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The Rise of Platinum Open Access Journals with Both Impact Factors and Zero Article Processing Charges

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Author : Joshua M. Pearce

It appears that open access (OA) academic publishing is better for science because it provides frictionless access to make significant advancements in knowledge. OA also benefits individual researchers by providing the widest possible audience and concomitant increased citation rates.

OA publishing rates are growing fast as increasing numbers of funders demand it and is currently dominated by gold OA (authors pay article processing charges (APCs)). Academics with limited financial resources perceive they must choose between publishing behind pay walls or using research funds for OA publishing.

Worse, many new OA journals with low APCs did not have impact factors, which reduces OA selection for tenure track professors. Such unpleasant choices may be dissolving. This article provides analysis with a free and open source python script to collate all journals with impact factors with the now more than 12,000 OA journals that are truly platinum OA (neither the author nor the readers pay for the peer-reviewed work).

The results found platinum OA is growing faster than both academic publishing and OA publishing. There are now over 350 platinum OA journals with impact factors over a wide variety of academic disciplines, giving most academics options for OA with no APCs.

URL : The Rise of Platinum Open Access Journals with Both Impact Factors and Zero Article Processing Charges

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/knowledge2020013

Biosecurity in an age of open science

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Authors : James Andrew Smith, Jonas B. Sandbrink

The risk of accidental or deliberate misuse of biological research is increasing as biotechnology advances. As open science becomes widespread, we must consider its impact on those risks and develop solutions that ensure security while facilitating scientific progress.

Here, we examine the interaction between open science practices and biosecurity and biosafety to identify risks and opportunities for risk mitigation. Increasing the availability of computational tools, datasets, and protocols could increase risks from research with misuse potential.

For instance, in the context of viral engineering, open code, data, and materials may increase the risk of release of enhanced pathogens. For this dangerous subset of research, both open science and biosecurity goals may be achieved by using access-controlled repositories or application programming interfaces. While preprints accelerate dissemination of findings, their increased use could challenge strategies for risk mitigation at the publication stage.

This highlights the importance of oversight earlier in the research lifecycle. Preregistration of research, a practice promoted by the open science community, provides an opportunity for achieving biosecurity risk assessment at the conception of research.

Open science and biosecurity experts have an important role to play in enabling responsible research with maximal societal benefit.

URL : Biosecurity in an age of open science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001600

Surveillance Publishing

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Author : Jeff Pooley

This essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing, with special attention to the example of Elsevier. A scholarly publisher can be defined as a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior.

The essay begins by tracing the Google search engine’s roots in bibliometrics, alongside a history of the citation analysis company that became, in 2016, Clarivate. The essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing by engaging with the work of Shoshana Zuboff, Jathan Sadowski, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, and Aziz Huq.

The recent history of Elsevier is traced to describe the company’s research-lifecycle data-harvesting strategy, with the aim to develop and sell prediction products to unviersity and other customers.

The essay concludes by considering some of the potential costs of surveillance publishing, as other big commercial publishers increasingly enter the predictive-analytics business. It is likely, I argue, that windfall subscription-and-APC profits in Elsevier’s “legacy” publishing business have financed its decade-long acquisition binge in analytics.

The products’ purpose, moreover, is to streamline the top-down assessment and evaluation practices that have taken hold in recent decades. A final concern is that scholars will internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors.

URL : Surveillance Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.1874

Ask the Editors: Assessing the Publishing Needs of Faculty Editors

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Authors : Matthew E. Hunter, Liz Dunne, Camille Thomas, Laura Miller, Devin Soper

Introduction

This article reports results from a survey of faculty members with editorial responsibilities. The survey explored what publishing services and platform functionalities respondents found most valuable in their work as editors, how satisfied they were with the services provided by commercial publishers, and to what extent they were aware of alternative publishing practices.

Method

The authors used data collected from a survey instrument that was distributed to a sample (n = 515) of faculty members with editorial responsibilities at their institution.

Results

Collected data suggest that faculty editors value specific publishing services (e.g., coordination of peer review and copyediting) and platform functionality (e.g., submission and peer-review management) more than others, recognize several challenges facing academic publishing in their disciplines (including the transition to open access publishing models), and are mostly aware of common forms of open access research dissemination such as open access journals and institutional repositories.

