Author : Alkim Ozaygen
This study explores data captured on the Internet related to OA scholarly books to provide a detailed overall picture of the dissemination of these books beginning from the point they were made OA.
To uncover the factors that impact on the digital uses of OA books, it explores relationships between book characteristics and the characteristics and motivations of the groups using and sharing books in digital landscapes.
Authors : Olatz Arrizabalaga, David Otaegui, Itziar Vergara, Julio Arrizabalaga, Eva Méndez
Background
The COVID-19 outbreak has made funders, researchers and publishers agree to have research publications, as well as other research outputs, such as data, become openly available.
In this extraordinary research context of the SARS CoV-2 pandemic, publishers are announcing that their coronavirus-related articles will be made immediately accessible in appropriate open repositories, like PubMed Central, agreeing upon funders’ and researchers’ instigation.
Methods
This work uses Unpaywall, OpenRefine and PubMed to analyse the level of openness of articles about COVID-19, published during the first quarter of 2020. It also analyses Open Access (OA) articles published about previous coronavirus (SARS CoV-1 and MERS CoV) as a means of comparison.
Results
A total of 5,611 COVID-19-related articles were analysed from PubMed. This is a much higher amount for a period of 4 months compared to those found for SARS CoV-1 and MERS during the first year of their first outbreaks (335 and 116 articles, respectively).
Regarding the levels of openness, 88.8% of the SARS CoV-2 papers are freely available; similar rates were found for the other coronaviruses. Deeper analysis showed that (i) 67.4% of articles belong to an undefined Bronze category; (ii) 76.4% of all OA papers don’t carry any license, followed by 10.4% which display restricted licensing. These patterns were found to be repeated in the three most frequent publishers: Elsevier, Springer and Wiley.
Conclusions
Our results suggest that, although scientific production is much higher than during previous epidemics and is open, there is a caveat to this opening, characterized by the absence of fundamental elements and values on which Open Science is based, such as licensing.
Authors : Anne Hobert, Najko Jahn, Philipp Mayr, Birgit Schmidt, Niels Taubert
This study investigates the development of open access (OA) to journal articles from authors affiliated with German universities and non-university research institutions in the period 2010-2018.
Beyond determining the overall share of openly available articles, a systematic classification of distinct categories of OA publishing allows to identify different patterns of adoption to OA.
Taking into account the particularities of the German research landscape, variations in terms of productivity, OA uptake and approaches to OA are examined at the meso-level and possible explanations are discussed.
The development of the OA uptake is analysed for the different research sectors in Germany (universities, non-university research institutes of the Helmholtz Association, Fraunhofer Society, Max Planck Society, Leibniz Association, and government research agencies).
Combining several data sources (incl. Web of Science, Unpaywall, an authority file of standardised German affiliation information, the ISSN-Gold-OA 3.0 list, and OpenDOAR), the study confirms the growth of the OA share mirroring the international trend reported in related studies.
We found that 45% of all considered articles in the observed period were openly available at the time of analysis. Our findings show that subject-specific repositories are the most prevalent OA type. However, the percentages for publication in fully OA journals and OA via institutional repositories show similarly steep increases.
Enabling data-driven decision-making regarding OA implementation in Germany at the institutional level, the results of this study furthermore can serve as a baseline to assess the impact recent transformative agreements with major publishers will likely have on scholarly communication.
URL : Open Access Uptake in Germany 2010-18: Adoption in a diverse research landscape
Author : William H. Walters
Data journals provide strong incentives for data creators to verify, document and disseminate their data. They also bring data access and documentation into the mainstream of scholarly communication, rewarding data creators through existing mechanisms of peer-reviewed publication and citation tracking.
These same advantages are not generally associated with data repositories, or with conventional journals’ data-sharing mandates. This article describes the unique advantages of data journals.
It also examines the data journal landscape, presenting the characteristics of 13 data journals in the fields of biology, environmental science, chemistry, medicine and health sciences.
These journals vary considerably in size, scope, publisher characteristics, length of data reports, data hosting policies, time from submission to first decision, article processing charges, bibliographic index coverage and citation impact.
They are similar, however, in their peer review criteria, their open access license terms and the characteristics of their editorial boards.
URL : Data journals: incentivizing data access and documentation within the scholarly communication system
Authors : Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer, Eva Méndez Rodríguez, Jeroen Sondervan, Frans J. Oort
Funders increasingly mandate researchers to publish their scientific articles in open access and to retain their copyright. Universities all over the world have set up institutional repositories and use repositories for the preservation and dissemination of academic production of their institutions, including scientific articles, reports, datasets, and other research outputs.
However, in general, authors do not find institutional repositories very attractive and accessible as an open access publication platform since repositories and open access are not part of the rewarding system.
We expect that researchers are more likely to publish and deposit their scientific papers in a repository, once they have the appearance, recognition and dissemination of a scientific journal.
That is why we took the initiative to set up a repository based journal ‘University Journals’ in which universities collaborate. The paper will explain the University Journals project and how the involved universities want to facilitate a valuable alternative publication platform that complies with Plan S principles and enables publication and dissemination of all research outcomes.
By establishing University Journals as a publication platform, university libraries are instrumental (and crucial) in achieving the ambitions of Open Science, and universities gain control over the publication process.
Auteur/Author : Anne Paris
À l’heure où la transition vers l’accès ouvert aux résultats de la recherche connaît une nouvelle impulsion, politique, à l’échelle nationale, européenne et internationale, notre étude s’attachera à en présenter les principes et les enjeux (économiques, éditoriaux, scientifiques, sociaux), les questions en débat (modèles économiques, adhésion de la communauté scientifique, évaluation de la recherche) et interrogera le rôle actif que les bibliothèques assurent pour promouvoir et développer une communication scientifique sans barrière.
URL : Les bibliothèques universitaires et les enjeux de l’open access
Original location : https://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/69560-les-bibliotheques-universitaires-et-les-enjeux-de-l-open-access
Authors : Olivier Pourret, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Jonathan P. Tennant
In recent years, the pace of the dissemination of scientific information has increased. In this context, the possibility and value of sharing open access (OA) online manuscripts in their preprint form seem to be growing in many scientific fields. More and more platforms are especially dedicated to free preprint publishing.
They are published, non-peer-reviewed scholarly papers that typically precede publication in a peer-reviewed journal. They have been a part of science since at least the 1960s.
In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web to help researchers share knowledge easily. A few months later, in August 1991, as a centralized web-based network, arXiv was created. arXiv is arguably the most influential preprint platform and has supported the fields of physics, mathematics and computer science for over 30 years.
Since, preprint platforms have become popular in many disciplines (e.g., bioRxiv for biological sciences) due to the increasing drive towards OA publishing, and can be publisher- or community-driven, profit or not for profit, and based on proprietary or free and open source software. A range of discipline-specific or cross-domain platforms now exist, with exponential growth these last five years.
While preprints as a whole still represent only a small proportion of scholarly publishing, a strong community of early adopters is already beginning to experiment with such value-enhancing tools in many more disciplines than before.
The two main options for geochemists are EarthArXiv and ESSOAr. A “one size fits all” model for preprints would never work across the entire scientific community. The geochemistry community needs to develop and sustain their own model.
URL : On the Potential of Preprints in Geochemistry: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly