Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Publishing

How society publishers can accelerate their transition to open access and align with Plan S

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Authors : Alicia Wise, Lorraine Estelle

Wellcome, UK Research and Innovation, and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers commissioned Information Power Ltd. to undertake a project to support society publishers to accelerate their transition to open access (OA) in alignment with Plan S and the wider move to accelerate immediate OA.

This project is part of a range of activities that cOAlition S partners are taking forward to support the implementation of Plan S principles. The objective of this project was to explore with learned societies a range of potential strategies and business models through which they could adapt and thrive under Plan S.

We consulted with society publishers through interviews, surveys, and workshops about the 27 business models and strategies identified during the project.

We also surveyed library consortia about their willingness to support society publishers to make the transition to OA. Our key finding is that transformative agreements emerge as the most promising model because they offer a predictable, steady funding stream.

We also facilitated pilot transformative agreement negotiations between several society publishers and library consortia. These pilots and a workshop of consortium representatives and society publishers informed the development of an OA transformative agreement toolkit.

Our conclusion is that society publishers should consider all the business models this project has developed and should not automatically equate OA with article publication charges.

URL : How society publishers can accelerate their transition to open access and align with Plan S

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1272

The role of learned societies in national scholarly publishing

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Authors : Elina Late, Laura Korkeamäki, Janne Pölönen, Sami Syrjämäki

This study examines the role of learned societies as publishers in Finland based on bibliographic information from two Finnish databases. We studied the share of learned societies’ peer‐reviewed publication channels (serials with ISSNs and book publishers with distinct ISBN roots) and outputs (journal articles, conference articles, book articles, and monographs) in Finland.

We also studied the share of learned societies’ open access (OA) publications. In 2018, there were 402 peer‐reviewed publication channels in Finland. In 2011–2017, the number of peer‐reviewed publications from scholars working in Finnish universities and published in Finland was 17,724.

Learned societies publish around 70% of these channels and publications, mostly in the fields of humanities and social sciences. Learned societies in Finland focus on journal publishing, whereas university presses and commercial publishers focus on book publishing. In 2016–2017, 38.4% of the learned societies’ outputs were OA.

This study concludes that Finnish learned societies play an integral part in national scholarly publishing. They play an especially important role in journal publishing, as commercial publishers produce only 2.6% of Finnish journals and book series, and only 1.4% of the journal articles from scholars working in Finnish universities.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1270

The journal publishing services agreement: A guide for societies

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Author : Michael T. Clarke

Societies have two fundamental choices when it comes to publishing their journals: they can remain independent, managing all facets of the publication business, or they can work with a larger commercial or not‐for‐profit publisher. If a society chooses to work with a larger publisher, it will invariably do so via a publishing services agreement.

This article discusses the challenges and complexities facing independent society publishers and the reasons why some societies choose to enter into publisher services agreements, whereas others choose to remain independent.

URL : The journal publishing services agreement: A guide for societies

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1266

Transformation: the future of society publishing

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Authors : Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Gaynor Redvers-Mutton

The release in September 2018 of Plan S has led many small and society publishers to examine their business models, and in particular ways to transform their journals from hybrids into pure open access (OA) titles.

This paper explores one means by which a society publisher might transform, focused specifically on the institutional set-price publish and read (P&R) package being developed by the Microbiology Society based on assessments of: the geographic diversity of our author and subscriber bases; trends in article numbers, article costs and revenues; the administrative complexity of the options; and the reputational and financial risks to the Society associated with the package.

We outline the process we followed to calculate the financial and publishing implications of P&R at different price points, and share our view that these kinds of packages are a stop on the way to new models of OA that do not rely on article processing charges (APCs).

Our hope is that in sharing our experience, we will contribute to a collective best practice about how to transform society publishing.

URL : Transformation: the future of society publishing

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.486

Article processing charges: Mirroring the citation impact or legacy of the subscription-based model?

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Author : Nina Schönfelder

With the ongoing open-access transformation, article processing charges (APCs) are gaining importance as one of the main business models for open-access publishing in scientific journals.

This paper analyzes how much of APC pricing can be attributed to journal-related factors. With UK data from OpenAPC (which aggregates fees paid for open-access articles by universities, funders, and research institutions), APCs are explained by the following variables: (1) the “source normalized impact per paper” (SNIP), (2) whether the journal is open access or hybrid, (3) the publisher of the journal, (4) the subject area of the journal, and (5) the year.

The results of the multivariate linear regression show that the journal’s impact and the hybrid status are the most important factors for the level of APCs. However, the relationship between APC and SNIP is different for open-access journals and hybrid journals.

APCs paid to open-access journals were found to be strongly increasing in conjunction with higher journal citation impact, whereas this relationship was observed to be much looser for articles in hybrid journals.

This paper goes beyond simple statistics, which have been discussed so far in the literature, by using control variables and applying statistical inference.

URL : Article processing charges: Mirroring the citation impact or legacy of the subscription-based model?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00015

Publishing computational research — A review of infrastructures for reproducible and transparent scholarly communication

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Authors : Markus Konkol, Daniel Nüst, Laura Goulier

Funding agencies increasingly ask applicants to include data and software management plans into proposals. In addition, the author guidelines of scientific journals and conferences more often include a statement on data availability, and some reviewers reject unreproducible submissions.

This trend towards open science increases the pressure on authors to provide access to the source code and data underlying the computational results in their scientific papers.

Still, publishing reproducible articles is a demanding task and not achieved simply by providing access to code scripts and data files. Consequently, several projects develop solutions to support the publication of executable analyses alongside articles considering the needs of the aforementioned stakeholders.

The key contribution of this paper is a review of applications addressing the issue of publishing executable computational research results. We compare the approaches across properties relevant for the involved stakeholders, e.g., provided features and deployment options, and also critically discuss trends and limitations.

The review can support publishers to decide which system to integrate into their submission process, editors to recommend tools for researchers, and authors of scientific papers to adhere to reproducibility principles.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.00484

Business as Usual with Article Processing Charges in the Transition towards OA Publishing: A Case Study Based on Elsevier

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Author : Sergio Copiello

This paper addresses the topic of the article processing charges (APCs) that are paid when publishing articles using the open access (OA) option. Building on the Elsevier OA price list, company balance sheet figures, and ScienceDirect data, tentative answers to three questions are outlined using a Monte Carlo approach to deal with the uncertainty inherent in the inputs.

The first question refers to the level of APCs from the market perspective, under the hypothesis that all the articles published in Elsevier journals exploit the OA model so that the subscription to ScienceDirect becomes worthless.

The second question is how much Elsevier should charge for publishing all the articles under the OA model, assuming the profit margin reduces and adheres to the market benchmark.

The third issue is how many articles would have to be accepted, in an OA-only publishing landscape, so that the publisher benefits from the same revenue and profit margin as in the recent past.

The results point to high APCs, nearly twice the current level, being required to preserve the publisher’s profit margin. Otherwise, by relaxing that constraint, a downward shift of APCs can be expected so they would tend to get close to current values. Accordingly, the article acceptance rate could be likely to grow from 26–27% to about 35–55%.

URL : Business as Usual with Article Processing Charges in the Transition towards OA Publishing: A Case Study Based on Elsevier

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8010003