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Open access in the humanities, arts and social sciences: Complex perceptions of researchers and implications for research support

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Author : Niamh Quigley

Adoption of open access in the humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) is a work in progress, with lower engagement in HASS than most of the natural sciences. HASS research impacts how we live, how we learn and how we see ourselves, and research institutions should encourage and enable their HASS research communities to increase the prevalence of open access research outputs.

Six experienced HASS researchers at a single academic institution in Perth, Australia, were interviewed to explore their perceptions and experiences of open access, and any barriers that they had encountered. Thematic analysis was used to code the transcribed interviews, and generate themes.

This study found a wide variance in the adoption of open access practices among HASS researchers. Some participants are publishing via APC-based gold open access (in DOAJ listed journals), while other participants encounter multiple barriers to sharing more of their work as open access.

Confusion about aspects of open access is evident. Even among participants who support open access, some have had poor experiences of open access publishing. This research also found that some participants hold extremely complex opinions on open access, which directly influence participants’ behaviour depending on which perspective they are considering.

These perspectives are: research supervisor, editorial role at journal, funding assessor and global citizen. Within HASS a diversity of behaviours exists around open access, and research institutions need to tailor their research support services around open access and scholarly publishing for different communities of researchers.

URL : Open access in the humanities, arts and social sciences: Complex perceptions of researchers and implications for research support

DOI : https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.10937

Evolution and Features of China’s Central Government Funding System for Basic Research

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Authors : Aruhan Bai, Cong Wu, Kejia Yang

Basic research is believed to be a crucial factor for building national innovation capacity and therefore was perceived as a key battleground for national technological and economic competition. Since the economic reform and opening up in the late 1970s, China has made great achievements in building up its national research system.

However, the lacking capabilities to conduct ground-breaking scientific work remain one of the daunting challenges for the country. How to restructure its funding system for basic research so to reinvigorate its indigenous innovation capacity has been one of the main concerns for the Chinese government in recent years.

To address this, the paper proposes a conceptual framework to analyze how China’s central government funding system for basic research has evolved since 1985. The paper concludes with a discussion of the identified problems and challenges that China is facing in its current funding system for basic research.

URL : Evolution and Features of China’s Central Government Funding System for Basic Research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.751497

Why does library holding format really matter for book impact assessment?: Modelling the relationship between citations and altmetrics with print and electronic holdings

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Author : Ashraf Maleki

Scholarly books are important outputs in some fields and their many publishing formats seem to introduce opportunities to scrutinize their impact. As there is a growing interest in the publisher-enforced massive collection of ebooks in libraries in the past decade, this study examined how this influences the relationship that library print holdings (LPH), library electronic holdings (LEH) and total library holdings (TLH) have with other metrics.

As a follow up study to a previous research on OCLC library holdings, the relationship between library holdings and twelve other metrics including Scopus Citations, Google Books (GB) Citations, Goodreads engagements, and Altmetric indicators were examined for 119,794 Scopus-indexed book titles across 26 fields.

Present study confirms the weak correlation levels observed between TLH and other indicators in previous studies and contributes additional evidence that print holdings can moderately reflect research, educational and online impact of books consistently more efficient than eholdings and total holdings across fields and over time, except for Mendeley for which eholdings slightly prevailed.

Regression models indicated that along with other dimensions, Google Books Citations frequently best explained LPH (in 14 out of 26 fields), whereas Goodreads User counts were weak, but the best predictor of both LEH and TLH (in 15 fields out of 26), suggesting significant association of eholdings with online uptake of books.

Overall, findings suggest that inclusion of eholdings overrides the more impactful counts of print holdings in Total Library Holdings metric and therefore undermines the statistical results, whilst print holdings has both statistically and theoretically promising underlying assumptions for prediction of impact of books and shows greater promise than the general Library Holding metric for book impact assessment.

Thus, there is a need for a distinction between print and electronic holding counts to be made, otherwise total library holding data need to be interpreted with caution.

URL : Why does library holding format really matter for book impact assessment?: Modelling the relationship between citations and altmetrics with print and electronic holdings

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04239-9

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on publication dynamics and non-COVID-19 research production

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Authors : Marc Raynaud, Valentin Goutaudier, Kevin Louis, Solaf Al‑Awadhi, Quentin Dubourg, Agathe Truchot, Romain Brousse, Nouredine Saleh, Alessia Giarraputo, Charlotte Debiais, Zeynep Demir, Anaïs Certain, Francine Tacafred, Esteban Cortes‑Garcia, Safia Yanes, Jessy Dagobert, Sofia Naser, Blaise Robin, Élodie Bailly, Xavier Jouven, Peter P. Reese, Alexandre Loupy

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected health systems and medical research worldwide but its impact on the global publication dynamics and non-COVID-19 research has not been measured.

We hypothesized that the COVID-19 pandemic may have impacted the scientific production of non-COVID-19 research.

Methods

We conducted a comprehensive meta-research on studies (original articles, research letters and case reports) published between 01/01/2019 and 01/01/2021 in 10 high-impact medical and infectious disease journals (New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature Medicine, British Medical Journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, Lancet Global Health, Lancet Public Health, Lancet Infectious Disease and Clinical Infectious Disease).

For each publication, we recorded publication date, publication type, number of authors, whether the publication was related to COVID-19, whether the publication was based on a case series, and the number of patients included in the study if the publication was based on a case report or a case series.

We estimated the publication dynamics with a locally estimated scatterplot smoothing method. A Natural Language Processing algorithm was designed to calculate the number of authors for each publication.

We simulated the number of non-COVID-19 studies that could have been published during the pandemic by extrapolating the publication dynamics of 2019 to 2020, and comparing the expected number to the observed number of studies.

