Extending the open monitoring of open science – Archive ouverte HAL

Abstract:  Abstract : We present a new Open Science Monitor framework at the country level for the case of France. We propose a fine-grained monitoring of the dynamics of the open access to publications, based on historical data from Unpaywall, and thus limited to Crossref-DOI documents. The economic models of journals publishing French publications are analyéed as well as the open access dynamics by discipline and open access route (publishers and repositories). The French Open Science Monitor (BSO) website: https://frenchopensciencemonitor.esr.gouv.fr presents the results to date (last observation date December 2021). 62% of the 170,000 French 2020 publications are available in December 2021. This rate has increased by 10 points in one year. The level of open access varies significantly from one discipline to another. Some disciplines, such as the physical sciences and mathematics, have long been committed to opening up their publications, while others, such as chemistry, are rapidly catching up. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the urgent need to open up scholarly outputs in the health field, a specific version of the French Open Science Monitor has been built: https://frenchopensciencemonitor.esr.gouv.fr/health. It monitors the open access dynamics of French publications in the biomedical field. It also analyses the transparency of the results of clinical trials and observational studies conducted in France. Only 57% of clinical trials completed in the last 10 years have shared their results publicly. In contrast to other Open Science Monitoring initiatives, the source code and the data of the French Open Science Monitor are shared with an open licence. The source code used for the French Open Science Monitor is available on GitHub, and shared with an open licence. The code is split in modules, in particular for indicators computations https://github.com/dataesr/bso-publications and https://github.com/dataesr/bso-clinical-trials and the web user interface https://github.com/dataesr/bso-ui. The data resulting of this work is shared on the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation open data portal: https://data.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/explore/dataset/open-access-monitor-france/information/ and https://data.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/explore/dataset/barometre-sante-de-la-science-ouverte/information/. The originality of the French Open Science Monitor also lies in the fact that it can easily be adapted to the level of an higher education and research institution. To date, some twenty higher education and research institutions have already used it to obtain reliable and open indicators on the progress of open science in their scientific production.

 

Watkinson | What has the COVID-19 pandemic taught us about humanities book publishing so far? A view from North America | The Journal of Electronic Publishing

“Ground down for years by the conflation of lack of physical circulation with a lack of interest, humanities publishers saw the passion unleashed when access to monographs became ubiquitous and easy. Publishers who were long-term skeptics of open access have become proponents, although still worried about how to sustain it financially….

How do we help these readers discover books and journals they can access? As the exponential growth of humanities titles in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) shows, a lot of literature is becoming permanently open access. However, good luck in doing a subject search for just open access content! Because US libraries have outsourced cataloging to companies such as EBSCO and ProQuest that rely on sales revenue to fund human-powered metadata enrichment, there is little incentive to surface open access books or even identify them as such. Small humanities journals are sometimes less visible because their publishers can’t create and distribute metadata (something DOAJ exists to help with). Academic books are also often invisible to the computers that mine full-text and metadata because the standards used in book publishing cater to print rather than electronic discovery. That’s because the trade giants dominate US book publishing and focus on selling bestsellers through Amazon.com rather than serving the needs of academic libraries. The consequence is that humanities book publishers spend all their efforts on BISAC codes (designed to help booksellers in arranging shelves), ONIX feeds (heavy on availability statuses), and ISBNs (using the same 13-digit UPC format as cereal boxes). Their focus on the print supply chain leaves little time for allocating digital object identifiers (DOIs), Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCIDs), or Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifiers, the building blocks of the digital ecosystem. The challenge of managing temporarily free-to-read materials during the pandemic and the switch to open has catalyzed some libraries to rediscover the importance of “technical services” that were in danger of being consigned to the building’s basement. The combination of untapped demand for poorly tamed information has also opened the doors to increasingly sophisticated informal organizations. The pirate site Z-Library, for example, offers millions of books and journal articles for free with a robust search mechanism and clean user interface. Based probably in Russia, outside the boundaries of copyright policing, Z-Library is both a symptom of unmet global demand and an existential threat to many academic publishers’ current sustainability models.

 

How can librarians and publishers sustain an ecosystem of humanities publishing in which access to the digital version of each title is free? Who pays the cost of publishing in fields that lack the grant funding of science, technical, and medical fields (STM)? The recognition that open access models that require authors to pay article processing charges (APCs) or book publishing charges (BPCs) are fundamentally inequitable to the many who cannot pay has led to new “hybrid” funding models. Several North American university presses have combined parent institutional support, payments from individual libraries and consortia, and grant funding where available to support OA book publishing. These include the Direct to Open program from the MIT Press, Fund to Mission from the University of Michigan Press, and the multi-institutional membership model that powers Lever Press. Beyond the university presses, “scholar-led” publishers such as Punctum Books and many library publishers provide options that rely on substantial volunteer labor and support in kind. All of these models rely on library support to a greater or lesser extent. Already under pressure from the inflationary costs of STM periodicals, this funding may not be able to scale. The Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) initiative is jointly led by the Association of American Universities, Association of Research Libraries, and Association of University Presses. This program aims to bring provosts to the table, providing funding for their faculty members to publish books as open access that is separate from the library’s allotment. An open question that the University of North Carolina Press is exploring is whether individual scholars will be willing to spend money on print copies of books that are available open access. Their Sustainable History Monograph Pilot already suggests that this may vary by field….”

