Faculty knowledge and attitudes regarding predatory open access journals: a needs assessment study

Authors : Stephanie M. Swanberg, Joanna Thielen, Nancy Bulgarelli

Objective

The purpose of predatory open access (OA) journals is primarily to make a profit rather than to disseminate quality, peer-reviewed research.

Publishing in these journals could negatively impact faculty reputation, promotion, and tenure, yet many still choose to do so. Therefore, the authors investigated faculty knowledge and attitudes regarding predatory OA journals.

Methods

A twenty-item questionnaire containing both quantitative and qualitative items was developed and piloted. All university and medical school faculty were invited to participate.

The survey included knowledge questions that assessed respondents’ ability to identify predatory OA journals and attitudinal questions about such journals. Chi-square tests were used to detect differences between university and medical faculty.

Results

A total of 183 faculty completed the survey: 63% were university and 37% were medical faculty. Nearly one-quarter (23%) had not previously heard of the term “predatory OA journal.”

Most (87%) reported feeling very confident or confident in their ability to assess journal quality, but only 60% correctly identified a journal as predatory, when given a journal in their field to assess.

Chi-square tests revealed that university faculty were more likely to correctly identify a predatory OA journal (p=0.0006) and have higher self-reported confidence in assessing journal quality, compared with medical faculty (p=0.0391).

Conclusions

Survey results show that faculty recognize predatory OA journals as a problem. These attitudes plus the knowledge gaps identified in this study will be used to develop targeted educational interventions for faculty in all disciplines at our university.

URL : Faculty knowledge and attitudes regarding predatory open access journals: a needs assessment study

Original location : http://jmla.pitt.edu/ojs/jmla/article/view/849

Integration of a National E-Theses Online Service with Institutional Repositories

Authors : Vasily Bunakov, Frances Madden

We present an information resource prototype that was developed by the FREYA project for the integration of a national e-thesis service and institutional repositories supported by a large national laboratory.

The integration allows us to mutually enrich the metadata in the e-thesis service and institutional repositories with new entities and attributes, and can offer novel ways of reasoning over research outcomes that are supported by direct funding and funding-in-kind by large research facilities.

The integrated information resource can be presented as a labeled-property graph for its exploration with a declarative query language and visualizations. We emphasize the role of persistent identifiers (PIDs), including for entities that are currently not necessarily or not consistently assigned PIDs.

URL : Integration of a National E-Theses Online Service with Institutional Repositories

Alternative location : https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/8/2/20/htm

Collaborating for public access to scholarly publications: A case study of the partnership between the US Department of Energy and CHORUS

Authors : H. Frederick Dylla, Jeffrey Salmon

Key points

  • The success of the CHORUS and DOE relationship is the result of nearly two decades of interactions between the DOE and a group of scientific publishers.
  • The relationship between CHORUS and the US federal agencies required understanding of different motivations, operations, and philosophies.
  • Although achieving public access was simple in principle, it required considerable effort to develop systems that satisfied all parties.
  • Publishers had been working with federal agencies to achieve open access before the 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, but this helped to create a path for a more fruitful relationship.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1298

Social engagement and institutional repositories: a case study

Author : Susan Boulton

This article explores the community reach and societal impact of institutional repositories, in particular Griffith Research Online (GRO), Griffith University’s institutional repository.

To promote research on GRO, and to encourage people to click through to the repository content, a pilot social media campaign and some subsequent smaller social media activities were undertaken in 2018.

After briefly touching on these campaigns, this article provides some reflections from these activities and proposes options for the future direction of social engagement and GRO in particular, and for institutional repositories in general.

This undertaking necessitates a shift in focus from repositories as a resource for the scholarly community to a resource for the community at large. The campaign also highlighted the need to look beyond performance metrics to social media metrics as a measure of the social and community impact of a repository.

Whilst the article is written from one Australian university’s perspective, the drivers and challenges behind researchers and universities translating their research into economic, social, environmental and cultural impacts are national and international.

The primary takeaway message is for libraries to take more of a proactive stance and to kick-start conversations within their institutions and with their clients to actively partner in creating opportunities to share research.

URL : Social engagement and institutional repositories: a case study

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.504

Publications numériques scientifiques universitaires internationales : Disruption, quels acteurs,quels projets ?

Auteur/Author : Appoline Romanens

Les enseignants-chercheurs d’aujourd’hui se heurtent à des APC, ont besoin de logiciels de PAO, avec un DMP pour apparaître dans la base de données du DOAJ, ou espérer rentrer dans celle duWoS.

Tous ces termes nous semblent éloignés du jargon du Journal des Sçavans, première manifestation de la compilation des pensées de la recherche scientifique.

Pourtant ils sont le signe d’une évolution du médium qui porte l’article académique scientifique aujourd’hui, le web de données, dans lequel toute publication scientifique se doit d’être réticulée pour survivre au publish or perish.

Afin de comprendre ce nouveau jargon de la recherche scientifique, qui témoigne de profonds changements dans le rapport qu’entretient l’enseignant-chercheur, l’éditeur puis le lecteur par rapport au texte, ce mémoire explore la notion de disruption dans le processus de création, relecture et édition puis publication et diffusion d’un article.

Outre un développement basé sur les théories de l’économie du document et de l’article scientifique, ce mémoire apporte deux études de cas qui rendent compte du phénomène de disruption dans les publications scientifiques, et propose à partir de ce corpus une ouverture sur ses enjeux actuels et futurs.

URL : Publications numériques scientifiques universitaires internationales : Disruption, quels acteurs,quels projets ?

Original location : https://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/69398-publications-numeriques-scientifiques-universitaires-internationales-disruption-quels-acteurs-quels-projets

Open Access eXchange (OAeX): an economic model and platform for fundraising open scholarship services

Authors : Jack Hyland, Alexander Kouker, Dmitri Zaitsev

This article describes the Open Access eXchange (OAeX) project, a pragmatic and comprehensive economic model and fundraising platform for open scholarship initiatives.

OAeX connects bidders with funders at scale and right across the open scholarship spectrum through crowdfunding: financial expenditure is regulated by a market of freely competing providers and financial transactions and transparency are assured by a clearing-house entity.

Specifically, OAeX seeks to facilitate open access publishing without the barrier of article processing charges (APCs), as well as contribute to solving challenges of transparency and economic sustainability in open scholarship projects in the broader sense.

URL : Open Access eXchange (OAeX): an economic model and platform for fundraising open scholarship services

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.500

Open Access+ Service: reframing library support to take research outputs to non-academic audiences

Author: Scott Taylor

The University of Manchester Library has established a key role in facilitating scholarly discourse through its mediated open access (OA) services, but has little track record in intentionally taking OA research outputs to non-academic audiences.

This article outlines recent exploratory steps the Library has taken to convince researchers to fully exploit this part of the scholarly communication chain. Driving developments within this service category is a belief that despite the recent rise in OA, the full public benefit of research outputs is often not being realized as many papers are written in inaccessibly technical language.

Recognizing our unique position to help authors reach broader audiences with simpler expressions of their work, we have evolved our existing managed OA services to systematically share plain-English summaries of OA papers via Twitter.

In parallel, we have taken steps to ensure that our commercial analytics tools work harder to identify and reach the networked communities that form around academic disciplines in the hope that these simpler expressions of research will be more likely to diffuse beyond these networks.

URL : Open Access+ Service: reframing library support to take research outputs to non-academic audiences

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.499