Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Publishing

Monographs and Open Access : A report to HEFCE

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“This report examines, and seeks to clarify, the range of issues that emerge when we think about the relationship between open access and monographs (including under this latter term other long scholarly publications). It arises from the immediate need of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and its sister funding councils in the UK, to examine the issues for open access in relation to books in a context where both funding and research councils in the UK have already established open-access requirements for publications in journals and conference proceedings, but the issues are much greater than those of defining the practicalities of mandates and the sustainability of open-access models. Furthermore, although the principal focus of the report is defined by the culture and policy preoccupations of higher education in this country, the international character of research, publishing, and academic careers has to be acknowledged.”

URL : http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/pubs/indirreports/2015/monographsandopenaccess/2014_monographs.pdf

Indian research going global: A study on the status of open access publishing

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Aims to measure quantitatively the scholarly journals which were produced with full immediate open access (OA) from 2003 to 2013. Focuses on the amount of India’s contribution to scholarly literature through the repositories of their institutions, amount of literature produced in various disciplines and the open source software’s (OSS) used for it.

Aims to know the current status of open access publishing in India. A survey of the open access journals indexed in the Directory of Open access Journals (DOAJ) and the repositories indexed in the Open DOAR is followed for this study. India started making its journals open access in 2003 with about 13 journals in a year and has reached about 197 journals till September 2013, which shows a growth of 15 fold of the open access journal output within a year.

The percentage of the multidisciplinary repositories is highest with 43% and the repositories of the disciplines such as Technology, Chemistry and Chemical Technology and Physics and Astronomy are 18%, 15% and 14% respectively among the 64 repositories listed in OpenDOAR.

With about 650 open access journals and about 64 open access directories, India has made important contributions towards the growth of Open access publishing.

URL : http://www.spoars.org/journal/v3n4p4

Digitization, Internet publishing and the revival of scholarly monographs: An empirical study in India

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“This research shows the growing utility of internet-based digital models in reviving the crisis-stricken traditional print monograph publishing. The rising prices of scientific journals in the past three decades forced academic and research libraries to resort to cutbacks on monograph budgets. The declining sales to libraries and rising production costs led to a significant drop in global demand for print monographs, rendering monograph publishing financially unattractive. Combining the flexibility of digitized content with the global reach of the Internet, three emerging digital models — print on demand, bundled e-books, and e-consortia — are beginning to revamp the monograph publishing business.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4932

Dark Research: information content in many modern research papers is not easily discoverable online

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“Background: Research is published in indexed, online scholarly journals so that published knowledge can be easily found and built upon by others. Most scholars rely on relatively few online indexing service providers to search for relevant scholarly content. It is under-appreciated that the quality of indexing can vary across different journals and that this can have an adverse effect on the quality of research.

Objective: In this short paper I compare the recall of commonly used online indexers; Google Scholar, Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Microsoft Academic Search and Mendeley Search against a selection of over 20,000 papers published in two different high-volume journals: PLOS ONE and Zootaxa.

Results: When using Google Scholar, content in Zootaxa has low recall for search terms that are known to occur in it, significantly lower than the near-perfect recall of the same terms in PLOS ONE. All other indexers tend to have lower recall than Google Scholar except Scopus which outperformed Google Scholar for recall on Zootaxa searches. I also elaborate why Dark Research is undesirable for optimal scientific progress with some recommendations for change.

Conclusion: This research is a basic proof-of-concept which demonstrates that when searching for published scholarly content, relevant studies can remain hidden as ’Dark Research’ in poorly-indexed journals, even despite expertise-informed efforts to find the content. The technological capability to do full text indexing on all modern scholarly journal content certainly exists, it is perhaps just publisher-imposed access-restrictions on content that prevents this from happening.”

URL : Dark Research: information content in many modern research papers is not easily discoverable online

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.773v1

Episciences IAM: un projet éditorial entre rupture et continuité

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“Avec le lancement de deux revues scientifiques, Episciences IAM (Informatics and Applied Mathematics) s’engage dans la voie des épi-journaux. Le principe du projet est de publier des résultats scientifiques labellisés par des revues du meilleur niveau. Il s’agit de contribuer à l’édition en Open Access pour un accès libre plus équitable. Au moyen d’une plateforme technique, des contributions scientifiques déjà en archive ouverte sont soumises à un processus d’évaluation et de validation scientifiques. Conçu à terme comme une infrastructure de recherche inter-établissements, le projet Episciences IAM s’appuie sur la plateforme Episciences, développée et hébergée par le CCSD du CNRS.”

URL : http://icoa2014.sciencesconf.org/37934

A Survey of Physical Sciences, Engineering and Mathematics Faculty Regarding Author Fees in Open Access Journals

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“Discussions of the potential of open access publishing frequently must contend with the skepticism of research authors regarding the need to pay author fees (also known as publication fees). With that in mind, the authors undertook a survey of faculty, postdocs, and graduate students in physical science, mathematics, and engineering fields at two research universities (Cornell University and Syracuse University) asking for their experience with and opinion of paying author fees for publication of research in open access journals. The results of this survey indicated that most respondents had not decided against publishing in an open access journal due to the author fee requirement. Those who had paid them only requested or received coverage for those fees in grant line-items or from institutional sources in a few cases. Responses seemed to combine cautious optimism about open access journals with intense skepticism about their quality and intense opposition to the idea of having to pay any additional costs from their own pockets.”

URL : http://www.istl.org/14-fall/refereed1.html

“Free to All”: Library Publishing and the Challenge of Open Access

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“There is a significant and important responsibility as libraries move into the role of publishing to retain our heritage of “access for all.” Connecting and collaborating with colleagues in the publishing industry is essential, but should come with the understanding that the library as an organization is access-prone. This article discusses the complexities of navigating that relationship, and calls for libraries and publishers to embrace and respect the position from which we begin. Finally, the article forecasts several possible characteristics of what “publishing” might look like if libraries press the principle of access in this growing area.”

URL : “Free to All”: Library Publishing and the Challenge of Open Access

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1181