International disparities in open access practices in the Earth Sciences

Authors : Olivier Pourret, David William Hedding, Daniel Enrique Ibarra, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Haiyan Liu, Jonathan Peter Tennant

Background

Open access (OA) implies free and unrestricted access to and re-use of research articles. Recently, OA publishing has seen a new wave of interest, debate, and practices surrounding that mode of publishing.

Objectives

To provide an overview of publication practices and to compare them among six countries across the world to stimulate further debate and to raise awareness about OA to facilitate decision-making on further development of OA practices in earth sciences.

Methods

The number of OA articles, their distribution among the six countries, and top ten journals publishing OA articles were identified using two databases, namely Scopus and the Web of Science, based mainly on the data for 2018.

Results

In 2018, only 24%–31% of the total number of articles indexed by either of the databases were OA articles. Six of the top ten earth sciences journals that publish OA articles were fully OA journals and four were hybrid journals. Fully OA journals were mostly published by emerging publishers and their article processing charges ranged from $1000 to $2200.

Conclusions

The rise in OA publishing has potential implications for researchers and tends to shift article-processing charges from organizations to individuals. Until the earth sciences community decides to move away from journal-based criteria to evaluate researchers, it is likely that such high costs will continue to maintain financial inequities within this research community, especially to the disadvantage of researchers from the least developed countries.

However, earth scientists, by opting for legal self- archiving of their publications, could help to promote equitable and sustainable access to, and wider dissemination of, their work.

URL : International disparities in open access practices in the Earth Sciences

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2021.e63663

Open Access in Geochemistry from Preprints to Data Sharing: Past, Present, and Future

Authors : Olivier Pourret, Dasapta Erwin Irawan

In this short communication, we discuss the latest advances regarding Open Access in the earth sciences and geochemistry community from preprints to findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data following the 14f session held at Goldschmidt conference (4–9 July 2021) dedicated to “Open Access in Earth Sciences”.

URL : Open Access in Geochemistry from Preprints to Data Sharing: Past, Present, and Future

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10010003

Diamond Open Access in Norway 2017–2020

Author : Jan Erik Frantsvåg

We see from information published elsewhere that Gold OA is on the increase globally. The OA Diamond study indicates that Diamond OA is an important component of scholarly communications, with an estimated 8–9% of the total global scholarly output.

These numbers, however, are on a global scale and are not necessarily representative of any given country; country case studies are needed to find this information. Norway is a country where the government has declared a 100% OA goal and most research has public funding. Norway has good financing structures for various models of OA, and it has a national CRIS system.

This study tries to find and present numbers for articles in scholarly journals to describe both recent developments and relative numbers for Norway as a whole, and for scholarly fields in Norway, with regards to Diamond OA. Numbers for and development of Gold OA will also be given and commented upon to some extent.

URL : Diamond Open Access in Norway 2017–2020

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10010013

Open access through Subscribe to Open: a society publisher’s implementation

Authors: Sara Bosshart, Rod Cookson, Philipp Hess

As pressures mount from global funding mandates and initiatives like Plan S, publishers are seeking sustainable solutions to transition their subscription portfolios to open access.

For self-publishing societies with niche portfolios and low publication volumes, traditional transition options such as article processing charge models or transformative agreements are limited or out of reach and often involve significant financial risk.

In this article, we focus on one society publisher’s implementation of Subscribe to Open (S2O): an emerging open access model that moves away from article-level charges, instead leveraging existing subscription revenues and infrastructure to achieve seamless and sustainable open access.

We outline the advantages of this model for society publishers, the parameters to consider when implementing the model, the initial community response to a successful implementation and some early data highlighting the effect of the S2O model on our journals.

URL : Open access through Subscribe to Open: a society publisher’s implementation

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.567

The Roles of Female Involvement and Risk Aversion in Open Access Publishing Patterns in Vietnamese Social Sciences and Humanities

Authors : Minh-Hoang Nguyen, Huyen Thanh Thanh Nguyen, Manh-Toan Ho, Tam-Tri Le, Quan-Hoang Vuong

The open-access (OA) publishing model can help improve researchers’ outreach, thanks to its accessibility and visibility to the public. Therefore, the presentation of female researchers can benefit from the OA publishing model.

