Revisiting “the 1990s debutante”: Scholar‐led publishing and the prehistory of the open access movement

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Author : Samuel A. Moore

The movement for open access publishing (OA) is often said to have its roots in the scientific disciplines, having been popularized by scientific publishers and formalized through a range of top‐down policy interventions. But there is an often‐neglected prehistory of OA that can be found in the early DIY publishers of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Managed entirely by working academics, these journals published research in the humanities and social sciences and stand out for their unique set of motivations and practices.

This article explores this separate lineage in the history of the OA movement through a critical‐theoretical analysis of the motivations and practices of the early scholar‐led publishers.

Alongside showing the involvement of the humanities and social sciences in the formation of OA, the analysis reveals the importance that these journals placed on experimental practices, critique of commercial publishing, and the desire to reach new audiences.

Understood in today’s context, this research is significant for adding complexity to the history of OA, which policymakers, advocates, and publishing scholars should keep in mind as OA goes mainstream.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24306

The Future of OA: A large-scale analysis projecting Open Access publication and readership

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Authors : Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem, Richard Orr

Understanding the growth of open access (OA) is important for deciding funder policy, subscription allocation, and infrastructure planning.

This study analyses the number of papers available as OA over time. The models includes both OA embargo data and the relative growth rates of different OA types over time, based on the OA status of 70 million journal articles published between 1950 and 2019.

The study also looks at article usage data, analyzing the proportion of views to OA articles vs views to articles which are closed access. Signal processing techniques are used to model how these viewership patterns change over time. Viewership data is based on 2.8 million uses of the Unpaywall browser extension in July 2019.

We found that Green, Gold, and Hybrid papers receive more views than their Closed or Bronze counterparts, particularly Green papers made available within a year of publication. We also found that the proportion of Green, Gold, and Hybrid articles is growing most quickly.

In 2019:

  • 31% of all journal articles are available as OA

  • 52% of article views are to OA article

Given existing trends, we estimate that by 2025:

  • 44% of all journal articles will be available as OA

  • 70% of article views will be to OA articles

The declining relevance of closed access articles is likely to change the landscape of scholarly communication in the years to come.

URL : The Future of OA: A large-scale analysis projecting Open Access publication and readership

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/795310

Produire, analyser et partager des données ouvertes en Humanités Numériques : quelques bonnes pratiques

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Auteur/Author : Gérald Kembellec

La réponse à des problématiques scientifiques liées aux humanités passe par le traitement numérique de corpus. Les humanités numériques deviennent un sujet d’importance qui regroupe des savoirs et des méthodes issus de diverses disciplines comme l’informatique, les statistiques, la sociologie, la cartographie ou encore la linguistique.

Cet article, s’il est ancré dans les sciences de l’information et de la communication, convoque des méthodes périphériques et se propose comme un vade-mecum de la gestion des données des humanités : la qualification, la collecte, le traitement, l’enrichissement, la documentation et le partage des données des humanités.

Nous mettons ici en avant le concept de « courtoisie du FAIR data » en contexte scientifique : la valorisation des corpus, en particulier par le partage de jeux de données de qualité, documentés et accessibles physiquement et légalement exploitables. Nous insistons également sur l’éthique lors des étapes de traitement et d’exploitation des données de la recherche.

URL : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/ISKOFRANCE2019/hal-02306958

Services de gestion et de partage des données de recherche : ce qu’en pensent les chercheurs

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Auteurs/Authors : Violaine Rebouillat, Ghislaine Chartron

En France, les professionnels de l’information scientifique et technique (IST) se positionnent sur le développement de services pour la gestion et la valorisation des données de recherche.

L’article interroge l’utilisation de ces services par les chercheurs. Il s’appuie sur 46 entretiens, réalisés auprès de chercheurs de l’Université de Strasbourg. Le catalogue Cat OPIDoR, référençant les services de données français, a servi de base d’étude pour l’enquête. Les résultats montrent que les services développés par les professionnels de l’IST correspondent pour une faible partie à ceux qu’utilisent les répondants.

Une des explications esquissées est qu’en matière de données les chercheurs sont davantage influencés par les recommandations des éditeurs que par celles des professionnels de l’IST.

