Archives des mots-clés : open access publishing

Open access and predatory publishing: a survey of the publishing practices of academic pharmacists and nurses in the United States

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Authors : Bridget C. Conlogue, Neyda V. Gilman, Louisa M. Holmes

Objective: Academics are under great pressure to publish their research, the rewards for which are well known (tenure, promotion, grant funding, professional prestige). As open access publishing gains acceptance as a publishing option, researchers may choose a “predatory publisher.” The purpose of this study is to investigate the motivations and rationale of pharmacy and nursing academics in the United States to publish in open access journals that may be considered “predatory.”

Methods: A 26-item questionnaire was programmed in Qualtrics and distributed electronically to approximately 4,500 academic pharmacists and nurses, 347 of whom completed questionnaires (~8%). Pairwise correlations were performed followed by a logistic regression to evaluate statistical associations between participant characteristics and whether participants had ever paid an article processing fee (APF).

Results: Participants who had published more articles, were more familiar with predatory publishing, and who were more concerned about research metrics and tenure were more likely to have published in open access journals. Moderate to high institutional research intensity has an impact on the likelihood of publishing open access. The majority of participants who acknowledged they had published in a predatory journal took no action after realizing the journal was predatory and reported no negative impact on their career for having done so.

Conclusion: The results of this study provide data and insight into publication decisions made by pharmacy and nursing academics. Gaining a better understanding of who publishes in predatory journals and why can help address the problems associated with predatory publishing at the root.

URL : Open access and predatory publishing: a survey of the publishing practices of academic pharmacists and nurses in the United States

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2022.1377

The APC-Effect: Stratification in Open Access Publishing

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Authors : Thomas Klebel,Tony Ross-Hellauer

Current implementations of Open Access (OA) publishing frequently involve Article Publishing Charges (APCs). Increasing evidence emerges that APCs impede researchers with fewer resources in publishing their research OA.

We analysed 1.5 million scientific articles from journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals to assess average APCs and their determinants for a comprehensive set of journal publications, across scientific disciplines, world regions and through time. Levels of APCs were strongly stratified by scientific fields and the institutions’ countries, corroborating previous findings on publishing cultures and the impact of mandates of research funders.

After controlling for country and scientific field with a multilevel mixture model, however, we found small to moderate effects of levels of institutional resourcing on the level of APCs. This is what we call the APC-Effect.

Effects were largest in countries with low GDP, suggesting decreasing marginal effects of institutional resources when general levels of funding are high. Our findings provide further evidence on how APCs stratify OA publishing and highlight the need for alternative publishing models.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/w5szk

How Open Is the U15? A Preliminary Analysis of Open Access Publishing in Canadian Academic Libraries

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Authors : Nikki Tummon, Robin Desmeules

Introduction

This study offers insight into open access (OA) culture at Canadian university libraries by detailing the degree to which librarians working at Canada’s U15 (a collective of research-intensive institutions in Canada) make their research OA, as well as exploring the depth and reach of any OA mandates these institutions have.

Method

This study uses a combination of bibliometric analysis and a review of institutional OA policies, beginning with an examination of a six-year span (2014–2019) of librarian-authored publications, searching four key library and information science databases, followed by a systematic search for a university-wide or library OA statement, policy, or mandate on each of the U15 websites.

Results & Discussion

The data suggest that Canadian academic librarians are personally motivated to self-archive and make their research open. The high rate of publication in Gold OA journals, combined with the fact that several of the key library and information science journals for Canadian librarians are already OA, points to the importance of OA publishing for librarians as a community, as does the high number of expressions of commitment to OA publishing.

Given the lack of variance comparatively between schools with an expression and without, the authors cannot comment on whether the expressions of support correlate to higher proportions of OA articles.

Conclusion

This article provides a snapshot of a positive OA publishing culture at 15 Canadian university libraries by presenting data that show that most libraries have an expression of commitment to OA principles and most Canadian academic librarians working at U15 schools ensure that their research is OA.

URL : How Open Is the U15? A Preliminary Analysis of Open Access Publishing in Canadian Academic Libraries

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.13831

Choices of immediate open access and the relationship to journal ranking and publish-and-read deals

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Author : Lars Wenaas

The role of academic journals is significant in the reward system of science, which makes their rank important for the researcher’s choice in deciding where to submit. The study asks how choices of immediate gold and hybrid open access are related to journal ranking and how the uptake of immediate open access is affected by transformative publish-and-read deals, pushed by recent science policy.