Results

Among the 22,525 studies assessed, 6319 met the inclusion criteria, of which 1022 (16.2%) were related to COVID-19 research. A dramatic increase in the number of publications in general journals was observed from February to April 2020 from a weekly median number of publications of 4.0 (IQR: 2.8–5.5) to 19.5 (IQR: 15.8–24.8) (p < 0.001), followed afterwards by a pattern of stability with a weekly median number of publications of 10.0 (IQR: 6.0–14.0) until December 2020 (p = 0.045 in comparison with April).

Two prototypical editorial strategies were found: 1) journals that maintained the volume of non-COVID-19 publications while integrating COVID-19 research and thus increased their overall scientific production, and 2) journals that decreased the volume of non-COVID-19 publications while integrating COVID-19 publications.

We estimated using simulation models that the COVID pandemic was associated with a 18% decrease in the production of non-COVID-19 research. We also found a significant change of the publication type in COVID-19 research as compared with non-COVID-19 research illustrated by a decrease in the number of original articles, (47.9% in COVID-19 publications vs 71.3% in non-COVID-19 publications, p < 0.001).

Last, COVID-19 publications showed a higher number of authors, especially for case reports with a median of 9.0 authors (IQR: 6.0–13.0) in COVID-19 publications, compared to a median of 4.0 authors (IQR: 3.0–6.0) in non-COVID-19 publications (p < 0.001).

Conclusion

In this meta-research gathering publications from high-impact medical journals, we have shown that the dramatic rise in COVID-19 publications was accompanied by a substantial decrease of non-COVID-19 research.

URL : Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on publication dynamics and non-COVID-19 research production

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-021-01404-9

Academic Librarians, Open Access, and the Ethics of Care

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Author : Cara Bradley

This paper explores the value of applying the ethics of care to scholarly communications work, particularly that of open-access (OA) librarians. The ethics of care is a feminist philosophical perspective that sees in the personal a new way to approach other facets of life, including the political and the professional.

Care, in this context, is broadly construed as “a species of activity that includes everything we do to maintain, contain, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 40). Joan Tronto outlined four elements of care: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness, and highlighted the value of care beyond the domestic sphere (1993).

The ethics of care values care and relationships as instructive ways of framing and examining work, and has been applied in diverse disciplines, including education, nursing, social work, and even business. Several LIS professionals have considered the ethics of care in the context of library technologies (Henry, 2016) and digital humanities (Dohe, 2019), among others.

The ethics of care can also provide inspiration for OA librarians as we think about the scope and nature of our work. What could open access librarians learn from the ethics of care? How might our practice change or evolve with the ethics of care as an underpinning philosophy?

Who do we include in our circle of care while we undertake our work? The ethics of care provides a more expansive way to think about OA librarianship.

URL : Academic Librarians, Open Access, and the Ethics of Care

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.12914

Open access scientific journals: an analysis of the DOAJ catalogue

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Authors : Suênia Oliveira Mendes, Rosângela Schwarz Rodrigues

Introduction

The research aims to analyse the publishers, countries of publication, citation indexes, article processing charges, and their inter-relations, in the journals that make up the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a global directory that offers scientific information in immediate and exclusive open access.

Method

Bibliographic, quantitative, and inferential study of 9,005 journals in the DOAJ, focusing on publishers, countries of publication, article processing charges, and citation indexes.

Analysis

Calculation of absolute and relative frequencies, measurement of central tendency, chi-squared test, and Mann-Whitney U test using the R statistical software (version 3.2.4) with a 95% confidence interval.

Results

Brazil is the country with the largest number of titles (10.9%), followed by the United Kingdom, which has a greater number of titles with article processing charges fees averaging US$ 1,474 for those that are DOAJ No Seal and US$ 862 for those that are certified DOAJ Seal. Europe has the greatest number of open access titles (47.6%).

The Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Elsevier, De Gruyter Open, BioMed Central, and Springer are the publishers with the greatest number of journals and a higher presence in citation indexes (Journal Citation Reports and SCImago Journal Rank). DOAJ Seal journals are correlated and more likely to have article processing charges fees.

Conclusions

In the consolidation of open access journals, commercial publishers and countries with a tradition of scientific publishing continue to gather the majority of journals. Thus, the oligopoly of commercial scientific publishers is maintained.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.47989/irpaper911

Membership of the editorial boards of journals published by the predatory publisher OMICS: willing and unwilling participation

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Author : Michael Downes

Introduction

OMICS is the largest and most successful predatory publisher, with numerous subsidiaries. In 2019 it was convicted of unethical publishing practices.

Method

A numerical tally of OMICS’s editorial listings was compiled across 131 nations. Names and affiliations were recorded for seven nations. A sample was surveyed to estimate the proportions of those aware and unaware of their listing, and of OMICS’s conviction.

Analysis

Excel enabled compilation, absolute and proportional tallies and random selection.

Results.

OMICS has twenty subsidiaries and 26,772 editor (and editorial board) listings, 11,361 from just seven nations. Proportional to population, Greeks were most frequently represented on OMICS’s editorial boards, followed by Americans, Singaporeans and Italians.

In absolute terms, Americans were the most numerous. The survey found that more than half of the respondents were either unaware of their listing or were unwilling to be listed, and 26% were unaware of OMICS’s conviction.

Conclusion

OMICS’s editorial boards do not function as they do for respectable publishers, hence the information published in OMICS journals is unreliable. Academic alliances with OMICS are potentially damaging to academic careers and institutional reputations.

Universities should develop policies dealing with predatory publishers in general and OMICS in particular.

URL : https://doi.org/10.47989/irpaper912