Attitudes, willingness, and resources to cover article publishing charges: The influence of age, position, income level country, discipline and open access habits

Authors : Francisco Segado-Boj, Juan-Jose Prieto-Gutiérrez, Juan Martín-Quevedo

The rise of open access (OA) publishing has been followed by the expansion of the Article Publishing Charges (APC) that moves the financial burden of scholarly journal publishing from libraries and readers to authors.

We introduce the results of an international randomly selected sampled survey (N = 3,422) that explores attitudes towards this pay-to-publish or Gold OA model among scholars. We test the predictor role of age, professional position, discipline, and income-level country in this regard.

We found that APCs are perceived more as a global threat to Science than a deterrent to personal professional careers. Academics in low and lower-middle income level countries hold the most unfavourable opinions about the APC system.

The less experimental disciplines held more negative perceptions of APC compared to STEM and the Life Sciences. Age and access to external funding stood as negative predictors of refusal to pay to publish. Commitment to OA self-archiving predicted the negative global perception of the APC.

We conclude that access to external research funds influences the acceptance and the particular perception of the pay to publish model, remarking the economic dimension of the problem and warning about issues in the inequality between centre and periphery.

URL : Attitudes, willingness, and resources to cover article publishing charges: The influence of age, position, income level country, discipline and open access habits

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1455

Diamond Open Access in Norway 2017–2020

Author : Jan Erik Frantsvåg

We see from information published elsewhere that Gold OA is on the increase globally. The OA Diamond study indicates that Diamond OA is an important component of scholarly communications, with an estimated 8–9% of the total global scholarly output.

These numbers, however, are on a global scale and are not necessarily representative of any given country; country case studies are needed to find this information. Norway is a country where the government has declared a 100% OA goal and most research has public funding. Norway has good financing structures for various models of OA, and it has a national CRIS system.

This study tries to find and present numbers for articles in scholarly journals to describe both recent developments and relative numbers for Norway as a whole, and for scholarly fields in Norway, with regards to Diamond OA. Numbers for and development of Gold OA will also be given and commented upon to some extent.

URL : Diamond Open Access in Norway 2017–2020

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10010013

Article Processing Charges, Altmetrics and Citation Impact: Is there an economic rationale?

Authors : Abdelghani Maddi, David Sapinho

The present study aims to analyze 1) the relationship between Citation Normalized Score of scientific publications and Article Processing Charges (APCs) of Gold Open Access (OA) publications 2) the determinants of APCs.

To do so, we used APCs information provided by the OpenAPC database, citation scores of publications from the WoS database and, for Altmetrics, data from Altmetrics.com database, over the period from 2006 to 2019 for 83,752 articles published in 4751 journals belonging to 267 distinct publishers.

Results show that contrary to common belief, paying high APCs does not necessarily increase the impact of publications. First, large publishers with high impact are not the most expensive. Second, publishers with the highest APCs are not necessarily the best in terms of impact.

Correlation between APCs and impact is moderate. Regarding the determinants, results indicate that APCs are on average 50% higher in hybrid journals than in full OA journals. The results also suggest that Altmetrics do not have a great impact: OA articles that have garnered the most attention on internet are articles with relatively low APCs.

Another interesting result is that the “number of readers” indicator is more effective as it is more correlated with classic bibliometrics indicators than the Altmetrics score.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03576911

The influence of funding on the Open Access citation advantage

Authors : Pablo Dorta-González, María Isabel Dorta-González

Some of the citation advantage in open access is likely due to more access allows more people to read and hence cite articles they otherwise would not. However, causation is difficult to establish and there are many possible bias. Several factors can affect the observed differences in citation rates.

Funder mandates can be one of them. Funders are likely to have OA requirement, and well-funded studies are more likely to receive more citations than poorly funded studies. In this paper this hypothesis is tested. Thus, we studied the effect of funding on the publication modality and the citations received in more than 128 thousand research articles, of which 31% were funded.

These research articles come from 40 randomly selected subject categories in the year 2016, and the citations received from the period 2016-2020 in the Scopus database. We found open articles published in hybrid journals were considerably more cited than those in open access journals.

Thus, articles under the hybrid gold modality are cite on average twice as those in the gold modality. This is the case regardless of funding, so this evidence is strong. Moreover, within the same publication modality, we found that funded articles generally obtain 50% more citations than unfunded ones.

