Étiquette : open access

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Offsetting and its discontents: challenges and opportunities of open access offsetting agreements

Author : Liam Earney

The growth of open access (OA) via the payment of article processing charges (APCs) in hybrid journals has been a key feature of the approach to OA in the UK. In response, Jisc Collections has been piloting ‘offsetting agreements’ that explicitly link subscription and APCs, seeking to reduce one as the other grows.

However, offsetting agreements have become increasingly contentious with institutions, advocates and publishers.

With reference to issues such as cost, administrative efficiency, transparency and the transition to open access, this paper provides an update on the status of UK negotiations, reflects on the challenges and opportunities presented by such agreements, and considers the implications for the path of future negotiations.

URL : Offsetting and its discontents: challenges and opportunities of open access offsetting agreements

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.345

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On the origin of nonequivalent states: How we can talk about preprints

Authors : Cameron Neylon, Damian Pattinson, Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin

Increasingly, preprints are at the center of conversations across the research ecosystem. But disagreements remain about the role they play. Do they “count” for research assessment?

Is it ok to post preprints in more than one place? In this paper, we argue that these discussions often conflate two separate issues, the history of the manuscript and the status granted it by different communities.

In this paper, we propose a new model that distinguishes the characteristics of the object, its “state”, from the subjective “standing” granted to it by different communities.

This provides a way to discuss the difference in practices between communities, which will deliver more productive conversations and facilitate negotiation, as well as sharpening our focus on the role of different stakeholders on how to collectively improve the process of scholarly communications not only for preprints, but other forms of scholarly contributions.

URL : On the origin of nonequivalent states: How we can talk about preprints

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11408.1

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Anticipated effects of an open access policy at a private foundation

Author : Eesha Khare, Carly Strasser

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF) was interested in understanding the potential effects of a policy requiring open access to peer-reviewed publications resulting from the research the foundation funds.

To explore this question, we collected data on more than 2000 publications in over 500 journals that were generated by GBMF grantees since 2001. We then examined the journal policies to establish how two possible open access policies might have affected grantee publishing habits.

We found that 99.3% of the articles published by grantees would have complied with a policy that requires open access within 12 months of publication. We also estimated the annual costs to GBMF for covering fees associated with « gold open access » to be between $250,000 and $2,500,000 annually.

URL : http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/18/128413

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Open Science: What, Why, and How

Authors : Barbara A. Spellman, Elizabeth A. Gilbert, Katherine S. Corker

Open Science is a collection of actions designed to make scientific processes more transparent and results more accessible. Its goal is to build a more replicable and robust science; it does so using new technologies, altering incentives, and changing attitudes.

The current movement towards open science was spurred, in part, by a recent “series of unfortunate events” within psychology and other sciences.

These events include the large number of studies that have failed to replicate and the prevalence of common research and publication procedures that could explain why.

Many journals and funding agencies now encourage, require, or reward some open science practices, including pre-registration, providing full materials, posting data, distinguishing between exploratory and confirmatory analyses, and running replication studies.

Individuals can practice and encourage open science in their many roles as researchers, authors, reviewers, editors, teachers, and members of hiring, tenure, promotion, and awards committees.

A plethora of resources are available to help scientists, and science, achieve these goals.

URL : https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ak6jr

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Metrics for openness

Authors : David M. Nichols, Michael B. Twidale

The characterization of scholarly communication is dominated by citation-based measures. In this paper we propose several metrics to describe different facets of open access and open research.

We discuss measures to represent the public availability of articles along with their archival location, licenses, access costs, and supporting information. Calculations illustrating these new metrics are presented using the authors’ publications.

We argue that explicit measurement of openness is necessary for a holistic description of research outputs.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10289/10842

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Open Access and Global Inclusion: A Look at Cuba

Authors : Authors : Elizabeth Jardine, Maureen Garvey, J. Silvia Cho

Is the Open Access movement meeting its goal of equalizing access to research worldwide? What we learned in libraries and archives during a delegation to Cuba inspired us to pursue this question.

Latin America has long used OA to share its research, but it still has not achieved parity in access and contribution with the developed world. We consider what the OA movement can do to relieve some of these global inequities.

URL : http://academicworks.cuny.edu/si_pubs/78/

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Looking Into Pandora’s Box: The Content Of Sci-Hub And Its Usage

Author : Bastian Greshake

Despite the growth of Open Access, illegally circumventing paywalls to access scholarly publications is becoming a more mainstream phenomenon. The web service Sci-Hub is amongst the biggest facilitators of this, offering free access to around 62 million publications.

So far it is not well studied how and why its users are accessing publications through Sci-Hub. By utilizing the recently released corpus of Sci-Hub and comparing it to the data of ~28 million downloads done through the service, this study tries to address some of these questions.

The comparative analysis shows that both the usage and complete corpus is largely made up of recently published articles, with users disproportionately favoring newer articles and 35% of downloaded articles being published after 2013.

These results hint that embargo periods before publications become Open Access are frequently circumnavigated using Guerilla Open Access approaches like Sci-Hub. On a journal level, the downloads show a bias towards some scholarly disciplines, especially Chemistry, suggesting increased barriers to access for these.

Comparing the use and corpus on a publisher level, it becomes clear that only 11% of publishers are highly requested in comparison to the baseline frequency, while 45% of all publishers are significantly less accessed than expected.

Despite this, the oligopoly of publishers is even more remarkable on the level of content consumption, with 80% of all downloads being published through only 9 publishers. All of this suggests that Sci-Hub is used by different populations and for a number of different reasons and that there is still a lack of access to the published scientific record.

A further analysis of these openly available data resources will undoubtedly be valuable for the investigation of academic publishing.

URL : Looking Into Pandora’s Box: The Content Of Sci-Hub And Its Usage

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/124495