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Laying Tracks as the Train Approaches: Innovative Open Access Book Publishing at Heidelberg University from the Editors’ Point of View

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Authors : Andrea Hacker, Elizabeth Corrao

In April 2016, Heidelberg University’s newly founded open access publisher heiUP launched the first volume of the new book series Heidelberg Studies in Transculturality.

This article reports on the challenges, accomplishments, and setbacks that informed the entire editorial production process, not only of the first volume but also of the series and the publishing enterprise overall.

The authors offer insights on crucial issues that any new open access publishing endeavour at an institution might face, namely acquiring manuscripts, designing and building workflows, and collaborating with partners to build an outlet for hosting the finished product.

This article also illustrates how the goal of providing a new digital reading experience through an innovative HTML format, in addition to print-on-demand and PDF versions of each manuscript, affected the progress of the entire project. Finally, we report on what it took to deliver results.

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jsp.48.2.76

Data Reuse as a Prisoner’s Dilemma: the social capital of open science

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Author : Bradly Alicea

Participation in Open Data initiatives require two semi-independent actions: the sharing of data produced by a researcher or group, and a consumer of shared data. Consumers of shared data range from people interested in validating the results of a given study to transformers of the data.

These transformers can add value to the dataset by extracting new relationships and information. The relationship between producers and consumers can be modeled in a game-theoretic context, namely by using a Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) model to better understand potential barriers and benefits of sharing.

In this paper, we will introduce the problem of data sharing, consider assumptions about economic versus social payoffs, and provide simplistic payoff matrices of data sharing.

Several variations on the payoff matrix are given for different institutional scenarios, ranging from the ubiquitous acceptance of Open Science principles to a context where the standard is entirely non-cooperative. Implications for building a CC-BY economy are then discussed in context.

URL : Data Reuse as a Prisoner’s Dilemma: the social capital of open science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/093518

Openness of Spanish scholarly journals as measured by access and rights

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Authors : Remedios Melero, Mikael Laakso, Miguel Navas-Fernández

Metrics regarding Open Access (OA) availability for readers and the enablers of redistribution of content published in scholarly journals, i.e. content licenses, copyright ownership, and publisher-stipulated self-archiving permissions are still scarce.

This study implements the four core variables (reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights, author posting rights) of the recently published Open Access Spectrum (OAS) to measure the level of openness in all 1728 Spanish scholarly journals listed in the Spanish national DULCINEA database at the end of 2015.

In order to conduct the analysis additional data has been aggregated from other bibliographic databases and through manual data collection (such data includes the journal research area, type of publisher, type of access, self-archiving and reuse policy, and potential type of Creative Commons (CC) licence used).

79% of journals allowed self-archiving in some form, 13.5% did not specify any copyright terms and 37% used CC licenses. From the total journals (1728), 1285 (74.5%) received the maximum score of 20 in reader rights. For 72% of journals, authors retain or publishers grant broad rights which include author reuse and authorisation rights (for others to re-use).

The OAS-compliant results of this study enable comparative studies to be conducted on other large populations of journals.

URL : https://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/142458

Opening the Publication Process with Executable Research Compendia

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Authors : Daniel Nüst, Markus Konkol, Marc Schutzeichel, Edzer Pebesma, Christian Kray, Holger Przibytzin, Jörg Lorenz

A strong movement towards openness has seized science. Open data and methods, open source software, Open Access, open reviews, and open research platforms provide the legal and technical solutions to new forms of research and publishing.

However, publishing reproducible research is still not common practice. Reasons include a lack of incentives and a missing standardized infrastructure for providing research material such as data sets and source code together with a scientific paper. Therefore we first study fundamentals and existing approaches.

On that basis, our key contributions are the identification of core requirements of authors, readers, publishers, curators, as well as preservationists and the subsequent description of an executable research compendium (ERC). It is the main component of a publication process providing a new way to publish and access computational research.

ERCs provide a new standardisable packaging mechanism which combines data, software, text, and a user interface description. We discuss the potential of ERCs and their challenges in the context of user requirements and the established publication processes.

