Étiquette : article-processing charges

Few Open Access Journals are Plan S Compliant

Authors : Jan Erik Frantsvåg, Tormod Eismann Strømme

Much of the debate on Plan S seems to concentrate on how to make toll access journals open access, taking for granted that existing open access journals are Plan S compliant.

We suspected this was not so, and set out to explore this using DOAJ’s journal metadata. We conclude that an overwhelmingly large majority of open access journals are not Plan S compliant, and that it is small HSS publishers not charging APCs that are least compliant and will face major challenges with becoming compliant.

Plan S need to give special considerations to smaller publishers and/or non-APC-based journals.

URL : Few Open Access Journals are Plan S Compliant

Alternative location : https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201901.0165/v3

Monitoring open access publishing costs at Stockholm University

Author : Lisa Lovén

Stockholm University Library (SUB) has been tracking the University’s open access (OA) publishing costs within the local accounting system since 2016. The objective is to gain an overview of the costs and to use this as a basis for decisions about how to proceed in order to support the transition to OA at Stockholm University.

This article explains the reasons behind using the accounting system as the primary source of information and describes the workflow of tracking costs and how additional data are retrieved.

Basic findings from the 2017 cost compilation are outlined, and the steps taken in 2018, with consequences for both the current workflow and the costs at SUB, are briefly discussed. A breakout session on this topic was presented at the UKSG Annual Conference in Glasgow in 2018.

URL : Monitoring open access publishing costs at Stockholm University

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.451

Scholarly journals in building and civil engineering – the big picture and current impact of open access

Author : Bo-Christer Björk

The publishing of scholarly peer reviewed journals has in the past 20 years moved from print to primarily digital publishing, but the subscription-based revenue model is still dominant.

This means that the additional benefits of open access to all scholarly articles still remains a vision, despite some progress. A selection of 72 leading journals in building & construction was studied, in order to determine the current status in this subfield of engineering. Of the approximately 9,500 articles published yearly in these, only some 5,6 % are in the 11 full OA journals included, and a couple of percentage more are paid OA articles in hybrid journals.

In most of the OA journals publishing is free for the authors. In terms of OA maturity, the field lags far behind the situation across all sciences, where at least 15 % of articles are in full OA journals.

If OA is to become more important in our field, the growth is likely to come from major publishers starting new journals funded by author payments (APCs) or converting existing hybrid journals once they have reached a critical share of paid OA articles.

URL : Scholarly journals in building and civil engineering – the big picture and current impact of open access

Alternative location : https://itcon.org/paper/2018/19

OpenAPC: a contribution to a transparent and reproducible monitoring of fee-based open access publishing across institutions and nations

Authors : Dirk Pieper, Christoph Broschinski

The OpenAPC initiative releases data sets on fees paid for open access (OA) journal articles by universities, funders and research institutions under an open database licence.

OpenAPC is part of the INTACT project, which is funded by the German Research Foundation and located at Bielefeld University Library.

This article provides insight into OpenAPC’s technical and organizational background and shows how transparent and reproducible reporting on fee-based open access can be conducted across institutions and publishers to draw conclusions on the state of the OA transformation process.

As part of the INTACT subproject, ESAC, the article also shows how OpenAPC workflows can be used to analyse offsetting deals, using the example of Springer Compact agreements.

URL : OpenAPC: a contribution to a transparent and reproducible monitoring of fee-based open access publishing across institutions and nations

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.439

Predatory Open Access Journals Publishing: What, Why and How?

Author : Shamprasad M. Pujar

The Internet has transformed scholarly publishing and made the availability of online resources possible, both in subscription and open access models. Open access, has enabled wider access to the scholarly literature, thus reducing the digital divide among the haves and have-nots.

In the case of journal articles, even though its ‘Gold’ (author pays model) and ‘Green’ access models have risen to the occasion, but some publishers of journals have turned its ‘Gold’ model to their advantage to earn a profit by charging fees for publication and adopting certain unethical practices of publishing.

An effort has been made here to explore what is ‘Predatory’ open access journals publishing, why this kind of publishing is flourishing and how this model works.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/32032

APCs – Mirroring the impact factor or legacy of the subscription-based model?

Author : Nina Schönfelder

With the ongoing open-access transformation, article processing charges (APCs) are gaining importance as the dominant business model for scientific open-access journals. This paper analyzes which factors determine the level of an APC by means of multivariate linear regression.

With data from OpenAPC, APCs actually paid are explained by the following variables: (1) the “source normalized impact per paper” (SNIP), (2) whether the journal is open access or hybrid, (3) the publisher of the journal, (4) the subject area of the journal, and (5) the year.

The results show that the journal’s impact and the hybrid status are the most important factors for the level of APCs. However, the relationship between APC and SNIP is different for open-access journals and hybrid journals.

The journal’s impact is crucial for the level of APCs in open-access journals, whereas it little alters APCs for publications in hybrid-journals. This paper contributes to the emerging literature initiated by the “Pay It Forward”-study conducted at the University of California Libraries.

It sets the foundations for the assessment whether the large-scale open-access transformation of scientific journals is a financially viable way for each research institution in general and universities in particular.

URL : APCs – Mirroring the impact factor or legacy of the subscription-based model?

DOI : http://doi.org/10.4119/unibi/2931061

Open access monitoring and business model in Latin America and Middle East: a comparative study based on DOAJ data and criteria

Authors : Ivonne Lujano, Mahmoud Khalifa

This research will focus on analyzing the state of open access journals in two regions of developing countries (Latin America and Middle East) according to two main aspects: a) business models and b) monitoring policies that journals implement to ensure the quality.

DOAJ alongside to other institutions has performed great efforts in order to enrich the movement of open access in developing countries. DOAJ is the largest database of peer reviewed open access journals. As March 2018 it has 11.250 journals, and more than 2.900.000 indexed articles from 123 countries.

Using the DOAJ database first, we identified the journals published in countries from the Latin America and Middle East. Then we extracted the data on APCs and submission charges to analyze the business models comparing this data with some other official documents.

We also analyzed some of the DOAJ’s data on monitoring policies, i.e. the review process for papers and the policy of screening for plagiarism. According to initial survey of business models implemented in open access journals in Latin America we found that only 5% of journals charge author fees (APCs and submission charges) being Brazil the country with the highest number of journals that adopt this policy.

Open access is the predominant business model in the majority of countries and it is mostly public funded. Regarding the Middle East region, we can list variant models depending on the economic conditions of each country. APCs and submission charges is growing trend in low economic countries, for example: Egypt, Sudan, North Africa States, however in high economic countries like Gulf States the authors get paid when publish a paper in a journal.

Most of the journals from Latin America (LATAM) implement double or simple blind peer review process and only four journals (published in Brazil and Argentina) carry out some kind of open peer review system. Concerning the policy of screening for plagiarism only 20% of journals state to use any type of software (open source, proprietary, free, etc.).

For journals in the Middle East (MENA), depending on DOAJ experience the types of peer-review are not quite clear for all journals’ editors. Some countries initiated to have policy for plagiarism.

Through the Higher Supreme of Universities in Egypt, screening for plagiarism checked for theses and faculty staff researches, however journals still not familiar with plagiarism detection software, and it requires high cost.

The research will find out deeper results about the two areas depending on DOAJ data analysis and other resources regarding the business model and journal monitoring.

URL : Open access monitoring and business model in Latin America and Middle East: a comparative study based on DOAJ data and criteria

Alternative location : http://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/2126