Promoting Open Access in Research-Performing Organizations: Spheres of Activity, Challenges, and Future Action Areas

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Author : Heinz Pampel

Open access (OA) has become a critical issue in science policy and affects a wide range of activities in universities and research labs. Research-performing organizations (RPOs), defined as publicly funded universities and research institutions, face significant challenges in shaping the OA transformation.

This article examines the spheres of activity available to RPOs for shaping the OA transformation, using a categorization of 22 spheres of activity related to OA. These spheres of activity include strategy and communication, services and infrastructures, business relationships with publishers, and collaborations.

Current challenges and future action areas in promoting OA are also described, providing support for RPOs in handling OA and highlighting key issues. The categorization can serve as a tool for systematically assessing OA activities at RPOs and shows that OA is a cross-cutting issue in these organizations.

Collaboration on OA activities, both within and beyond organizations, presents a challenge. To effectively promote OA, it is crucial to strengthen the interaction between funding agencies and RPOs. Libraries are critical stakeholders, playing a vital role in advancing OA at the local, national, and international levels in partnership with RPO management and other partners in faculty, administration, and information technology.

URL : Promoting Open Access in Research-Performing Organizations: Spheres of Activity, Challenges, and Future Action Areas

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11030044

Scientific Excellence and Publication Patterns: The Winning Applicants of the Bolyai János Research Scholarship in Hungary in 2021

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Authors : Péter Sasvári, Tamás Kaiser, Krisztián Várföldi, Csaba Fási

The following paper examines some of the publishing habits observed among the winning applicants of the Bolyai János Research Scholarship. As an academic support programme, the Bolyai Research Scholarship forms a bridge between scholars with the title of doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) and the young generation of researchers with an academic degree. The winning applicants in 2021 were researchers under the age of 45, cooperating with international co-authors, having highly cited publications and showing a continuous publication history of 15 years on average.

The scholarship holders come primarily from research centres and universities. The paper argues that the achievements of scholarship holders follow the international patterns of academic excellence and publication as well as the requirements for international cooperation and publishing mainly in open access journals.

In doing so, they prefer journals under the umbrella of Elsevier for performing their publication activities; however, there has been a significant increase in those publishing in MDPI journals, recently. The results show that one-third of the applicants had published before and a fifth of them had published in one of the journals of MDPI two months after announcing the list of the winning applicants.

At the same time, differences in publication traditions and award systems reveal marked differences in publication strategies and evaluation criteria across fields of science. Based on this, the descriptive statistics presented in this paper contribute to our understanding of the conscious career planning of young scholars in line with international standards.

URL : Scientific Excellence and Publication Patterns: The Winning Applicants of the Bolyai János Research Scholarship in Hungary in 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11030043

How do journals publishing palliative and end-of-life care research report ethical approval and informed consent?

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Authors : Tove Godskesen, Knut Jørgen Vie, William Bülow, Bodil Holmberg, Gert Helgesson, Stefan Eriksson

This study explores how papers published in international journals in palliative and end-of-life care report ethical approval and informed consent. A literature search following PRISMA guidelines was conducted in PubMed, the Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, the ProQuest Social Science Premium Collection, PsycINFO, and the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL). A total of 169 empirical studies from 101 journals were deductively coded and analysed.

The results showed that 5% of publications provided no information on ethical approval, 12% reported minimal information, 56% reported rudimentary information, and 27% reported comprehensive details. We also found that 13% did not report any information on informed consent, 17% reported minimal information, 50% reported rudimentary information, and 19% reported comprehensive details.

The prevalence of missing and incomplete ethical statements and inadequate reporting of informed consent processes in recent publications raises concerns and highlights the need for improvement. We suggest that journals advocate high reporting standards and potentially reject papers that do not meet ethical requirements, as this is the quickest path to improvement.

URL : How do journals publishing palliative and end-of-life care research report ethical approval and informed consent?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1580

The state of scientific PDF accessibility in repositories: A survey in Switzerland

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Authors : Alireza Darvishy, Rolf Sethe, Ines Engler, Oriane Pierrès, Juliet Manning

This survey analyzes the quality of the portable document format (PDF) documents in online repositories in Switzerland, examining their accessibility for people with visual impairments. Two minimal accessibility features were analysed: the PDFs had to have tags and a hierarchical heading structure.

The survey also includes interviews with the managers or heads of multiple Swiss universities’ repositories to assess the general opinion and knowledge of PDF accessibility. An analysis of interviewee responses indicates an overall lack of awareness of PDF accessibility, and shows that online repositories currently have no concrete plans to address the issue.

