Directory of Open Access Journals in Keywords. Distribution and Themes of Articles

Authors : Rosangela Schwarz Rodrigues, Breno Kricheldorf Hermes de Araújo, Laura Lavinia Sabino dos Santos, Ana Lidia Campos Brizola

Researchers depend on consultation with previous work in their field, most of which is published in scientific journals. The open access movement has affected journals and articles, providing new alternatives for accessing scientific content, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is the most specialized and multidisciplinary database of open access journals.

The main goal of this study is to analyze publications that include “DOAJ” in their keywords, to determine how researchers in the areas of Library and Information Science and Social Science are studying it.

The specific objectives are: a) to describe the characteristics of journals indexed in the Web of Science, DOAJ, or SCOPUS that have published articles with “DOAJ” as a keyword; b) to identify the institutional affiliations of the authors of those articles; and c) to classify the articles according to subject area.

We identified 39 articles from 29 journals. The countries with the largest numbers of journals are the United States and the United Kingdom (six journals each). Most of the journals were open access, of which universities were the biggest publishers.

The countries with the largest numbers of authors were India (12), and Italy and Russia (11 each), and the journal that published the most articles was the University of Nebraska’s Library Philosophy and Practice (four articles).

Most articles analyze the quality (65.5%), followed by the growth (25.6%), of the Open Access Movement. An analysis of the subject areas covered revealed significant gaps, as the economic, legal and technological aspects of DOAJ were not represented.

URL : Directory of Open Access Journals in Keywords. Distribution and Themes of Articles

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4403/jlis.it-12630

Open Data and Open Access Articles: Exploring Connections in the Life Sciences

Author : Sarah C. Williams

Objectives

This small-scale study explores the current state of connections between open data and open access (OA) articles in the life sciences.

Methods

This study involved 44 openly available life sciences datasets from the Illinois Data Bank that had 45 related research articles. For each article, I gathered the OA status of the journal and the article on the publisher website and checked whether the article was openly available via Unpaywall and Research Gate. I also examined how and where the open data was included in the HTML and PDF versions of the related articles.

Results

Of the 45 articles studied, less than half were published in Gold/Full OA journals, and while the remaining articles were published in Gold/Hybrid journals, none of them were OA. This study found that OA articles pointed to the Illinois Data Bank datasets similarly to all of the related articles, most commonly with a data availability statement containing a DOI.

Conclusions

The findings indicate that Gold OA in hybrid journals does not appear to be a popular option, even for articles connected to open data, and this study emphasizes the importance of data repositories providing DOIs, since the related articles frequently used DOIs to point to the Illinois Data Bank datasets. This study also revealed concerns about free (not licensed OA) access to articles on publisher websites, which will be a significant topic for future research.

URL : Open Data and Open Access Articles: Exploring Connections in the Life Sciences

DOI : https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol9/iss1/3/

Open Access Perceptions, Strategies, and Digital Literacies: A Case Study of a Scholarly-Led Journal

Authors : Noella Edelmann, Judith Schoßböck

Open access (OA) publications play an important role for academia, policy-makers, and practitioners. Universities and research institutions set up OA policies and provide authors different types of support for engaging in OA activities. This paper presents a case study on OA publishing in a scholarly community, drawing on qualitative and quantitative data gained from workshops and a survey.

As the authors are the managing editors of the OA eJournal for eDemocracy and Open Government (JeDEM), the aim was to collect data and insights on the publication choices of authors interested in OA publishing and other crucial factors such as personal attitudes to publishing, institutional context, and digital literacy in order to improve the journal.

In the first phase, two workshops with different stakeholders were held at the Conference for e-Democracy and Open Government (CeDEM) held in Austria and in South Korea in 2016. In the second phase, an online survey was sent to all the users of the e-journal JeDEM in October 2019.

From the workshops, key differences regarding OA perception and strategies between the stakeholder groups were derived. Participants strongly perceived OA publishing as a highly individualist matter embedded within a publishing culture emphasizing reputation and rankings.

The survey results, however, showed that institutional support differs considerably for authors. Factors such as visibility, reputation, and impact play the biggest role for the motivation to publish OA.

The results from both inquiries provide a better understanding of OA publishing attitudes and the relevant digital literacies but also suggest the need to investigate further the enablers or difficulties of scholarship, particularly in a digital context.

They clearly point to the potential of regularly addressing the users of the journal as well as communicating with them the more nuanced aspects of OA publishing, non-traditional metrics, or respective digital literacies, in order to reduce misconceptions about OA and to support critical stances.

URL : Open Access Perceptions, Strategies, and Digital Literacies: A Case Study of a Scholarly-Led Journal

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8030044

Transitioning to Open Access: An Evaluation of the UK Springer Compact Agreement Pilot 2016–2018

Authors : Mafalda Marques, Graham Stone

This article analyzes the UK’s first “read and publish” journals agreement. The Springer Compact Agreement pilot ran from 2016 to 2018. The authors outline the methodology and data sources used to undertake a detailed analysis of the agreement.

