EN

Visible as Journals, Invisible as Publishers: Limitations of OpenAlex for Analysing University Publishing

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Maryna Nazarovets

This study presents the results of an exploratory audit of publisher-affiliation metadata for a selected sample of university-published journals in OpenAlex. A corpus of 60 UJs from 10 countries, chosen to represent low-visibility publishing environments, was examined. Journal records retrieved from OpenAlex in January 2025 and January 2026 were manually verified against Ulrichsweb, the journals’ websites, and the ISSN Portal, in order to assess the journals’ indexing status and the presence of publisher-related metadata.

While OpenAlex indexes a significant proportion of the sampled journals, including titles not covered by major commercial indexing systems, coverage remains incomplete, even for active journals. Furthermore, structured publisher affiliation was rarely found within the sample.

In January 2025, only 9% of indexed journals were linked to a publisher entity via OpenAlex’s publisher-affiliation fields. By January 2026, publisher names appeared more frequently as unstructured text, while the proportion of journals linked to a publisher entity remained largely unchanged.

These results indicate that university journals are often visible in OpenAlex as sources, but are insufficiently represented at the publisher level, limiting the interpretability of institutional publishing activity and obscuring the role of university publishing in the broader scholarly landscape.

URL : Visible as Journals, Invisible as Publishers: Limitations of OpenAlex for Analysing University Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2061

 

EN

Comparison of OpenAlex and Scopus coverage of German institutions’ publications in top-tier journals

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Andrey Lovakov, Ivan Sterligov

OpenAlex has recently emerged as a leading alternative to proprietary bibliometric sources. However, concerns remain regarding the quality of its metadata, especially the institutional profiles which are crucial for evaluating organizations. This study assesses the quality of affiliation data in OpenAlex using German research institutions.

Publications from top-tier journals were analyzed and institutional publication counts in OpenAlex were systematically compared with counts in Scopus. The results show that OpenAlex generally contains more publications at the journal level, reflecting its broader coverage. However, institutional publication counts in OpenAlex are consistently lower, indicating missing or incorrectly assigned affiliations.

Nevertheless, the correlations between institutional outputs in both databases are very high, suggesting that relative institutional rankings remain stable. These findings suggest that OpenAlex is suitable for comparative institutional analyses in academic research but requires further improvement in affiliation metadata before it can be used for evaluation contexts that rely on absolute publication counts.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.01337

FR

Accompagner le développement des ressources éducatives libres, un nouvel enjeu pour les bibliothèques de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche ?

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Autrice : Marion Brunetti

Inscrites dans le mouvement de l’éducation ouverte et soutenues par la recommandation de 2019 de l’UNESCO, les ressources éducatives libres favorisent l’accès équitable aux savoirs, la mutualisation pédagogique et la diffusion des connaissances. En ce sens, elles sont en corrélation avec les missions des bibliothèques de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche. Ce travail interroge leurs rôles et positionnement dans l’accompagnement du développement de ces matériels d’apprentissage.

URL : Accompagner le développement des ressources éducatives libres, un nouvel enjeu pour les bibliothèques de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche ?

enssib : https://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/74204-accompagner-le-developpement-des-ressources-educatives-libres-un-nouvel-enjeu-pour-les-bibliotheques-de-l-enseignement-superieur-et-de-la-recherche

EN

The State of Scientific Poster Sharing and Reuse

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Aydan Gasimova, Paapa Mensah-Kane, Gerard F. Blake, Sanjay Soundarajan, James ONeill, Bhavesh Patel

Scientific posters are one of the most common forms of scholarly communication and contain early-stage insights with potential to accelerate scientific discovery. We investigated where posters are shared, to what extent their sharing aligns with the FAIR principles, and how commonly they are reused.

We identified 86 platforms hosting posters, with many not assigning persistent identifiers. A total of 150k posters are shared as of 2024 on the 43 platforms where we were able to count, which is relatively low. Looking in more detail at posters shared on Zenodo and Figshare, we found that repositories are not always supporting structured metadata critical for poster discovery, like conference information, and that researchers are not providing such metadata even if they are supported.

We also observed that while there is some engagement with posters in terms of views and downloads, citing posters is not yet a common practice. Our recommendations are for the scientific community to encourage poster sharing and reuse and establish clear guidelines to make posters FAIR.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.21150

EN

Permapublishing: Toward Sustainable Publishing Practices

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Antoine Fauchié

The sustainability of publishing systems goes far beyond the production of printed books, and there is now an urgent need to examine digital production methods, from software to the technical infrastructures used to disseminate knowledge. Despite a lack of consideration for the durability of these publishing modes, the tools and other technical workings can be rethought to take into account the dimensions of longevity and sobriety.

As a concept and a community of practice, permacomputing allows us to explore radical initiatives in the use of computing in a limited context. Its extension into the field of publishing, permapublishing, is an opportunity to identify and analyze sustainable publishing modes that can be shared, hijacked or extended, through the elaboration of three structuring principles: decoupling, deprecation and empowerment.

URL : Permapublishing: Toward Sustainable Publishing Practices

DOI : https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE29732

EN

Un/Sustainable Peer Review and Generative AI: Ethical Gaps, Editorial Acceleration, and the Whitewashing of Technological Solutionism

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Angel Gord, Chris H. Gray, Ana Rodrígue, Elías Said-Hung, Raúl Tabaré

Generative AI in peer review raises ethical and environmental concerns and risks deepening existing inequities in scholarly publishing. Celebrated gains in speed often mask declines in quality and accountability.

Training and deploying large models impose environmental costs. In editorial workflows, AI can privilege technical fixes over structural reform, and evidence shows it reproduces human biases while being cast as neutral. We call for a renewed commitment to open-science principles anchored in human oversight, deep sustainability, and broader justice.

The paper concludes by interrogating sustainability’s absence from green-economy debates and mapping the values likely to shape the future of peer review.

URL : Un/Sustainable Peer Review and Generative AI: Ethical Gaps, Editorial Acceleration, and the Whitewashing of Technological Solutionism

DOI : https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE29731

EN

The French HSS Community Speaks Out on Open Science: A Top-Down and Bottom-Up Taxonomy Approach

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : CandiCe Fillaud, ChériFa BoukaCem-Zeghmouri, Yutong Fei, Valentine FaVel-kapoian

This paper presents a thematic, taxonomy-based analysis that reveals a turn by French HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences) scholars towards criticism of the French national Open Science policy.

By examining their argumentation, we better understand how far official discourse on OS fails to take into account the specificities of HSS disciplines, methodologies, and research practices. To achieve this, we developed a 5-step research design: (1) compilation of a corpus of peer-reviewed papers critical of the national Open Science policy, (2) extraction of quotations containing arguments justifying the criticism, (3) Top-Down indexing of these arguments; (4) construction of a Bottom-Up taxonomy of researchers’ criticisms of Open Science based on an iterative thematic analysis of their arguments, and (5) cross-referencing the two taxonomies.

Our results show that criticism of Open Science accompanied the publication of the two national plans, in 2018 and 2021. The Bottom-Up taxonomy shows that the largest share of the criticism expressed by researchers focuses on Open Research Data, and that this facet cuts across argument categories to the greatest degree, representing the majority of legal/ethical (91.7%), praxis-based (70.0%), and epistemological (68.2%) arguments.

The paper’s original contribution lies in the dialogue it raises about a broader view of Open Science when it comes to HSS. It also provides unprecedented analysis of the categories of argument employed by French HSS scholars to justify their criticism of national French Open Science policy.

URL : The French HSS Community Speaks Out on Open Science: A Top-Down and Bottom-Up Taxonomy Approach

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7835