Data consists of 186,621 articles published with a Norwegian affiliation in the period 2013–2021, all of which were published in journals ranked in a National specific ranking, on one of two levels according to their importance, prestige, and perceived quality within a discipline.

The results are that researchers chose to have their articles published as hybrid two times as often in journals on the most prestigious level compared with journals on the normal level. The opposite effect was found with gold open access where publishing on the normal level was chosen three times more than on the high level.

This can be explained by the absence of highly ranked gold open access journals in many disciplines. With the introduction of publish-and-read deals, hybrid open access has boosted and become a popular choice enabling the researcher to publish open access in legacy journals.

The results confirm the position of journals in the reward system of science and should inform policymakers about the effects of transformative arrangements and their costs against the overall level of open access.

URL : Choices of immediate open access and the relationship to journal ranking and publish-and-read deals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.943932

How transformative agreements are actually transforming the subscription system: a society publisher’s perspective

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Authors : Graham Anderson, Jade Heyman, Maggie Simmons

Transformative agreements (TAs) are useful tools to accelerate the growth in open access (OA) for small publishers with limited resources, such as the three discussing the advantages and impact of TAs in this article.

The Royal Society, the Microbiology Society and the Geological Society observe an uptake in OA output with the increase in demand for TAs. While TA models differ across publishers, successful and sustainable models are characterized by transparency in pricing and data, simplicity, equitability and above all a transformation objective of achieving full OA.

Collaboration with institutions and consortia is key to realizing mutual goals and managing the agreement and implementation of complex arrangements with limited resources. The Royal Society, with over 320 institutions opted in, the Microbiology Society with over 250 and the Geological Society with over 40, are all mobilizing their resources and improving their systems to move away from paywall and subscription models.

URL : How transformative agreements are actually transforming the subscription system: a society publisher’s perspective

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.579

Attitudes, willingness, and resources to cover article publishing charges: The influence of age, position, income level country, discipline and open access habits

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Authors : Francisco Segado-Boj, Juan-Jose Prieto-Gutiérrez, Juan Martín-Quevedo

The rise of open access (OA) publishing has been followed by the expansion of the Article Publishing Charges (APC) that moves the financial burden of scholarly journal publishing from libraries and readers to authors.

We introduce the results of an international randomly selected sampled survey (N = 3,422) that explores attitudes towards this pay-to-publish or Gold OA model among scholars. We test the predictor role of age, professional position, discipline, and income-level country in this regard.

We found that APCs are perceived more as a global threat to Science than a deterrent to personal professional careers. Academics in low and lower-middle income level countries hold the most unfavourable opinions about the APC system.

The less experimental disciplines held more negative perceptions of APC compared to STEM and the Life Sciences. Age and access to external funding stood as negative predictors of refusal to pay to publish. Commitment to OA self-archiving predicted the negative global perception of the APC.

We conclude that access to external research funds influences the acceptance and the particular perception of the pay to publish model, remarking the economic dimension of the problem and warning about issues in the inequality between centre and periphery.

URL : Attitudes, willingness, and resources to cover article publishing charges: The influence of age, position, income level country, discipline and open access habits

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1455

The Rise of Platinum Open Access Journals with Both Impact Factors and Zero Article Processing Charges

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Author : Joshua M. Pearce

It appears that open access (OA) academic publishing is better for science because it provides frictionless access to make significant advancements in knowledge. OA also benefits individual researchers by providing the widest possible audience and concomitant increased citation rates.

OA publishing rates are growing fast as increasing numbers of funders demand it and is currently dominated by gold OA (authors pay article processing charges (APCs)). Academics with limited financial resources perceive they must choose between publishing behind pay walls or using research funds for OA publishing.

Worse, many new OA journals with low APCs did not have impact factors, which reduces OA selection for tenure track professors. Such unpleasant choices may be dissolving. This article provides analysis with a free and open source python script to collate all journals with impact factors with the now more than 12,000 OA journals that are truly platinum OA (neither the author nor the readers pay for the peer-reviewed work).

The results found platinum OA is growing faster than both academic publishing and OA publishing. There are now over 350 platinum OA journals with impact factors over a wide variety of academic disciplines, giving most academics options for OA with no APCs.

URL : The Rise of Platinum Open Access Journals with Both Impact Factors and Zero Article Processing Charges

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/knowledge2020013