services for the scientific community. These platforms establish that it is possible to create an independent system where reviewers get recognition and reward for the efforts they put into ensuring that quality research reaches the scientific community. One of the main features of these platforms is that they are “third party companies” independent of publishers. This way, biases are completely prevented since editors and publishers are unable to influence reviewers, even when they may have a role in the workflow, since these platforms are designed to prevent direct communication among the different actors.
Basically, what these platforms do is provide authors and publishers with appropriate reviews and also provide reviewers with an extra motivation making them more willing to review manuscripts and complete the task in shorter periods (10, 11). They provide rewards to reviewers using two major strategies: 1. Credit through certificates or other elements that the reviewer can add to his curriculum vitae and 2. Other benefits such as monetary reward or rights to have their own manuscripts reviewed.
In this update, we report the global features of five of these platforms at the time of comparing them: Rubriq, Peereviewers, Publons.Peerage of Science and Academic Karma (Table 1). 

Rubriq
Peereviewers
Publons
Peerage of Science
Academic Karma
Service/s
Clients choose: review of contents + statistics, or review of contents + suggestion of suitable journals
Database of reviewers
Record of reviewers, journals and reviews
Reviews and publishing offers
Exchange of services
Review protocol
Closed. All manuscript go under the same protocol (Scorecard)
Open. Clients can customize the protocol of review
Open (Peerage Essay)
Open. Clients can customize the protocol of review
Fee (valid in  2015)
Several options depending on the services, from $500 to $650 (3 reviewers included)
$100 per reviewer
Type of acknowledgment to reviewers
Monetary (100$)
Monetary (50$), Certificate
Online record
Online record, ability to submit own articles for review
Online record, ability to submit own articles for review
Table 1. Comparison between third-party platforms offering reviewer services

To start with we would like to compare Rubriq (17) and Peereviewers (18). Both perform similarly but there are also some points distinguishing them (Table 1). In both cases, the reviewer must register on the platforms (restricted to academics and researchers with a given expertise) and declare their expert profile, so that they can be invited as reviewers for manuscripts that match their profile. Reviewers who are selected to review receive an email which contains a summary of the manuscript and instructions on how to complete the process. If the reviewer agrees, he/she will get access to the full text and the review form. When the review is finished a report is sent to the client and the reviewer is rewarded. The identity of the reviewer is also “anonymised” to the clients.
Another platform offering rewards to reviewers is Publons (19). Publons has a different objective: they do not offer any service to authors or publishers, but keep a record of reviewers, journals and reviews. They have a list of journals and create an account for each reviewer. A list containing all reviews conducted by a reviewer is listed in the reviewer’s account after being verified, next to the title of the journal to which each review belongs. Reviewers can claim the reviews they made in several ways, including online forms or by email. These data generate some statistics that place each reviewer in the corresponding percentile activity compared with that of all registered reviewers. The profile of each reviewer is public, so that reviewers can use this website to provide evidence of their activity.
Peerage of Science offers a tripartite where authors, reviewers and editors have a role (20) (Table 1). Authors submit manuscripts to Peerage of Science before submitting to any journal. Once submitted, any qualified peer-reviewer can choose to review the manuscript. The peer review process is available concurrently to all editors, with automated event tracking. If authors have received publishing offers from editors they may choose to accept one of these offers, or accept none and use their review in non-participating journals. A positive aspect of Peerage of Science is that peer reviewers are themselves peer reviewed. Reviewers are notified that they can evaluate the reviews sent by other reviewers. This extra twist contributes to increasing the quality of peer review. From the reviewer’s point of view, Peerage of Science offers credit for curricular purposes only as an externally verifiable measure of the reviewers’ expertise in their scientific fields.
An innovative approach comes from Academic Karma (21). Academic Karma is both the name of a currency and a platform for peer review. Instead of exchanging money, authors and reviewers exchange karma: reviewers earn 50 karma per reviewed manuscript and authors of the manuscript collectively spend 50 karma per reviewer (Table 1). Then reviewers may use their Karma for paying reviewers when authoring manuscripts. Editors are also involved since they receive the reviewer’s report simultaneously to authors.
An important point is how reviewers’ identities and their expertise are verified and how attribution of merits can be recorded and tracked. The Working Group on Peer Review Service (created to develop a data model and citation standard for peer review activity that can be used to support both existing and new review models) stresses the need for standardized citation structures for reviews which can enable the inclusion of peer review activity in personal recognition and evaluation, as well the ability to refer to reviews as part of the scholarly literature (6). In this regard, all platforms described here are using or are starting to use ORCID identifiers for both authors and reviewers, and DOIs as identification for published reviews (22). ORCID itself is also offering the option of adding reviews to ORCID profiles. Researchers with a profile in these networks can link this to their ORCID iD so that the reviews they have recorded on the platform are added to their ORCID page (23). In turn, these identificators will ease future reaearch on peer review and will probaly allow us to measure the impact of these platforms in the academic publishing process.
In conclusion, motivating and rewarding reviewers is a need that can be addressed both by publishers and third party organizations. Online platforms are good tools for giving credit to reviewers and to convey monetary reward, at the same time offering a way of recording review activity.

