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

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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

Problematizing Peer Review: Academic Librarians’ Pedagogical Approaches to Peer Review

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Authors : Lana Mariko Wood, Gr Keer

INTRODUCTION

This study is the first to consider how academic librarians’ understanding of and participation in the peer review process influences their information literacy pedagogy and practice.

METHODS

This mixed-methods study uses a modified sequential explanatory design, beginning with a survey of academic librarians in the United States and Canada, followed by interviews with interested study participants.

RESULTS & DISCUSSION

The researchers find that academic librarians frequently teach about peer review, but approaches vary widely, and though some have adapted the Framework to fit their instruction about peer review, there are no best practices.

Instructor demands, the length of instructional sessions, and student level influence whether and how academic librarians contextualize the peer review process. While some academic librarians draw from their personal experience in the peer review process as authors, reviewers, and/or editors in their teaching, academic librarians do not consistently report their personal experience as an influence on their teaching of the peer review process to students.

CONCLUSION

This article argues that academic librarians should consider the place of peer review in information literacy instruction, including interrogating how scaffolding instruction about peer review may provide a disservice to students from an equity perspective.

The authors urge academic librarians who have it to draw on personal experience to contextualize their instruction about peer review.

URL : Problematizing Peer Review: Academic Librarians’ Pedagogical Approaches to Peer Review

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2399

Does Conflict of Interest Distort Global University Rankings?

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Author : Igor Chirikov

Global university rankings influence students’ choices and higher education policies throughout the world. When rankers not only evaluate universities but also provide them with consulting, analytics, or advertising services rankers are vulnerable to conflicts of interest that may potentially distort their rankings.

The paper assesses the impact of contracting with rankers on university ranking outcomes using difference-in-difference research design. The study matches data on the positions of 28 Russian universities in QS World University Rankings between 2016 and 2021 with information on contracts these universities had for services from QS – a company that produces these rankings.

The study estimates the effects of the conflicts of interest with two difference-in-difference models. The first model compares the difference in five-year change in rankings between QS rankings and Times Higher Education (THE) rankings across two groups of universities – those that frequently (five times or more) contracted for QS services, and those that never or seldomly contracted for QS services.

The second model compares the difference in five-year change in faculty-student ratios – between scores in QS rankings, THE rankings, and scores recorded by national statistics – across the same two groups of universities.

The results suggest universities with frequent QS-related contracts had an increase of 0.75 standard deviations (~140 positions) in QS World University Rankings and an increase of 0.9 standard deviations in reported QS faculty-student ratio scores over five years, regardless of changes in the institutional quality.

The study calls for universities, governments, and prospective students to reconsider their use of global rankings where conflicts of interest may be generated by the ranker’s business activities.

URL : https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8hk672nh

Data Management Plans in Horizon 2020: what beneficiaries think and what we can learn from their experience

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Author : Daniel Spichtinger

Background

Data Management Plans (DMPs) are at the heart of many research funder requirements for data management and open data, including the EU’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Horizon 2020. This article provides a summary of the findings of the DMP Use Case study, conducted as part of OpenAIRE Advance.

Methods

As part of the study we created a vetted collection of over 800 Horizon 2020 DMPs. Primarily, however, we report the results of qualitative interviews and a quantitative survey on the experience of Horizon 2020 projects with DMPs.

Results & Conclusions

We find that a significant number of projects had to develop a DMP for the first time in the context of Horizon 2020, which points to the importance of funder requirements in spreading good data management practices. In total, 82% of survey respondents found DMPs useful or partially useful, beyond them being “just” an European Commission (EC) requirement.

DMPs are most prominently developed within a project’s Management Work Package. Templates were considered important, with 40% of respondents using the EC/European Research Council template. However, some argue for a more tailor-made approach.

The most frequent source for support with DMPs were other project partners, but many beneficiaries did not receive any support at all. A number of survey respondents and interviewees therefore ask for a dedicated contact point at the EC, which could take the form of an EC Data Management Helpdesk, akin to the IP helpdesk.