Discussion

The survey results may be helpful to library publishers in making decisions about what publishing services and platform functionalities to prioritize in the development of their publishing programs. In addition to utilizing the survey data to assess the needs of editors, the authors also identified a number of expanded uses of the survey related to marketing and outreach.

Conclusion

Insofar as faculty editors are key stakeholders that library publishers seek to build partnerships with, it is important to understand their needs and preferences as editors. This article provides some insight into these questions that may prove helpful to library publishers.

URL : Ask the Editors: Assessing the Publishing Needs of Faculty Editors

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.12912

Social justice driving open access publishing: an African perspective

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Authors : Reggie Raju, Auliya Badrudeen

The OA movement is generally considered to have been founded for the truly philanthropic purpose of promoting equity and inclusivity in access to scholarship. For Africans, this meant the opening of the research ecosystem to marginalized research communities who could then freely make use of shared research to aid in the socio-economic development and emancipation of the continent.

However, this philanthropic purpose has been deviated from, leading instead to the disenfranchisement of the African research community. Through systemic inequalities embedded in the scholarly ecosystem, the publishing landscape has been northernised, with research from the global north sitting at the very top of the knowledge hierarchy to the exclusion of Africa and other parts of the global south.

For this reason, progressive open access practices and policies need to be adopted, with an emphasis on social justice as an impetus, to enhance the sharing and recognition of African scholarship, while also bridging the ‘research-exchange’ divide that exists between the global south and north.

Furthermore, advocates of open access must collaborate to create equal opportunities for African voices to participate in the scholarly landscape through the creation and dissemination of global south research. Thusly, the continental platform was developed by the University of Cape Town.

This platform was developed around the concept of a tenant model to act as a contributor to social justice-driven open access advocacy, and as a disruptor of the unjust knowledge hierarchies that exist.

URL : Social justice driving open access publishing: an African perspective

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.1910

Caching and Reproducibility: Making Data Science Experiments Faster and FAIRer

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Authors : Moritz Schubotz, Ankit Satpute, André Greiner-Petter, Akiko Aizawa, Bela Gipp

Small to medium-scale data science experiments often rely on research software developed ad-hoc by individual scientists or small teams. Often there is no time to make the research software fast, reusable, and open access.

The consequence is twofold. First, subsequent researchers must spend significant work hours building upon the proposed hypotheses or experimental framework. In the worst case, others cannot reproduce the experiment and reuse the findings for subsequent research. Second, suppose the ad-hoc research software fails during often long-running computational expensive experiments.

In that case, the overall effort to iteratively improve the software and rerun the experiments creates significant time pressure on the researchers. We suggest making caching an integral part of the research software development process, even before the first line of code is written.

This article outlines caching recommendations for developing research software in data science projects. Our recommendations provide a perspective to circumvent common problems such as propriety dependence, speed, etc. At the same time, caching contributes to the reproducibility of experiments in the open science workflow.

Concerning the four guiding principles, i.e., Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR), we foresee that including the proposed recommendation in a research software development will make the data related to that software FAIRer for both machines and humans.

We exhibit the usefulness of some of the proposed recommendations on our recently completed research software project in mathematical information retrieval.

URL : Caching and Reproducibility: Making Data Science Experiments Faster and FAIRer

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.861944

Academic vs. biological age in research on academic careers: a large-scale study with implications for scientifically developing systems

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Authors : Marek Kwiek, Wojciech Roszka

Biological age is an important sociodemographic factor in studies on academic careers (research productivity, scholarly impact, and collaboration patterns). It is assumed that the academic age, or the time elapsed from the first publication, is a good proxy for biological age.

In this study, we analyze the limitations of the proxy in academic career studies, using as an example the entire population of Polish academic scientists and scholars visible in the last decade in global science and holding at least a PhD (N = 20,569). The proxy works well for science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) disciplines; however, for non-STEMM disciplines (particularly for humanities and social sciences), it has a dramatically worse performance.

This negative conclusion is particularly important for systems that have only recently visible in global academic journals. The micro-level data suggest a delayed participation of social scientists and humanists in global science networks, with practical implications for predicting biological age from academic age.

We calculate correlation coefficients, present contingency analysis of academic career stages with academic positions and age groups, and create a linear multivariate regression model.

Our research suggests that in scientifically developing countries, academic age as a proxy for biological age should be used more cautiously than in advanced countries: ideally, it should be used only for STEMM disciplines.

URL : Academic vs. biological age in research on academic careers: a large-scale study with implications for scientifically developing systems

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04363-0