The most cited modality is the hybrid gold and the least cited is the gold, well below even the paywalled. Furthermore, the use of open access repositories considerably increases the citations received, especially for those articles without funding. Thus, the articles in open access repositories (green) are 50% more cited than the paywalled ones.

This evidence is remarkable and does not depend on funding. Excluding the gold modality, there is a citation advantage in more than 75% of the cases and it is considerably greater among unfunded articles. This result is strong both across fields and over time

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.02082v1

Sharing published short academic works in institutional repositories after six months : The implementation of the article 25fa (Taverne Amendment) in the Dutch Copyright Act

Authors : Jeroen Sondervan, Arjan Schalken, Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer

The ambition of the Netherlands, laid down in the National Plan Open Science, is to achieve 100% open access for academic publications. The ambition was to be achieved by 2020. However, it is to be expected that for the year 2020 between 70% and 75% of the articles will be open access.

Until recently, the focus of the Netherlands has been on the gold route – open access via journals and publishers’ platforms. This is likely to be costly and it is also impossible to cover all articles and other publication types this way.

Since 2015, Dutch Copyright Act has offered an alternative with the implementation of Article 25fa (also known as the ‘Taverne Amendment’), facilitating the green route, i.e. open access via (trusted) repositories.

This amendment allows researchers to share short scientific works (e.g. articles and book chapters in edited collections), regardless of any restrictive guidelines from publishers. From February 2019 until August 2019 all Dutch universities participated in the pilot ‘You Share, we Take Care!’ to test how this copyright amendment could be interpreted and implemented by institutions as a policy instrument to enhance green open access and “self-archiving”.

In 2020 steps were taken to scale up further implementation of the amendment. This article describes the outcomes of this pilot and shares best practices on implementation and awareness activities in the period following the pilot until early 2021, in which libraries have played an instrumental role in building trust and working on effective implementations on an institutional level.

It concludes with some possible next steps for alignment, for example on a European level.

URL : Sharing published short academic works in institutional repositories after six months : The implementation of the article 25fa (Taverne Amendment) in the Dutch Copyright Act

DOI : https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.10915

The Impact of the German ‘DEAL’ on Competition in the Academic Publishing Market

Authors : Justus Haucap, Nima Moshgbar, Wolfgang Benedikt Schmal

The German DEAL agreements between German universities and research institutions on the one side and Springer Nature and Wiley on the other side facilitate easy open access publishing for researchers located in Germany.

We use a dataset of all publications in chemistry from 2016 to 2020 and apply a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact on eligible scientists’ choice of publication outlet.

We find that even in the short period following the conclusion of these DEAL agreements, publication patterns in the field of chemistry have changed, as eligible researchers have increased their publications in Wiley and Springer Nature journals at the cost of other journals.

From that two related competition concerns emerge: First, academic libraries may be, at least in the long run, left with fewer funds and incentives to subscribe to non-DEAL journals published by smaller publishers or to fund open access publications in these journals.

Secondly, eligible authors may prefer to publish in journals included in the DEAL agreements, thereby giving DEAL journals a competitive advantage over non-DEAL journals in attracting good papers.

Given the two-sided market nature of the academic journal market, these effects may both further spur the concentration process in this market.

URL : https://ssrn.com/abstract=3815451

Open Access Models, Pirate Libraries and Advocacy Repertoires: Policy Options for Academics to Construct and Govern Knowledge Commons

Author : Melanie Dulong de Rosnay

In this article, I propose exploring open access publishing through the lenses of Knowledge Commons. Instead of focusing on users’ rights to access and reuse the output under open copyright licensing conditions, I study the governance of the academic publishing ecosystem, and its political economy, technical and labour infrastructure. Based on selected examples, I discuss how they comply with the concept of the commons.

I use analytical frameworks from the Ostromian literature of the governance of Knowledge Commons to provide insights on the various steps of academic publishing work as a process. I then analyse a scope of open access publishing projects, including gold, green, diamond, platinum and pirate libraries. Finally, I draw from practices a repertoire of advocacy actions and I make recommendations for academics to develop policies supporting Academic Commons.

URL : Open Access Models, Pirate Libraries and Advocacy Repertoires: Policy Options for Academics to Construct and Govern Knowledge Commons

DOI : https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.913