Exploring open access coverage of Wikipedia-cited research across the White Rose Universities

Authors : Andy Tattersall, Nick Sheppard, Thom Blake, Kate O’Neill, Christopher Carroll

The popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is an important and influential platform that assists with the communication of science to a global audience. Using data obtained from Altmetric.com and Unpaywall, we looked at research from the White Rose Universities (Sheffield, Leeds and York) that is cited on Wikipedia.

Of that research, we explored what percentage of citations were available open access (OA) and the location of those citations to ascertain whether they were hosted by publishers or within OA repositories.

This article explores the importance of access to OA research within such an important and leading platform as Wikipedia and how well it supports effective scientific communication across society.

URL : Exploring open access coverage of Wikipedia-cited research across the White Rose Universities

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.559

La Science Ouverte à l’Université de Lorraine : bilan des actions entreprises et enjeux pour l’avenir

Auteurs.trices/Authors : Laetitia Bracco, Julien Brancher, Nicolas Fressengeas, Lylette Lacôte-Gabrysiak, Andreas Gutsfeld, Rudy Hahusseau, Thomas Jouneau, Celia Lentretien, Jean-François Lutz, Frédéric Villiéras

Le présent document se propose de retracer succinctement les actions entreprises par l’Université de Lorraine dans le cadre de sa politique Science Ouverte, elle-même dans les pas du premier Plan National pour la Science Ouverte de 2018 (PNSO1), puis d’esquisser les grands enjeux en la matière pour l’établissement, s’inspirant pour ce faire du deuxième Plan National pour le Science Ouverte, publié en 2021 (PNSO2), des initiatives de la Commission Européenne et de la récente recommandation de l’Unesco.

La première partie présentera donc le bilan des réalisations, en le structurant via les grands axes du PNSO1 ; tout comme la deuxième partie, qui s’efforcera d’anticiper les grands enjeux pour les années à venir, aidée en cela par le PNSO2 dont elle adopte la structuration.

URL : https://hal.univ-lorraine.fr/hal-03554958

Contribution of the Open Access modality to the impact of hybrid journals controlling by field and time effects

Authors : Pablo Dorta-González, María Isabel Dorta-González

Purpose

Researchers are more likely to read and cite papers to which they have access than those that they cannot obtain. Thus, the objective of this work is to analyze the contribution of the Open Access (OA) modality to the impact of hybrid journals.

Design / methodology /approach

The “research articles” in the year 2017 from 200 hybrid journals in four subject areas, and the citations received by such articles in the period 2017-2020 in the Scopus database, were analyzed. The hybrid OA papers were compared with the paywalled ones.

The journals were randomly selected from those with share of OA papers higher than some minimal value. More than 60 thousand research articles were analyzed in the sample, of which 24% under the OA modality.

Findings

We obtain at journal level that cites per article in both hybrid modalities (OA and paywalled) strongly correlate. However, there is no correlation between the OA prevalence and cites per article.

There is OA citation advantage in 80% of hybrid journals. Moreover, the OA citation advantage is consistent across fields and held in time. We obtain an OA citation advantage of 50% in average, and higher than 37% in half of the hybrid journals. Finally, the OA citation advantage is higher in Humanities than in Science and Social Science.

Research limitations

Some of the citation advantage is likely due to more access allows more people to read and hence cite articles they otherwise would not. However, causation is difficult to establish and there are many possible bias.

Several factors can affect the observed differences in citation rates. Funder mandates can be one of them. Funders are likely to have OA requirement, and well-funded studies are more likely to receive more citations than poorly funded studies.

Another discussed factor is the selection bias postulate, which suggests that authors choose only their most impactful studies to be open access.

Practical implications

For hybrid journals, the open access modality is positive, in the sense that it provides a  greater number of potential readers. This in turn translates into a greater number of citations and an improvement in the position of the journal in the rankings by impact factor.

For researchers it is also positive because it increases the potential number of readers and citationsreceived.

Originality /value

Our study refines previous results by comparing documents more similar to each other. Although it does not examine the cause of the observed citation advantage, we find that it exists in a very large sample.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09284

The Rise of the Guest Editor—Discontinuities of Editorship in Scholarly Publishing

Authors : Marcel Knöchelmann, Felicitas Hesselmann, Martin Reinhart, Cornelia Schendzielorz

Scholarly publishing lives on traditioned terminology that gives meaning to subjects such as authors, inhouse editors and external guest editors, artifacts such as articles, journals, special issues, and collected editions, or practices of acquisition, selection, and review.

These subjects, artifacts, and practices ground the constitution of scholarly discourse. And yet, the meaning ascribed to each of these terms shifts, blurs, or is disguised as publishing culture shifts, which becomes manifest in new digital publishing technology, new forms of publishing management, and new forms of scholarly knowledge production.

As a result, we may come to over- or underestimate changes in scholarly communication based on traditioned but shifting terminology. In this article, we discuss instances of scholarly publishing whose meaning shifted.

We showcase the cultural shift that becomes manifest in the new, prolific guest editor. Though the term suggests an established subject, this editorial role crystallizes a new cultural setting of loosened discourse communities and temporal structures, a blurring of publishing genres and, ultimately, the foundations of academic knowledge production.

URL : The Rise of the Guest Editor—Discontinuities of Editorship in Scholarly Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.748171

Library funding for open access at KU Leuven

Authors : Demmy Verbeke, Laura Mesotten

As main buyers of scholarly literature, research libraries have always provided essential economic support for sustaining the market of academic publishing. With the switch to open access (OA), libraries are now faced with transitioning this support from the demand (subscriptions) to the supply (publications) side.

The way in which this is currently done, in general, risks strengthening the preponderance of the for-profit approach to scholarly communication. We therefore believe that it is essential to apply library budgets to foster a greater diversity.

That is exactly the purpose of the Fund for Fair Open Access, set up by KU Leuven Libraries in 2018, which is exclusively devoted to stimulating the development of non-profit and community-led initiatives.

This is achieved by library memberships to sustain open scholarship infrastructure, by supporting diamond OA programmes and by subsidizing OA books published by Leuven University Press.

In this article, we will demonstrate the accomplished successes of the fund and share some insights we have gathered along the way, such as our decision to cease financing article processing charges, even in a Fair OA business model.

URL : Library funding for open access at KU Leuven

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.565

Open access in the humanities, arts and social sciences: Complex perceptions of researchers and implications for research support

Author : Niamh Quigley

Adoption of open access in the humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) is a work in progress, with lower engagement in HASS than most of the natural sciences. HASS research impacts how we live, how we learn and how we see ourselves, and research institutions should encourage and enable their HASS research communities to increase the prevalence of open access research outputs.

Six experienced HASS researchers at a single academic institution in Perth, Australia, were interviewed to explore their perceptions and experiences of open access, and any barriers that they had encountered. Thematic analysis was used to code the transcribed interviews, and generate themes.

This study found a wide variance in the adoption of open access practices among HASS researchers. Some participants are publishing via APC-based gold open access (in DOAJ listed journals), while other participants encounter multiple barriers to sharing more of their work as open access.

Confusion about aspects of open access is evident. Even among participants who support open access, some have had poor experiences of open access publishing. This research also found that some participants hold extremely complex opinions on open access, which directly influence participants’ behaviour depending on which perspective they are considering.

These perspectives are: research supervisor, editorial role at journal, funding assessor and global citizen. Within HASS a diversity of behaviours exists around open access, and research institutions need to tailor their research support services around open access and scholarly publishing for different communities of researchers.

URL : Open access in the humanities, arts and social sciences: Complex perceptions of researchers and implications for research support

DOI : https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.10937