URL : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/ISKOFRANCE2019/hal-02307085

Data papers as a new form of knowledge organization in the field of research data

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Authors : Joachim Schöpfel, Dominic Farace, Hélène Prost, Antonella Zane

Data papers have been defined as scholarly journal publications whose primary purpose is to describe research data. Our survey provides more insights about the environment of data papers, i.e. disciplines, publishers and business models, and about their structure, length, formats, metadata and licensing.

Data papers are a product of the emerging ecosystem of data-driven open science. They contribute to the FAIR principles for research data management. However, the boundaries with other categories of academic publishing are partly blurred. Data papers are (can be) generated automatically and are potentially machine-readable.

Data papers are essentially information, i.e. description of data, but also partly contribute to the generation of knowledge and data on its own. Part of the new ecosystem of open and data-driven science, data papers and data journals are an interesting and relevant object for the assessment and understanding of the transition of the former system of academic publishing.

URL : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/ISKOFRANCE2019/halshs-02284548

Editors’ and authors’ individual conflicts of interest disclosure and journal transparency. A cross-sectional study of high-impact medical specialty journals

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Authors : Rafael Dal-Ré, Arthur L Caplan, Ana Marusic

Objective

To assess the fulfilment of authors’ and editors’ individual disclosure of potential conflicts of interest in a group of highly influential medicine journals across a variety of specialties.

Design

Cross-sectional analysis.

Setting and participants

Top-ranked five journals as per 2017 Journal Citation Report impact factor of 26 medical, surgery and imaging specialties.

Interventions

Observational analysis.

Primary and secondary outcome measures

Percentage of journals requiring disclosure of authors’ and editors’ individual potential conflicts of interest (CoI). Journals that were listed as followers of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations, members of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and linked to a third party (ie, college, professional association/society, public institution).

Results

Although 99% (129/130) of journals required author’s CoI disclosure, only 12% (16/130) reported individual editors’ potential CoIs. Forty−five per cent (58/130) of journals were followers of the ICMJE Recommendations, and 73% (95/130) were COPE members. Most (69%; 90/130) were linked to a college, professional society/association or public institution. Only one journal did not have policies on individual authors’ and editors’ CoI disclosure.

Conclusion

Very few high-impact medical journals disclosed their editorial teams’ individual potential CoIs—conversely, almost all required disclosure of authors’ individual CoIs. Journal followers of the ICMJE Recommendations should regularly disclose the editors’ individual CoIs, as this is the only legitimate way to ask the same transparency of authors.

URL : Editors’ and authors’ individual conflicts of interest disclosure and journal transparency. A cross-sectional study of high-impact medical specialty journals

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-029796

Evaluating FAIR maturity through a scalable, automated, community-governed framework

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Authors : Mark D. Wilkinson, Michel Dumontier, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Luiz Olavo Bonino da Silva Santos, Mario Prieto, Dominique Batista, Peter McQuilton, Tobias Kuhn, Philippe Rocca-Serra, Mercѐ Crosas, Erik Schultes

Transparent evaluations of FAIRness are increasingly required by a wide range of stakeholders, from scientists to publishers, funding agencies and policy makers. We propose a scalable, automatable framework to evaluate digital resources that encompasses measurable indicators, open source tools, and participation guidelines, which come together to accommodate domain relevant community-defined FAIR assessments.

The components of the framework are: (1) Maturity Indicators – community-authored specifications that delimit a specific automatically-measurable FAIR behavior; (2) Compliance Tests – small Web apps that test digital resources against individual Maturity Indicators; and (3) the Evaluator, a Web application that registers, assembles, and applies community-relevant sets of Compliance Tests against a digital resource, and provides a detailed report about what a machine “sees” when it visits that resource.

We discuss the technical and social considerations of FAIR assessments, and how this translates to our community-driven infrastructure. We then illustrate how the output of the Evaluator tool can serve as a roadmap to assist data stewards to incrementally and realistically improve the FAIRness of their resources.

URL : Evaluating FAIR maturity through a scalable, automated, community-governed framework

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-019-0184-5