Étiquette : Philips Ayeni

Catégories
EN

Inequity, precarity, and disparity: Exploring systemic and institutional barriers in open access publishing

Authors : Philips Ayeni, Vincent Larivière

Despite increasing advocacy for open access (OA), its uptake in some disciplines has remained low. Existing studies have linked the low uptake of OA in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) to disciplinary norms, limited funding for article processing charges (APCs), and researchers’ preferences.

However, there is a growing concern about inequity in the scholarly communication landscape, as OA publishing has remained unaffordable to many researchers. This study investigates systemic and institutional barriers to OA publishing in Canada, as well as strategies for improving the uptake of and equity in OA publishing.

Using semi-structured interviews, qualitative data was collected from 20 professors from the HSS disciplines of research-intensive universities in the country. Data was analyzed using the NVivo software, following the reflexive thematic analysis approach.

Findings revealed five systemic and institutional barriers to OA publishing: (1) unaffordable APCs; (2) precarious career stage and tenure requirements; (3) unequal privileges; (4) gender; and (5) conflicting and unsupportive institutional OA policies.

We conclude that there needs to be a concerted effort in promoting and funding viable and sustainable OA models, which removes the financial burden of OA publishing from researchers.

There is also an increasing need to promote OA culture within academia and provide institutional support for OA publishing. Notably, the model of academic scholarship that places prominence on journal metrics for tenure and promotion needs to be reformed. Some recommendations for reducing systemic and institutional barriers to OA publishing are provided.

URL : Inequity, precarity, and disparity: Exploring systemic and institutional barriers in open access publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006251353385

 

Catégories
EN

Open access publishing in an African context: Notable improvements and recurring challenges

Authors : Sodiq Onaolapo, Philips Ayeni, Siphamandla Mncube

Open access publishing has been promoted as a pivotal means of bridging the gap in knowledge access and usage. Despite the growing support for open access publishing globally, little is known about African scholars’ engagement with open access publishing and the barriers limiting their open access publishing practices.

Using a survey research design, data was collected from 241 researchers from selected universities in Africa, such as Nigerian, Kenyan and South African universities. The data was collected using online surveys and analysed using the descriptive statistics of frequency counts and percentages. T

he study reveals that while most of the respondents had published open access articles (78.01%) and had a positive perception of the quality of open access journals (73.45%) and editorial teams, more than half were still limited by article processing charges (58.51%) as they had no funding for their research.

Although African researchers are embracing open access publishing more now than they were historically, barriers such as article processing charges and the prolonged response time from reviewers continue to pose a serious challenge to open access uptake in Africa. This study proposes five recommendations for improving open access uptake in African and Global South countries.

URL : Open access publishing in an African context: Notable improvements and recurring challenges

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/03400352251351113

Catégories
EN

Evaluating the linguistic coverage of OpenAlex: An assessment of metadata accuracy and completeness

Authors : Lucía Céspedes, Diego Kozlowski, Carolina Pradier, Maxime Holmberg Sainte-Marie, Natsumi Solange Shokida, Pierre Benz,
Constance Poitras, Anton Boudreau Ninkov, Saeideh Ebrahimy, Philips Ayeni, Sarra Filali, Bing Li, Vincent Larivière

Clarivate’s Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier’s Scopus have been for decades the main sources of bibliometric information. Although highly curated, these closed, proprietary databases are largely biased toward English-language publications, underestimating the use of other languages in research dissemination.

Launched in 2022, OpenAlex promised comprehensive, inclusive, and open-source research information. While already in use by scholars and research institutions, the quality of its metadata is currently still being assessed. This paper contributes to this literature by assessing the completeness and accuracy of OpenAlex’s metadata related to language, through a comparison with WoS, as well as an in-depth manual validation of a sample of 6836 articles.

Results show that OpenAlex exhibits a far more balanced linguistic coverage than WoS. However, language metadata are not always accurate, which leads OpenAlex to overestimate the place of English while underestimating that of other languages. If used critically, OpenAlex can provide comprehensive and representative analyses of languages used for scholarly publishing, but more work is needed at infrastructural level to ensure the quality of metadata on language.

URL : Evaluating the linguistic coverage of OpenAlex: An assessment of metadata accuracy and completeness

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24979