If DMPs are published, they are most often made available on the project website, which, however, is often taken offline after the project ends. There is therefore a need to further raise awareness on the importance of using repositories to ensure preservation and curation of DMPs.

The study identifies IP and licensing arrangements for DMPs as promising areas for further research.

URL : Data Management Plans in Horizon 2020: what beneficiaries think and what we can learn from their experience

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.13342.1

The Changing Landscape of Open Access Publishing: Can Open Access Publishing Make the Scholarly World More Equitable and Productive?

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Author : Richard G. Dudley

Almost 50% of scholarly articles are now open access in some form. This greatly benefits scholars at most institutions and is especially helpful to independent scholars and those without access to libraries. It also furthers the long-standing idea of knowledge as a public good.

The changing dynamics of open access (OA) threaten this positive development by solidifying the pay-to-publish OA model which further marginalizes peripheral scholars and incentivizes the development of sub-standard and predatory journals. Causal loop diagrams (CLDs) are used to illustrate these interactions.

URL : The Changing Landscape of Open Access Publishing: Can Open Access Publishing Make the Scholarly World More Equitable and Productive?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2345

Transparency, provenance and collections as data: the National Library of Scotland’s Data Foundry

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Author : Sarah Ames

‘Collections as data’ has become a core activity for libraries in recent years: it is important that we make collections available in machine-readable formats to enable and encourage computational research. However, while this is a necessary output, discussion around the processes and workflows required to turn collections into data, and to make collections data available openly, are just as valuable.

With libraries increasingly becoming producers of their own collections – presenting data from digitisation and digital production tools as part of datasets, for example – and making collections available at scale through mass-digitisation programmes, the trustworthiness of our processes comes into question.

In a world of big data, often of unclear origins, how can libraries be transparent about the ways in which collections are turned into data, how do we ensure that biases in our collections are recognised and not amplified, and how do we make these datasets available openly for reuse?

This paper presents a case study of work underway at the National Library of Scotland to present collections as data in an open and transparent way – from establishing a new Digital Scholarship Service, to workflows and online presentation of datasets.

It considers the changes to existing processes needed to produce the Data Foundry, the National Library of Scotland’s open data delivery platform, and explores the practical challenges of presenting collections as data online in an open, transparent and coherent manner.

URL : Transparency, provenance and collections as data: the National Library of Scotland’s Data Foundry

Original location : https://www.liberquarterly.eu/article/10.18352/lq.10371/

Prevalence of nonsensical algorithmically generated papers in the scientific literature

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Authors : Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé

In 2014 leading publishers withdrew more than 120 nonsensical publications automatically generated with the SCIgen program. Casual observations suggested that similar problematic papers are still published and sold, without follow-up retractions.

No systematic screening has been performed and the prevalence of such nonsensical publications in the scientific literature is unknown. Our contribution is 2-fold.

First, we designed a detector that combs the scientific literature for grammar-based computer-generated papers. Applied to SCIgen, it has a 83.6% precision. Second, we performed a scientometric study of the 243 detected SCIgen-papers from 19 publishers.

We estimate the prevalence of SCIgen-papers to be 75 per million papers in Information and Computing Sciences. Only 19% of the 243 problematic papers were dealt with: formal retraction (12) or silent removal (34).

Publishers still serve and sometimes sell the remaining 197 papers without any caveat. We found evidence of citation manipulation via edited SCIgen bibliographies. This work reveals metric gaming up to the point of absurdity: fraudsters publish nonsensical algorithmically generated papers featuring genuine references.

It stresses the need to screen papers for nonsense before peer-review and chase citation manipulation in published papers. Overall, this is yet another illustration of the harmful effects of the pressure to publish or perish.

URL : Prevalence of nonsensical algorithmically generated papers in the scientific literature

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24495