Étiquette : open access

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EN

Paying for Publication with Peer Review Design and Simulation of a Fee-Free, Credit-Based Open Access Journal for Information Technology

Author : Murat Ozer

Open access publishing has moved much of the cost of scholarly communication from readers to authors, while the labor of peer review remains unpaid and unevenly shared.

This paper describes the design of Quorum: An Open Journal of Information Technology (this http URL), a journal that charges neither readers nor authors and uses peer review as its currency instead. Every first complete review a scholar writes on a manuscript earns one credit, and one credit pays for one submission.

Each manuscript receives three double-blind reviews from reviewers matched automatically by expertise, and editorial decisions follow published rules rather than editor discretion.

The paper documents the credit ledger, a bootstrapping mechanism called the genesis block, a reviewer search that widens after seven days and opens the paper to volunteers, the decision rules, and the integrity safeguards. An agent-based simulation, run for two simulated years with 40 replications per scenario, evaluates these choices.

Without the genesis block, no paper was submitted in any replication. With it, a community growing from 40 to about 330 members submitted about 603 papers, and papers waited a median of 7 days for a full review panel.

The day-7 escalation had a modest effect in a large community but a decisive one in a small community of about 60 members, where removing it left 48.8% of papers without a panel after 60 days, compared with 4.6% with it. Unspent credits also accumulated to about 3.7 per member after two years, which points to a policy choice the journal will face as it grows.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.33864

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FR

Gouvernance et circulation des données dans les archives ouvertes en Afrique : le cas de DICAMES

Author : Alphée Yannick Hilaire Ngalli Ngomo

Cette étude analyse la collection numérique DICAMES pour comprendre sa gouvernance et la circulation des données. Mobilisant une méthodologie bibliométrique, elle révèle une répartition géographique inégale et des biais structurels dans les métadonnées.

L’article préconise une normalisation des données et une double validation pour corriger ces lacunes. Au-delà des aspects techniques, il mobilise les notions de souveraineté informationnelle et de diplomatie scientifique, concluant sur la nécessité de faire de ces archives des leviers stratégiques pour renforcer la position de l’Afrique dans le paysage scientifique mondial.

URL : https://lesenjeux.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/2026/dossier/07-gouvernance-et-circulation-des-donnees-dans-les-archives-ouvertes-en-afrique-le-cas-de-dicames/

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EN

Awareness of Predatory Journals and Open Access: an online survey among Italian Researchers

Authors : Silvia Maccarini, Núria Bautista-Puig, Eva Méndez

This study investigates Italian academics’ awareness, perceptions, and experiences of predatory publishing, a phenomenon recognised as a threat to research integrity and scholarly communication. An online survey of researchers affiliated with Italian universities and research institutes yielded 258 responses, which were analysed.

Results show that awareness of predatory publishing is high: almost half of respondents (47.9%) had discussed it with colleagues, and more than one-third had encountered it as authors, reviewers, or readers. Familiarity varies across dimensions, with predatory journals and spam emails being most recognised, and fraudulent websites and podcasts less so. 30% of participants reported personal experience of editorial misleading, mainly as authors, and 76% had received spam or phishing solicitations. Significant differences emerged by professional title and age, with senior researchers demonstrating greater awareness and greater exposure to training.

Most participants perceive predatory publishing as having a moderate or high impact on scientific integrity, but only half have received training in research ethics or use verification tools. Open-ended responses show concern about the “publish or perish” culture and the difficulty of distinguishing legitimate from predatory journals. The findings highlight awareness and vulnerability in the Italian academic publishing landscape.

URL : Awareness of Predatory Journals and Open Access: an online survey among Italian Researchers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-720

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EN

Constructing a (Meaningful) Scholarly Publishing Narrative: Bootstrapping Green Open Access Submissions for Open Access Week

Authors : Tim Ribaric, Erin Moorhead

Introduction

Green Open Access requires authors to submit appropriate versions of journal articles to a repository; the challenge for researchers is to remember to perform this task after the primary work of the publication process is done. This case study at Brock University Library shows how it is possible to bootstrap these types of submissions by crafting meaningful publishing narratives through a collection of clever Open Access Week initiatives.

Literature Review

The literature review assesses the existing scholarly material on Open Access outreach efforts and touches on Open Access in the Canadian context. It explores the dynamics of self-archiving with Green Open Access and the use of institutional repositories. The existing literature on wielding open data as a tool to serve libraries is discussed, and the potential of these tools to support librarian advocacy work is examined.

Description of Program and Benefits

By using a collection of Open Access scholarly publishing web services and APIs, two outreach campaigns were conducted by Brock University Library during Open Access Week 2025. The first was a State of Scholarly Publishing Report that showed broad trends in output from the organization, and the second was a Green Open Access Call to Action that prompted researchers to submit recently published eligible papers to the repository.

Conclusion

There was enough enthusiasm generated from these two projects that the Brock University Library will continue to run these campaigns in subsequent Open Access Weeks. The publishing report was engaging and was included in many different venues on campus, while the Green Open Access Call to Action resulted in submissions from 37% of contacted authors.

