Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Publishing

Online Access and the Scientific Journal Market An…

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Online Access and the Scientific Journal Market: An Economist’s Perspective (Draft Report for the National Academy of Sciences) :

In Section 1 of the report I will focus on the most basic unit of analysis – the scientific journal as a communication platform – and then discuss the behavior of publishers, authors, libraries, etc. Once this is accomplished, I can address the questions identified earlier: in Section 2, the journals crisis, and in Section 3, the impact of online access on citations. Finally, Section 4 summarizes the main conclusions of the report, considers the policy implications and offers some directions for future research.”

URL : https://commons.georgetown.edu/blogs/copyrightnrc/files/NRC-Copyright-McCabe-NAS-Report-draft2.pdf

Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal…

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Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal Ranking :

“Academic journal ranking serves as an important criterion for the scholarly community to assess research quality and for librarians to select the best publications for collection development. Because of the complexity of publication behaviors, various approaches have been developed to assist in journal ranking, of which comparing the rates of citation using citation indexes to rate journals has been popularly practiced and recognized in most academic disciplines. ISI’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is among the most used rankings, which “offers a systematic, objective means to critically evaluate the world’s leading journals, with quantifiable, statistical information based on citation data.” Yet, citation-based journal rankings, such as JCR, have included few open access journals on their lists. Of these limited OA journals, many were either recently converted into open access or are publicly available with conditions. The relative exclusion of OA journals creates two deficiencies for scholarly communication.First, these rankings may not accurately portray the full picture of journal publications to reflect an on-going advancement in scholarship. Second, they may discourage the open access movement by marginalizing the majority of OA journals. In fact, some OA journals have successfully built reputations, attracting high-quality articles and sizable numbers of citations.

This research is an attempt to add selected OA journals to the journal quality rankings using library and information science (LIS) as an example. It is helpful to detect the position of OA journals in journal rankings so that scholars can recognize the progresses of OA publishing and make active contributions to support the OA movement. Such rankings will also encourage librarians and information professionals to improve the existing library publishing enterprise and make continuous efforts for journal practices.”

URL : http://infodocket.com/2011/05/19/preprint-positioning-open-access-journals-in-a-lis-journal-ranking/

Use made of open access journals by Indian…

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Use made of open access journals by Indian researchers to publish their findings :

“Most of the papers published in the more than 360 Indian open access journals are by Indian researchers. But how many papers do they publish in high impact international open access journals? We have looked at India’s contribution to all seven Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals, 10 BioMed Central (BMC) journals and Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports. Indian crystallographers have published more than 2,000 structure reports in Acta Crystallographica, second only to China in number of papers, but have a much better citations per paper average than USA, Britain, Germany and France, China and South Korea. India’s contribution to BMC and PLoS journals, on the other hand, is modest at best. We suggest that the better option for India is institutional self-archiving.”

URL : http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/10may2011/1297.pdf

DINI Certificate Document and Publication Services 2010…

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DINI Certificate “Document and Publication Services” 2010 :

“In summer 2010 the DINI working group for Electronic Publishing released the third edition of the DINI Certificate “Document and Publication Services” and by this adapted the well-established criteria catalogue for scholarly repository services to current developments. Now, the English version of the DINI Certificate 2010 has been made available to the public.

The global scientific communication system is subject to a fundamental transition process. Due to new opportunities arising from the internet and other information and communication technologies and also to the changing requirements of scholars and scientists, new means and channels for scientific communication develop. A leading development is the global Open Access movement committed to the idea of freely available scientific and scholarly publications.

To support the numerous developments in Germany and to set common standards for publication infrastructures DINI’s Electronic Publishing working group embraced this topic early on and in 2002 published its first recommendations for “Electronic Publishing in Higher Education”. Based on these documents, the working group formulated criteria and formalized them in the DINI Certificate “Document and Publication Services”. Following the 2004 and 2007 editions, 2010 is the third version of the document. The certificate describes technical, organisational and legal aspects that should be considered in the process of setting up and operating a scholarly repository service and puts considerable interest in Open Access. The aim of DINI is to move forward towards a standardised and interoperable repository landscape to improve the visibility and linkages of scientific publications. During the years the DINI certificate has gained reputation as standard-setting authority for repositories.

