Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Publishing

Stability and Longevity in the Publication Careers of U.S. Doctorate Recipients

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Since the 1950s, the number of doctorate recipients has risen dramatically in the United States. In this paper, we investigate whether the longevity of doctorate recipients’ publication careers has changed.

This is achieved by matching 1951–2010 doctorate recipients with rare names in astrophysics, chemistry, economics, genetics and psychology in the dissertation database ProQuest to their publications in the publication database Web of Science.

Our study shows that pre-PhD publication careers have changed: the median year of first publication has shifted from after the PhD to several years before PhD in most of the studied fields. In contrast, post-PhD publication career spans have not changed much in most fields.

The share of doctorate recipients who have published for more than twenty years has remained stable over time; the shares of doctorate recipients publishing for shorter periods also remained almost unchanged.

Thus, though there have been changes in pre-PhD publication careers, post-PhD career spans remained quite stable.

URL : Stability and Longevity in the Publication Careers of U.S. Doctorate Recipients

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0154741

Comparing Published Scientific Journal Articles to Their Pre-print Versions

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Academic publishers claim that they add value to scholarly communications by coordinating reviews and contributing and enhancing text during publication.

These contributions come at a considerable cost: U.S. academic libraries paid $1.7 billion for serial subscriptions in 2008 alone. Library budgets, in contrast, are flat and not able to keep pace with serial price inflation.

We have investigated the publishers’ value proposition by conducting a comparative study of pre-print papers and their final published counterparts.

This comparison had two working assumptions: 1) if the publishers’ argument is valid, the text of a pre-print paper should vary measurably from its corresponding final published version, and 2) by applying standard similarity measures, we should be able to detect and quantify such differences.

Our analysis revealed that the text contents of the scientific papers generally changed very little from their pre-print to final published versions. These findings contribute empirical indicators to discussions of the added value of commercial publishers and therefore should influence libraries’ economic decisions regarding access to scholarly publications.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05363

A Journal is a Club: A New Economic Model for Scholarly Publishing

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A new economic model for analysis of scholarly publishing—journal publishing in particular—is proposed that draws on club theory. The standard approach builds on market failure in the private production (by research scholars) of a public good (new scholarly knowledge).

In that model publishing is communication, as the dissemination of information. But a club model views publishing differently: namely as group formation, where members form groups in order to confer externalities on each other, subject to congestion.

A journal is a self-constituted group, endeavouring to create new knowledge. In this sense ‘a journal is a club’. The knowledge club model of a journal seeks to balance the positive externalities due to a shared resource (readers, citations, referees) against negative externalities due to crowding (decreased prospect of publishing in that journal).

A new economic model of a journal as a ‘knowledge club’ is elaborated. We suggest some consequences for the management of journals and financial models that might be developed to support them.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2763975

Open peer review : from an experiment to a model. A narrative of an open peer review experimentation

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This article narrates the development of the experimentation of an open peer review and open commentary protocols. This experiment concerns propositions of articles for the environmental sciences journal VertigO, digital and open access scientific publication.

This experiment did not last long enough (4 months) and was not deployed on a large enough corpus (10 preprints) to lead to firm quantitative conclusions. However, it highlights practical leads and thoughts about the potentialities and the limitations of the open review processes – in the broadest sense – for scientific publishing.

Based on the exemplary of the experiment and a participant observation as a copy-editor devoted to open peer review, the article finally proposes a model from the experimented prototype.

This model, named OPRISM, could be implemented on other publishing contexts for social sciences and humanities. Central and much debated activity in the academic world, peer review refers to different practices such as control, validation, allocation and contradiction exercised by the scientific community for itself.

Its scope is wide: from the allocation for funding to the relevance of a recruitment. According to common sense, the control of the scientific community by itself is a guarantee of scientific quality.

This issue became even more important in an international context of competition between universities and between scholars themselves.

URL : Open peer review : from an experiment to a model

Alternative location : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01302597

Access to human, animal, and environmental journals is still limited for the One Health community

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Objective

“One Health” is an interdisciplinary approach to evaluating and managing the health and well-being of humans, animals, and the environments they share that relies on knowledge from the domains of human health, animal health, and the environmental sciences.

The authors’ objective was to evaluate the extent of open access (OA) to journal articles in a sample of literature from these domains. We hypothesized that OA to articles in human health or environmental journals was greater than access to animal health literature.

Methods

A One Health seminar series provided fifteen topics. One librarian translated each topic into a search strategy and searched four databases for articles from 2011 to 2012.

Two independent investigators assigned each article to human health, the environment, animal health, all, other, or combined categories. Article and journal-level OA were determined. Each journal was also assigned a subject category and its indexing evaluated.

Results

Searches retrieved 2,651 unique articles from 1,138 journals; 1,919 (72%) articles came from 406 journals that contributed more than 1 article. Seventy-seven (7%) journals dealt with all 3 One Health domains; the remaining journals represented human health 487 (43%), environment 172 (15%), animal health 141 (12%), and other/combined categories 261 (23%).

The proportion of OA journals in animal health (40%) differed significantly from journals categorized as human (28%), environment (28%), and more than 1 category (29%). The proportion of OA for articles by subject categories ranged from 25%–34%; only the difference between human (34%) and environment (25%) was significant.

Conclusions

OA to human health literature is more comparable to animal health than hypothesized. Environmental journals had less OA than anticipated.

URL : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816484/

On the Marginal Cost of Scholarly Communication

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We assessed the marginal cost of scholarly communication from the perspective of an agent looking to start an independent, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. We found that various vendors can accommodate all of the services required for scholarly communication for a price ranging between $69 and $318 per article.

In contrast, if an agent had access to software solutions replacing the services provided by vendors, the marginal cost of scholarly communication would be reduced to the cloud infrastructure cost alone and drop to between $1.36 and $1.61 per article.

Incidentally, DOI registration alone accounts for between 82% and 98% of this cost. While vendor cost typically decreases with higher volume, new offerings in cloud computing exhibit the opposite trend, challenging the notion that large volume publishers benefit from economies of scales as compared to smaller publishers.

Given the current lack of software solutions fulfilling the functions of scholarly communication, we conclude that the development of high quality “plug-and-play” open source software solutions would have a significant impact in reducing the marginal cost of scholarly communication, making it more open to experimentation and innovation.

URL : https://research.science.ai/article/on-the-marginal-cost-of-scholarly-communication

Big Publishers, Bigger Profits: How the Scholarly Community Lost the Control of its Journals

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Despite holding the potential to liberate scholarly information, the digital era has, to the contrary, increased the control of a few for-profit publishers. While most journals in the print era were owned by academic institutions and scientific societies, the majority of scientific papers are currently published by five for-profit publishers, which often exhibit profit margins between 30%-40%.

This paper documents the evolution of this consolidation over the last 40 years, discusses the peculiar economics of scholarly publishing, and reflects upon the role of publishers in today’s academe.

URL : Big Publishers, Bigger Profits: How the Scholarly Community Lost the Control of its Journals

Alternative location : http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/view/26422