Archives des mots-clés : open access

OpenAPC: a contribution to a transparent and reproducible monitoring of fee-based open access publishing across institutions and nations

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Authors : Dirk Pieper, Christoph Broschinski

The OpenAPC initiative releases data sets on fees paid for open access (OA) journal articles by universities, funders and research institutions under an open database licence.

OpenAPC is part of the INTACT project, which is funded by the German Research Foundation and located at Bielefeld University Library.

This article provides insight into OpenAPC’s technical and organizational background and shows how transparent and reproducible reporting on fee-based open access can be conducted across institutions and publishers to draw conclusions on the state of the OA transformation process.

As part of the INTACT subproject, ESAC, the article also shows how OpenAPC workflows can be used to analyse offsetting deals, using the example of Springer Compact agreements.

URL : OpenAPC: a contribution to a transparent and reproducible monitoring of fee-based open access publishing across institutions and nations

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.439

Predatory Open Access Journals Publishing: What, Why and How?

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Author : Shamprasad M. Pujar

The Internet has transformed scholarly publishing and made the availability of online resources possible, both in subscription and open access models. Open access, has enabled wider access to the scholarly literature, thus reducing the digital divide among the haves and have-nots.

In the case of journal articles, even though its ‘Gold’ (author pays model) and ‘Green’ access models have risen to the occasion, but some publishers of journals have turned its ‘Gold’ model to their advantage to earn a profit by charging fees for publication and adopting certain unethical practices of publishing.

An effort has been made here to explore what is ‘Predatory’ open access journals publishing, why this kind of publishing is flourishing and how this model works.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/32032

Leveraging Elsevier’s Creative Commons License Requirement to Undermine Embargo

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Author : Josh Bolick

In the last round of author-sharing policy revisions, Elsevier created a labyrinthine title-by-title embargo structure requiring embargoes from 12 to 48 months for authors sharing via institutional repository (IR), while permitting immediate sharing via an author’s personal website or blog. At the same time, all prepublication versions are to bear a Creative Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) license.

At the time this policy was announced, it was criticized by many in the scholarly communication community as overly complicated and restrictive. However, this CC licensing requirement creates an avenue for subverting an embargo in the IR to achieve quicker and wider open distribution of the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM).

To wit, authors may post an appropriately licensed copy on their personal site or blog, at which point the author’s host institution may deposit without an embargo in the IR, not through the license granted in the publication agreement, but through the CC license on the author’s version, which the sharing policy mandates.

This article outlines the background and rationale of the issue and discusses the benefits, workflows, and remaining questions.

URL : Leveraging Elsevier’s Creative Commons License Requirement to Undermine Embargo

DOI : https://doi.org/10.17161/jcel.v2i2.7415

The use and perceptions of open Access resources by legal academics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa

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Author : Elizabeth Moll-Willard

Although access to primary legal materials in South Africa is now easily accessible as a result of the Free Access to Law movement, access to legal scholarship is not as easy.

Through using the University of Cape Town (UCT) as a case study, due to its research intensive nature, it is possible to see how academics are publishing their legal scholarship through the use of bibliometrics and data mining.

After the success of a Research Visibility month, law librarians were able to attest to the perceptions of legal academics around the importance of the openness and visibility of their research.

The author contrasts these two to see if the perception of legal academics around the visibility of their resources reflects their publishing practices. It is seen that although academics at UCT publish mostly in closed journals, the publishing in open and hybrid journals has slowly increased during the period 2011-2015.

Further it is evidenced that legal academics are exploring other avenues, including that of self-archiving, to boost the visibility of their work. Law Librarians are able to assist in boosting at least the visibility, if not the openness of legal academics’ work.

URL : The use and perceptions of open Access resources by legal academics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa

Alternative location : https://ojs.law.cornell.edu/index.php/joal/article/view/78

How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?

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Authors : Juan Pablo Alperin, Gustavo E. Fischman, Erin C. McKiernan, Carol Muñoz Nieves, Meredith T. Niles, Lesley Schimanski

Much of the work of universities, even private institutions, has significant public dimensions. Faculty work in particular is often funded by public funds, is aimed at serving the public good, and is subject to public evaluation.

To understand how the public dimensions of faculty work are valued, we analyzed review, tenure and promotion documents from a representative sample of 129 Canadian and American universities.

We found terms and concepts related to public and community are mentioned in a large portion of documents, but mostly in ways that relate to service—an undervalued aspect of academic careers.

Moreover, we find significant mentions of traditional research outputs and citation-based metrics. Such outputs and metrics reward faculty work targeted to academics, and mostly disregard the public dimensions.

We conclude that institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work towards systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized.

URL : How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?

DOI : https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:21015

Measuring Open Access Policy Compliance: Results of a Survey

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Authors : Shannon Kipphut-Smith, Michael Boock, Kimberly Chapman, Michaela Willi Hooper

INTRODUCTION

In the last decade, a significant number of institutions have adopted open access (OA) policies. Many of those working with OA policies are tasked with measuring policy compliance.

This article reports on a survey of Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI) members designed to better understand the methods currently used for measuring and communicating OA policy success.

METHODS

This electronic survey was distributed to the COAPI member listserv, inviting both institutions who have passed an implemented policies and those who are still developing policies to participate.

RESULTS

The results to a number of questions related to topics such as policy workflows, quantitative and qualitative measurement activities and related tools, and challenges showed a wide range of responses, which are shared here.

DISCUSSION

It is clear that a number of COAPI members struggle with identifying what should be measured and what tools and methods are appropriate. The survey illustrates how each institution measures compliance differently, making it difficult to benchmark against peer institutions.

CONCLUSION

As a result of this survey, we recommend that institutions working with OA policies be as transparent as possible about their data sources and methods when calculating deposit rates and other quantitative measures.

It is hoped that this transparency will result in the development of a set of qualitative and quantitative best practices for assessing OA policies that standardizes assessment terminology and articulates why institutions may want to measure policies.

URL : Measuring Open Access Policy Compliance: Results of a Survey

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2247

APCs – Mirroring the impact factor or legacy of the subscription-based model?

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Author : Nina Schönfelder

With the ongoing open-access transformation, article processing charges (APCs) are gaining importance as the dominant business model for scientific open-access journals. This paper analyzes which factors determine the level of an APC by means of multivariate linear regression.

With data from OpenAPC, APCs actually paid are explained by the following variables: (1) the “source normalized impact per paper” (SNIP), (2) whether the journal is open access or hybrid, (3) the publisher of the journal, (4) the subject area of the journal, and (5) the year.

The results show that the journal’s impact and the hybrid status are the most important factors for the level of APCs. However, the relationship between APC and SNIP is different for open-access journals and hybrid journals.

The journal’s impact is crucial for the level of APCs in open-access journals, whereas it little alters APCs for publications in hybrid-journals. This paper contributes to the emerging literature initiated by the “Pay It Forward”-study conducted at the University of California Libraries.

It sets the foundations for the assessment whether the large-scale open-access transformation of scientific journals is a financially viable way for each research institution in general and universities in particular.

URL : APCs – Mirroring the impact factor or legacy of the subscription-based model?

DOI : http://doi.org/10.4119/unibi/2931061