Archives des mots-clés : open access

The Enlightenment of Peer Review : How Academic Librarians Can Utilize Open Peer Review Methods to Advance Information Literacy

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Author : Sandra Moore

In today’s world of digital scholarly publishing, it is increasingly clear that movements such as open access (OA), Open Science, and open peer review (OPR) are increasingly impactful and gaining momentum.

The shift towards openness in the academy reveals a transformation of traditional structures that compose scholarly communication as well as changing attitudes about the nature of authority and access within these systems.

These new directions in the scholarly information landscape have created a need for academic librarians to realign roles and respond in ways that build resiliency in an era of rapid change.

Recognizing that many core elements of scholarly communication are powerful tools for teaching students about information literacy can lead to transformative instructional strategies.

This paper explores how academic librarians can leverage the innovative traits of OPR to advance information literacy through experiential student learning opportunities grounded in the ACRL (2016) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.

URL : The Enlightenment of Peer Review : How Academic Librarians Can Utilize Open Peer Review Methods to Advance Information Literacy

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5206/elip.v3i1.8618

Who’s writing open access (OA) articles? Characteristics of OA authors at Ph.D.-granting institutions in the United States

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Authors : Anthony J. Olejniczak, Molly J. Wilson

The open access (OA) publication movement aims to present research literature to the public at no cost and with no restrictions.

While the democratization of access to scholarly literature is a primary focus of the movement, it remains unclear whether OA has uniformly democratized the corpus of freely available research, or whether authors who choose to publish in OA venues represent a particular subset of scholars—those with access to resources enabling them to afford article processing charges (APCs).

We investigated the number of OA articles with article processing charges (APC OA) authored by 182,320 scholars with known demographic and institutional characteristics at American research universities across 11 broad fields of study.

The results show, in general, that the likelihood for a scholar to author an APC OA article increases with male gender, employment at a prestigious institution (AAU member universities), association with a STEM discipline, greater federal research funding, and more advanced career stage (i.e., higher professorial rank).

Participation in APC OA publishing appears to be skewed toward scholars with greater access to resources and job security.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00091

Built to last! Embedding open science principles and practice into European universities

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Authors : Tiberius Ignat, Paul Ayris

The purpose of this article is to examine the cultural change needed by universities, as identified by LERU in its report Open Science and its role in universities: a roadmap for cultural change.

It begins by illustrating the nature of that cultural change. Linked to that transformation is a necessary management change to the way in which organizations perform research. Competition is not the only, or necessarily the best, way to conduct this transformation.

Open science brings to the fore the values of collaboration and sharing. Building on a number of Focus on Open Science Workshops held over five years across Europe, the article identifies best practice in changing current research practices, which will then contribute to the culture change necessary to deliver open science.

Four case studies, delivered at Focus on Open Science Workshops or other conferences in Europe, illustrate the advances that are being made: the findings of a Workshop on Collaboration and Competition at the OAI 11 meeting in Geneva in June 2019; alternative publishing platforms, exemplified by UCL Press; open data, FAIR data and reproducibility; and a Citizen Science Workshop held at the LIBER Conference in Dublin in June 2019.

URL : Built to last! Embedding open science principles and practice into European universities

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.501

Characteristics of academic publications, preprints, and registered clinical trials on the COVID-19 pandemic

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Authors : Silvia Gianola, Tiago S. Jesus, Silvia Bargeri, Greta Castellini

The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a deluge of publications. For this cross-sectional study we compared the amount and reporting characteristics of COVID-19-related academic articles and preprints and the number of ongoing clinical trials and systematic reviews.

To do this, we searched the PubMed database of citations and abstracts for published life science journals by using appropriate combinations of medical subject headings (MeSH terms), and the COVID-19 section of the MedRxiv and BioRxiv archives up to 20 May 2020 (21 weeks).

In addition, we searched Clinicaltrial.gov, Chinese Clinical Trial Registry, EU Clinical Trials Register, and 15 other trial registers, as well as PROSPERO, the international prospective register of systematic reviews.

The characteristics of each publication were extracted. Regression analyses and Z tests were used to detect publication trends and their relative proportions. A total of 3635 academic publications and 3805 preprints were retrieved. Only 8.6% (n = 329) of the preprints were already published in indexed journals. The number of academic and preprint publications increased significantly over time (p<0.001).