“Researching factors influencing faculty engagement with open practices” by Jessica Kirschner

“Researching factors influencing faculty engagement with open practices” provides an overview of a current research project at VCU which is attempting to identify which factors influence faculty engagement with open practices (for this project, publishing an open access article or book or creating or customizing OER), focusing on the VCU School of Education. An initial quantitative survey has been completed and the project will soon move to a qualitative data collection phase of interviews and focus groups. This presentation provides an overview on the current project status, initial results, how the team hopes to apply our findings, and next steps. Initial results includes how faculty are generally supportive of the concept of open, but are unsure how it will be received by promotion and tenure committees.

RRS campaign preview | Plan S

“Open Access benefits everyone. Retain your rights.
It’s good for you, for science, and for society…

The Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) enables authors to exercise the rights they have on their manuscripts to deposit a copy of the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in a repository on publication and provide open access to it. To help researchers acknowledge and assert their rights, cOAlition S is launching an online campaign, under the theme “Publish with Power: Protect your rights“. The campaign aims to encourage researchers to retain their intellectual property rights, explains the steps they need to take and highlights the benefits for them and also for science and society. Below is a suite of resources about the Rights Retention Strategy, freely available for downloading, using and sharing….”

At what point do academics forego citations for journal status? | Impact of Social Sciences

“The limitations of journal based citation metrics for assessing individual researchers are well known. However, the way in which these assessment systems differentially shape research practices within disciplines is less well understood. Presenting evidence from a new analysis of business and management academics, Rossella Salandra and Ammon Salter and James Walker¸ explore how journal status is valued by these academics and the point at which journal status becomes more prized than academic influence….”

At what point do academics forego citations for journal status? | Impact of Social Sciences

“The limitations of journal based citation metrics for assessing individual researchers are well known. However, the way in which these assessment systems differentially shape research practices within disciplines is less well understood. Presenting evidence from a new analysis of business and management academics, Rossella Salandra and Ammon Salter and James Walker¸ explore how journal status is valued by these academics and the point at which journal status becomes more prized than academic influence….”

Changing dynamics of scholarly publication: a perspective towards open access publishing and the proposed one nation, one subscription policy of India | SpringerLink

In the midst of the most widely used subscription-based publishing model, open access publishing is gaining a foothold in the publishing world. India, as one of the world’s leading producers of scientific information, has seen a considerable escalation in the production of open access knowledge content, which has sparked a scholarly debate towards the availability and accessibility of scholarly knowledge to all. Despite the fact that two major science funding agencies of India, the Department of Science and Technology and Department of Biotechnology, adopted an open access policy in 2014 to promote green open access to articles produced from publicly financed research projects, academic content still remains out of reach for everyone due to inadequate planning and implementation. Recently the Government of India has proposed a “one nation, one subscription” (ONOS) policy to make scholarly knowledge more accessible to Indian citizens. The study’s primary goal is to look into the open-access situation across many subject groups in India and globally. The aim is to understand whether a blanket subscription policy is the best way to facilitate the accessibility of scholarly knowledge or if subject-specific needs implications of other global OA initiatives are worth considering when implementing the ONOS policy.

ACS and Jisc partner to enable open access publishing for researchers across the UK

The Publications division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and Jisc consortium have reached a transitional agreement which will serve researchers in the UK across all fields of chemistry.

The three-year agreement, which will last through 2024, provides the ability for all scientific articles published by researchers at UK universities and research institutes in ACS journals to be open access (OA) at no cost to the researcher.

 

UVA Library’s Aperio to begin publishing “Language Documentation and Description” | UVA Library News and Announcements

“The journal “Language Documentation and Description” (LDD) and UVA Library are pleased to announce that LDD has joined Aperio, the UVA Library-led open access press….

Aperio, a service of UVA Library, publishes discipline-leading, high-quality open access journals. By removing price and permission barriers, Aperio increases the dissemination, visibility, accessibility, and impact of research and scholarship across disciplines, while providing its journals with a stable and committed institutional home….”

Job: Preprint Community Manager | preLights

preLights is a preprint highlighting service that is centred around a community of early-career researchers. Launched in 2018, this initiative has gained significant attention from researchers as well as the publishing industry, being nominated for an ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing in 2019. We are now looking for the right person to join us for the next phase of community building and the site’s growth and development.

Joining an experienced and successful publishing team, this is an exciting opportunity for an enthusiastic and motivated team player to take a step into publishing or for someone already working in publishing to extend their interest in online communities.

Applicants will have relevant research experience, ideally a PhD in a field that features in preLights’ coverage. They should have a good understanding of the needs of scientists and the growing impact of preprints in biomedical research.

Benefits of publishing with us | About UCL Open: Environment

“UCL Open: Environment is committed to using its position and unique set of strengths to develop and disseminate original knowledge, not only for its own inherent value but also to address the significant challenges facing the world today and those that will arise in the future.

Drawing on these founding values, we want to stimulate disruptive thinking across the research landscape to showcase radical and critical thinking applied to real world problems that benefit humanity. We believe that the future of scientific and scholarly pursuit is best served by an open science agenda and fully open access publishing because knowledge should be accessible to all, regardless of location or financial means. We want to transform the way new knowledge is shared openly and without barriers….”

Repositories and beyond – the evolving landscape | SCONUL

“The UK’s repository infrastructure is ripe for redevelopment with the window for doing so now open post the 2020 REF. This event will give an overview of the current Repository and Research Information Management landscape and direction of travel, including the function of the Jisc Framework, exploring different models from open source to commercial.

 

Offered early in the UK post-2021 REF cycle, this discussion will be of interest to those with strategic responsibility for, or interest in, the research systems landscape and those potentially reconsidering current institutional repository and/or research information system provision….”

Librarians make a difference! Help us open up education

Academic librarians are crucial actors in implementing OE policy, practice and principles and they have played a pivotal role in advancing them, developing Open Access, Open Scholarship and Open Science policies […]

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