We conclude that ERCs provide a novel potential to find, explore, reuse, and archive computer-based research.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1045/january2017-nuest

Do You Speak Open Science? Resources and Tips to Learn the Language

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Authors : Paola Masuzzo​, Lennart Martens

The internet era, large-scale computing and storage resources, mobile devices, social media, and their high uptake among different groups of people, have all deeply changed the way knowledge is created, communicated, and further deployed.

These advances have enabled a radical transformation of the practice of science, which is now more open, more global and collaborative, and closer to society than ever. Open science has therefore become an increasingly important topic.

Moreover, as open science is actively pursued by several high-profile funders and institutions, it has fast become a crucial matter to all researchers.

However, because this widespread interest in open science has emerged relatively recently, its definition and implementation are constantly shifting and evolving, sometimes leaving researchers in doubt about how to adopt open science, and which are the best practices to follow.

This article therefore aims to be a field guide for scientists who want to perform science in the open, offering resources and tips to make open science happen in the four key areas of data, code, publications and peer-review.

URL : Do You Speak Open Science? Resources and Tips to Learn the Language

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2689v1

A Different Shade of Green: A Survey of Indonesian Higher Education Institutional Repositories

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Author : Toong Tjiek Liauw, Paul Genoni

INTRODUCTION

Institutional repositories (IRs) are an accepted part of the open access landscape, and they have a particular role to play in supporting scholarly communication in developing countries, such as Indonesia.

METHODS

Content analysis was conducted of 52 Indonesian higher education institutional repository websites between November 2014 and February 2015. Assessment included the degrees of “openness” of repositories, the types of works collected, software used, exploration tools, existence of links to institutional website, the language used for access points, and the standard of metadata.

The study also gathered qualitative indicators of local practices in the management and population of repositories.

RESULTS

Only 26.9% of the surveyed IRs provide all or most documents in full-text; the most widely included types of work are Theses and Dissertations (84.6%) and Published Works (80.8%), but there is also a high representation of Unpublished Works and University Records. Most IRs (90.3%) provide access points in the form of standardized subject headings, and English is widely used.

DISCUSSION

The characteristics of the content of the IRs surveyed suggests that many Indonesian IRs were conceived as a corporate information management system rather than as a genuine attempt to support open access.

CONCLUSION

The findings lead the authors to speculate that institutional repositories serving Indonesian higher education institutions are in their early adoption phase; and that initial drivers for them have been corporate information management, institutional prestige, and the need to combat plagiarism.

URL : A Different Shade of Green: A Survey of Indonesian Higher Education Institutional Repositories

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2136

Helping journals to improve their publishing standards: a data analysis of DOAJ new criteria effects

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Authors : Andrea Marchitelli, Paola Galimberti, Andrea Bollini, Dominic Mitchell

In 2013, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) expanded and updated its inclusion criteria and its journal evaluation process, ultimately removing a large number of journals that failed to submit an updated application.

The present study examined the results of the new process and its capability to improve the quality of the directory and the reliability of the information contained in it. A dataset of 12.595 journals included in DOAJ, since its launch in 2003 until May 15th 2016, was examined and compared to other data.

The number of journals deleted from DOAJ during this period is 3776; the majority of them (2851 journals) were excluded because publishers failed to complete the reapplication on time; 490 had ceased publication or were otherwise inactive; 375 were excluded for ethical issues; 53 because they were no longer open access or the content was embargoed, the final 7 were removed for other reasons.

The top five countries in terms of the percentage of journals removed are: Japan (74% of journals removed); Pakistan (60%); Canada (51%); United States (50%); and Mexico (49%). Our study has shown that 158 of the removed journals are included in Beall’s lists; 1130 journals indexed in DOAJ are included in Scopus and/or JCR.

Our analysis demonstrates that, thanks to the new acceptance criteria, to the improved screening process performed by national groups under the direction of the new management, there is a noticeable quality improvement of the journals indexed in DOAJ.

URL : Helping journals to improve their publishing standards: a data analysis of DOAJ new criteria effects

Alternative location : http://leo.cineca.it/index.php/jlis/article/view/12052