Étiquette : open access

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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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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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“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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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

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Open Infrastructure and the Threat of “Vanishing” Journals: Leveraging Open Knowledge Commons, Open Source Software, and DIY Solutions to Preserve Humanities and Social Sciences Research

Authors : Graham Jensen, Sajib Ghosh, Archie To, Ray Siemens

Academic journals, institutional repositories, and emerging digital technologies have played a crucial role in providing access to scholarship. However, free and unfettered access to research is not a given—nor are the digital infrastructures through which open research is published and made accessible immune to commercial enclosure or obsolescence. The threat of “vanishing” digital publications also remains a very real threat, and open-access and humanities and social sciences (HSS) journals are particularly at risk of disappearing. In this paper, we aim to address the related issues of access to, and preservation of, HSS research by examining our own experiments with open methods and tools for the (re)publication of open-access scholarship via open infrastructure. As part of this process of self-examination, we focus on one infrastructural initiative that is equipped to support this work: the Canadian-based HSS Commons.

In the process, we also invite consideration of how low-budget, DIY-style innovation and experimentation in the realm of digital research software constitute valid, crucial forms of humanistic intervention and activity. To do so, we discuss a project that emerged from the HSS Commons’ collaborative partnership with Iter Canada: a large-scale migration of open-access back issues from scholarly journals or book series operated by Iter.

In conclusion, we reflect on the larger significance, potential wider application, and limitations of such interventions. Indeed, while there are many possible benefits to the workflow we developed—which resulted in the publication of over 6,000 publications in the HSS Commons repository, and which we hope will serve as a model for other groups or journals interested in backing up and increasing the discoverability of their own research—our work on this project also highlighted the many methodological, infrastructural, and institutional challenges that still face those who may be interested in pursuing open scholarship of this kind.

URL : Open Infrastructure and the Threat of “Vanishing” Journals: Leveraging Open Knowledge Commons, Open Source Software, and DIY Solutions to Preserve Humanities and Social Sciences Research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7860

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Evaluating Open Access Advantages for Citations and Altmetrics (2011-21): A Dynamic and Evolving Relationship

Author : Mike Taylor

Differences between the impacts of Open Access (OA) and non-OA research have been observed over a range of citation and altmetric indicators, usually finding an Open Access Advantage (OAA). However, science-wide analyses covering multiple years, indicators and disciplines are lacking. Using citations and six altmetrics for 33.3M articles published 2011-21, we compare OA and non-OA papers.

The results show that there is no universal OAA across all disciplines or impact indicators: the OAA for citations tends to be lower for recent papers, whereas the OAAs for news, blogs and Twitter are consistent across years and unrelated to volume of OA publications. Wikipedia OAAs are consistently pronounced for all subjects except Humanities (HU) and Social Sciences. Patent OAAs for are strongest for Medical & Health Sciences (MHS) and Life Sciences (LS).

Uniquely, the OAAs for Policy citations is stronger for recently published research. These results support different hypotheses for different subjects and indicators. The evidence is consistent with OA accelerating research impact in MHS, LS and HU; increased visibility/discoverability being a factor in promoting the socio-economic impact; and that OA is a factor in growing online engagement with research. OAAs are therefore complex, dynamic, multi-factorial and require considerable analysis to understand.

URL : Evaluating Open Access Advantages for Citations and Altmetrics (2011-21): A Dynamic and Evolving Relationship

DOI : Serendipity and Scientific Styles: An Ordinary

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Funders open access mandates: uneven uptake and challenging models

Authors : Lucía Céspedes, Madelaine Hare, Simon van Bellen, Philippe Mongeon, Vincent Larivière

Over the last two decades, research funders have adopted Open Access (OA) mandates, with various forms and success. While some funders emphasize gold OA through article processing charges, others favour green OA and repositories, leading to a fragmented policy landscape.

Compliance with these mandates depends on several factors, including disciplinary field, monitoring, and availability of repository infrastructure. Based on 5 million papers supported by 36 funders from 20 countries, 11 million papers funded by other organisations, and 10 million papers without any funding reported, this study explores how different policies influence the adoption of OA.

Findings indicate a sustained growth in OA overall, especially hybrid and gold OA, and that funded papers are more likely to be OA than unfunded papers. Those results suggest that policies such as Plan S, as well as read-and-publish agreements, have had a strong influence on OA adoption, especially among European funders.

However, the global low uptake of Diamond OA and limited indexing of OA outputs in Latin American countries highlight ongoing disparities, influenced by funding constraints, journal visibility, and regional infrastructure challenges.

URL : Funders open access mandates: uneven uptake and challenging models

Arxiv : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.03457