Étiquette : open access

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Open Research Data and Open Peer Review: Perceptions of a Medical and Health Sciences Community in Greece

Authors : Eirini Delikoura, Dimitrios Kouis

Recently significant initiatives have been launched for the dissemination of Open Access as part of the Open Science movement. Nevertheless, two other major pillars of Open Science such as Open Research Data (ORD) and Open Peer Review (OPR) are still in an early stage of development among the communities of researchers and stakeholders.

The present study sought to unveil the perceptions of a medical and health sciences community about these issues. Through the investigation of researchers‘ attitudes, valuable conclusions can be drawn, especially in the field of medicine and health sciences, where an explosive growth of scientific publishing exists.

A quantitative survey was conducted based on a structured questionnaire, with 179 valid responses. The participants in the survey agreed with the Open Peer Review principles. However, they ignored basic terms like FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and appeared incentivized to permit the exploitation of their data.

Regarding Open Peer Review (OPR), participants expressed their agreement, implying their support for a trustworthy evaluation system.

Conclusively, researchers need to receive proper training for both Open Research Data principles and Open Peer Review processes which combined with a reformed evaluation system will enable them to take full advantage of the opportunities that arise from the new scholarly publishing and communication landscape.

URL : Open Research Data and Open Peer Review: Perceptions of a Medical and Health Sciences Community in Greece

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9020014

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Open Access Models, Pirate Libraries and Advocacy Repertoires: Policy Options for Academics to Construct and Govern Knowledge Commons

Author : Melanie Dulong de Rosnay

In this article, I propose exploring open access publishing through the lenses of Knowledge Commons. Instead of focusing on users’ rights to access and reuse the output under open copyright licensing conditions, I study the governance of the academic publishing ecosystem, and its political economy, technical and labour infrastructure. Based on selected examples, I discuss how they comply with the concept of the commons.

I use analytical frameworks from the Ostromian literature of the governance of Knowledge Commons to provide insights on the various steps of academic publishing work as a process. I then analyse a scope of open access publishing projects, including gold, green, diamond, platinum and pirate libraries. Finally, I draw from practices a repertoire of advocacy actions and I make recommendations for academics to develop policies supporting Academic Commons.

URL : Open Access Models, Pirate Libraries and Advocacy Repertoires: Policy Options for Academics to Construct and Govern Knowledge Commons

DOI : https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.913

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What happens when a journal converts to Open Access? A bibliometric analysis

Authors : Fakhri Momeni, Philipp Mayr, Nicholas Fraser, Isabella Peters

In recent years, increased stakeholder pressure to transition research to Open Access has led to many journals converting, or ‘flipping’, from a closed access (CA) to an open access (OA) publishing model.

Changing the publishing model can influence the decision of authors to submit their papers to a journal, and increased article accessibility may influence citation behaviour. In this paper we aimed to understand how flipping a journal to an OA model influences the journal’s future publication volumes and citation impact.

We analysed two independent sets of journals that had flipped to an OA model, one from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and one from the Open Access Directory (OAD), and compared their development with two respective control groups of similar journals. For bibliometric analyses, journals were matched to the Scopus database.

We assessed changes in the number of articles published over time, as well as two citation metrics at the journal and article level: the normalised impact factor (IF) and the average relative citations (ARC), respectively. Our results show that overall, journals that flipped to an OA model increased their publication output compared to journals that remained closed.

Mean normalised IF and ARC also generally increased following the flip to an OA model, at a greater rate than was observed in the control groups. However, the changes appear to vary largely by scientific discipline. Overall, these results indicate that flipping to an OA publishing model can bring positive changes to a journal.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14522

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Only two out of five articles by New Zealand researchers are free-to-access: a multiple API study of access, citations, cost of Article Processing Charges (APC), and the potential to increase the proportion of open access

Authors : Richard Kenneth Alistair White, Anton Angelo, Deborah Jane Fitchett, Moira Fraser, Luqman Hayes, Jess Howie, Emma Richardson, Bruce Duncan White

We studied journal articles published by researchers at all eight of New Zealand universities in 2017 to determine how many were freely accessible on the web. We wrote software code to harvest data from multiple sources, code that we now share to enable others to reproduce our work on their own sample set.

In May 2019, we ran our code to determine which of the 2017 articles were open at that time and by what method; where those articles would have incurred an Article Processing Charge (APC) we calculated the cost if those charges had been paid.

Where articles were not freely available we determined whether the policies of publishers in each case would have allowed deposit in a non-commercial repository (Green open access). We also examined citation rates for different types of access. We found that, of our 2017 sample set, about two out of every five articles were freely accessible without payment or subscription (41%).

Where research was explicitly said to be funded by New Zealand’s major research funding agencies, the proportion was slightly higher at 45%. Where open articles would have incurred an APC we estimated an average cost per article of USD1,682 (for publications where all articles require an APC, that is, Gold open access) and USD2,558 (where APC payment is optional, Hybrid open access) at a total estimated cost of USD1.45m.

Of the paid options, Gold is by far more common for New Zealand researchers (82% Gold, 18% Hybrid). In terms of citations, our analysis aligned with previous studies that suggest a correlation between publications being freely accessible and, on balance, slightly higher rates of citation.

This is not seen across all types of open access, however, with Diamond OA achieving the lowest rates. Where articles were not freely accessible we found that a very large majority of them (88% or 3089 publications) could have been legally deposited in an institutional repository.

Similarly, only in a very small number of cases had a version deposited in the repository of a New Zealand university made the difference between the publication being freely accessible or not (125 publications).

