Catégorie : EN

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Open access: brave new world requires bravery

The year 2012 heralded significant developments in open access (OA) that impacted the relationships between the major stakeholders in scholarly publishing: researchers, funders, publishers and governments.

In the UK, the clear preference for a gold OA policy enunciated by the government-backed ‘Finch Report’ is now being implemented by the research councils. Although the policy has been modified to include green routes to OA publishing, arguments continue about the optimal route to a system of open access that can work on a global scale. Resolution of these disputes will require courage and imagination.

URL : http://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/2048-7754.26.1.22/

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Academic Libraries as Data Quality Hubs

Academic libraries have a critical role to play as data quality hubs on campus. There is an increased need to ensure data quality within ‘e-science’. Given academic libraries’ curation and preservation expertise, libraries are well suited to support the data quality process.

Data quality measurements are discussed, including the fundamental elements of trust, authenticity, understandability, usability and integrity, and are applied to the Digital Curation Lifecycle model to demonstrate how these measures can be used to understand and evaluate data quality within the curatorial process. Opportunities for improvement and challenges are identified as areas that are fruitful for future research and exploration.

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss3/5/

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Open Access and the Author-Pays Problem: Assuring Access for Readers and Authors in a Global Community of Scholars

Out of concern for its lifeblood—communication—academia is rushing to correct serious inequities in access and revenue distribution by embracing open access (OA) in a variety of ways: some journals provide access openly to all readers, some allow authors to pay for OA options, some share copyrights with authors to allow open sharing,etc.

For publication in some fully OA journals, though, publication charges associated with an ‘author-pays’ business model can be substantial, reflecting costs involved in production and publication of quality scholarly articles and (sometimes) significant profit margins for publishers. Such charges may constitute significant barriers for potential authors, particularly those at institutions or in countries with fewer resources.

Consequently, an OA journal for readers may in reality be a closed-access journal for authors.

[…]

This commentary is not a criticism of OA publishers with author-pays systems, such as PLoS, which has creatively faced a difficult challenge and stands as an example of a
successful non-profit OA publishing endeavor.

Nor is this commentary an attack on OA journals in general. On the contrary, this paper advocates developing a robust and vibrant variety of OA journals. Two of the authors are also publishers of OA journals that do not follow the ‘author-pays’ system, described briefly later in this commentary.

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss3/3/

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Use of blogs, Twitter and Facebook by PhD Students for Scholarly Communication: A UK study

This study explores scholarly use of social media by PhD researchers through mix-methods of qualitative interviews, participant observation and content analysis of a case study #phdchat.

We found that blogs, Twitter and Facebook are among the most popular social media tools being used by researchers. They can be used by PhD students and early career researchers to benefit their scholarly communication practice, promote their professional profiles, disseminate their work to a wider audience quickly, and gain feedbacks and support from peers across the globe.

There are also difficulties and potential problems such as the lack of standards and incentives, the risks of idea being pinched and plagiarism, lack of knowledge of how to start and maintain using social media tool and the potential huge amount of time and effort needed to invest.

We found that respondents link different social media tools together to maximise the impact of the content disseminated, as well as to create a personal learning network (PLN) connected with people across the globe.

For privacy issue, the participants use different identities on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is usually set as private with access for friends only and Twitter is public and used for professional purposes.

However, Facebook page and groups can be public which are used to build a community and disseminate information without revealing much content from individual member’s personal profile.”

URL : https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/item/?pid=uk-ac-man-scw:187789

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A Comparison of Open Access in Exercise Science Journals: 2010 to 2012

The aim of this study was to complete an audit on the number of open access journals within the discipline of Exercise Science. Publishing in open access journals results in wide dissemination of material in a very short period of time compared with the more traditional way of publishing in a subscription journal. The 2010 ERA journal list, category Human Movement and Sport Science, was initially utilised and then compared with the openness of the same journals in 2012.

In this study journals were audited for their degree of open access, open licensing and open format. Open access relates to the free online availability of research results and hence research publications and in the discipline of exercise science relates to the concept of an idealised level playing field.

Open licensing relates to the ability of the consumers to replicate and share those publications freely whilst open format relates to the use of open and transferrable format types. Open access increased (p=0.014) as did our measurement of open licensing (p=0.000) and open formats (p=0.021) between the 2010 and 2012 reviews of the journals in 1106 For code.

This study reveals an increase in the number of Exercise Science journals that have full or partial open access over the two year period and suggests that authors are increasingly adopting peer reviewed open access journal publications. It is evident from this study that the impact of open access journals be assessed and further research into the feasibility of such a rating is imperative.

URL : http://bentham-open.com/contents/pdf/TOSSJ/TOSSJ-6-1.pdf

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What Do Journals Do? – Voluntary Public Goods and the Doomsday of Commercial Science Publishing

Commercial (and non-commercial) science publishing has evolved as a solution to a number of problems in the market for research results. It has reduced transaction costs by bringing together authors and readers, which is just the simple advantage of market intermediaries. It has delivered added value to readers by filtering out bad work.

It has added value to authors by delivering signals of high quality work. It has added value by sorting, relieving readers from the necessity to identify relevant work in some field of interest. And it has contributed to the value of published work by delivering guidance from reviewers to authors.

But technological changes already have and will continue to erase the value of these services. These services can be provided in much better quality and at much lower costs via open access science networks like SSRN.

All we need to make this work are some simple technical improvements and a few new but simple modes of peer interaction. My conjecture is that commercial science publishing will not survive for more than a couple of years.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2189631

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Open Access Versus Traditional Journal Pricing: Using a Simple ‘Platform Market’ Model to Understand Which Will Win (and Which Should)

Economists have built a theory to understand markets in which, rather than selling directly to buyers, suppliers sell through a platform, which controls prices on both sides. The theory has been applied to understand markets ranging from telephony, to credit cards, to media.

In this paper, we apply the theory to the market for scholarly journals, with the journal functioning as the platform between submitting authors and subscribing readers. Our goal is to understand the conditions under which a journal would prefer open access to traditional pricing and under which open access would be better for the scholarly community.

Our new model captures much of the richness of the existing economic literature on journal pricing, and indeed adds some fresh insights, yet is simple enough to be accessible to a broad audience.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2201773