Étiquette : open access

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Article processing charge expenditure in Chile: The current situation

Author : Erwin Krauskopf

The National Agency of Research and Development from Chile is proposing, for the first time, a national OA policy aiming to ensure access to the scientific knowledge contained in publications resulting from research projects and graduate thesis.

Since no information regarding APC expenditure in Chile is available, this study examined the cost of APC for the 2019 publications that included at least one Chilean affiliation. The total expenditure for the year 2019 was estimated at USD 9,129,939.

The results confirm that almost one third of the total APC was spent on publications from Health & Medical Sciences, research area with the highest APC (USD 6000). Furthermore, five commercial publishers collected 52% of the total APC expenditure.

Unfortunately, the cost of publishing in some journals is so high that it causes detrimental effects on the research capacity of under resourced individuals. In the Chilean scenario, APC is not well suited to scale as most universities do not have an OA budget to support researchers that are eager to publish their work in OA journals.

Perhaps the implementation of an OA policy ought to be accompanied by sustainable APC funding grants aimed at supporting under resourced researchers that want to make their research freely available.

URL : Article processing charge expenditure in Chile: The current situation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1413

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Over-promotion and caution in abstracts of preprints during the COVID-19 crisis

Authors : Frederique Bordignon, Liana Ermakova, Marianne Noel

The abstract is known to be a promotional genre where researchers tend to exaggerate the benefit of their research and use a promotional discourse to catch the reader’s attention. The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted intensive research and has changed traditional publishing with the massive adoption of preprints by researchers.

Our aim is to investigate whether the crisis and the ensuing scientific and economic competition have changed the lexical content of abstracts. We propose a comparative study of abstracts associated with preprints issued in response to the pandemic relative to abstracts produced during the closest pre-pandemic period.

We show that with the increase (on average and in percentage) of positive words (especially effective) and the slight decrease of negative words, there is a strong increase in hedge words (the most frequent of which are the modal verbs can and may).

Hedge words counterbalance the excessive use of positive words and thus invite the readers, who go probably beyond the ‘usual’ audience, to be cautious with the obtained results.

The abstracts of preprints urgently produced in response to the COVID-19 crisis stand between uncertainty and over-promotion, illustrating the balance that authors have to achieve between promoting their results and appealing for caution.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1411

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Game theory and scholarly publishing: premises for an agreement around open access

Author : Abdelghani Maddi

Stakeholders in research and scientific publishing are gradually joining the Open-Access (OA) movement, which is gaining momentum to become nowadays at the heart of scientific policies in high-income countries.

The rise of OA generates profound changes in the chain of production and dissemination of knowledge. Free access to peer-reviewed research methods and results has contributed to the dynamics of science observed in recent years.

The modes of publication and access have also evolved; the classic model, based on journal subscriptions is gradually giving way to new economic models that have appeared with the arrival of OA.

The objective of this article is twofold. First, propose a model for the publishing market based on the literature as well as on changes in open science policies. Second, analyze publishing strategies of publishers and institutions.

To do so, we relied on game theory in economics. Results show that in the short term, the publisher’s equilibrium strategy is to adopt a hybridpublishing model, while the institutions’ equilibrium strategy is to publish in OA.

This equilibrium is not stable and that in the medium/long term, the two players will converge on an OA publishing strategy. The analysis of the equilibrium in mixed-strategies confirms this result.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03265171v2

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EN

Article Processing Charges based publications: to which extent the price explains scientific impact?

Authors : Abdelghani Maddi, David Sapinho

The present study aims to analyze relationship between Citations Normalized Score (NCS) of scientific publications and Article Processing Charges (APCs) amounts of Gold Open access publications.

To do so, we use APCs information provided by OpenAPC database and citations scores of publications in the Web of Science database (WoS). Database covers the period from 2006 to 2019 with 83,752 articles published in 4751 journals belonging to 267 distinct publishers.

Results show that contrary to this belief, paying dearly does not necessarily increase the impact of publications. First, large publishers with high impact are not the most expensive.

