Étiquette : open access

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EN

Access, accommodation, and science: Knowledge in an “open” world

« The rising popularity of open access (OA) publishing in scholarly communities is purportedly leading to increased public knowledge. At least, that’s a key piece of the OA moral argument. This is especially true for discussions of scientific research.

We argue, however, that while there have been significant moves to provide better material/technological access to research, OA advocates must still tackle the issue of making original scientific research conceptually accessible. Despite being freely available on the Internet, articles are not also by default linguistically, conceptually, or ideologically accessible to the global public(s) they are intended to reach.

In this article, we examine how OA coupled with innovative scientific communication practices can help align the ideals of OA with the realities of complex, specialized genres of writing to provide better, more “open,” access to research.

We look to PLOS ONE and the PLOS Blog Network to discuss how the innovative material access of PLOS ONE coupled with the communication strategies of PLOS Bloggers can work together toward more openly accessible original scientific research articles. »

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4341

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Non classé

The Transition to Open Access This report…

The Transition to…Open Access :

« This report describes and draws conclusions from the transition of the Association for Learning Technology’s journal Research in Learning Technology from toll-access to Open Access, and from being published by one of the « big five » commercial publishers to being published by a specialist Open Access publisher. The focus of the report is on what happened in the run-up to and after the transition, rather than on the process of deciding to switch between publishing models, which is covered in in ALT’s 2011 report « Journal tendering for societies: a brief guide » – http://repository.alt.ac.uk/887/ . »

URL : http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2243/

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EN

The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer: The Effect of Open Access on Cites to Science Journals Across the Quality Spectrum

An open-access journal allows free online access to its articles, obtaining revenue from fees charged to submitting authors. Using panel data on science journals, we are able to circumvent some problems plaguing previous studies of the impact of open access on citations.

We find that moving from paid to open access increases cites by 8% on average in our sample, but the effect varies across the quality of content. Open access increases cites to the best content (top-ranked journals or articles in upper quintiles of citations within a volume) but reduces cites to lower-quality content.

We construct a model to explain these findings in which being placed on a broad open-access platform can increase the competition among articles for readers’ attention. We can find structural parameters allowing the model to fit the quintile results quite closely.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2269040

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Non classé

Delayed Open Access – an overlooked high impact…

Delayed Open Access – an overlooked high-impact category of openly available scientific literature:

« Delayed open access (OA) refers to scholarly articles in subscription journals made available openly on the web directly through the publisher at the expiry of a set embargo period. Though a substantial number of journals have practiced delayed OA since they started publishing e-versions, empirical studies concerning open access have often overlooked this body of literature. This study provides comprehensive quantitative measurements by identifying delayed OA journals, collecting data concerning their publication volumes, embargo lengths, and citation rates. Altogether 492 journals were identified, publishing a combined total of 111 312 articles in 2011. 77,8 % of these articles were made open access within 12 months from publication, with 85,4 % becoming available within 24 months. A journal impact factor analysis revealed that delayed OA journals have on average twice as high average citation rates compared to closed subscription journals, and three times as high as immediate OA journals. Overall the results demonstrate that delayed OA journals constitute an important segment of the openly available scholarly journal literature, both by their sheer article volume as well as by including a substantial proportion of high impact journals. »

URL : http://hanken.halvi.helsinki.fi/portal/en/publications/delayed-open-access%28a2eb7a79-1078-4657-9d57-4f9f5a1ff228%29.html

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EN

Open Access Subject Repositories – an Overview

Subject repositories are open web collections of working papers or manuscript copies of published scholarly articles, specific to particular scientific disciplines. The first repositories emerged already in the early 1990’s and in some fields of science they have become an important channel for the dissemination of research results.

Using quite strict inclusion criteria 56 subject repositories were identified from a much larger number indexed in two repository indexes. A closer study of these demonstrated a huge variety in sizes, organizational models, functions and topics.

When they first started to emerge subject repositories catered to a strong market demand, but the later development of Internet search engines, the rapid growth of institutional repositories and the tightening up of journal publisher OA policies seems to be slowing down their growth.

URL : http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/repositories/Subject_Repositories.pdf

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Non classé

The four pillars of scholarly publishing The future…

The four pillars of scholarly publishing: The future and a foundation :

« With the rise of electronic publishing and the inherent paradigm shifts for so many other scientific endeavours, it is time to consider a change in the practices of scholarly publication in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. To facilitate the speed and quality of science, the future of scholarly communication will rest on four pillars – an ecosystem of scholarly products, immediate and open access, open peer review, and full recognition for participating in the process. These four pillars enable us to build better tools to facilitate the discovery of new relevant work for individual scientists, one of the greatest challenges of our time as we cope with the current deluge of scientific information. By incorporating these principles into future publication platforms, we argue that science and society will be better served than by remaining locked into a publication formula that arose in the 1600s. It has served its purpose admirably and well, but it is time to move forward. With the rise of the Internet, scholarly publishing has embraced electronic distribution. But the tools afforded by the Internet and other advancing technologies have profound implications for scholarly communication beyond just distribution. We argue that, to best serve science, the process of scholarly communication must embrace these advances and evolve. Here we consider the current state of the process in ecology and evolutionary biology and propose directions for change. We identify four pillars for the future of scientific communication: (1) an ecosystem of scholarly products; (2) immediate and open access; (3) open peer review; and (4) full recognition for participating in the process. These four pillars will guide the development of better tools and practices for discovering and sharing scientific knowledge in a modern networked world. Things were far different when the existing system arose in the 1600s, and though it has served its purpose admirably and well, it is time to move forward. »

URL : https://peerj.com/preprints/11/

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Non classé

Metajournals A federalist proposal for scholarly communication and…

Metajournals. A federalist proposal for scholarly communication and data aggregation :

« While the EU is building an open access infrastructure of archives (e.g. OpenAIRE) and it is trying to implement it in the Horizon 2020 program, the gap between the tools and the human beings – researchers, citizen scientists, students, ordinary people – is still wide. The necessity to dictate open access publishing as a mandate for the EU funded research – ten years after the BOAI – is an obvious symptom of it: there is a chasm between the net and the public use of reason. To escalate the advancement and the reuse of research, we should federate the multitude of already existing open access journals in federal open overlay journals that receive their contents from the member journals and boost it with their aggregation power and their semantic web tools. The article contains both the theoretical basis and the guidelines for a project whose goals are:
1. making open access journals visible, highly cited and powerful, by federating them into wide disciplinary overlay journals;
2. avoiding the traps of the “authors pay” open access business model, by exploiting one of the virtue of federalism: the federate journals can remain little and affordable, if they gain visibility from the power of the federal overlay journal aggregating them;
3. enriching the overlay journals both through semantic annotation tools and by means of open platforms dedicated to host ex post peer review and experts comments;
4. making the selection and evaluation processes and their resulting data as much as possible public and open, to avoid the pitfalls (e. g, the serials price crisis) experienced by the closed access publishing model. It is about time to free academic publishing from its expensive walled gardens and to put to test the tools that can help us to transform it in one open forest, with one hundred flowers – and one hundred trailblazers. »

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/19101/