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Funders open access mandates: uneven uptake and challenging models

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Lucía Céspedes, Madelaine Hare, Simon van Bellen, Philippe Mongeon, Vincent Larivière

Over the last two decades, research funders have adopted Open Access (OA) mandates, with various forms and success. While some funders emphasize gold OA through article processing charges, others favour green OA and repositories, leading to a fragmented policy landscape.

Compliance with these mandates depends on several factors, including disciplinary field, monitoring, and availability of repository infrastructure. Based on 5 million papers supported by 36 funders from 20 countries, 11 million papers funded by other organisations, and 10 million papers without any funding reported, this study explores how different policies influence the adoption of OA.

Findings indicate a sustained growth in OA overall, especially hybrid and gold OA, and that funded papers are more likely to be OA than unfunded papers. Those results suggest that policies such as Plan S, as well as read-and-publish agreements, have had a strong influence on OA adoption, especially among European funders.

However, the global low uptake of Diamond OA and limited indexing of OA outputs in Latin American countries highlight ongoing disparities, influenced by funding constraints, journal visibility, and regional infrastructure challenges.

URL : Funders open access mandates: uneven uptake and challenging models

Arxiv : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.03457

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Publishing Service in Times of Crisis: A Case Study of the Academic Library’s Contribution to the New Knowledge Dissemination

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Valentyna Mamedova, Valerii Kushnarov, Olena Skachenko, Alla Malshakova

Introduction

Academic libraries play an important role in scholarly communication and the dissemination of new knowledge about the state of science in their educational institutions. The article presents a case study of the contribution of the library of Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts (Ukraine) to the university’s publishing program, which includes the publication of 10 peer-reviewed open access journals, monographs, and conference proceedings.

Description of Service

It is found that the library’s publishing house edited 598 scientific works, including 107 monographs/textbooks and 115 conference proceedings. To promote the publishing program and scientific journals, a digital interactive project of 12+ Books of the Year was developed. Visualisation of information about the results of the library’s publishing activity has made scientific communication instant and universal.

The article adds to the list of references on library publishing services; explores the evolution and range of publishing services; identifies the factors that have influenced library publishing in the crisis times of COVID-19 and martial law. The article can be useful for librarians-practitioners involved in library publishing.

Next steps

In the future, the research library will continue to facilitate production and post-production publishing processes and promote the university’s publishing program. It is also intended to intensify the library’s participation in the system of formal scholarly and scientific communication, to increase publication activity as an impact factor of university journals, and citation of articles.

URL : Publishing Service in Times of Crisis: A Case Study of the Academic Library’s Contribution to the New Knowledge Dissemination

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18937

 

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Gaming the peer review system: Evidence for a review mill in medicine highlights the need to ensure reviewer integrity

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : M. Ángeles Oviedo-García, René Aquarius, Dorothy V. M. Bishop

Background

Review mills are recognized when individuals generate numerous generic review reports, typically containing suggestions for citations to their own work. Here, we report a network with characteristics of a review mill in the field of gynecological oncology.

Methods

Our search started with a review that contained “boilerplate” comments as well as suggestions that specific PubMed IDs be cited. We searched the internet using Google for review reports using the same boilerplate comments. We coded text to quantify similarities between reviews and compiled citations suggested by reviewers. For comparison, we analyzed 59 reviews of the same articles by other peer reviewers.

Results

We identified a network of 195 review reports that shared boilerplate text from 170 articles. One hundred and eighty-six reports suggested citing articles coauthored by a member of the network. Five members of the network had editorial roles. Authors of 142 articles complied with suggestions for citation. Boilerplate text and citation recommendations were rare in the comparison reports.

Conclusions

Review mills lead to articles being published without proper peer review. This is of particular concern in medical research. Open peer review and transparent reporting of the editors responsible for handling papers will make it easier to detect review mills.

URL : Gaming the peer review system: Evidence for a review mill in medicine highlights the need to ensure reviewer integrity

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2026.2640012

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The evolution of Baltic scientific journals

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Gergely Ferenc Lendvai, Péter Sasvári, Arūnas Gudinavičius

This study examines the evolution of scientific journals in the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, through a scientometric lens, assessing their international integration, publication trends, and impact within the global research ecosystem.

Using Scopus and SciVal databases, we analysed 49,695 articles from 122 Baltic journals indexed in Scopus, focusing on quartile rankings, subject area distributions, citation impact, and international collaborations.