URL : Constructing a (Meaningful) Scholarly Publishing Narrative: Bootstrapping Green Open Access Submissions for Open Access Week

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.21406

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EN

Examining Persistence of European Open Repository Infrastructure and its Diffusion in the Scholarly Record

Authors : George Macgregor, Joy Davidson

This article seeks to determine the extent to which the principle of persistence is observed by repositories and the organizations that operate them. In addition, the impact that negative repository persistence levels may be having on the scholarly record is assessed.

This is achieved by interrogating and combining data on European repositories from several repository registries and web-scraped sources, including the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which creates a unique dataset of historic repository locations and their OAI-PMH endpoints.

Then, this data is used as the basis for text mining CORE, a vast corpus of scholarly outputs, to determine the extent to which impersistent European repository content has permeated the scholarly literature. The findings indicate that over one-fifth of European repositories (greater than 20 per cent) could be classified as “dead,” with an even greater proportion (greater than 40 per cent) of the machine interfaces associated with these repositories similarly dead.

Problematically, this analysis indicates that approximately 12,000 unique scholarly works cite, refer to, or actively use this repository content, amounting to approximately 19,000 unique repository locations, all of which are now dead and unretrievable from their stated resource locations. Partly owing to limitations in available repository registry data and the existence of “zombie” repositories, there are reasons to conclude that the total number of scholarly works referring to dead repository content is far higher.

In addition, evidence of dead repository content entering the current scholarly record is found, which is described as “dead on arrival” referencing.

The implications of these observations are considered, explanations are proffered, and possible policy interventions to address repository persistence are proposed. The dataset also enables several observations on the nature of impersistent repositories to be made, including their profile and their decay rate.

URL : Examining Persistence of European Open Repository Infrastructure and its Diffusion in the Scholarly Record

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v20i1.1116

 

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EN

Research integrity and open access models: insights from Retraction Watch and OpenAlex

Author : Ben Rawlins

This study examines the relationship between research integrity and open access (OA) publishing models using data from Retraction Watch and OpenAlex. Analysing 60,608 retracted publications from 2009 to 2024, the article traces how retraction patterns have shifted alongside the expansion of OA, with gold OA surpassing closed access as the dominant modality among retracted articles by 2023.

The analysis also highlights the economic dimensions of research integrity and OA, with an estimated US$41.9 million in article processing charges (APCs) collected by publishers for research that was later retracted.

These findings raise concerns about APC‑based publishing models that directly link publisher revenue to publication volume, creating structural tensions for editorial oversight and quality control. Rather than framing OA as inherently more or less prone to integrity failures, the article argues that these challenges reflect broader incentive structures within contemporary scholarly publishing.

Addressing them will require co‑ordinated governance efforts among publishers, funders, libraries and research institutions to ensure that OA is matched by accountability, transparency and trust in scholarly research.

URL : Research integrity and open access models: insights from Retraction Watch and OpenAlex

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.763

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EN

The Rise of Diamond Open Access Journals in Earth Sciences: Past Developments, Present Tensions, and Future Pathways

Authors : Olivier Pourret, Maëlis Arnould, Thibault Duretz, James Ian Farquharson, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Larry Syu-Heng Lai, Alice Lefebvre, Craig Magee, Marc-Alban Millet, Samantha Teplitzky, Camille Thomas, Romain Vaucher, Lauren Waszek, Mark A Wieczorek, Thomas William Wong Hearing

Over roughly the last decade, a visible, community-led Diamond Open Access (OA) ecosystem has emerged in the Earth sciences, not as a departure from tradition, but as the latest expression of a long-standing culture of open, society-supported scholarly communication.

While free-to-read, fee-free publishing initiatives have deep roots in the field, predating the Diamond terminology by decades and encompassing regional infrastructures and institutional serial publishing by geological surveys and learned societies, the period since the mid-2010s has brought a new wave of explicitly Diamond-identified, community-governed disciplinary journals that have transformed the visibility and ambition of this model. This article analyzes that transition through a field-specific lens, taking journals such as Volcanica, Seismica, Tektonika, Geomorphica, Geodynamica, Sedimentologika, Advances in Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry, Open Paleontology, Planetary Research, and Journal of Studies of Earth’s Deep Interior as emblematic of a broader shift in scholarly communication.

Building on current Diamond OA debates, we argue that Earth sciences Diamond journals are not merely “no-fee” outlets but sociotechnical experiments in reclaiming agency, redistributing publishing labor, and redefining value away from commercial metrics. This article develops three claims. First, the Earth sciences Diamond turn has been enabled by existing community infrastructures and high levels of volunteer coordination, but it remains uneven and fragile.

Second, Diamond models strengthen equity for authors and readers while exposing unresolved tensions around labor sustainability, institutional support, and recognition regimes still structured by prestige metrics. Third, Earth sciences offer a strategically important testbed for a wider transition towards commons-based scholarly communication, especially where global fieldwork, data justice, and decolonizing commitments demand alternatives to the pay-to-read and pay-to-publish systems.

We conclude that the next decade should prioritize durable funding compacts, shared technical infrastructure, and reform of research assessment so that Diamond OA can scale without reproducing extractive or technocratic governance.

URL : The Rise of Diamond Open Access Journals in Earth Sciences: Past Developments, Present Tensions, and Future Pathways

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31223/X56J5P