Étiquette : open access

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Global Flow of Scholarly Publishing and Open Access

Author : Olivier Pourret

Open access is not a new topic for Elements. The topic was addressed by Alex Speer, Kevin Murphy, and Sharon Tahirkheliin 2013 (Speer et al. 2013) and, later, by Christian Chopin in 2018 (Chopin 2018). I fully agree that there is a strong imperative for the geochemistry, mineralogy, and petrology communities to ensure that the research it produces is widely accessible, especially in the increasingly important context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Indeed, according to the STM Report 2018 (Johnson et al. 2018), two thirds of the scholarly literature in 2016 remains inaccessible to the public because it is hidden behind a paywall. Scholars have been making various cases for wider public access to published research, known as open access (OA), since the late 1980s.

Scientific publishing is currently undergoing a major transformation,with a move towards OA marking a major shift in the financial models of the major publishers. This opens up greater diversity in publishing routes and raises wider issues around publishing ethics.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02496933/

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Scientific globalism during a global crisis: research collaboration and open access publications on COVID-19

Authors : Jenny J. Lee, John P. Haupt

This study sought to understand the nature of scientific globalism during a global crisis, particularly COVID-19. Findings show that scientific globalism occurs differently when comparing COVID-19 publications with non-COVID-19 publications during as well as before the pandemic.

Despite the tense geopolitical climate, countries increased their proportion of international collaboration and open-access publications during the pandemic. However, not all countries engaged more globally.

Countries that have been more impacted by the crisis and those with relatively lower GDPs tended to participate more in scientific globalism than their counterparts.

DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10734-020-00589-0

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Some Issues on the Funding of the Scientific Publication in Open Access

Authors : Maria José Sá José Sá, Sandro Serpa

The academic/scientific publication in Open Access is already a current practice with several advantages, and the trend is that it will continue to be adopted worldwide by academics and researchers to disseminate the results of their work among the scientific community and the public at large.

At a time when Open Access is not only unavoidable but tends to become generalised as a form of scientific publication, this paper seeks to put forth, discuss and analyse some emerging issues, which are directly related to the financing of the publication of scientific research in Open Access, and which are directly linked to the consequences for academic freedom and the impact of the dissemination of the scientific publication, as current questions that shape the scientific publication that we will have and wish.

The results of this analysis allow concluding that, for this new way of publishing science to grow in a sustained way, it is necessary to ensure, among other aspects, the existence of independent scientific advisory boards; freedom of publication within certain boundaries; a sustainability strategy to plan for the operation of the platform; transparency in public scrutiny; and respect for the law.

URL : Some Issues on the Funding of the Scientific Publication in Open Access

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36941/ajis-2020-0063

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Adopting open access in the social sciences and humanities: evidence from a developing nation

Authors : Thu-Trang Vuong, Manh-Toan Ho, Minh-Hoang Nguyen, Thanh-Huyen T. Nguyen, Thanh-Dung Nguyen, Thi-Linh Nguyen, Anh-Phuong Luong, Quan-Hoang Vuong

Open Access (OA) publishing, with ambitious movements such as Plan S, is engendering radical changes among academic publishers. Emerging countries need to keep publishing as well as adopt open access to catch up with the changes.

Using exclusive data from the Social Sciences & Humanities Peer Awards (SSHPA) database, the study employed both descriptive statistics and a Bayesian linear regression model to examine the journals and publishers in which Vietnamese social scientists published during the period 2008–2019, and the potential of pursuing the OA movement in Vietnam.

We found an increasing diversification in the publishing sources of Vietnamese social science researchers with growth rates of 9.8% and 14.1% per annum in the number of publishers and journals, respectively. Given that the proportion of Gold OA articles had a fourfold increase over the examined period, it seems that the Vietnamese academic community is adopting OA.

Furthermore, Bayesian analysis results hint at positive associations of internal and external collaborative power (number of domestic and foreign authors, respectively) with the decision to publish in OA (βb_TotalVN_OpenAccess = 0.22; βb_TotalForeign_OpenAccess = 0.15).

The results and its implications suggest that Vietnamese policymakers and university director boards should facilitate as well as control the quality of the scientific publishing and the OA movement.

URL : Adopting open access in the social sciences and humanities: evidence from a developing nation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04522

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Researcher’s Perceptions on Publishing “Negative” Results and Open Access

Authors : Lucía Echevarría, Alberto Malerba, Virginia Arechavala-Gomeza

Scientific advance is based on reproducibility, corroboration, and availability of research results. However, large numbers of experimental results that contradict previous work do not get published and many research results are not freely available as they are hidden behind paywalls.

As part of COST Action “DARTER”, a network of researchers in the field of RNA therapeutics, we have performed a small survey among our members and their colleagues to assess their opinion on the subject of publishing contradictory or ambiguous results and their attitude to open access (OA) publishing.

Our survey indicates that, although researchers highly value publication of “negative” results, they often do not publish their own, citing lack of time and the perception that those results may not be as highly cited. OA, on the other hand, seems to be widely accepted, but in many cases not actively sought by researchers due to higher costs associated with it.

URL : Researcher’s Perceptions on Publishing “Negative” Results and Open Access

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1089/nat.2020.0865

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International authorship and collaboration across bioRxiv preprints

Authors : Richard J Abdill, Elizabeth M Adamowicz, Ran Blekhman

Preprints are becoming well established in the life sciences, but relatively little is known about the demographics of the researchers who post preprints and those who do not, or about the collaborations between preprint authors.

Here, based on an analysis of 67,885 preprints posted on bioRxiv, we find that some countries, notably the United States and the United Kingdom, are overrepresented on bioRxiv relative to their overall scientific output, while other countries (including China, Russia, and Turkey) show lower levels of bioRxiv adoption.

We also describe a set of ‘contributor countries’ (including Uganda, Croatia and Thailand): researchers from these countries appear almost exclusively as non-senior authors on international collaborations.

Lastly, we find multiple journals that publish a disproportionate number of preprints from some countries, a dynamic that almost always benefits manuscripts from the US.

URL :  International authorship and collaboration across bioRxiv preprints

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.58496

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Building trust in preprints: recommendations for servers and other stakeholders

Authors : Jeffrey Beck, Christine Ferguson, Kathryn Funk, Brooks Hanson, Melissa Harrison, Michele Ide-Smith, Rachael Lammey, Maria Levchenko, Alex Mendonça, Michael Parkin, Naomi Penfold, Nicole Pfeiffer, Jessica Polka, Iratxe Puebla, Oya Y Rieger, Martyn Rittman, Richard Sever, Sowmya Swaminathan

On January 20 and 21, 2020, ASAPbio, in collaboration with EMBL-EBI and Ithaka S+R, convened over 30 representatives from academia, preprint servers, publishers, funders, and standards, indexing and metadata infrastructure organisations at EMBL-EBI (Hinxton, UK) to develop a series of recommendations for best practices for posting and linking of preprints in the life sciences and ideally the broader research community.

We hope that these recommendations offer guidance for new preprint platforms and projects looking to enact best practices and ultimately serve to improve the experience of using preprints for all.

URL : Building trust in preprints: recommendations for servers and other stakeholders

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/8dn4w