Étiquette : open access

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Faculty Perspectives on Open Access: A Multidimensional Analysis of Open-Access Usage and Library Relationships at an R2 Institution

Authors : James E. Van Loon, Julia E. Rodriguez

Introduction: The focus of this study is the broad impact open-access (OA) publishing has on all aspects of faculty members’ work (including publishing habits, research activities, and teaching) and on faculty relationships with the library.

Methods: An online survey addressing the impact of OA publishing on faculty and on their relationship with the library was administered to full-time tenure-track faculty at an R2 institution. Responses were analyzed by disciplinary unit, and themes were developed from faculty qualitative responses.

Results: A majority of faculty respondents had experience with OA publishing, with payment of article processing charges (APCs) to OA publishers, and with the use of OA materials in research and teaching. Many faculty respondents reported a substantial impact of OA on their research, teaching, and authorship, but expressed concern with the funding of OA publishing fees, with the quality and reputation of OA journals, and with the ethics of the OA business model.

Discussion: Faculty respondents demonstrate differing levels of familiarity with OA materials in all three roles. Overall, they are more receptive to OA materials as readers and researchers and more demanding about the quality, impact, and cost of OA publishing as authors.

Conclusion: Despite recognition of the benefits of OA materials, faculty respondents express concern over the cost, quality, and ethics of OA publishing. Faculty respondents also indicate a desire for the institution to provide funding for OA publications and rely on the library for expertise in locating, evaluating, and utilizing OA publications.

URL : Faculty Perspectives on Open Access: A Multidimensional Analysis of Open-Access Usage and Library Relationships at an R2 Institution

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.20328

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EN

Challenges of Open Access Adoption in Low-Resource Settings: Lessons From Tunisia

Author : Ridha Mhamdi

Introduction

Open Access (OA) publishing is a transformative movement that removes subscription barriers to facilitate unrestricted dissemination of scholarly research. This study aims to identify gaps in OA adoption in Tunisia, assess whether Gold OA publications enhance the visibility and impact of research, and determine how OA publishing aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Methods

Using Scopus data, we performed a bibliometric analysis of Tunisian research (2020-2024), including publication trends, citation metrics, SDG alignment, and funding sources of OA publications.

Results

Despite high regional productivity, over 60% of publications by Tunisian researchers remain paywalled, limiting their visibility. Hybrid Gold OA demonstrated the highest citation impact, while the advantage of Gold OA was constrained by publication in lower-prestige journals. Although Medicine, Computer Science, and Engineering were the dominant fields in OA output, only 40% of OA publications were aligned with the SDGs.

International collaboration, notably with Saudi Arabia, was a key driver of OA adoption. However, high article processing charges (APCs) and a heavy reliance on institutional funding present significant financial barriers.

Conclusion

Tunisia’s OA expansion is hindered by financial sustainability challenges and a misalignment with SDG-focused research. To enhance global research visibility and contribution to sustainable development, we recommend strategic policy shifts: redirecting funds from subscriptions to OA models, pursuing transformative agreements, supporting Diamond OA, and incentivizing high-impact, sustainability-focused research.

URL : Challenges of Open Access Adoption in Low-Resource Settings: Lessons From Tunisia

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.21182

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EN

Assessing open access scholarly journals for integration into artificial intelligence research assistants

Authors : Sanja Gidakovic, Heather Moulaison-Sandy, Jenny Bossalle

Introduction

Freely available standalone AI research assistants such as Elicit and Consensus are used by academics to find relevant literature. These systems rely extensively on freely available sources, including open access journal content. No baseline for understanding the level of quality of such journals used in these assistants has been carried out.

Method

A sample of 807 English-language journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals that became open access before 2021 was investigated for quality metrics using SCImago rankings and other defining characteristics and analysed in conjunction with the Directory data.

Analysis

Scimago journal ranking quartile scores were recorded for each of the journals. Descriptive statistics were produced using Excel, and visualizations using Tableau Public.

Results

Of our sample, over half were ranked in Scopus, and many were in quartile 1. Many university or small association journals were unranked.

Conclusions

AI research assistants may miss some high-quality open access content due to reliance on metrics. Commercial enterprises play a large role in sources used to produce content, effectively gatekeeping the process and potentially shaping the creation of new knowledge.

URL : Assessing open access scholarly journals for integration into artificial intelligence research assistants

DOI : https://doi.org/10.47989/ir31263095

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EN

The Age of APCs: Corresponding Author Approaches to Article Processing Charges and Open Access

Authors : Mitchell Scott, Ben Rawlins

Introduction

As open access and APCs reshape scholarly publishing, and with the University of Kentucky Libraries opting out of large transformative agreements (TA), this study explores how affiliated corresponding authors navigate APCs in relation to their personal, disciplinary, and institutional values.

Literature Review

The literature shows that faculty have mixed feelings about open access (OA) publishing, shaped by things like discipline, age, and concerns about quality and cost; but many are motivated by increased visibility and funder requirements, using a range of methods to cover APCs, from grants and institutional support to personal funds, with big differences across disciplines.

Methods

This study investigated how University of Kentucky-affiliated corresponding authors manage Article Processing Charges (APCs) and their perspectives on OA publishing through surveys and eight semistructured interviews with 383 unique authors identified from Scopus data for 2023–2024 OA publications.

Findings

Using Scopus to identify 383 University of Kentucky-affiliated corresponding authors of 2023– 2024 OA publications, this study explored how they manage APCs and view OA publishing through a survey and eight follow-up semistructured interviews.