References and Notes
1.The Wellcome Trust (2003) Economic analysis of scientific research publishing: A report commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, revised ed. Available: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtd003182.pdf. Accessed 10th July 2015.
2. Costs and business models in scientific research publishing A report commissioned by the Wellcome Trust. http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtd003184.pdf
3. The National Academies (US) Committee on Electronic Scientific, Technical, and Medical Journal Publishing. Electronic Scientific, Technical, and Medical Journal Publishing and Its Implications: Report of a Symposium. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK215820/
4. Ware, Mark and Mabe, Michael (2015)  An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing. International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, 2015. http://www.stm-assoc.org/2015_02_20_STM_Report_2015.pdf Accessed 20th October 2015.
5. Walker R, Rocha da Silva P. (2015) Emerging trends in peer review—a survey. Frontiers in Neuroscience 9:169
6. Paglione LD, Lawrence RN. (2015) Data exchange standards to support and acknowledge peer-review activity. Learned Publishing, 28 (4):309-316(8)
7.Van Noorden, R. (2014) Global scientific output doubles every nine years. Nature.com [Internet], NewsBlog, 7 May 2014. Available from: http:// blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-output-doublesevery-nine-years.html
8. The Wellcome Trust (2015) Scholarly Communication and Peer Review: The Current Landscape and Future Trends. http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/%40policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtp059003.pdf Accessed 12 November 2015.
9. Marijke Breuning, Jeremy Backstrom, Jeremy Brannon, Benjamin Isaak Gross, Michael Widmeie  Reviewer Fatigue? (2015) Why Scholars Decline to Review their Peers’ Work PS: Political Science & Politics 48(4):595-600. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1049096515000827
10.Björk B; Hedlund T.(2015)  Emerging new methods of peer review in scholarly journals. Learned Publishing 28(2): 85-91
11. Thomson Reuters (2010) Increasing the Quality and Timeliness of Scholarly Peer Review. A report for Scholarly Publishers..http://scholarone.com/media/pdf/peerreviewwhitepaper.pdf
12. Taylor & Francis (2015) Peer review in 2015: A global view. http://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/peer-review-in-2015/Accessed 20th October 2015
13. Alice Meadows (2015, January 7th) Recognition for peer review and editing in Australia – and beyond? Blog post in Exchanges http://exchanges.wiley.com/blog/2015/01/07/recognition-for-peer-review-and-editing-in-australia-and-beyond/Accessed 20th October 2015.
14. Andrew Trounson. Journals should credit editors, says ARC. Post in The Australian http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/journals-should-credit-editors-says-arc/story-e6frgcjx-1227201178857Accessed 20th October 2015.
15. Alberts, P., Hanson, B., and Kelner, K.L. 2008. Reviewing peer review. Science, 321 (5885): 15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1162115.
16. Review rewards. Nature [Internet], 514(7522): 274–274. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1038/514274a
17.http://www.rubriq.com/
18.http://www.peereviewers.com/
19.http://www.publons.com
20.https://www.peerageofscience.org
21.http://academickarma.org/
22.Gasparyan AY, Akazhanov NA, Voronov AA, Kitas GD. Systematic and open identification of researchers and authors: focus on open researcher and contributor ID. J Korean Med Sci. 2014 Nov;29(11):1453-6. doi: 10.3346/jkms.2014.29.11.1453
   

Online Platforms for Recruiting and Motivating Reviewers

Authors and publishers have easily understandable motivations for participating in scholarly publishing, but there is less clear motivation for reviewers. This post highlights the need of recognizing and rewarding reviewers and describes how online platforms can ease achieving this objective at the time of being a source for recruiting reviewers and recording review activity. A description and a comparison of the main online platforms available today are also provided.

The academic publishing process is driven by four main actors: authors, editors, publishers and reviewers, each of whom play a vital role in ensuring that high standards are maintained throughout the process of preparing the article, reviewing it and finally publishing it. Each main actor needs to have some motivation that drives participation and the quality of their contribution to the publishing process. I would like to summarize what I think are the main motivations of each party in the review process. Authors are driven by their wish to make public the results of their investigations. Besides that, the production of high quality scientific content is a highly valued merit in academia and research. Researchers whose curricular vitae boast of a large list of high-quality publications are well respected and have easier access to funding.
When it comes to editors, becoming a member of editorial board of scientific journals is in itself considered to be a merit. Editors normally serve in an “altruistic” mode, without expecting financial reward. They view being an editor as a means by which they can give back to the scientific and academic community. However, some editors are perhaps not as altruistic as one may think since they also gain recognition from the role which enhances their reputations and therefore access to funding. In addition, it is noteworthy that some publishers do provide some sort of compensation to editors for their work, which can be an additional motivation.
Scientific publishers are mainly based on two models of publication: 1. The traditional model, in which access to the full text of the articles is only accessible to subscribers (individual or institutional) 2. Open access model, in which publishers charge authors a fee for publishing articles with the full text available to all readers. In one way or other, major publishers manage to generate large chunks of revenue from the publishing process. The scientific publishing industry alone generates billions of dollars every year (1-4). Besides this, there is also a large group of non-profit and association/institutional publishers who make very little (if any) financial gain from their journals, but publish them as part of their mission to serve members and academia. Thus, the motivation of this last type of non-profit journal is radically different of that of publishers working as traditional for-profit companies.
While the motivation for three of the four actors in the publishing process can be clearly identified, the reason why reviewers participate in the publishing process is not so clear. There is no “material” reward for reviewers. Rather, it is the scientific altruism or commitment to the scientific model that motivates them to work. Reviewers are encouraged by the belief that they play an important role in ensuring that good quality research work reaches the community. The fact that reviewers themselves are also authors makes them more aware of the importance of good reviewers. In recent decades the number of scientific journals and the number of published articles has multiplied with a growth rate of approximately 3%-10% per year depending on the research area  (5-8), resulting in a true “explosion” of manuscripts that are submitted to publishers. As journals receive more and more manuscripts and the number of journals continues to grow, reviewers get saturated with multiple requests and invitations.  Thus, it is easy to understand “reviewer fatigue”, although many other factors may influence the reviewer’s decision to decline invitations to review manuscripts   (9). As a consequence editors often cannot find appropriate reviewers for manuscripts and this may result in delayed times for the various phases of the review process, and authors often have to wait months until their manuscripts get reviewed.
Getting more reviewers and making them more committed with providing good review reports on time is the main reason why it is necessary to increase the motivation of the reviewers. And indeed it seems fair to reward authors for their work in a sector that generates significant benefits. Several voices insist on this need again and again worldwide (10-15). Some journals/publishers are experimenting with direct payment of reviewers, although this is an exception. Anyway several arguments can be made against direct monetary compensation, in particular because paying reviewers would break the independence between editors/publishers and reviewers, which is one of the pillars of the academic publishing process. Most publishers acknowledge reviewers in front-matter summary pages or lists of reviewers or in letters upon request. Some others, such as Frontiers, make public the names of reviewers (and the name of the editor in charge) of all published articles including the names of the reviewers in a footnote in every published article. Others, such as Elsevier, are launching their own recognition platforms providing their reviewers with a personalized profile page where their reviewing history is documented and where they can download certificates. Authors and editors can also evaluate the quality of reviews done, providing feedback that may result in better quality of the review process. Nature, for example, recognizes reviewers with payment in kind, where reviewers receive free journal access, tools and services or vouchers for research supplies (16).  
In recent years, independent communities have developed online platforms offering review services for the scientific community. These platforms establish that it is possible to create an independent system where reviewers get recognition and reward for the efforts they put into ensuring that quality research reaches the scientific community. One of the main features of these platforms is that they are “third party companies” independent of publishers. This way, biases are completely prevented since editors and publishers are unable to influence reviewers, even when they may have a role in the workflow, since these platforms are designed to prevent direct communication among the different actors.
Basically, what these platforms do is provide authors and publishers with appropriate reviews and also provide reviewers with an extra motivation making them more willing to review manuscripts and complete the task in shorter periods (10, 11). They provide rewards to reviewers using two major strategies: 1. Credit through certificates or other elements that the reviewer can add to his curriculum vitae and 2. Other benefits such as monetary reward or rights to have their own manuscripts reviewed.
In this update, we report the global features of five of these platforms at the time of comparing them: Rubriq, Peereviewers, Publons.Peerage of Science and Academic Karma (Table 1). 