Given that most New Zealand researchers support research being open, there is clearly a large gap between belief and practice in New Zealand’s research ecosystem.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.23.164004

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An analysis of the factors affecting open access to research output in institutional repositories in selected universities in East Africa

Author : Miriam Kakai

INTRODUCTION

Institutional repositories (IRs) present universities with an opportunity to provide global open access (OA) to their scholarship, however, this avenue was underutilised in two of the three universities in this study.

This study aimed at proposing interventions to improve access to research output in IRs in universities in East Africa, and it adds to the depth of knowledge on IRs by pointing out the factors that limit OA in IRs, some of which include lack of government and funder support for OA and mediated content collection workflows that hardly involved seeking author permission to self-archive.

METHODS

A mixed methods approach, following a concurrent strategy was used to investigate the low level of OA in IRs. Data was collected from three purposively selected IRs in universities in East Africa, using self-administered questionnaires from 183 researchers and face-to-face interviews from six librarians.

RESULTS

The findings revealed that content was collected on a voluntary basis, with most of the research output deposited in the IR without the authors’ knowledge. The respondents in this study were, however, supportive of the activities of the IR, and would participate in providing research output in the IR as OA if required to do so.

CONCLUSION

The low level of OA in IRs in universities in East Africa could be increased by improving the IR workflow, collection development, and marketing processes. Self-archiving could be improved by increasing the researchers’ awareness and knowledge of OA and importance of IRs, while addressing their concerns about copyright infringement.

URL : An analysis of the factors affecting open access to research output in institutional repositories in selected universities in East Africa

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2276

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Open access analytics with open access repository data: A Multi-level perspective

Author : Ibraheem Mohammed Sultan Al Sadi

Within nearly two decades after the open access movement emerged, its community has drawn attention to understanding its development, coverage, obstacles and motivations. To do so, they depend on data-centric analytics of open access publishing activities, using Web information space as their data sources for these analytical activities.

Open access repositories are one such data source that nurtures open access publishing activities and are a valuable source for analytics. Therefore, the open access community utilises open access repository infrastructure to develop and operate analytics, harnessing the widely adopted Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) interoperability layer to develop value-added services with an analytics agenda.

However,this layer presents its limitations and challenges regarding the support of analytical value-added services. To address these practices, this research has taken the step to consolidate these practices into the ‘open access analytics’ notion of drawing attention to its significance and bridge it with data analytics literature.

As part of this, an explanatory case study demonstrate show the OAI-PMH service provider approach supports open access analytics and also presents its limitations using Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) analytics as a case study.

The case study reflects the limitation of open access registries to enable a single point of discovery due to the quality of their records and complexity of open access repositories taxonomy, the complexity of operationalising the unit of analysis in particular analytics due to the limitations in the OAI-PMH metadata schemes, the complex and resource-intensive harvesting process due to the large volume of data and the low quality of OAI-PMH standards adoptions and the issue of service provider suitability due to a single point of failure.

Also, this doctoral thesis proposes the use of Open Access Analytics using Open Access Repository Data with a Social Machine (OAA-OARD-SM) as a conceptual frame work to deliver open access analytics by using the open access repository infrastructure in acollaborative manner with social machines.

Furthermore, it takes advantage of the web observatory infrastructure as a form of web-based mediated technology to coordinate the open access analytics process. The conceptual framework re-frames the open access analytics process into four layers: the open access repository layer, the open access registry layer, the data analytics layer and open access analytics layer.

It also conceptualises analytics practices carried out within individual repository boundaries as core practices for the realisation of open access analytics and examines how the repository management team can participate in the open access analytics process.

To understand this, expert interviews were carried out to investigate and understand the analytics practices within the repository boundaries and the repository management teams’ interactions with analytics applications that are fed by the open access repository or used by repository management to operate open access analytics.

The interviews provide insight into the variations in the types of analytic practices and highlight the active role played by the repository management team in these practices. Thus, it provides an understanding of the analytics practices within open access repositories by classifying them into two main categories: the distributed analytical applications and locally operated analytics.

The distributed analytics application includes cross repository OAI-based analytics, cross-repository usage data aggregators, solo-repository content-centric analytics and solo-repository centric analytics.

On the other hand, the locally operated analytics take forms of Current Research Information System (CRIS),repository embedded functionalities and in-house developed analytics. It also classifies the repository management interactions with analytics into four roles: data analyst, administrative, data and system management, and system development and support.

Lastly, it raises concerns associated with the application of analytics on open access repositories, including data-related, cost-related and analytical concerns.

URL : http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/447464

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Working with publication technology to make open access journals sustainable

Authors : Marcel Wrzesinski, Patrick Urs Riechert, Frédéric Dubois, Christian Katzenbach

Over the last 25 years, scholars around the world have used electronic publishing to open up their work, share it with interested publics instantly or even become publishers themselves.

This white paper explores in what ways advances in publication technology in the journal sector (e.g. the widespread use of content management and editorial systems) contributes to a more inclusive and sustainable open access ecosystem.

Drawing on a study we did in Germany in 2019-2021, and for which we tested technical solutions together with the international, peer-reviewed diamond open access journal Internet Policy Review, we present and discuss publishing solutions based on software, workflows, and collaborations with regard to their practicability and scalability.

The paper finds that scholar-led publishing is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to technical solutions tending towards increased bibliodiversity (i.e., variety of content, publication formats and publishing institutions).

URL : Working with publication technology to make open access journals sustainable

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4558781