Despite that, little is known about how gender affects OA practices. Thus, the current study explores the effects of female involvement and risk aversion on OA publishing patterns among Vietnamese social sciences and humanities.

The study employed Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) on a dataset of 3,122 Vietnamese social sciences and humanities (SS&H) publications during 2008–2019. The Mindsponge mechanism was specifically used to construct theoretical models, while Bayesian inference was utilized for fitting models.

The result showed a positive association between female participation and OA publishing probability. However, the positive effect of female involvement on OA publishing probability was negated by the high ratio of female researchers in a publication. OA status was negatively associated with the JIF of the journal in which the publication was published, but the relationship was moderated by the involvement of a female researcher(s).

The findings suggested that Vietnamese female researchers might be more likely to publish under the OA model in journals with high JIF for avoiding the risk of public criticism.

The study could only provide evidence on the association between female involvement and OA publishing probability. However, whether to publish under OA terms is often determined by the first or corresponding authors, but not necessarily gender-based.

Systematically coordinated actions are suggested to better support women and promote the OA movement in Vietnam.

The findings show the OA publishing patterns of female researchers in Vietnamese SS&H.

URL : The Roles of Female Involvement and Risk Aversion in Open Access Publishing Patterns in Vietnamese Social Sciences and Humanities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2478/jdis-2022-0001

Free access to scientific literature and its influence on the publishing activity in developing countries: The effect of Sci-Hub in the field of mathematics

Authors : Kilian Buehling, Matthias Geissler, Dorothea Strecker

This paper investigates whether free access to scientific literature increases the participation of under-represented groups in scientific discourse. To this end, we aggregate and match data tracing access to Sci-Hub, a widely used black open access (OA) repository or shadow library, and publication data from the Web of Science (WoS).

We treat the emergence of Sci-Hub as an exogenous event granting relatively unrestricted access to publications, which are otherwise hidden behind a paywall. We analyze changes in the publication count of researchers from developing countries in a given journal as a proxy for general participation in scientific discourse.

Our results indicate that in the exemplary field of mathematics, free access to academic knowledge is likely to improve the representation of authors from developing countries in international journals.

Assuming the desirability of greater international diversity in science (e.g., to generate more original work, reproduce empirical findings in different settings, or shift the research focus toward topics that are overlooked by researchers from more developed countries), our findings lend evidence to the claim of the OA movement that scientific knowledge should be free and widely distributed.

URL : Free access to scientific literature and its influence on the publishing activity in developing countries: The effect of Sci-Hub in the field of mathematics

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24636

Extraction and validation of scientific data for the identification of publications in open access journals

Authors : Patrícia Mascarenhas Dias, Thiago Magela Rodrigues Dias, Gray Farias Moita, Adilson Luiz Pinto

This work aims to identify articles published in open access journals registered in the Lattes Platform curricula. Currently, the curricular data from the Lattes Platform has been the source of several studies that adopt bibliometric metrics to understand scientific evolution in Brazil. However, when registering a publication in a curriculum, only basic information from the magazine is informed.

Therefore, to quantify the publications made in open access journals, a strategy is proposed that uses data from the Directory of Open Access Journals, validating the publications and, thus, obtaining a process that allows identifying which publications were made in this communication format.

Therefore, using the proposed methodology, which has a low computational cost, it was possible to quantify in an unprecedented way the publications of Brazilians in open access journals registered in the curricula of the Lattes Platform.

In addition, having the authors’ data of the publications, it was possible to understand how these authors are geographically distributed in the country, what their areas of operation are and how they have published the results of their research in open access.

It is noteworthy that they are generally published in Portuguese and English. Over the last few years, the representativeness of publications in open access journals has increased.

URL : Extraction and validation of scientific data for the identification of publications in open access journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1590/2318-0889202234e210040