Rubriq
Peereviewers
Publons
Peerage of Science
Academic Karma
Service/s
Clients choose: review of contents + statistics, or review of contents + suggestion of suitable journals
Database of reviewers
Record of reviewers, journals and reviews
Reviews and publishing offers
Exchange of services
Review protocol
Closed. All manuscript go under the same protocol (Scorecard)
Open. Clients can customize the protocol of review
Open (Peerage Essay)
Open. Clients can customize the protocol of review
Fee (valid in  2015)
Several options depending on the services, from $500 to $650 (3 reviewers included)
$100 per reviewer
Type of acknowledgment to reviewers
Monetary (100$)
Monetary (50$), Certificate
Online record
Online record, ability to submit own articles for review
Online record, ability to submit own articles for review
Table 1. Comparison between third-party platforms offering reviewer services

To start with we would like to compare Rubriq (17) and Peereviewers (18). Both perform similarly but there are also some points distinguishing them (Table 1). In both cases, the reviewer must register on the platforms (restricted to academics and researchers with a given expertise) and declare their expert profile, so that they can be invited as reviewers for manuscripts that match their profile. Reviewers who are selected to review receive an email which contains a summary of the manuscript and instructions on how to complete the process. If the reviewer agrees, he/she will get access to the full text and the review form. When the review is finished a report is sent to the client and the reviewer is rewarded. The identity of the reviewer is also “anonymised” to the clients.
Another platform offering rewards to reviewers is Publons (19). Publons has a different objective: they do not offer any service to authors or publishers, but keep a record of reviewers, journals and reviews. They have a list of journals and create an account for each reviewer. A list containing all reviews conducted by a reviewer is listed in the reviewer’s account after being verified, next to the title of the journal to which each review belongs. Reviewers can claim the reviews they made in several ways, including online forms or by email. These data generate some statistics that place each reviewer in the corresponding percentile activity compared with that of all registered reviewers. The profile of each reviewer is public, so that reviewers can use this website to provide evidence of their activity.
Peerage of Science offers a tripartite where authors, reviewers and editors have a role (20) (Table 1). Authors submit manuscripts to Peerage of Science before submitting to any journal. Once submitted, any qualified peer-reviewer can choose to review the manuscript. The peer review process is available concurrently to all editors, with automated event tracking. If authors have received publishing offers from editors they may choose to accept one of these offers, or accept none and use their review in non-participating journals. A positive aspect of Peerage of Science is that peer reviewers are themselves peer reviewed. Reviewers are notified that they can evaluate the reviews sent by other reviewers. This extra twist contributes to increasing the quality of peer review. From the reviewer’s point of view, Peerage of Science offers credit for curricular purposes only as an externally verifiable measure of the reviewers’ expertise in their scientific fields.
An innovative approach comes from Academic Karma (21). Academic Karma is both the name of a currency and a platform for peer review. Instead of exchanging money, authors and reviewers exchange karma: reviewers earn 50 karma per reviewed manuscript and authors of the manuscript collectively spend 50 karma per reviewer (Table 1). Then reviewers may use their Karma for paying reviewers when authoring manuscripts. Editors are also involved since they receive the reviewer’s report simultaneously to authors.
An important point is how reviewers’ identities and their expertise are verified and how attribution of merits can be recorded and tracked. The Working Group on Peer Review Service (created to develop a data model and citation standard for peer review activity that can be used to support both existing and new review models) stresses the need for standardized citation structures for reviews which can enable the inclusion of peer review activity in personal recognition and evaluation, as well the ability to refer to reviews as part of the scholarly literature (6). In this regard, all platforms described here are using or are starting to use ORCID identifiers for both authors and reviewers, and DOIs as identification for published reviews (22). ORCID itself is also offering the option of adding reviews to ORCID profiles. Researchers with a profile in these networks can link this to their ORCID iD so that the reviews they have recorded on the platform are added to their ORCID page (23). In turn, these identifiers will ease future research on peer review and will probaly allow us to measure the impact of these platforms in the academic publishing process.
In conclusion, motivating and rewarding reviewers is a need that can be addressed both by publishers and third party organizations. Online platforms are good tools for giving credit to reviewers and to convey monetary reward, at the same time offering a way of recording review activity.