This includes the number of open access articles published, the number of author opt-outs and rejected articles. Institutional savings (or cost avoidance), and the financial implications resulting from the number of opt-outs and rejected articles are also discussed.

The value of articles published and cost per download for non-OA content are also covered. The agreement, at the consortia level, has constrained the total cost of publication—during the three years, the HE sector has avoided paying additional costs of €20,000,800 ($22,761,688) for publishing OA by paying the single combined fee that capped publication costs at 2014 rates.

All institutions taking part in the Springer Compact agreement published OA articles equivalent to or in excess of their total 2014 APC spend between 2016 and 2018. By 2018, 30 percent of institutions published OA articles to the value of or in excess of the combined fee paid to Springer. The article concludes with a number of recommendations for future agreements and considers compliance with Plan S guidelines.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.81.6.913

Coronavirus mapping in scientific publications: When science advances rapidly and collectively, is access to this knowledge open to society?

Authors : Simone Belli, Rogério Mugnaini, Joan Baltà, Ernest Abadal

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating a global health emergency. Mapping this health emergency in scientific publications demands multiple approaches to obtain a picture as complete as possible. To progress in the knowledge of this pandemic and to control its effects, international collaborations between researchers are essentials, as well as having open and immediate access to scientific publications, what we called “coopetition”.

Our main objectives are to identify the most productive countries in coronavirus publications, to analyse the international scientific collaboration on this topic, and to study the proportion and typology of open accessibility to these publications.

We have analyzed 18,875 articles indexed in Web of Science. We performed the descriptive statistical analysis in order to explore the performance of the more prolific countries and organizations, as well as paying attention to the last 2 years. Registers have been analyzed separately via the VOSviewer software, drawing a network of links among countries and organizations to identify the starred countries and organizations, and the strongest links of the net.

We have explored the capacity of researchers to generate scientific knowledge about a health crisis emergency, and their global capacity to collaborate among them in a global emergency. We consider that science is moving rapidly to find solutions to international health problems but access to this knowledge by society is not so quick due to several limitations (open access policies, corporate interests, etc.).

We have observed that papers from China in the last 3 months (from January 2020 to March 2020) have a strong impact compared with papers published in years before. The United States and China are the major producers of documents of our sample, followed by all European countries, especially the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and France.

At the same time, the leading role of Saudi Arabia, Canada or South Korea should be noted, with a significant number of documents submitted but very different dynamics of international collaboration.

The proportion of international collaboration is growing in all countries in 2019–2020, which contrasts with the situation of the last two decades. The organizations providing the most documents to the sample are mostly Chinese.

The percentage of open access articles on coronavirus for the period 2001–2020 is 59.2% but if we focus in 2020 the figures increase up to 91.4%, due to the commitment of commercial publishers with the emergency.

URL : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03590-7

Open Access Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences: an Open Access Altmetric Advantage

Author : Michael Taylor

The last decade has seen two significant phenomena emerge in research communication: the rise of open access (OA) publishing, and evidence of online sharing in the form of altmetrics. There has been limited examination of the effect of OA on online sharing for journal articles, and little for books.

This paper examines the altmetrics of a set of 32,222 books (of which 5% are OA) and a set of 220,527 chapters (of which 7% are OA) indexed by the scholarly database Dimensions in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

Both OA books and chapters have significantly higher use on social networks, higher coverage in the mass media and blogs, and evidence of higher rates of social impact in policy documents. OA chapters have higher rates of coverage on Wikipedia than their non-OA equivalents, and are more likely to be shared on Mendeley.

Even within the Humanities and Social Sciences, disciplinary differences in altmetric activity are evident. The effect is confirmed for chapters, although sampling issues prevent the strong conclusion that OA facilitates extra attention at whole book level, the apparent OA altmetrics advantage suggests that the move towards OA is increasing social sharing and broader impact.

URL  : https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10442

Big deals et open access: quelle stratégie numérique pour les bibliothèques universitaires ?

Auteur/Author : Isabelle Bizos

Le marché mondial de l’édition scientifique tend à se concentrer et à se développer sous la forme de monopoles anticoncurrentiels. Les coûts d’acquisitions des ressources électroniques s’envolent et les bibliothèques universitaires ne peuvent plus durablement soutenir ces augmentations exponentielles.

Fondé sur le fonctionnement de la recherche et en particulier sur le système d’évaluation des productions scientifiques, l’écosystème de l’information scientifique et technique est pris dans un cercle vicieux.

La révolution de la science ouverte et l’évolution des cadres législatifs des états bousculent les modèles économiques et deviennent un espoir pour faciliter la diffusion de l’information avec cependant des risques avérés aussi bien financiers qu’en matière de signalement et de conservation.

Les bibliothèques universitaires s’organisent et s’évaluent pour faire face aux défis de la diffusion de la documentation électronique. Elles sont au coeur des stratégies numériques des établissements de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche.

URL : Big deals et open access: quelle stratégie numérique pour les bibliothèques universitaires ?

Original location : https://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/69602-big-deals-et-open-access-quelle-strategie-numerique-pour-les-bibliotheques-universitaires