Case reports (6% academic vs 0.9% preprints; p<0.001) and letters (17.4% academic vs 0.5% preprints; p<0.001) accounted for a greater share of academic compared to preprint publications. Differently, randomized controlled trials (0.22% vs 0.63%; p<0.001) and systematic reviews (0.08% vs 5%) made up a greater share of the preprints.

The relative proportion of clinical studies registered at Clinicaltrials.gov, Chinese Clinical Trial Registry, and EU Clinical Trials Register was 57.9%, 49.5%, and 98.9%, respectively, most of which were still “recruiting”.

PROSPERO listed 962 systematic review protocols. Preprints were slightly more prevalent than academic articles but both were increasing in number.

The void left by the lack of primary studies was filled by an outpour of immediate opinions (i.e., letters to the editor) published in PubMed-indexed journals. Summarizing, preprints have gained traction as a publishing response to the demand for prompt access to empirical, albeit not peer-reviewed, findings during the present pandemic.

URL : Characteristics of academic publications, preprints, and registered clinical trials on the COVID-19 pandemic

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240123

Branding Scholarly Journals: Transmuting Symbolic Capital into Economic Capital

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Auteurs/Authors : Mahdi Khelfaoui, Yves Gingras

In this paper, we analyze a relatively recent commercial strategy devised by large academic publishers, consisting in the branding of their most prestigious scientific journals. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s model of capital conversion, we show how publishers transfer the symbolic capital of an already prestigious journal to derivative journals that capture part of the prestige of the original brand and transform it into new economic capital.

As shown by their high impact factors, these new journals, bearing the mark of the original journal in their titles, are rapidly adopted by researchers. Through manuscript transfer mechanisms, publishers also use part of the papers rejected by their flagship and highly selective jour-nals to recycle and monetize them inlower impactor open access derivativejournals of their lists.

URL : https://cirst2.openum.ca/files/sites/179/2020/08/Note_2020-03-branding.pdf

Evaluating the impact of open access policies on research institutions

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Authors : Chun-kai (karl) Huang, Cameron Neylon, Richard Hosking, Lucy Montgomery, Katie S Wilson, Alkim Ozaygen, Chloe Brookes-Kenworthy

The proportion of research outputs published in open access journals or made available on other freely-accessible platforms has increased over the past two decades, driven largely by funder mandates, institutional policies, grass-roots advocacy, and changing attitudes in the research community.

However, the relative effectiveness of these different interventions has remained largely unexplored. Here we present a robust, transparent and updateable method for analysing how these interventions affect the open access performance of individual institutes.

We studied 1,207 institutions from across the world, and found that, in 2017, the top-performing universities published around 80–90% of their research open access.

The analysis also showed that publisher-mediated (gold) open access was popular in Latin American and African universities, whereas the growth of open access in Europe and North America has mostly been driven by repositories.

URL : Evaluating the impact of open access policies on research institutions

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.57067

Open access at the national level: A comprehensive analysis of publications by Finnish researchers

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Authors : Janne Pölönen, Mikael Laakso, Raf Guns, Emanuel Kulczycki, Gunnar Sivertsen

Open access (OA) has mostly been studied by relying on publication data from selective international databases, notably Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus.

The aim of our study is to show that it is possible to achieve a national estimate of the number and share of OA based on institutional publication data providing a comprehensive coverage of the peer-reviewed outputs across fields, publication types, and languages.

Our data consists of 48,177 journal, conference, and book publications from 14 Finnish universities in 2016–2017, including information about OA status, as self-reported by researchers and validated by data-collection personnel through their Current Research Information System (CRIS).

We investigate the WoS, Scopus, and DOI coverage, as well as the share of OA outputs between different fields, publication types, languages, OA mechanisms (gold, hybrid, and green), and OA information sources (DOAJ, Bielefeld list, and Sherpa/Romeo).

We also estimate the role of the largest international commercial publishers compared to the not-for-profit Finnish national publishers of journals and books.

We conclude that institutional data, integrated at national and international level, provides one of the building blocks of a large-scale data infrastructure needed for comprehensive assessment and monitoring of OA across countries, for example at the European level.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00084