References and Notes
1.The Wellcome Trust (2003) Economic analysis of scientific research publishing: A report commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, revised ed. Available: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtd003182.pdf. Accessed 10th July 2015.
2. Costs and business models in scientific research publishing A report commissioned by the Wellcome Trust. http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtd003184.pdf
3. The National Academies (US) Committee on Electronic Scientific, Technical, and Medical Journal Publishing. Electronic Scientific, Technical, and Medical Journal Publishing and Its Implications: Report of a Symposium. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK215820/
4. Ware, Mark and Mabe, Michael (2015)  An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing. International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, 2015. http://www.stm-assoc.org/2015_02_20_STM_Report_2015.pdf Accessed 20th October 2015.
5. Walker R, Rocha da Silva P. (2015) Emerging trends in peer review—a survey. Frontiers in Neuroscience 9:169
6. Paglione LD, Lawrence RN. (2015) Data exchange standards to support and acknowledge peer-review activity. Learned Publishing, 28 (4):309-316(8)
7.Van Noorden, R. (2014) Global scientific output doubles every nine years. Nature.com [Internet], NewsBlog, 7 May 2014. Available from: http:// blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-output-doublesevery-nine-years.html
8. The Wellcome Trust (2015) Scholarly Communication and Peer Review: The Current Landscape and Future Trends. http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/%40policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtp059003.pdf Accessed 12 November 2015.
9. Marijke Breuning, Jeremy Backstrom, Jeremy Brannon, Benjamin Isaak Gross, Michael Widmeie  Reviewer Fatigue? (2015) Why Scholars Decline to Review their Peers’ Work PS: Political Science & Politics 48(4):595-600. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1049096515000827
10.Björk B; Hedlund T.(2015)  Emerging new methods of peer review in scholarly journals. Learned Publishing 28(2): 85-91
11. Thomson Reuters (2010) Increasing the Quality and Timeliness of Scholarly Peer Review. A report for Scholarly Publishers..http://scholarone.com/media/pdf/peerreviewwhitepaper.pdf
12. Taylor & Francis (2015) Peer review in 2015: A global view. http://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/peer-review-in-2015/Accessed 20th October 2015
13. Alice Meadows (2015, January 7th) Recognition for peer review and editing in Australia – and beyond? Blog post in Exchanges http://exchanges.wiley.com/blog/2015/01/07/recognition-for-peer-review-and-editing-in-australia-and-beyond/Accessed 20th October 2015.
14. Andrew Trounson. Journals should credit editors, says ARC. Post in The Australian http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/journals-should-credit-editors-says-arc/story-e6frgcjx-1227201178857Accessed 20th October 2015.
15. Alberts, P., Hanson, B., and Kelner, K.L. 2008. Reviewing peer review. Science, 321 (5885): 15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1162115.
16. Review rewards. Nature [Internet], 514(7522): 274–274. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1038/514274a
17.http://www.rubriq.com/
18.http://www.peereviewers.com/
19.http://www.publons.com
20.https://www.peerageofscience.org
21.http://academickarma.org/
22.Gasparyan AY, Akazhanov NA, Voronov AA, Kitas GD. Systematic and open identification of researchers and authors: focus on open researcher and contributor ID. J Korean Med Sci. 2014 Nov;29(11):1453-6. doi: 10.3346/jkms.2014.29.11.1453
   

Fun(d) with Science

Many researchers will tell you that financing their work–writing grants, securing funding, and budgeting for varying funding levels year to year–is the least rewarding part of life in academia, but there’s no escaping the simple fact that science costs money. … Continue reading »

The post Fun(d) with Science appeared first on EveryONE.

The Downside of Open-Access Publishing

Over the past couple of years, many people involved in scientific research and publishing have received increasing numbers of emails with invitations to submit papers to newly established journals, join their editorial boards, or even apply to serve as their editors-in-chief. Personally, I have been alternately amused and annoyed by these messages. A glance at the journal’s name or the associated website has told me that these simply are not serious publications. But the establishment of new journals and publishers at a rapidly increasing pace should be taken seriously, since it affects the scientific record as a whole.

