Archives des mots-clés : open access publishing

The relationship between usage and citations in an open access mega journal

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Authors : Barbara McGillivray, Mathias Astell

How does usage of an article relate to the number of citations it accrues? Does the timeframe in which an article is used (and how much that article is used) have an effect on when and how much that article is cited?

What role does an article’s subject area play in the relationship between usage and citations? This paper aims to answer these questions through an observational study of usage and citation data collected about a multidisciplinary, open access mega journal, Scientific Reports.

We find that while the direct correlation between usage and citations is only moderate at best, the relationship between how early and how much an article is used and how early it is cited is much clearer. What is more, we find that when an article is cited earlier it is also cited more often, leading to the assertion that if an article is more highly accessed early on, it is more likely to be cited earlier and more often.

As Scientific Reports is a multidisciplinary journal covering all natural and clinical sciences, this study was also able to look at the differences across subject areas and found some interesting variations when comparing the major subject areas covered by the journal (i.e. biological, Earth, physical and health sciences).

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01333

Open access mythbusting: Testing two prevailing assumptions about the effects of open access adoption

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Authors : Dan Pollock, Ann Michael

This article looks at whether there is evidence to support two prevailing assumptions about open access (OA). These assumptions are: (1) fully OA journals are inherently of poorer quality than journals supported by other business models and (2) the OA business model, that is, paying for publication, is more ‘competitive’ than the subscription journal access business model.

The assumptions have been discussed in contemporary industry venues, and we have encountered them in the course of their work advising scholarly communications organizations.

Our objective was to apply data analytics techniques to see if these assumptions bore scrutiny. By combining citation‐based impact scores with data from publishers’ price lists, we were able to look for relationships between business model, price, and ‘quality’ across several thousands of journals.

We found no evidence suggesting that OA journals suffer significant quality issues compared with non‐OA journals. Furthermore, authors do not appear to ‘shop around’ based on OA price.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1209

Monitoring open access publishing costs at Stockholm University

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Author : Lisa Lovén

Stockholm University Library (SUB) has been tracking the University’s open access (OA) publishing costs within the local accounting system since 2016. The objective is to gain an overview of the costs and to use this as a basis for decisions about how to proceed in order to support the transition to OA at Stockholm University.

This article explains the reasons behind using the accounting system as the primary source of information and describes the workflow of tracking costs and how additional data are retrieved.

Basic findings from the 2017 cost compilation are outlined, and the steps taken in 2018, with consequences for both the current workflow and the costs at SUB, are briefly discussed. A breakout session on this topic was presented at the UKSG Annual Conference in Glasgow in 2018.

URL : Monitoring open access publishing costs at Stockholm University

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.451

Open access medical journals: Benefits and challenges

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Authors : Jenny Z.Wang, Aunna Pourang, Barbara Burrall

The world of medical science literature is ever increasingly accessible via the Internet. Open access online medical journals, in particular, offer access to a wide variety of useful information at no cost.

In addition, they provide avenues for publishing that are available to health care providers of all levels of training and practice. Whereas costs are less with the publishing of online open access journals, fewer resources for funding and technical support also exist.

A recent rise in predatory journals, which solicit authors but charge high fees per paper published and provide low oversight, pose other challenges to ensuring the credibility of accessible scientific literature.

Recognizing the value and efforts of legitimate open access online medical journals can help the reader navigate the over 11,000 open access journals that are available to date.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clindermatol.2018.09.010

Scholarly journals in building and civil engineering – the big picture and current impact of open access

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Author : Bo-Christer Björk

The publishing of scholarly peer reviewed journals has in the past 20 years moved from print to primarily digital publishing, but the subscription-based revenue model is still dominant.

This means that the additional benefits of open access to all scholarly articles still remains a vision, despite some progress. A selection of 72 leading journals in building & construction was studied, in order to determine the current status in this subfield of engineering. Of the approximately 9,500 articles published yearly in these, only some 5,6 % are in the 11 full OA journals included, and a couple of percentage more are paid OA articles in hybrid journals.

In most of the OA journals publishing is free for the authors. In terms of OA maturity, the field lags far behind the situation across all sciences, where at least 15 % of articles are in full OA journals.

If OA is to become more important in our field, the growth is likely to come from major publishers starting new journals funded by author payments (APCs) or converting existing hybrid journals once they have reached a critical share of paid OA articles.

URL : Scholarly journals in building and civil engineering – the big picture and current impact of open access

Alternative location : https://itcon.org/paper/2018/19

Being a deliberate prey of a predator: Researchers’ thoughts after having published in predatory journal

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Authors: Najmeh Shaghaei, Charlotte Wien, Jakob Pavl Holck, Anita L. Thiesen, Ole Ellegaard, Evgenios Vlachos, Thea Marie Drachen

A central question concerning scientific publishing is how researchers select journals to which they submit their work, since the choice of publication channel can make or break researchers.

The gold-digger mentality developed by some publishers created the so-called predatory journals that accept manuscripts for a fee with little peer review. The literature claims that mainly researchers from low-ranked universities in developing countries publish in predatory journals.

We decided to challenge this claim using the University of Southern Denmark as a case. We ran the Beall’s List against our research registration database and identified 31 possibly predatory publications from a set of 6,851 publications within 2015-2016.

A qualitative research interview revealed that experienced researchers from the developed world publish in predatory journals mainly for the same reasons as do researchers from developing countries: lack of awareness, speed and ease of the publication process, and a chance to get elsewhere rejected work published.

However, our findings indicate that the Open Access potential and a larger readership outreach were also motives for publishing in open access journals with quick acceptance rates.

URL : Being a deliberate prey of a predator: Researchers’ thoughts after having published in predatory journal

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10259

Perception of postgraduate students towards open access publication in some selected institutions in Malaysia

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Author : James Oluwaseyi Hodonu-Wusu

This article investigates perception of postgraduate students towards open access publication in two research institutions in Malaysia. A descriptive survey was used in the study which involves 121 respondents from 500 sample population sent instrument to from both Universities.

A simple random techniques was used for the study. Data were analyzed using frequency counts, percentages, mean and standard deviation, independent sample t-test and One-way analysis of variance tests (ANOVA) was employed to determine if there is a statistically significant mean differences in perceived usefulness and perceived effectiveness of OA publications between ages of postgraduate students.

The findings revealed why postgraduate scholars should embrace Open Access publication for wider visibility and reproducibility of academic research and development.

The results also shows that majority of the respondents were of mean age of 2.67 and highest age bracket was between 26-35 years. However, the sample size of the survey was quite small and further research is needed to determine if similar findings are obtained when other researchers are included in the sample.

URL : Perception of postgraduate students towards open access publication in some selected institutions in Malaysia

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/a4mjz