Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Publishing

How transformative agreements are actually transforming the subscription system: a society publisher’s perspective

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Authors : Graham Anderson, Jade Heyman, Maggie Simmons

Transformative agreements (TAs) are useful tools to accelerate the growth in open access (OA) for small publishers with limited resources, such as the three discussing the advantages and impact of TAs in this article.

The Royal Society, the Microbiology Society and the Geological Society observe an uptake in OA output with the increase in demand for TAs. While TA models differ across publishers, successful and sustainable models are characterized by transparency in pricing and data, simplicity, equitability and above all a transformation objective of achieving full OA.

Collaboration with institutions and consortia is key to realizing mutual goals and managing the agreement and implementation of complex arrangements with limited resources. The Royal Society, with over 320 institutions opted in, the Microbiology Society with over 250 and the Geological Society with over 40, are all mobilizing their resources and improving their systems to move away from paywall and subscription models.

URL : How transformative agreements are actually transforming the subscription system: a society publisher’s perspective

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.579

Should open access lead to closed research? The trends towards paying to perform research

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Authors : Lin Zhang, Yahui Wei, Ying Huang, Gunnar Sivertsen

Open Access (OA) emerged as an important transition in scholarly publishing worldwide during the past two decades. So far, this transition is increasingly based on article processing charges (APC), which create a new paywall on the researchers’ side. Publishing is part of the research process and thereby necessary to perform research.

This study analyses the global trends towards paying to perform research by combing observed trends in publishing from 2015 to 2020 with an APC price list. APC expenses have sharply increased among six countries with different OA policies: the USA, China, the UK, France, the Netherlands, and Norway.

The estimated global revenues from APC among major publishers now exceed 2 billion US dollars annually. Mergers and takeovers show that the industry is moving towards APC-based OA as the more profitable business model.

Research publishing will be closed to those who cannot make an institution or project money payment. Our results lead to a discussion of whether APC is the best way to promote OA.

URL : Should open access lead to closed research? The trends towards paying to perform research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04407-5

OA isn’t free, it costs folks like you and me. How open access ideology obscures labour inequity in academia

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Author : John Bryans

Despite the framing of open access (OA) as a progressive movement that challenges neoliberalism and champions the public good, academic labour is often left out of these analyses (Eve, 2017).

In a bid to liberate academic labour from the neoliberal hands of commercial publishing, advocates of OA have argued that making scholarly work “free” can help to establish an academic commons (de Rosnay, 2021).

However initiatives to mandate OA in academia like “Plan S” set the stage for academic labourers to be compelled to give up rights to their intellectual property (Frantzvag & Stromme, 2019). In this essay I argue that the broad acceptance of OA as the liberatory savior of academic publishing is misguided, as it obscures the right-wing libertarian roots of the movement and would see academics voluntarily alienate themselves from their labour (Golumbia, 2016).

Drawing on Golumbia’s (2016) Marxist reading of the political economy of OA, I argue that devaluing academic labour by characterizing it as unproductive and immaterial negates the abstract labour that produces scholarly works.

Undoubtedly, libraries have an important role to play in the OA “revolution” (Burns, 2018), although not as assenting boosters but as critical voices that advocate for the rights of workers.

URL : OA isn’t free, it costs folks like you and me. How open access ideology obscures labour inequity in academia

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5206/elip.v5i1.14524

Characteristics of ‘mega’ peer-reviewers

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Authors : Danielle B. Rice, Ba’ Pham, Justin Presseau, Andrea C. Tricco, David Moher

Background

The demand for peer reviewers is often perceived as disproportionate to the supply and availability of reviewers. Considering characteristics associated with peer review behaviour can allow for the development of solutions to manage the growing demand for peer reviewers.

The objective of this research was to compare characteristics among two groups of reviewers registered in Publons.

Methods

A descriptive cross-sectional study design was used to compare characteristics between (1) individuals completing at least 100 peer reviews (‘mega peer reviewers’) from January 2018 to December 2018 as and (2) a control group of peer reviewers completing between 1 and 18 peer reviews over the same time period.

