A Very Long Embargo: Journal Choice Reveals Active Non-Compliance with Funder Open Access Policies by Australian and Canadian Neuroscientists

Authors: Shaun Yon-Seng Khoo, Belinda Po Pyn Lay

Research funders around the world have implemented open access policies that require funded research to be made open access, usually by self-archiving, within 12 months of publication.

Elsevier is unique among major science publishers because it produces several journals with non-compliant self-archiving embargoes of more than 12 months. We used Elsevier’s Scopus database to study the rate at which Australian and Canadian neuroscientists publish in Elsevier’s non-compliant (embargoes > 12 months) and compliant journals (embargoes ≤ 12 months).

We also examined publications in immediate open access neuroscience journals that had the DOAJ Seal and neuroscience publications in open access mega-journals. We found that the implementation of Australian and Canadian funder open access policies in 2012/2013 and 2015 did not reduce the number of publications in non-compliant journals.

Instead, scientific output in all publication types increased with the greatest growth in immediate open access journals. This data suggests that funder open access policies that are similar to the Australian and Canadian policies are likely to have little effect beyond an association with a general cultural trend towards open access.

URL : A Very Long Embargo: Journal Choice Reveals Active Non-Compliance with Funder Open Access Policies by Australian and Canadian Neuroscientists

DOI: http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10252

Unethical aspects of open access

Authors : David Shaw, Bernice Elger

In this article we identify and discuss several ethical problematic aspects of open access scientific publishing.

We conclude that, despite some positive effects, open access is unethical for at least three reasons: it discriminates against researchers, creates an editorial conflict of interest and diverts funding from the actual conduct of research. To be truly open access, all researchers must be able to access its benefits.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2018.1537789

On the Heterogeneous Distributions in Paper Citations

Authors : Jinhyuk Yun, Sejung Ahn, June Young Lee

Academic papers have been the protagonists in disseminating expertise. Naturally, paper citation pattern analysis is an efficient and essential way of investigating the knowledge structure of science and technology.

For decades, it has been observed that citation of scientific literature follows a heterogeneous and heavy-tailed distribution, and many of them suggest a power-law distribution, log-normal distribution, and related distributions.

However, many studies are limited to small-scale approaches; therefore, it is hard to generalize. To overcome this problem, we investigate 21 years of citation evolution through a systematic analysis of the entire citation history of 42,423,644 scientific literatures published from 1996 to 2016 and contained in SCOPUS.

We tested six candidate distributions for the scientific literature in three distinct levels of Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) classification scheme. First, we observe that the raw number of annual citation acquisitions tends to follow the log-normal distribution for all disciplines, except for the first year of the publication.

We also find significant disparity between the yearly acquired citation number among the journals, which suggests that it is essential to remove the citation surplus inherited from the prestige of the journals.

Our simple method for separating the citation preference of an individual article from the inherited citation of the journals reveals an unexpected regularity in the normalized annual acquisitions of citations across the entire field of science.

Specifically, the normalized annual citation acquisitions have power-law probability distributions with an exponential cut-off of the exponents around 2.3, regardless of its publication and citation year.

Our results imply that journal reputation has a substantial long-term impact on the citation.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.08809

Publish-and-Flourish: decentralized co-creation and curation of scholarly content

Authors : Emilija Stojmenova Duh, Andrej Duh, Uroš Droftina, Tim Kos, Urban Duh, Tanja Simonič Korošak, Dean Korošak

Scholarly communication is today immersed in publish or perish culture that propels noncooperative behaviour in the sense of strategic games played by researchers.

Here we introduce and describe a blockchain based platform for decentralized scholarly communication. The design of the platform rests on community driven publishing reviewing processes and implements incentives that promote cooperative user behaviour.

Key to achieve cooperation in blockchain based scholarly communication is to transform a static research paper into a modifiable research paper under continuous peer review process.

We describe and discuss the implementation of a modifiable research paper as a smart contract on the blockchain.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.10263

Dimensions of open research: critical reflections on openness in the ROER4D project

Authors : Thomas William King, Cheryl-Ann Hodgkinson-Williams, Michelle Willmers, Sukaina Walji

Open Research has the potential to advance the scientific process by improving the transparency, rigour, scope and reach of research, but choosing to experiment with Open Research carries with it a set of ideological, legal, technical and operational considerations.