The Internet has profoundly and permanently changed the ways in which information can be disseminated and discussed. And since scientific publishing is precisely about getting new findings out to researchers and readers for discussion, the Internet has changed scientific publishing considerably, mostly for the better — and will continue to do so. Distribution costs can be very low if a journal chooses to publish only online, for instance, but there are still high costs involved for proper peer review and editorial quality control. The introduction, a decade ago, of an open-access model in which authors pay to have their work published offered an alternative way of financing this quality control. But it also opened up opportunities to charge authors a fee to publish their papers with little or no quality control.
Jeffrey Beall, an academic librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, who is interested in scholarly open-access publishing, calls its more questionable incarnations “predatory.”1 “Predatory, open-access publishers,” he writes on his blog, Scholarly Open Access (http://scholarlyoa.com), “are those that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit. Typically, these publishers spam professional email lists, broadly soliciting article submissions for the clear purpose of gaining additional income. Operating essentially as vanity presses, these publishers typically have a low article acceptance threshold, with a false-front or non-existent peer review process. Unlike professional publishing operations, whether subscription-based or ethically-sound open access, these predatory publishers add little value to scholarship, pay little attention to digital preservation, and operate using fly-by-night, unsustainable business models.”
Beall is not the first person to ask whether the author-pays model can be exploited. Ever since it was introduced, questions have been raised about the possibility that publishers would be tempted to lower their editorial standards to attract authors who would be happy to see their work published quickly and without too much scrutiny. But Beall has now compiled a list of publishers and journals that he finds questionable and is encouraging discussion in the scientific community about these entities and the criteria that one might use to identify them.2
Whether it’s fair to classify all these journals and publishers as “predatory” is an open question — several shades of gray may be distinguishable. Some of the publishers are intentionally misleading, naming nonexistent people as their editors and editorial board members and claiming ownership of articles that they have plagiarized from other publications. Other journals and publishers on Beall’s list may be real, though it’s obvious that the people running them are not very professional, and some of the publications may have been created simply because it seemed like a clever business scheme to collect author fees of several hundred dollars apiece to post papers in a journal-like layout at a fraction of the traditional price. Viewed in some lights, such enterprises may not be unethical: thousands of researchers worldwide need to publish, and not all of them can do so in the highest-ranked journals. But it is surely problematic for journals and publishers to pretend to be something they aren’t, misleading authors, readers, and the scientific community at large.
Most of the new open-access journals state that they are international, scientific, or scholarly peer-reviewed journals and offer quick turnaround times. Some of them also cover very broad subject areas — for example, the Academic Research Publishing Agency publishes the International Journal of Research and Reviews in Applied Sciences (www.arpapress.com) and encourages submissions from a wide range of scientific fields. It is difficult to imagine how a single journal could manage to properly validate papers that are so varied.
Until recently, “international, scientific, peer-reviewed journal” has had a fairly specific meaning to the scientific community and society at large: it has meant a journal that checks submitted papers for scientific quality, but also for relevance and interest to its readers, and also ensures that it contains new findings that may advance science. These features render a journal trustworthy and worthy of readers’ time and money. Many observers were therefore understandably disturbed when the journal publisher Elsevier admitted in 2009 that it had published six “fake journals” funded by pharmaceutical companies — in Elsevier’s own words, “sponsored article compilation publications . . . that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures.” The company had intentionally exploited the word “journal” to give the impression that these publications were honest and reliable.
Of course, the terms “international,” “scientific,” “peer-reviewed,” “journal,” “article,” “editor,” and “publisher” do not have copyrighted or patented definitions and can have varied meanings, especially in the Internet age. Must an article be different from a submitted paper? Isn’t everything published online automatically international? Is there anything wrong with a situation in which the editor and publisher are just one person who has set up a website where researchers can submit their papers and pay a fee to have them laid out in a professional way and made available to all interested parties? Isn’t it a good thing that this vast number of new publishers and journals will make it possible to get all research — whatever its quality level — into the public domain? Perhaps. But describing a simple online-posting service as “an international, scientific, peer-reviewed journal” leads authors and readers to believe that they are submitting to or reading something they aren’t.
We must recognize that no publication or financing model is, in itself, morally superior to others or can guarantee high quality. Various models can produce high-quality content, and all are vulnerable to exploitation. It might make the most sense to concern ourselves less with the publication or financing model used and more with ensuring transparency about a publication’s content and editorial processes. And perhaps we should insist that not all these enterprises can be called “scientific journals.” As a reader, I do not want to spend my time reading vast quantities of low-quality research and would be willing to pay for someone to do the sort of filtering for quality, relevance, and novelty that journal editors have traditionally done. As a researcher, by contrast, I might see it as a waste of time to seek a journal that would publish my research and might be willing to spend money to make it available to other researchers and the public. It would be fair to everyone, though, to be explicit about the fact that these are very different types of publications. With greater transparency, the questionable or predatory publishers who are using either author-pays or subscription models would also be easier to spot — and avoid.

The Downside of Open-Access Publishing

Over the past couple of years, many people involved in scientific research and publishing have received increasing numbers of emails with invitations to submit papers to newly established journals, join their editorial boards, or even apply to serve as their editors-in-chief. Personally, I have been alternately amused and annoyed by these messages. A glance at the journal’s name or the associated website has told me that these simply are not serious publications. But the establishment of new journals and publishers at a rapidly increasing pace should be taken seriously, since it affects the scientific record as a whole.

The Internet has profoundly and permanently changed the ways in which information can be disseminated and discussed. And since scientific publishing is precisely about getting new findings out to researchers and readers for discussion, the Internet has changed scientific publishing considerably, mostly for the better — and will continue to do so. Distribution costs can be very low if a journal chooses to publish only online, for instance, but there are still high costs involved for proper peer review and editorial quality control. The introduction, a decade ago, of an open-access model in which authors pay to have their work published offered an alternative way of financing this quality control. But it also opened up opportunities to charge authors a fee to publish their papers with little or no quality control.
Jeffrey Beall, an academic librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, who is interested in scholarly open-access publishing, calls its more questionable incarnations “predatory.”1 “Predatory, open-access publishers,” he writes on his blog, Scholarly Open Access (http://scholarlyoa.com), “are those that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit. Typically, these publishers spam professional email lists, broadly soliciting article submissions for the clear purpose of gaining additional income. Operating essentially as vanity presses, these publishers typically have a low article acceptance threshold, with a false-front or non-existent peer review process. Unlike professional publishing operations, whether subscription-based or ethically-sound open access, these predatory publishers add little value to scholarship, pay little attention to digital preservation, and operate using fly-by-night, unsustainable business models.”
Beall is not the first person to ask whether the author-pays model can be exploited. Ever since it was introduced, questions have been raised about the possibility that publishers would be tempted to lower their editorial standards to attract authors who would be happy to see their work published quickly and without too much scrutiny. But Beall has now compiled a list of publishers and journals that he finds questionable and is encouraging discussion in the scientific community about these entities and the criteria that one might use to identify them.2
Whether it’s fair to classify all these journals and publishers as “predatory” is an open question — several shades of gray may be distinguishable. Some of the publishers are intentionally misleading, naming nonexistent people as their editors and editorial board members and claiming ownership of articles that they have plagiarized from other publications. Other journals and publishers on Beall’s list may be real, though it’s obvious that the people running them are not very professional, and some of the publications may have been created simply because it seemed like a clever business scheme to collect author fees of several hundred dollars apiece to post papers in a journal-like layout at a fraction of the traditional price. Viewed in some lights, such enterprises may not be unethical: thousands of researchers worldwide need to publish, and not all of them can do so in the highest-ranked journals. But it is surely problematic for journals and publishers to pretend to be something they aren’t, misleading authors, readers, and the scientific community at large.
Most of the new open-access journals state that they are international, scientific, or scholarly peer-reviewed journals and offer quick turnaround times. Some of them also cover very broad subject areas — for example, the Academic Research Publishing Agency publishes the International Journal of Research and Reviews in Applied Sciences (www.arpapress.com) and encourages submissions from a wide range of scientific fields. It is difficult to imagine how a single journal could manage to properly validate papers that are so varied.
Until recently, “international, scientific, peer-reviewed journal” has had a fairly specific meaning to the scientific community and society at large: it has meant a journal that checks submitted papers for scientific quality, but also for relevance and interest to its readers, and also ensures that it contains new findings that may advance science. These features render a journal trustworthy and worthy of readers’ time and money. Many observers were therefore understandably disturbed when the journal publisher Elsevier admitted in 2009 that it had published six “fake journals” funded by pharmaceutical companies — in Elsevier’s own words, “sponsored article compilation publications . . . that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures.” The company had intentionally exploited the word “journal” to give the impression that these publications were honest and reliable.
Of course, the terms “international,” “scientific,” “peer-reviewed,” “journal,” “article,” “editor,” and “publisher” do not have copyrighted or patented definitions and can have varied meanings, especially in the Internet age. Must an article be different from a submitted paper? Isn’t everything published online automatically international? Is there anything wrong with a situation in which the editor and publisher are just one person who has set up a website where researchers can submit their papers and pay a fee to have them laid out in a professional way and made available to all interested parties? Isn’t it a good thing that this vast number of new publishers and journals will make it possible to get all research — whatever its quality level — into the public domain? Perhaps. But describing a simple online-posting service as “an international, scientific, peer-reviewed journal” leads authors and readers to believe that they are submitting to or reading something they aren’t.
We must recognize that no publication or financing model is, in itself, morally superior to others or can guarantee high quality. Various models can produce high-quality content, and all are vulnerable to exploitation. It might make the most sense to concern ourselves less with the publication or financing model used and more with ensuring transparency about a publication’s content and editorial processes. And perhaps we should insist that not all these enterprises can be called “scientific journals.” As a reader, I do not want to spend my time reading vast quantities of low-quality research and would be willing to pay for someone to do the sort of filtering for quality, relevance, and novelty that journal editors have traditionally done. As a researcher, by contrast, I might see it as a waste of time to seek a journal that would publish my research and might be willing to spend money to make it available to other researchers and the public. It would be fair to everyone, though, to be explicit about the fact that these are very different types of publications. With greater transparency, the questionable or predatory publishers who are using either author-pays or subscription models would also be easier to spot — and avoid.