The latest edition of the DINI certificate addresses particularly the following aspects:
– The growing importance of the “golden road” to Open Access.
– The increased demand for interoperability with comprehensive services.
– The growing technical virtualization of Document and Publication Services (hosting of services).
– A comprehensive view of the scientific and scholarly research processes.”

URL : https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5803.html

Journal tendering for societies: a brief guide

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Hundreds of societies publish journals in collaboration with publishers. Some may be considering how and whether to renegotiate or go out to tender. Some may be considering whether they can/should/wish to change the business model of the journal (e.g. by a move to Open Access). Other societies may be considering using an external publisher for the first time.

This guide, based on our experience, is written for all of these. In their negotiations with publishers learned societies – especially smaller ones – may have difficulty articulating their requirements and assessing the publishers’ offerings. This is true where they wish to compare the newer models with typical “conventional” models, or simply compare different conventional offerings.

The reasons are complex and include:

  • lack of knowledge of the publishing industry on the part of the society’s executive staff (who cannot always find the time to acquire the knowledge);
  • the “author/research funder pays” models, which, whilst becoming more prevalent in the domains of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), appear (but may not actually be) rather less feasible in other domains.

This guide draws on the experience of one learned society, the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), in reviewing the publishing arrangements for its journal Research in Learning Technology, between September and December 2010.

URL : http://repository.alt.ac.uk/887/

Back to the future: authors, publishers and ideas in a copy-friendly environment

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How could scholars survive in a copy-friendly environment jeopardizing the established system of scholarly publishing in which scientific publishers seemed to be authors’ best friends? A backward itinerary across three German Enlightenment thinkers who took part to the debate on (unauthorized) reprinting shows us ways – usual and unusual – in which culture can flourish in a copy-friendly environment.

While Fichte endorsed an intellectual property theory, took the function of publishers for granted and neglected the interests of the public, Kant saw authors as speakers and justified publishers’ rights only as long as they work as spokespersons helping writers to reach the public. Eventually Lessing’s project was designed to foster authors’ autonomy by means of a subscription system that could have worked only on the basis of a free information flow and of direct relationships with and within the public itself.

Such a condition can be compared with the situation of ancient auctores, with one difference: while the ancient communities of knowledge were educated minorities, because of the limitations of orality and manuscript media system, we have now the opportunity to take Enlightenment seriously.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15445

The costs and potential benefits of alternative scholarly…

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The costs and potential benefits of alternative scholarly publishing models :

“Introduction. This paper reports on a study undertaken for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which explored the economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models. Rather than simply summarising the study’s findings, this paper focuses on the approach and presents a step-by-step account of the research process, highlighting the combination of process mapping, activity costing and macro modelling.

Method. The analysis relies primarily on existing sources, collating activity cost information from the wide-ranging literature on scholarly communication. Where necessary, these sources were supplemented by targeted informal consultation with experts.

Analysis. We examine the costs and potential benefits of the major alternative models for scholarly publishing, including subscription publishing, open access publishing and self-archiving. Adopting a formal approach to modelling the scholarly communication process and identifying activity costs, this paper presents activity and system-wide costs for each of the alternative publishing models. It then explores the potential impacts of enhanced access on returns to R&D.

Results. We find that different scholarly publishing models could make a material difference to the costs faced by various parties and to the returns on investment in R&D that might be realised.

Conclusion. It seems likely that more open access could have substantial benefits in the longer term. While the benefits may be lower during a transitional period they would be likely to be positive for both open access publishing and self-archiving alternatives.”

URL : http://informationr.net/ir/16-1/paper469.html