Étiquette : open access

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The prehistory of biology preprints: a forgotten experiment from the 1960s

Author : Matthew Cobb

In 1961, the NIH began to circulate biological preprints in a forgotten experiment called the Information Exchange Groups (IEGs).

This system eventually attracted over 3600 participants and saw the production of over 2,500 different documents, but by 1967 it was effectively shut down by journal publishers’ refusal to accept articles that had been circulated as preprints.

This article charts the rise and fall of the IEGs and explores the parallels with the 1990s and the biomedical preprint movement of today.

URL : The prehistory of biology preprints: a forgotten experiment from the 1960s

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3174v1

 

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Future Challenges and Opportunities in Academic Publishing

Author : Kyle Siler

Digitization and the rise of Open Access publishing is an important recent development in academic communication. The current publishing system exhibits challenges with cost, where many universities are forced to cancel journal subscriptions for economic reasons, as well as access, as scholars and the public alike often lack access to research published in paywalled subscription journals.

Open Access publishing solves the access problem, but not necessarily cost problems. Universities and researchers are currently in a challenging, interstitial stage of scholarly publishing. Subscription journals still dominate scholarly communication, yet a growing imperative to fund and support Open Access alternatives also exists.

Stakeholders, including faculty, university administrators, publishers, scientific funding institutions and librarians and governments alike currently strategize and fight for their professional and economic interests in the broader publishing system.

Four main trends are suggested that will characterize the future of scholarly publishing: 1) antagonism with scholarly associations; 2) changes and innovations to peer review; 3) Scientific/Intellectual Movements around Open Access 4) publishing and new professional niches in the publishing landscape.

This article suggests potential trajectories and outcomes for these various conflicts over the costs and benefits of academic publishing.

URL : https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/cjs/index.php/CJS/article/view/28140

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Research Management: Combining Platforms, Practices, and Policies

Author : Shawn Martin

Research management is about more than open access and it is about more than creating online publishing platforms. It is about creating online publishing platforms that meet the needs of all of the stakeholders in the higher education enterprise, most notably faculty.

Technological infrastructure needs to be combined with policies that reflect the career needs of faculty members.

So far, the goal of combining open scholarship policies with online infrastructure has been elusive. The answer may be to rethink how the career structure of faculty members is structured and how research managers and librarians can be a part of the solution.

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0020.212

 

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Open Access and OER in Latin America: A survey of the policy landscape in Chile, Colombia and Uruguay

Author : Amalia Toledo

This chapter presents an overview of the mechanisms (funding, policy, legislative and procedural) adopted by Latin American governments with respect to Open Access and Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives in the higher education sector.

It addresses three questions: How do the higher education systems of Chile, Colombia and Uruguay operate and fund their activities in general? How do existing policies and processes incorporating Open Access and/or OER influence student access to learning and research materials in these countries? What policy, advocacy and community-building interventions might be useful for promoting Open Education activities in these contexts?

This study employed a descriptive, case study approach to examine whether and how Open Access and OER policies have been applied at national and institutional levels. It first engaged in an Open Education policy country-mapping exercise, then conducted a comparative analysis, and concluded the research process with a workshop conducted with 10 regional education experts and activists to validate findings.

Findings indicate that while each country has its own approach to funding higher education, there are few or no specific national and/or institutional policies aimed at promoting Open Education in the higher education sectors.

Low OER awareness and a commercialised model of higher education appear to account for the lack of any OER policies in Chile, while in Colombia various national and institutional strategies reveal a country at a nascent stage of Open Education policy development.

By contrast, the nature of OER management and extent of policy implementation in Uruguay suggests that it is an enabling environment for current and future open policy development.

URL : Open Access and OER in Latin America: A survey of the policy landscape in Chile, Colombia and Uruguay

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.602781

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Who is Actually Harmed by Predatory Publishers?

Authors : Martin Paul Eve, Ernesto Priego

“Predatory publishing” refers to conditions under which gold open-access academic publishers claim to conduct peer review and charge for their publishing services but do not, in fact, actually perform such reviews.

Most prominently exposed in recent years by Jeffrey Beall, the phenomenon garners much media attention. In this article, we acknowledge that such practices are deceptive but then examine, across a variety of stakeholder groups, what the harm is from such actions to each group of actors.

We find that established publishers have a strong motivation to hype claims of predation as damaging to the scholarly and scientific endeavour while noting that, in fact, systems of peer review are themselves already acknowledged as deeply flawed.

URL : Who is Actually Harmed by Predatory Publishers?

Alternative location : http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/867

 

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The legal and policy framework for scientific data sharing, mining and reuse

Author : Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay

Text and Data Mining, the automatic processing of large amounts of scientific articles and datasets, is an essential practice for contemporary researchers. Some publishers are challenging it as a lawful activity and the topic is being discussed during European copyright law reform process.

In order to better understand the underlying debate and contribute to the policy discussion, this article first examines the legal status of data access and reuse and licensing policies. It then presents available options supporting the exercise of Text and Data Mining: publication under open licenses, open access legislations and a recognition of the legitimacy of the activity.

For that purpose, the paper analyses the scientific rational for sharing and its legal and technical challenges and opportunities. In particular, it surveys existing open access and open data legislations and discusses implementation in European and Latin America jurisdictions.

Framing Text and Data mining as an exception to copyright could be problematic as it de facto denies that this activity is part of a positive right to read and should not require additional permission nor licensing.

It is crucial in licenses and legislations to provide a correct definition of what is Open Access, and to address the question of pre-existing copyright agreements. Also, providing implementation means and technical support is key. Otherwise, legislations could remain declarations of good principles if repositories are acting as empty shells.

URL ; https://books.openedition.org/editionsmsh/9082

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The State of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles

Authors : Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem, Vincent Larivière, Juan Pablo Alperin, Lisa Matthias, Bree Norlander, Ashley Farley, Jevin West, Stefanie Haustein

Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles.

We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigate OA in three populations: 1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, 2) recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and 3) articles viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that lets users find OA articles using oaDOI.

We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made free-to-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license.

We also examine the citation impact of OA articles, corroborating the so-called open-access citation advantage: accounting for age and discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA. We encourage further research using the free oaDOI service, as a way to inform OA policy and practice.

URL : The State of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3119v1