Mois : mars 2012

Pricing principles used by Scholarly Open Access Publishers…

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Pricing principles used by Scholarly Open Access Publishers :

“The article processing charge (APC) is currently the primary method of funding professionally published Open Access peer reviewed journals. The pricing principles of 77 OA publishers publishing over 1000 journals using APCs were studied and classified. The most commonly used pricing method is a single fixed fee, which can either be the same for all of a publisher’s journals or individually determined for each journal. Fees are usually only levied for publication of accepted papers, but there are some journals that also charge submission fees. Instead of fixed prices many publishers charge by the page or have multi-tiered fees depending on the length of articles. The country of origin of the author can also influence the pricing, in order to facilitate publishing for authors from developing countries.”

URL : http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc3/acceptedversion.pdf

Open access central funds in UK universities …

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Open access central funds in UK universities :

“This paper reports on the extent to which higher education institutions in the UK have set up central funds and similar institutionally co-ordinated approaches to the payment of open access article-processing charges. It presents data demonstrating that central funds have only been set up by a minority of institutions and that the number of institutions has not changed significantly between 2009 and 2011. It then explores the barriers to the establishment of such funds and discusses recent developments that might lower these barriers. Finally, it provides a case study of the development of the central fund at the University of Nottingham in the UK and considers the sustainability of such an approach.”

URL : http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2012/00000025/00000002/art00005
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20120205

The effects of open access mandates on institutional…

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The effects of open access mandates on institutional repositories in the UK and Germany :

“Purpose :
This research project explores the effects of institutional open access mandates on institutional repositories in Higher Education Institutions in the UK and Germany. Therefore, it analyses the experiences, opinions, and expectations of institutional repository managers from both countries.

Methodology : A thorough literature review and a questionnaire-based survey were conducted to gain background information regarding open access publishing, institutional repositories, and institutional open access mandates. Semi-structured follow-up interviews provide an in-depth insight into the views of institutional repository managers regarding the effects of institutional open access mandates. The results are presented thematically.

Findings : There is evidence that institutional mandates do have effects on institutional repositories in different ways, e.g. on content deposited and service provision. The effects vary according to the characteristics of repositories and the approach taken by institutions. The research results also indicate that the experiences of institutions with a mandate and the expectations of institutions without one are almost identical across both the UK and Germany, although the developmental context of institutional repositories and institutional mandates in these two countries are very different.

Impact : The findings of the dissertation are of interest for Higher Education Institutions considering the implementation of an institutional open access mandate.

Research limitations : The research was limited in the comparative analysis of the experiences of institutional repository managers as there are almost no mandates implemented in Germany. The limited time did not allow to follow-up further questions after the
interviews were transcribed and analysed. A study of larger scale, for example on European level, should be interesting.

Value : The value of this dissertation is the exploration of the effects of institutional open access mandates on institutional repository services, a neglected field within the vast research about open access publishing and mandates so far.”

URL : https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/handle/2134/9327

Open peer review by a selected papers network…

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Open peer review by a selected-papers network :

“A selected-papers (SP) network is a network in which researchers who read, write, and review articles subscribe to each other based on common interests. Instead of reviewing a manuscript in secret for the Editor of a journal, each reviewer simply publishes his review (typically of a paper he wishes to recommend) to his SP network subscribers. Once the SP network reviewers complete their review decisions, the authors can invite any journal editor they want to consider these reviews and initial audience size, and make a publication decision. Since all impact assessment, reviews, and revisions are complete, this decision process should be short. I show how the SP network can provide a new way of measuring impact, catalyze the emergence of new subfields, and accelerate discovery in existing fields, by providing each reader a fine-grained filter for high-impact. I present a three phase plan for building a basic SP network, and making it an effective peer review platform that can be used by journals, conferences, users of repositories such as arXiv, and users of search engines such as PubMed. I show how the SP network can greatly improve review and dissemination of research articles in areas that are not well-supported by existing journals. Finally, I illustrate how the SP network concept can work well with existing publication services such as journals, conferences, arXiv, PubMed, and online citation management sites.”

URL : http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/FullText.aspx?ART_DOI=10.3389/fncom.2012.00001&name=Computational_Neuroscience

Case Studies on Institutional Open Approaches The Open…

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Case Studies on Institutional Open Approaches: The Open University :

“Interpreting openness has been part of The Open University’s mission since its foundation in 1969. As a distance teaching university it has always developed extensive educational resources for its students and occasionally for a wider audience but the emergence of open educational resources (OER) has challenged the ways in which it both develops and uses such teaching materials, in particular an over-reliance on in-house authoring and embedded third party materials and income from sales and licensing of such content. As educational resources are integral to the university’s teaching and business model a large scale, institution-wide, action research project aligned to University strategic objectives was established to examine the potential impact of OER in those models (with funding support from a US Foundation). Extensive research and evaluation activities plus widespread staff acceptance and experience in the use of OER in various parts of their work has enabled a gradual bottom-up adoption and planned top-down embedding of OER and other aspects of openness into most facets of University work after five years, including a defined open media policy.”

URL : http://oro.open.ac.uk/33245/

Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact

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In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or “altmetrics”, sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science.

We find that that different indicators vary greatly in activity. Around 5% of sampled articles are cited in Wikipedia, while close to 80% have been included in at least one Mendeley library. There is, however, an encouraging diversity; a quarter of articles have nonzero data from five or more different sources. Correlation and factor analysis suggest citation and altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone.

There are moderate correlations between Mendeley and Web of Science citation, but many altmetric indicators seem to measure impact mostly orthogonal to citation. Articles cluster in ways that suggest five different impact “flavors”, capturing impacts of different types on different audiences; for instance, some articles may be heavily read and saved by scholars but seldom cited. Together, these findings encourage more research into altmetrics as complements to traditional citation measures.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.4745

Survey on open access in FP7 Open…

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Survey on open access in FP7 :

“Open access refers to the practice of granting free Internet access to research outputs. The principal objective of an open access policy in the seventh framework programme (FP7) is to provide researchers and other interested members of the public with improved online access to EU-funded research results. This is considered a way to improve the EU’s return on research and development investment.

The European Commission launched in August 2008 the open access pilot in FP7. It concerns all new projects from that date in seven FP7 research areas: energy, environment, health, information and communication technologies (cognitive systems, interaction, and robotics), research infrastructures (e-infrastructures), science in society (SiS) and socioeconomic sciences and humanities (SSH). Grant beneficiaries are expected to deposit peer-reviewed research articles or final manuscripts resulting from their projects into an online repository and make their best efforts to ensure open access to those articles within a set period of time after publication.

In addition to the pilot, FP7 rules of participation also allow all projects to have open access fees eligible for reimbursement during the time of the grant agreement (1) (‘open access publishing’, also called ‘author pays’ fees).

In May 2011, the Commission identified the 811 projects designated at the time and sent a questionnaire to all project coordinators in order to collect feedback on their experiences of both the implementation of the pilot and the reimbursement of open access publishing costs. A total of 194 answers were received by the end of August 2011. They provide important input for the future of the open access policy and practices in Horizon 2020 (the future EU framework programme for research and innovation), and for the preparation of a communication from the Commission and a recommendation to Member States on scientific publications in the digital age.”

URL : http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/survey-on-open-access-in-fp7_en.pdf