Veille dédiée aux Sciences de l'Information et des Bibliothèques // Collecting and Sharing research papers in Library and Information science ISSN 2429-3938
Authors : David Shaw, Bernice Elger
In this article we identify and discuss several ethical problematic aspects of open access scientific publishing.
We conclude that, despite some positive effects, open access is unethical for at least three reasons: it discriminates against researchers, creates an editorial conflict of interest and diverts funding from the actual conduct of research. To be truly open access, all researchers must be able to access its benefits.
Authors : Jeroen Sondervan, Fleur Stigter
Authors : Dirk Pieper, Christoph Broschinski
The OpenAPC initiative releases data sets on fees paid for open access (OA) journal articles by universities, funders and research institutions under an open database licence.
OpenAPC is part of the INTACT project, which is funded by the German Research Foundation and located at Bielefeld University Library.
This article provides insight into OpenAPC’s technical and organizational background and shows how transparent and reproducible reporting on fee-based open access can be conducted across institutions and publishers to draw conclusions on the state of the OA transformation process.
As part of the INTACT subproject, ESAC, the article also shows how OpenAPC workflows can be used to analyse offsetting deals, using the example of Springer Compact agreements.
Author : Nina Schönfelder
With the ongoing open-access transformation, article processing charges (APCs) are gaining importance as the dominant business model for scientific open-access journals. This paper analyzes which factors determine the level of an APC by means of multivariate linear regression.
With data from OpenAPC, APCs actually paid are explained by the following variables: (1) the “source normalized impact per paper” (SNIP), (2) whether the journal is open access or hybrid, (3) the publisher of the journal, (4) the subject area of the journal, and (5) the year.
The results show that the journal’s impact and the hybrid status are the most important factors for the level of APCs. However, the relationship between APC and SNIP is different for open-access journals and hybrid journals.
The journal’s impact is crucial for the level of APCs in open-access journals, whereas it little alters APCs for publications in hybrid-journals. This paper contributes to the emerging literature initiated by the “Pay It Forward”-study conducted at the University of California Libraries.
It sets the foundations for the assessment whether the large-scale open-access transformation of scientific journals is a financially viable way for each research institution in general and universities in particular.
URL : APCs – Mirroring the impact factor or legacy of the subscription-based model?
Author : Muruli Acharya
With the advent of open access movement, open access journals (OAJs) being the prodigious source of academic and research information have been gaining significant magnitude.
The electronic age has made it easier and more convenient than ever to break barriers to research information. The present study aims to study and analyse the status of 497 OAJs in Agriculture indexed in Directory of Open Access Journals.
Specified traits such as Geographic and language wise distribution, coverage of Indexing/Abstracting databases, ranking of journals according to Impact Factor (IF), OA licensing model adopted, policy of plagiarism, visibility on social media and related issues of the OAJs in Agriculture are evaluated in the paper.
Results indicated the dominance of De Gruyter Open as a publisher with highest number of OAJs, English as a content language, Indonesia with highest number of OAJs, Google scholar with highest journals indexed.
The study observes the increasing migration of journals from commercial practice to OA. Frontiers in Plant Science found with highest Impact Factor among OAJs in Agriculture.
URL : Agriculture Journals Covered by Directory of Open Access Journals: An Analytical Study
Alternative location : http://publications.drdo.gov.in/ojs/index.php/djlit/article/view/13114
Author : Pierre Mounier
A number of initiatives exist in European countries to support open scholarly communication in humanities and social sciences.
This article looks at the work of Open Access in the European Research Area through Scholarly Communication (OPERAS), a consortium of 36 partners from all over Europe, including many university presses, that is working to build a future European infrastructure to address the challenges in open access publishing.
Their initial study, OPERAS‐D, revealed a variety of models among the partners influenced by national cultures. Although the partners’ activities were found to be fragmented, they also reflect the ‘bibliodiversity’ that exists in European societies.
To address the challenge of fragmentation, it is argued that, by following a cooperative model, European actors can benefit by sharing expertise, resources, and costs of development for the good of all.
As a future infrastructure to support open scholarly communication across Europe, OPERAS aims to coordinate a range of publishers and service providers to offer researchers and societies a fully functional web of services to cover the entire research lifecycle.
Authors : Wanyenda Leonard Chilimo, Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha
The study investigates Library and Information Science (LIS) journals that published research articles between 2003 and 2013, which were about open access (OA) and were indexed in LIS databases.
The purpose was to investigate the journals’ OA policies, ascertain the degree to which these policies facilitate OA to publications, and investigate whether such texts are also available as OA. The results show that literature growth in the domain has been significant, with a total of 1,402 articles produced during the eleven years under study.
The OA policies of the fifty-six journals that published the highest number of articles were analysed. The results show that most articles (404; 41%) were published in hybrid journals, whereas 272 (29.7%) appeared in OA journals.
Some 143 (53%) of the articles published in hybrid journals were available as green OA copies. In total, 602 (66%) of all the articles published were available as OA.
The results show that the adoption of OA for research articles on that very subject is somewhat higher than in other fields. The study calls on LIS professionals to be conversant with the OA policies of the various journals that may publish their research.
URL : How open is open access research in Library and Information Science?
Alternative location : http://sajlis.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/1710