Discussion

The discussion highlights key aspects of APC-driven OA, including authors’ experiences with paying for APCs, journals flipping to Gold OA, and difficulty with peer review, while also showing that the University of Kentucky is already spending significant funds on APCs. Conclusion: This study reveals corresponding authors’ conflicting views on transformative agreements, valued for easing APC burdens but seen as exploitative, while exposing funding inequities at the University of Kentucky and underscoring the need for a more coordinated OA strategy.

URL : The Age of APCs: Corresponding Author Approaches to Article Processing Charges and Open Access

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.20329

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EN

The French HSS Community Speaks Out on Open Science: A Top-Down and Bottom-Up Taxonomy Approach

Authors : CandiCe Fillaud, ChériFa BoukaCem-Zeghmouri, Yutong Fei, Valentine FaVel-kapoian

This paper presents a thematic, taxonomy-based analysis that reveals a turn by French HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences) scholars towards criticism of the French national Open Science policy.

By examining their argumentation, we better understand how far official discourse on OS fails to take into account the specificities of HSS disciplines, methodologies, and research practices. To achieve this, we developed a 5-step research design: (1) compilation of a corpus of peer-reviewed papers critical of the national Open Science policy, (2) extraction of quotations containing arguments justifying the criticism, (3) Top-Down indexing of these arguments; (4) construction of a Bottom-Up taxonomy of researchers’ criticisms of Open Science based on an iterative thematic analysis of their arguments, and (5) cross-referencing the two taxonomies.

Our results show that criticism of Open Science accompanied the publication of the two national plans, in 2018 and 2021. The Bottom-Up taxonomy shows that the largest share of the criticism expressed by researchers focuses on Open Research Data, and that this facet cuts across argument categories to the greatest degree, representing the majority of legal/ethical (91.7%), praxis-based (70.0%), and epistemological (68.2%) arguments.

The paper’s original contribution lies in the dialogue it raises about a broader view of Open Science when it comes to HSS. It also provides unprecedented analysis of the categories of argument employed by French HSS scholars to justify their criticism of national French Open Science policy.

URL : The French HSS Community Speaks Out on Open Science: A Top-Down and Bottom-Up Taxonomy Approach

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7835

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EN

“Well, Parts of Linguistics Is Open…”: Insights into Linguists’ Diverse Understandings of Open Science

Author : Elen Le Foll

Broadly defined as the study of language, linguistics is a diverse field spanning many disciplines. Recent studies on the prevalence of Questionable Research Practices (QRPs) in linguistics (e.g. Isbell et al. 2022) suggest that it suffers from many of the same issues that triggered the replication crisis in psychology (see e.g. Sönning and Werner 2021). While surveys have indicated that linguists are generally in favour of Open Science/Scholarship (OS), there appears to be a “a misalignment between the attitude to and the adoption of OS practices” (Liu and de Cat 2024, 64).

The present study aims to gain insights into this misalignment by exploring linguists’ understanding of what constitutes OS and of the specificities of linguistic research that (can) affect its applicability to (subdisciplines of) linguistics. To this end, the study draws on the results of an anonymous, small-scale survey and the qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with 26 linguists based in Northern Europe, representing all career stages, and a wide range of subdisciplines within linguistics.

The results reveal diverse understandings of OS among linguists. While some focus on the accessibility of research (for both academics and the wider public), others prioritise the sharing of data, materials, and code to promote transparency, reproducibility, and replicability. The latter group also emphasises the importance of OS principles and values like rigour, fairness, and collaboration. Linguists report learning about OS through conferences, workshops, library services, and social media but, most importantly, in personal interactions with other researchers, thus making much of this knowledge network-dependent.

The interviewees highlight several challenges and considerations that they believe need to be addressed when applying OS to linguistics. These include ethical and legal issues concerning data sharing, the high inter-person variability inherent to many linguistic studies, the need for (more) funding for open-access monographs, and for training in data management and statistical methods.

URL : “Well, Parts of Linguistics Is Open…”: Insights into Linguists’ Diverse Understandings of Open Science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7974

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EN

Doing Openness Otherwise: Democratization and OA Publishing in the HSS

Author : Rebekka Kiesewetter

Open access (OA) publishing has often been framed through democratization narratives that shape how openness is understood in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). This article examines these narratives and critiques how they are bound up with discourses that equate openness with technological, legal, or financial access to research outputs.

In doing so, they abstract openness from the epistemic, social, and affective conditions under which scholarly knowledge is produced, evaluated, and experienced. In their mainstream, policy‑ and funder‑driven forms, these discourses—and the technocratic model of openness they promote—have become entangled with prestige regimes that privilege measurable outputs, reward efficiency, and marginalize forms of scholarly labor that resist quantification. As OA publishing becomes increasingly embedded within performance‑driven research cultures, HSS scholars often experience it less as an ethical or intellectual commitment than as an administrative obligation.

Even those critical of this evolution frequently lack the time, resources, or institutional support to pursue alternatives. In response, the article foregrounds OA practices emerging from feminist, decolonial, and post‑hegemonic traditions as democratic interventions into the very conditions of scholarly work. Through analysis of three publishing initiatives—Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium (Méndez Cota 2023), the “Open Science Manifesto” (OCSDNet 2017), and “editing otherwise” (Kiesewetter 2024a, b)—it proposes that OA publishing can become a terrain of democratization through situated, collective experimentation with how knowledge is recognized, shared, and lived. Here, openness is not a technical fix or compliance measure but a practical insistence that scholarship can be done differently.

URL : Doing Openness Otherwise: Democratization and OA Publishing in the HSS

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7944