Data was provided by Publons, which offers a repository of peer reviewer activities in addition to tracking peer reviewer publications and research metrics. Mann Whitney tests and chi-square tests were conducted comparing characteristics (e.g., number of publications, number of citations, word count of peer review) of mega peer reviewers to the control group of reviewers.

Results

A total of 1596 peer reviewers had data provided by Publons. A total of 396 M peer reviewers and a random sample of 1200 control group reviewers were included. A greater proportion of mega peer reviews were male (92%) as compared to the control reviewers (70% male).

Mega peer reviewers demonstrated a significantly greater average number of total publications, citations, receipt of Publons awards, and a higher average h index as compared to the control group of reviewers (all p < .001). We found no statistically significant differences in the number of words between the groups (p > .428).

Conclusions

Mega peer reviewers registered in the Publons database also had a higher number of publications and citations as compared to a control group of reviewers. Additional research that considers motivations associated with peer review behaviour should be conducted to help inform peer reviewing activity.

URL : Characteristics of ‘mega’ peer-reviewers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-022-00121-1

The need for accelerated change in diversity, equity and inclusion in publishing and learned societies

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Author : Jonathan Roscoe

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) is a key priority for many organizations and institutions, including learned societies. With diversity at universities, both in the UK and around the world, being reported as low, it was decided to make DE&I one of the main areas of enquiry for the seventh Wiley Society Member Survey, conducted in May 2021.

We found that satisfaction with levels of representation for gender, race and ethnicity was falling and that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic had disproportionately affected those already most disadvantaged within the academic hierarchy.

In order to fully understand the current status of DE&I in academia, and within societies in particular, this paper also draws on other research undertaken or supported by Wiley, including a survey of journal editors and the Brave New World study, as well as further research in which Wiley was not involved.

What it shows is that academic research, learned societies and publishing all have their own DE&I issues that need to be addressed, but that through improved DE&I can come better research.

URL : The need for accelerated change in diversity, equity and inclusion in publishing and learned societies

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1457

The Rise of Platinum Open Access Journals with Both Impact Factors and Zero Article Processing Charges

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Author : Joshua M. Pearce

It appears that open access (OA) academic publishing is better for science because it provides frictionless access to make significant advancements in knowledge. OA also benefits individual researchers by providing the widest possible audience and concomitant increased citation rates.

OA publishing rates are growing fast as increasing numbers of funders demand it and is currently dominated by gold OA (authors pay article processing charges (APCs)). Academics with limited financial resources perceive they must choose between publishing behind pay walls or using research funds for OA publishing.

Worse, many new OA journals with low APCs did not have impact factors, which reduces OA selection for tenure track professors. Such unpleasant choices may be dissolving. This article provides analysis with a free and open source python script to collate all journals with impact factors with the now more than 12,000 OA journals that are truly platinum OA (neither the author nor the readers pay for the peer-reviewed work).

The results found platinum OA is growing faster than both academic publishing and OA publishing. There are now over 350 platinum OA journals with impact factors over a wide variety of academic disciplines, giving most academics options for OA with no APCs.

URL : The Rise of Platinum Open Access Journals with Both Impact Factors and Zero Article Processing Charges

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/knowledge2020013

Surveillance Publishing

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Author : Jeff Pooley

This essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing, with special attention to the example of Elsevier. A scholarly publisher can be defined as a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior.

The essay begins by tracing the Google search engine’s roots in bibliometrics, alongside a history of the citation analysis company that became, in 2016, Clarivate. The essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing by engaging with the work of Shoshana Zuboff, Jathan Sadowski, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, and Aziz Huq.

The recent history of Elsevier is traced to describe the company’s research-lifecycle data-harvesting strategy, with the aim to develop and sell prediction products to unviersity and other customers.

The essay concludes by considering some of the potential costs of surveillance publishing, as other big commercial publishers increasingly enter the predictive-analytics business. It is likely, I argue, that windfall subscription-and-APC profits in Elsevier’s “legacy” publishing business have financed its decade-long acquisition binge in analytics.

The products’ purpose, moreover, is to streamline the top-down assessment and evaluation practices that have taken hold in recent decades. A final concern is that scholars will internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors.

URL : Surveillance Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.1874