This paper concludes by presenting a set of recommendations for online repositories to improve the accessibility of their PDF documents.

URL : The state of scientific PDF accessibility in repositories: A survey in Switzerland

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1581

Impact of publisher’s commercial or non-profit orientation on editorial practices: Moving towards a more strategic approach to supporting editorial staff

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Author : Katarina Krapež

This study was guided by previous research highlighting the significance of journal publishers’ commercial or non-profit orientations in shaping academic editors’ perspectives regarding the necessity of enhancing editorial and business practices. There is limited understanding of how the editor–publisher relationship varies based on publishers’ commercial orientation.

This study revealed five key factors influencing editors’ attitudes towards how publishers strive to provide high-quality publications: (i) availability of high-quality publication services; (ii) sufficient technological support and access to visibility-related data; (iii) accessible marketing and indexing services; (iv) access to continuous education for the editorial team; and (v) a balance between editorial autonomy and publisher support in managing the journal.

The study indicated that editors partnering with commercial publishers tended to receive more extensive and advanced services, better technological support, and more training opportunities, contributing to the production of superior end products.

However, working with commercial publishers resulted in the trade-off of less editorial independence, which sometimes compromised editors’ decision-making ability and made them feel uncertain about their further involvement. The study’s findings highlighted the importance of publishers adopting a more strategic approach to support their editorial staff, while considering the unique needs of each journal.

URL : Impact of publisher’s commercial or non-profit orientation on editorial practices: Moving towards a more strategic approach to supporting editorial staff

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1575

Pour quelles revues et publishers les chercheurs d’une université pluridisciplinaire travaillent-ils ?

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Auteur/Author :  Maxence Larrieu

Le document contextualise et présente une cartographie réalisée en 2022 à Université Paris Cité, dans le cadre de la plateforme éditoriale OPUS. Les activités éditoriales visées sont celles nécessaires au fonctionnement d’une revue scientifique, comme rédacteur en chef, relecteur ou plus largement membre des comités éditoriaux. La cartographie décrit les revues dans lesquelles les chercheurs de l’université exercent ces activités.

Elle se démarque par l’utilisation du récent outil OpenEditors, qui partage les données structurées des comités éditoriaux des principaux publishers. Cette méthode, enrichie manuellement, autorise une vue omnidisciplinaire appropriée pour l’université : environ 320 revues sont identifiées, 130 pour la santé, idem pour les SHS et moitié moins pour les sciences et techniques.

Les revues sont ensuite analysées manuellement selon différents critères : gouvernance, plateforme, publisher commercial et modèle économique. Les résultats, composés de 7 graphiques, sont précédés d’une explication de la méthode et du jeu de données réalisé. Enfin, des exemples d’utilisation de la cartographie sont proposés.

URL : https://hal.science/hal-04197253

Development and preliminary validation of an open access, open data and open outreach indicator

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Authors : Evgenios Vlachos, Regine Ejstrup, Thea Marie Drachen, Bertil Fabricius Dorch

We present the development and preliminary validation of a new person-centered indicator that we propose is named “OADO” after its target concepts: Open Access (OA), Open Data (OD) and Open Outreach (OO).

The indicator is comprised of two factors: the research factor indicating the degree of OA articles and OD in research; and the communication factor indicating the degree of OO in communication activities in which a researcher has participated. We stipulate that the weighted version of this new indicator, the Weighted-OADO, can be used to assess the openness of researchers in relation to their peers from their own discipline, department, or even group/center.

The OADO is developed and customized to the needs of Elsevier’s Research Information Management System (RIMS) environment, Pure. This offers the advantage of more accurate interpretations and recommendations for action, as well as the possibility to be implemented (and further validated) by multiple institutions, allowing disciplinary comparisons of the open practices across multiple institutes.

Therefore, the OADO provides recommendations for action, and enables institutes to make informed decisions based on the indicator’s outcome. To test the validity of the OADO, we retrieved the Pure publication records from two departments for each of the five faculties of the University of Southern Denmark and calculated the OADO of 995 researchers in total.

We checked for definition validity, actionability, transferability, possibility of unexpected discontinuities of the indicator, factor independence, normality of the indicator’s distributions across the departments, and indicator reliability.

Our findings reveal that the OADO is a reliable indicator for departments with normally distributed values with regards to their Weighted-OADO. Unfortunately, only two departments displayed normal distributions, one from the health sciences and one from engineering.

For departments where the normality assumption is not satisfied, the OADO can still be useful as it can indicate the need for making a greater effort toward openness, and/or act as an incentive for detailed registration of research outputs and datasets.

URL : Development and preliminary validation of an open access, open data and open outreach indicator

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2023.1218213