Access, ethics, and piracy

Author : Stuart Lawson

Open access has been progressively making more scholarship openly available. But a majority of journal articles are still behind paywalls so some people have turned to piracy to access them.

While some regard this practice as criminal and unethical, for others ‘liberating’ research is a justified act of civil disobedience.

This article considers both the efficacy and ethics of piracy, placing ‘guerilla open access’ within a longer history of piracy and access to knowledge.

By doing so, we can see that since piracy is not only an inevitable part of the intellectual landscape but can potentially drive progressive developments in communication practices, open access emerges as a contender for moving beyond proprietary forms of commodifying scholarly knowledge.

URL : Access, ethics, and piracy

Alternative location : https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/k483r/

Les archives ouvertes dans le monde arabe : entre stagnation et évolution

Author : Mohamed Ben Romdhane

L’offre des archives ouvertes dans le monde arabe ne cesse d’accroitre ces dernières années, c’est ce que cette étude essaye de montrer à travers l’identification et l’évaluation de ces dépôts en se basant sur une grille spécifique et en comparant les résultats obtenus à ceux obtenus par d’autres études antérieures.

Sur d’autres plans, l’étude a montré une légère évolution dans quelques aspects voire une stagnation dans d’autres. C’est ainsi que les politiques des institutions arabes envers le libre accès et les archives ouvertes restent inconnus et non déclarées. Pour ce qui est le volume de ces dépôts, la plupart restent très peu alimentés.

URL : https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01412079

 

The persistence of open access electronic journals

Author : Elizabeth A. Lightfoot

Purpose

Open access (OA) electronic journals have been identified as potentially at risk of loss without more coordinated preservation efforts. The purpose of this paper is to test the current availability of OA electronic journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Design/methodology/approach

Using publicly available journal metadata downloaded from DOAJ, individual journal URLs were tested for validity and accessibility using a Microsoft Excel Visual Basic for Applications macro.

Findings

Initial results showed 69.51% of the URLs tested returned a successful HTTP status code. The remainder of the URLs returned codes that indicated redirection or errors.

Originality/Value

Unlike past studies of link decay, this is not limited to cited references or a specific discipline. This study utilizes the full DOAJ metadata to analyze the persistence of OA electronic journals.

URL : http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/glworks/55/

Open supply? On the future of document supply in the world of open science

Author : Joachim Schöpfel

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to propose a personal viewpoint on the development of document supply in the context of the recent European Union (EU) decisions on open science.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper provides some elements to the usual questions of service development, about business, customers, added value, environment and objectives.

Findings

The EU goal for open science is 100 per cent available research results in 2020. To meet the challenge, document supply must change, include more and other content, serve different targets groups, apply innovative technology and provide knowledge. If not, document supply will become a marginalized library service.

Originality/value

Basically, open science is not library-friendly, and it does not offer a solution for the actual problems of document supply. But it may provide an opportunity for document supply to become a modern service able to deal with new forms of unequal access and digital divide.

URL : http://hal.univ-lille3.fr/hal-01408443

Scholarly Management Publication and Open Access Funding Mandates: a Review of Publisher Policies

Author : Jessica Lange

The open access movement has been growing steadily over the past twenty years. Recently, many national funding agencies in North America have been requiring recipients of grant-funding to make their articles open access.

On the surface this produces a potential conflict for management researchers; management faculty members are expected to publish in prestigious journals but the discipline views open access journals as being of lower quality (Hahn & Wyatt, 2014, p.98).

As such, the question arises if it is it possible for management researchers to comply with open access policies while still publishing in highly-ranked journals?

This article will compare publishing policies from top management journals to funding agencies’ open access requirements in order to determine which journals meet these conditions.

Journals will be drawn from several established journal lists such as the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) 24, the Financial Times (FT) Research Rankings, and Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science Journal Citation Reports.

Results show that 80% of journals in the sample set are compatible with open access funding mandates. Of the journals which are compatible, 48% require an APC and 52% permit self-archiving in an acceptable time-frame.

In addition to discussing open access publishing opportunities in management, this article will highlight opportunities for management librarians to develop their services and act as resources for faculty navigating this new framework.

URL : Scholarly Management Publication and Open Access Funding Mandates: a Review of Publisher Policies

Alternative location : http://ticker.mcgill.ca/article/view/19

 

Does Online Access Promote Research in Developing Countries? Empirical Evidence from Article-Level Data

Authors : Frank Mueller-Langer, Marc Scheufen, Patrick Waelbroeck

Universities in developing countries have rarely been able to subscribe to academic journals in the past. The “Online Access to Research in the Environment” initiative (OARE) provides institutions in developing countries with free online access to more than 5,700 environmental science journals.

Here we analyze the effect of OARE registration on scientific output by research institutions in five developing countries. We apply a difference-in-difference estimation method using panel data for 18,955 journal articles from 798 research institutions.

We find that online access via OARE increases publication output by at least 43% while lower-ranked institutions located in remote areas benefit less. These results are robust when we apply instrumental variables to account for the information diffusion process and a Bayesian estimation method to control for self-selection into the initiative.

URL : https://ssrn.com/abstract=2870617