Creative Commons and the Openness of Open Access

The Internet has inspired multiple movements toward greater openness — most prominently, open access, open data, open science, and open educational resources. None of these is based on the belief that there should be such a thing as a free lunch, but each recognizes that the Internet changes the economics of publication and digital-resource sharing so that changes can feasibly be made to traditional practices that are in some ways “closed,” requiring payment for access to information or prohibiting myriad reuses of accessible information. The quality of “openness” applies to both the terms of access and the terms of use. Advocates in each movement — and I am one, serving on the boards of directors of two organizations promoting open access, Creative Commons and the Public Library of Science (PLOS) — share an understanding that an open resource is freely accessible over the Internet. Opinions vary about the terms of use necessary for a resource to be open.

Copyright law supplies the baseline terms of use for almost all information on the Internet. These terms can be altered if the copyright owner grants a license or permission to do something that would otherwise infringe copyright. Traditionally, copyright owners granted licenses to specific persons or entities. More recently, copyright owners seeking to grant permission to everyone have issued public licenses broadening the range of permitted uses, subject to certain conditions. Creative Commons licenses are the most widely used of these public licenses for all kinds of copyrighted works except software, for which free and open-source licenses are most common.
Within the open-access context, debate focuses on whether an article is “open” when it, like this one, is freely accessible over the Internet but still subject to the standard restrictions imposed by copyright law. The question also applies to most articles posted in PubMed Central under the Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health or in institutional repositories under most university policies, such as that recently adopted by the University of California, San Francisco.1 The three major declarations of purpose for the open-access movement (the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities) say no: openness requires making the literature freely accessible under liberal terms that permit nearly all reuses so long as the author receives credit for the work when it’s republished or adapted.2
The rationale for seeking open terms of both access and use is as follows. Free access provides the literature to at least five overlapping audiences: researchers who happen upon open-access research articles while browsing the Web rather than a password-protected database; researchers at institutions that cannot afford the subscription prices for the growing literature; researchers in disciplines other than that of a journal’s intended audience, who would not otherwise subscribe; patients, their families, students, and other members of the public with an interest in the information but without the means to subscribe; and researchers’ computers running text-mining software to analyze the literature. In addition, granting readers full reuse rights unleashes the full range of human creativity for translating, combining, analyzing, adapting, and preserving the scientific record, whereas traditional copyright arrangements in scientific publishing increasingly inhibit scholarly communication.
The argument for open licensing must be understood in the context of the baseline terms of use provided by copyright law. Copyright applies to works of authorship. One does not have to do anything to “get” a copyright. It attaches automatically when a work is created and stays intact even if a work is published without the copyright symbol (©). Copyright does not apply to the ideas or facts in the covered work, however, but only to the author’s expression of these.
Copyright law gives the copyright owner the exclusive rights to make and publicly distribute copies of the work, to publicly perform or display the work, and to prepare adaptations of it. Granted initially to the author or authors of a work, these rights can be assigned or exclusively licensed to a publisher or other content distributor if that is done in writing. After authors sign away these rights, they, too, must seek permission or a license from the publisher if they wish to make or distribute copies of their article, unless doing so would be considered fair use. Fair use permits certain uses that have positive social benefit, such as use in research or education, and that do not unduly interfere with the copyright owner’s ability to receive economic benefits from publishing or licensing the work.
Copyright’s terms do not restrict all uses of an article. In addition to fair use, uses of facts such as scientific data are not covered by copyright except to the extent that an author has exercised minimal creativity in their selection or arrangement. This minimal-creativity standard might prevent republication of some tables or figures, but copyright doesn’t restrict the reuse of the underlying data if they’re arranged in a different format or a conceptually new figure.
For a wide range of creators, educators, and researchers who care primarily about broad distribution of their work, copyright’s standard terms are inappropriate because they prevent reuses that these authors wish not simply to permit but to encourage, such as translation into other languages. Creative Commons is an organization that has responded by producing a suite of six copyright licenses that offer standardized terms of sharing to permit a range of uses beyond fair use, subject to certain conditions.3 The four conditions are combined into six permutations reflecting the types of copyright restrictions that people who otherwise choose to share their works for free might like to retain (see tableTable 1Creative Commons Licenses.). The licenses, designed to allow all uses except those prohibited by a specified condition, have been adopted by a variety of institutional and individual copyright owners.
All Creative Commons licenses require that users who republish or reuse a work in a way that would otherwise infringe copyright give attribution as directed by the copyright owner. That’s the only condition included in the Creative Commons Attribution license — the only Creative Commons license meeting the definition of “open access” endorsed by the Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin declarations. This license is used by leading open-access publishers such as PLOS and BioMed Central, recommended by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and adopted by the World Bank for its internally published research. Commercial science publishers that have launched publications funded by article-processing charges also use Creative Commons licenses, but they either use a more restrictive license or offer authors choices. The Nature Publishing Group’s Scientific Reports, for example, allows authors to choose from three Creative Commons licenses, including the Attribution license.
Other adopters of Creative Commons licenses impose additional conditions on users. Two of these conditions, called ShareAlike and NoDerivatives, concern adaptations of the licensed work. The Wikipedia community, for example, has adopted the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, which requires both attribution and that any adaptations be licensed under the same license. MIT OpenCourseWare, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, adopted the license with the Attribution and ShareAlike conditions but added a NonCommercial condition, prohibiting commercial uses. The various creators of the online educational materials in the University of Michigan Medical School’s Open Michigan database have adopted nearly the full suite of Creative Commons licenses.4 The broad adoption of these licenses reflects a belief that a work is not “open” until it’s freely accessible on the Internet and under a public license offering more liberal terms of use than copyright law provides. Though options offered by Creative Commons licenses address the needs of copyright owners in various contexts, in the open-access context, the Attribution license in my opinion remains the gold standard.

