Luqman Hayes – InfoDoc MicroVeille

Authors : Luqman Hayes, Craig Murdoch

Diamond open access journals make a significant contribution to scholarship globally while enduring a precarious existence due to a lack of funding. The purpose of this study was to identify the necessary characteristics of a shared service that would deliver improved sustainability for diamond journals in Aotearoa New Zealand.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with several of the editors of journals hosted by Tuwhera, Auckland University of Technology’s diamond hosting service. We sought to understand their experiences, both positive and negative, via thematic analysis of the interview transcripts. These themes indicate that our diamond journal editors face significant burdens due to lack of funding, which threaten the unique contribution they make as journals of and from Aotearoa.

We conclude that a shared open infrastructure is the most appropriate way to ensure the sustainability of diamond journals in Aotearoa, but that it must be accompanied by shared services that address the administrative and journal production load currently experienced by editors.

We propose that such an endeavor should be funded by shifting a small percentage of existing library subscription expenditure from profit-making publishers to diamond journals.

URL : The time for action is now: Equity and sustainability for diamond publishing in Aotearoa New Zealand

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18311

Authors : Richard Kenneth Alistair White, Anton Angelo, Deborah Jane Fitchett, Moira Fraser, Luqman Hayes, Jess Howie, Emma Richardson, Bruce Duncan White

We studied journal articles published by researchers at all eight of New Zealand universities in 2017 to determine how many were freely accessible on the web. We wrote software code to harvest data from multiple sources, code that we now share to enable others to reproduce our work on their own sample set.

In May 2019, we ran our code to determine which of the 2017 articles were open at that time and by what method; where those articles would have incurred an Article Processing Charge (APC) we calculated the cost if those charges had been paid.

Where articles were not freely available we determined whether the policies of publishers in each case would have allowed deposit in a non-commercial repository (Green open access). We also examined citation rates for different types of access. We found that, of our 2017 sample set, about two out of every five articles were freely accessible without payment or subscription (41%).

Where research was explicitly said to be funded by New Zealand’s major research funding agencies, the proportion was slightly higher at 45%. Where open articles would have incurred an APC we estimated an average cost per article of USD1,682 (for publications where all articles require an APC, that is, Gold open access) and USD2,558 (where APC payment is optional, Hybrid open access) at a total estimated cost of USD1.45m.

Of the paid options, Gold is by far more common for New Zealand researchers (82% Gold, 18% Hybrid). In terms of citations, our analysis aligned with previous studies that suggest a correlation between publications being freely accessible and, on balance, slightly higher rates of citation.

This is not seen across all types of open access, however, with Diamond OA achieving the lowest rates. Where articles were not freely accessible we found that a very large majority of them (88% or 3089 publications) could have been legally deposited in an institutional repository.

Similarly, only in a very small number of cases had a version deposited in the repository of a New Zealand university made the difference between the publication being freely accessible or not (125 publications).

Given that most New Zealand researchers support research being open, there is clearly a large gap between belief and practice in New Zealand’s research ecosystem.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.23.164004