Researchers, especially those in resource-constrained situations, may not be aware of the complex interrelations between these different domains of open practice, the additional resources required, or how Open Research can support traditional research practices.

Using the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project as an example, this paper attempts to demonstrate the interrelation between ideological, legal, technical and operational openness; the resources that conducting Open Research requires; and the benefits of an iterative, strategic approach to one’s own Open Research practice.

In this paper we discuss the value of a critical approach towards Open Research to ensure better coherence between ‘open’ ideology (embodied in strategic intention) and ‘open’ practice (the everyday operationalisation of open principles).

URL : Dimensions of open research: critical reflections on openness in the ROER4D project

Alternative location : https://www.openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/285

What Value Do Journal Whitelists and Blacklists Have in Academia?

Authors : Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva, Panagiotis Tsigaris

This paper aims to address the issue of predatory publishing, sensu lato. To achieve this, we offer our perspectives, starting initially with some background surrounding the birth of the concept, even though the phenomenon may have already existed long before the popularization of the term “predatory publishing”.

The issue of predation or “predatory” behavior in academic publishing is no longer limited to open access (OA). Many of the mainstream publishers that were exclusively subscription-based are now evolving towards a state of complete OA.

Academics seeking reliable sources of journals to publish their work tend to rely on a journal’s metrics such as citations and indexing, and on whether it is blacklisted or whitelisted.

Jeffrey Beall raised awareness of the risks of “predatory” OA publishing, and his blacklists of “predatory” OA journals and publishers began to be used for official purposes to distinguish valid from perceived invalid publishing venues.

We initially reflect on why we believe the blacklists created by Beall were flawed, primarily due to the weak set of criteria confusing non-predatory with true predatory journals leading to false positives and missing out on blacklisting true predatory journals due to false negatives.

Historically, most critiques of “predatory publishing” have relied excessively on Beall’s blacklists to base their assumptions and conclusions but there is a need to look beyond these.

There are currently a number of blacklists and whitelists circulating in academia, but they all have imperfections, such as the resurrected Beall blacklists, Crawford’s OA gray list based on Beall’s lists, Cabell’s new blacklist with about 11,000 journals, the DOAJ with about 11,700 OA journals, and UGC, with over 32,600 journals prior to its recent (May 2018) purge of 4305 journals.

The reader is led into a discussion about blacklists’ lack of reliability, using the scientific framework of conducting research to assess whether a journal could be predatory at the pre- and post-study levels. We close our discussion by offering arguments why we believe blacklists are academically invalid.

URL : What Value Do Journal Whitelists and Blacklists Have in Academia?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2018.09.017

Leveraging Concepts in Open Access Publications

Authors : Andrea Bertino, Luca Foppiano, Laurent Romary, Pierre Mounier

Aim

This paper addresses the integration of a Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) service within a group of open access (OA) publishing digital platforms and considers its potential impact on both research and scholarly publishing.

This application, called entity-fishing, was initially developed by Inria in the context of the EU FP7 project CENDARI (Lopez et al., 2014) and provides automatic entity recognition and disambiguation against Wikipedia and Wikidata. Distributed with an open-source licence, it was deployed as a web service in the DARIAH infrastructure hosted at the French HumaNum.

Methods

In this paper, we focus on the specific issues related to its integration on five OA platforms specialized in the publication of scholarly monographs in social sciences and humanities as part of the work carried out within the EU H2020 project HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure).

Results and Discussion

In the following sections, we give a brief overview of the current status and evolution of OA publications and how HIRMEOS aims to contribute to this.

We then give a comprehensive description of the entity-fishing service, focusing on its concrete applications in real use cases together with some further possible ideas on how to exploit the generated annotations.

Conclusions

We show that entity-fishing annotations can improve both research and publishing process. Entity-fishing annotations can be used to achieve a better and quicker understanding of the specific and disciplinary language of certain monographs and so encourage non-specialists to use them.

In addition, a systematic implementation of the entity-fishing service can be used by publishers to generate thematic indexes within book collections to allow better cross-linking and query functions.

URL : https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01900303/