Second, publishers with the highest APCs are not necessarily the best in terms of impact. Correlation between APCs and impact is moderate. Otherwise, in the econometric analysis we have shown that publication quality is strongly determined by journal quality in which it is published. International collaboration also plays an important role in citations score.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07348

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The Changing Landscape of Open Access Publishing: Can Open Access Publishing Make the Scholarly World More Equitable and Productive?

Author : Richard G. Dudley

Almost 50% of scholarly articles are now open access in some form. This greatly benefits scholars at most institutions and is especially helpful to independent scholars and those without access to libraries. It also furthers the long-standing idea of knowledge as a public good.

The changing dynamics of open access (OA) threaten this positive development by solidifying the pay-to-publish OA model which further marginalizes peripheral scholars and incentivizes the development of sub-standard and predatory journals. Causal loop diagrams (CLDs) are used to illustrate these interactions.

URL : The Changing Landscape of Open Access Publishing: Can Open Access Publishing Make the Scholarly World More Equitable and Productive?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2345

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Open access book usage data – how close is COUNTER to the other kind?

Author : Ronald Snijder

In April 2020, the OAPEN Library moved to a new platform, based on DSpace 6. During the same period, IRUS-UK started working on the deployment of Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice (R5). This is, therefore, a good moment to compare two widely used usage metrics – R5 and Google Analytics (GA).

This article discusses the download data of close to 11,000 books and chapters from the OAPEN Library, from the period 15 April 2020 to 31 July 2020. When a book or chapter is downloaded, it is logged by GA and at the same time a signal is sent to IRUS-UK.

This results in two datasets: the monthly downloads measured in GA and the usage reported by R5, also clustered by month. The number of downloads reported by GA is considerably larger than R5. The total number of downloads in GA for the period is over 3.6 million.

In contrast, the amount reported by R5 is 1.5 million, around 400,000 downloads per month. Contrasting R5 and GA data on a country-by-country basis shows significant differences. GA lists more than five times the number of downloads for several countries, although the totals for other countries are about the same.

When looking at individual tiles, of the 500 highest ranked titles in GA that are also part of the 1,000 highest ranked titles in R5, only 6% of the titles are relatively close together. The choice of metric service has considerable consequences on what is reported.

Thus, drawing conclusions about the results should be done with care. One metric is not better than the other, but we should be open about the choices made. After all, open access book metrics are complicated, and we can only benefit from clarity.

URL : Open access book usage data – how close is COUNTER to the other kind?

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.539

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EN

Day-to-day discovery of preprint–publication links

Authors : Guillaume Cabanac, Theodora Oikonomidi, Isabelle Boutron

Preprints promote the open and fast communication of non-peer reviewed work. Once a preprint is published in a peer-reviewed venue, the preprint server updates its web page: a prominent hyperlink leading to the newly published work is added.

Linking preprints to publications is of utmost importance as it provides readers with the latest version of a now certified work. Yet leading preprint servers fail to identify all existing preprint–publication links.

This limitation calls for a more thorough approach to this critical information retrieval task: overlooking published evidence translates into partial and even inaccurate systematic reviews on health-related issues, for instance.

We designed an algorithm leveraging the Crossref public and free source of bibliographic metadata to comb the literature for preprint–publication links. We tested it on a reference preprint set identified and curated for a living systematic review on interventions for preventing and treating COVID-19 performed by international collaboration: the COVID-NMA initiative (covid-nma.com).

The reference set comprised 343 preprints, 121 of which appeared as a publication in a peer-reviewed journal. While the preprint servers identified 39.7% of the preprint–publication links, our linker identified 90.9% of the expected links with no clues taken from the preprint servers.

The accuracy of the proposed linker is 91.5% on this reference set, with 90.9% sensitivity and 91.9% specificity. This is a 16.26% increase in accuracy compared to that of preprint servers. We release this software as supplementary material to foster its integration into preprint servers’ workflows and enhance a daily preprint–publication chase that is useful to all readers, including systematic reviewers.

This preprint–publication linker currently provides day-to-day updates to the biomedical experts of the COVID-NMA initiative.

URL : Day-to-day discovery of preprint–publication links

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03900-7