The findings reveal that while the number of Baltic journals has increased significantly since 1990, these journals remain largely positioned in the lower quartiles (Q3 and Q4), with few achieving Q1 status. Social sciences and humanities dominate the Baltic publishing landscape, yet these disciplines exhibit relatively low citation metrics compared to STEM fields. International collaboration remains limited, with single-country publications (SCPs) prevailing, though a notable rise in co-authorship with Chinese scholars in Lithuanian journals has emerged.

Despite digitalization efforts, there are still systemic problems. Peer review challenges persist due to small academic communities and language barriers. Furthermore, Baltic journals are not visible internationally. Citation impact remains modest, with older articles experiencing diminishing citation rates over time.

Our study highlights the need for enhanced journal management practices, greater international collaboration, and increased indexing efforts to improve the global visibility and prestige of Baltic journals.

URL : The evolution of Baltic scientific journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-026-05580-7

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Peer Community In and Peer Community Journal: A Two-Step Diamond OA Process Giving Research Communities Back Control of Publishing

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Barbara Class , Denis Bourguet, Thomas Guillemaud

The current academic publishing system faces many well-identified issues. Not only is it slow and costly, but it is also an opaque system that produces a substantial amount of non-reproducible results.

Peer Community In (PCI) is a non-profit organisation that allows research communities to organise the open and free peer-review of preprints on different thematic platforms. The authors of preprints that are recommended by these platforms can then choose to submit them to any journal or to Peer Community Journal, a diamond open access journal, which publishes any and only PCI-recommended preprints.

Because PCI follows the highest standards for evaluations and openness, many institutions and journals publicly recognise PCI-recommended preprints as being of similar value to accepted journal articles.

This two-step process hence decouples the evaluation of research articles from their publication, while offering a free open-access publication venue for its recommended preprints. Doing so allows researchers to reappropriate the publishing system, and the increasing number of submissions, publications, and communities shows a growing demand for such alternative publishing models.

Ongoing developments aim to further increase the robustness and reproducibility of published research via increasing requirements and checks at submission and promoting the use of registered reports.

URL : Peer Community In and Peer Community Journal: A Two-Step Diamond OA Process Giving Research Communities Back Control of Publishing

HAL :  https://hal.science/hal-05536120

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PreprintToPaper dataset: connecting bioRxiv preprints with journal publications

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Autors : Fidan Badalova, Julian Sienkiewicz, Philipp Mayr

The PreprintToPaper dataset connects bioRxiv preprints with their corresponding journal publications, enabling large-scale analysis of the preprint-to-publication process. It comprises metadata for 145,517 preprints from two periods, 2016–2018 (pre-pandemic) and 2020–2022 (pandemic), retrieved via the bioRxiv and Crossref APIs.

We selected the two periods to capture preprint-publication dynamics before and during the COVID-19 pandemic while avoiding transitional years. Each record includes bibliographic information such as titles, abstracts, authors, institutions, submission dates, licenses, and subject categories, alongside enriched publication metadata including journal names, publication dates, author lists, and further information.

In addition to the main dataset, a version-history subset provides all available versions of preprints within the two selected periods, enabling analysis of how preprints evolve over time. Preprints are categorized into three groups: Published (formally linked to a journal article), Preprint Only (posted on a preprint server), and Gray Zone (potentially published in a journal but unlinked).

To enhance reliability, title and author similarity scores were computed, and a human-annotated subset of 299 records was created to evaluate Gray Zone cases. The dataset supports diverse applications, including studies of scholarly communication, open science policies, bibliometric tool development, and natural language processing research on textual changes between preprints and their corresponding journal articles.

URL : PreprintToPaper dataset: connecting bioRxiv preprints with journal publications

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06867-3

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Perceptions and values of Spanish women scientists towards digital science communication

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Rosana Villares, Carmen Pérez-Llantada, Oana Maria Carciu

The digitalisation of science communication has been widely promoted within the Open Science movement in Europe to foster the social impact of research, as well as a more participatory culture of science.

Using semi-structured interviews, we explore Spanish women scientists’ values and perceptions regarding digital science communication. Results highlight the social value of science communication as well as intrinsic motivation as factors to actively engage in disseminating, educating and promoting science digitally.

Adopting Open Science principles, participants craft open access multimodal materials (e.g., educational short videos, podcasts), use supporting multimodal resources and digital tools, and engage in social media to reach broad audiences.

Finally, we propose some policy recommendations and pedagogical guidelines in terms of digital literacy, digital genres, and science accommodation strategies to promote digital science communication.

URL : Perceptions and values of Spanish women scientists towards digital science communication

DOI : https://doi.org/10.22323/156420251226063745