Creative Commons and the Openness of Open Access

The Internet has inspired multiple movements toward greater openness — most prominently, open access, open data, open science, and open educational resources. None of these is based on the belief that there should be such a thing as a free lunch, but each recognizes that the Internet changes the economics of publication and digital-resource sharing so that changes can feasibly be made to traditional practices that are in some ways “closed,” requiring payment for access to information or prohibiting myriad reuses of accessible information. The quality of “openness” applies to both the terms of access and the terms of use. Advocates in each movement — and I am one, serving on the boards of directors of two organizations promoting open access, Creative Commons and the Public Library of Science (PLOS) — share an understanding that an open resource is freely accessible over the Internet. Opinions vary about the terms of use necessary for a resource to be open.

Copyright law supplies the baseline terms of use for almost all information on the Internet. These terms can be altered if the copyright owner grants a license or permission to do something that would otherwise infringe copyright. Traditionally, copyright owners granted licenses to specific persons or entities. More recently, copyright owners seeking to grant permission to everyone have issued public licenses broadening the range of permitted uses, subject to certain conditions. Creative Commons licenses are the most widely used of these public licenses for all kinds of copyrighted works except software, for which free and open-source licenses are most common.
Within the open-access context, debate focuses on whether an article is “open” when it, like this one, is freely accessible over the Internet but still subject to the standard restrictions imposed by copyright law. The question also applies to most articles posted in PubMed Central under the Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health or in institutional repositories under most university policies, such as that recently adopted by the University of California, San Francisco.1 The three major declarations of purpose for the open-access movement (the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities) say no: openness requires making the literature freely accessible under liberal terms that permit nearly all reuses so long as the author receives credit for the work when it’s republished or adapted.2
The rationale for seeking open terms of both access and use is as follows. Free access provides the literature to at least five overlapping audiences: researchers who happen upon open-access research articles while browsing the Web rather than a password-protected database; researchers at institutions that cannot afford the subscription prices for the growing literature; researchers in disciplines other than that of a journal’s intended audience, who would not otherwise subscribe; patients, their families, students, and other members of the public with an interest in the information but without the means to subscribe; and researchers’ computers running text-mining software to analyze the literature. In addition, granting readers full reuse rights unleashes the full range of human creativity for translating, combining, analyzing, adapting, and preserving the scientific record, whereas traditional copyright arrangements in scientific publishing increasingly inhibit scholarly communication.
The argument for open licensing must be understood in the context of the baseline terms of use provided by copyright law. Copyright applies to works of authorship. One does not have to do anything to “get” a copyright. It attaches automatically when a work is created and stays intact even if a work is published without the copyright symbol (©). Copyright does not apply to the ideas or facts in the covered work, however, but only to the author’s expression of these.
Copyright law gives the copyright owner the exclusive rights to make and publicly distribute copies of the work, to publicly perform or display the work, and to prepare adaptations of it. Granted initially to the author or authors of a work, these rights can be assigned or exclusively licensed to a publisher or other content distributor if that is done in writing. After authors sign away these rights, they, too, must seek permission or a license from the publisher if they wish to make or distribute copies of their article, unless doing so would be considered fair use. Fair use permits certain uses that have positive social benefit, such as use in research or education, and that do not unduly interfere with the copyright owner’s ability to receive economic benefits from publishing or licensing the work.
Copyright’s terms do not restrict all uses of an article. In addition to fair use, uses of facts such as scientific data are not covered by copyright except to the extent that an author has exercised minimal creativity in their selection or arrangement. This minimal-creativity standard might prevent republication of some tables or figures, but copyright doesn’t restrict the reuse of the underlying data if they’re arranged in a different format or a conceptually new figure.
For a wide range of creators, educators, and researchers who care primarily about broad distribution of their work, copyright’s standard terms are inappropriate because they prevent reuses that these authors wish not simply to permit but to encourage, such as translation into other languages. Creative Commons is an organization that has responded by producing a suite of six copyright licenses that offer standardized terms of sharing to permit a range of uses beyond fair use, subject to certain conditions.3 The four conditions are combined into six permutations reflecting the types of copyright restrictions that people who otherwise choose to share their works for free might like to retain (see tableTable 1Creative Commons Licenses.). The licenses, designed to allow all uses except those prohibited by a specified condition, have been adopted by a variety of institutional and individual copyright owners.
All Creative Commons licenses require that users who republish or reuse a work in a way that would otherwise infringe copyright give attribution as directed by the copyright owner. That’s the only condition included in the Creative Commons Attribution license — the only Creative Commons license meeting the definition of “open access” endorsed by the Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin declarations. This license is used by leading open-access publishers such as PLOS and BioMed Central, recommended by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and adopted by the World Bank for its internally published research. Commercial science publishers that have launched publications funded by article-processing charges also use Creative Commons licenses, but they either use a more restrictive license or offer authors choices. The Nature Publishing Group’s Scientific Reports, for example, allows authors to choose from three Creative Commons licenses, including the Attribution license.
Other adopters of Creative Commons licenses impose additional conditions on users. Two of these conditions, called ShareAlike and NoDerivatives, concern adaptations of the licensed work. The Wikipedia community, for example, has adopted the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, which requires both attribution and that any adaptations be licensed under the same license. MIT OpenCourseWare, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, adopted the license with the Attribution and ShareAlike conditions but added a NonCommercial condition, prohibiting commercial uses. The various creators of the online educational materials in the University of Michigan Medical School’s Open Michigan database have adopted nearly the full suite of Creative Commons licenses.4 The broad adoption of these licenses reflects a belief that a work is not “open” until it’s freely accessible on the Internet and under a public license offering more liberal terms of use than copyright law provides. Though options offered by Creative Commons licenses address the needs of copyright owners in various contexts, in the open-access context, the Attribution license in my opinion remains the gold standard.

Sustaining open data business

These thoughts on sustaining open data business were provoked by ORCID, a not-for-profit business set up by a group of large academic publishers and a few leading universities. Its aim is to provide a central directory of researchers, with profiles describing them.
ORCID is committing to provide open source software but not necessarily open data – offering some limited “non-commercial” activity of the service. Researchers can open their data by “claiming” it but what volume of them are going to do that? Do many more than 15% of academics publish their work in their local open access institutional repository?
I want to illustrate that it is perfectly possible, if not necessary, to support a business publishing open data. Strategies for successful open data companies:
  • Charge for quality – as geonames.org offer a cleaned up better authoritative version of a somewhat crowdsourced database
  • Charge for high volume – as SimpleGeo offer 10K per day calls to the service and charge a small fee after that.
  • Charge for private data storage – as Talis offer free triplestores for linked open data, and charge for a private data service.
  • Charge for analytical capacity – Fortius One offer the free GeoCommons web map making service and charge for the GeoIQ analysis package.
Of course one can always do consultancy and custom development to cover costs. Establishing a namespace, becoming a reference point for others; geoname linked data is used because it is widely used, because it arrived early in the domain.
In a survey of potential users, the most sizeable number of ORCID prospective users thought the data would only really be useful as open data. Charging for institutional access and sponsorship are seen as ways to sustain it. Yet there plenty of ways to sustain open data business, for-profit or not or in between. We might yet get a system that really serves academic publication rather than markets to it.

Librarians and Libraries and Open Access

“Roses red and violets blue
stays unread
till paid by you”


How can librarians prove that their libraries still provide education?
Their situation is nohow a warming one. However, the solution couldn’t be more simple.

 

Complex Situation

Libraries order journals and books. The cost of academic material is climbing rapidly (from 1989 to 2003 by 315% according to ARL). This is possible because the market is dominated by a small number of large publishers who can demand very high prices for their publications. The world production of scholarly outputs, by contrast, has been at least doubled.
Even the most well endowed library cannot afford to provide all of the research material necessary for its students/researchers, let alone the one in the developing world. In addition, library budgets have been severely slashed everywhere.

 

Two Crises and the Damage Done

SERIALS PRICING CRISIS (in its forth decade according to Peter Suber)
  • costs climbing, number of journals growing, library budgets are being slashed
  • researchers must do without access to some of the journals critical to their research.
PERMISSION CRISIS (in its first decade according to Peter Suber)
  • legal and technological barriers are raised limiting how libraries may use the journals
  • legal barrier: copyright law, licensing agreement
  • technological barrier: digital rights management which blocks access to unauthorized users
Both crises impede research
and when research is impeded
so are all the benefits of research.

Peter Suber

 

Simple Solution

This would present an insoluble problem in the print machine era, however with internet technology available, both crises may be answered with Open Access to research material. The middleman can now be left out of the picture and mutual responsibility in promoting the wide dissemination of knowledge is now solely on librarians and publishers.
A report commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, for example, concludes that “open access is not only a practical, efficient and sustainable model for disseminating high-quality peer-reviewed research, but that it is a system that could also bring savings of as much as 30%
SPARC is calling recently for stories being collected for the OA Week about Open Access causing major swerve in specific scientific study. Thus, even if it didn’t prove as a money saving solution, it will, undoubtedly prove as a “community-saving” solution.

 

Librarians Act Today and Envision the Year 2025

That librarians are strong advocates for Open Access is obvious when recognized that SPARC, one of the strongest OA organization on a global level, was founded by the research library community.
Other than that, librarians are:
  • educating faculty and administrators on campus about Open Access
  • building digital repositories for OA journals/books
  • supporting OA journals (which make more than 20% of peer-reviewed journals today)
There are weak spots to the movement with librarians not always being as engaged as
they should, but the idea is still in its growth process and the awareness is yet to be raised.
The latest report, Futures Thinking for Academic Librarians: Higher Education in 2025, sponsored by ACRL, provides nine likely, high-impact scenarios for the future of higher education and the supporting role of librarians, and it is abbreviated in bullet points by Philip Davis from Scholarly Kitchen: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/09/22/future-of-academic-librarians/

Taken from InTech