Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Legal and policy implications of licenses between LIS open access journal publishers and authors : A qualitative case study

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Authors : Tomas A. Lipinski, Katie Chamberlain Kritikos

“Open access” (“OA”) refers to research placed online free from all price barriers and from most permission barriers (Suber, 2015). OA may apply to research outputs published traditionally, such as books (Schwartz, 2012) and articles in academic journals (Suber, 2015), and non-traditionally, such as student dissertations and theses (Schöpfel & Prost).

The lack of legal barriers is grounded in and given effect through the law of copyright and contract, and the submission of content by authors is often executed through a publication agreement.

This paper studies the contract aspects of OA and the open publishing movement in library and information science (“LIS”) scholarly communication. To explore this phenomenon, it undertakes a case study of the publication agreements of five OA LIS journals.

The sample consists of a brand-new open journal with an agreements drafted by copyright librarians (journal 1) and top-ranked LIS journals that converted to OA (journals 2 through 5) (Scimago, 2017).

With a descriptive data analysis based on that in Lipinski and Copeland (2015; 2013) and Lipinski (2013; 2012), the case study investigates the similarities and differences in the agreements used by the sampled OA LIS journals.

The study builds on the best practices from the Harvard Open Access Project (Shieber & Suber, 2016; 2013). It recommends best practices for the drafting and content of OA LIS publication agreements.

URL : Legal and policy implications of licenses between LIS open access journal publishers and authors : A qualitative case study

Alternative location : http://www.qqml-journal.net/index.php/qqml/article/view/440

Access, preservation and analysis in a consortial journal archive: the evolution of Scholars Portal Journals

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Authors : Sabina Pagotto, Wei Zhao

This article discusses Scholars Portal Journals (SP Journals), a library consortium-run platform that aggregates and archives licensed scholarly journal content in the province of Ontario, Canada.

Born in the early days of e-journals out of a need to provide consistent and long-term access to scholarly materials in the sometimes volatile world of online publishing, SP Journals has evolved into a major digital repository and archive.

With over 55 million full-text articles and serving a student population of just under half a million, SP Journals represents a major investment in access to online scholarship.

This article explains the lifecycle of content on the platform, from initial publisher negotiations to delivering usage reports, and discusses considerations of running a locally hosted journal platform.

URL : Access, preservation and analysis in a consortial journal archive: the evolution of Scholars Portal Journals

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.458

The effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals

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Authors : Giangiacomo Bravo, Francisco Grimaldo, Emilia López-Iñesta, Bahar Mehmani, Flaminio Squazzoni

To increase transparency in science, some scholarly journals are publishing peer review reports. But it is unclear how this practice affects the peer review process. Here, we examine the effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals involved in a pilot study at Elsevier.

By considering 9,220 submissions and 18,525 reviews from 2010 to 2017, we measured changes both before and during the pilot and found that publishing reports did not significantly compromise referees’ willingness to review, recommendations, or turn-around times.

Younger and non-academic scholars were more willing to accept to review and provided more positive and objective recommendations. Male referees tended to write more constructive reports during the pilot.

Only 8.1% of referees agreed to reveal their identity in the published report. These findings suggest that open peer review does not compromise the process, at least when referees are able to protect their anonymity.

URL : The effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-08250-2

Scholarly Communication and Open Access in Psychology: Current Considerations for Researchers

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Author : Laura Bowering Mullen

Scholarly communication and open access practices in psychological science are rapidly evolving. However, most published works that focus on scholarly communication issues do not target the specific discipline, and instead take a more “one size fits all” approach.

When it comes to scholarly communication, practices and traditions vary greatly across the disciplines. It is important to look at issues such as open access (of all types), reproducibility, research data management, citation metrics, the emergence of preprint options, the evolution of new peer review models, coauthorship conventions, and use of scholarly networking sites such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu from a disciplinary perspective.

Important issues in scholarly publishing for psychology include uptake of authors’ use of open access megajournals, how open science is represented in psychology journals, challenges of interdisciplinarity, and how authors avail themselves of green and gold open access strategies.

This overview presents a discipline-focused treatment of selected scholarly communication topics that will allow psychology researchers and others to get up to speed on this expansive topic.

Further study into researcher behavior in terms of scholarly communication in psychology would create more understanding of existing culture as well as provide early career researchers with a more effective roadmap to the current landscape.

As no other single work provides a study of scholarly communication and open access in psychology, this work aims to partially fill that niche.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2d7um

Correcting duplicate publications: follow up study of MEDLINE tagged duplications

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Authors : Mario Malički, Ana Utrobičić, Ana Marušić

Introduction

As MEDLINE indexers tag similar articles as duplicates even when journals have not addressed the duplication(s), we sought to determine the reasons behind the tagged duplications, and if the journals had undertaken or had planned to undertake any actions to address them.

Materials and methods

On 16 January 2013, we extracted all tagged duplicate publications (DPs), analysed published notices, and then contacted MEDLINE and editors regarding cases unaddressed by notices.

For non-respondents, we compared full text of the articles. We followed up the study for the next 5 years to see if any changes occurred.

Results

We found 1011 indexed DPs, which represented 555 possible DP cases (in MEDLINE, both the original and the duplicate are assigned a DP tag). Six cases were excluded as we could not obtain their full text.

Additional 190 (35%) cases were incorrectly tagged as DPs. Of 359 actual cases of DPs, 200 (54%) were due to publishers’ actions (e.g. identical publications in the same journal), and 159 (46%) due to authors’ actions (e.g. article submission to more than one journal). Of the 359 cases, 185 (52%) were addressed by notices, but only 25 (7%) retracted.

Following our notifications, MEDLINE corrected 138 (73%) incorrectly tagged cases, and editors retracted 8 articles.

Conclusions

Despite clear policies on how to handle DPs, just half (54%) of the DPs in MEDLINE were addressed by journals and only 9% retracted. Publishers, editors, and indexers need to develop and implement standards for better correction of duplicate published records.

URL : Correcting duplicate publications: follow up study of MEDLINE tagged duplications

DOI : https://doi.org/10.11613/BM.2019.010201

Merits and Limits: Applying open data to monitor open access publications in bibliometric databases

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Authors : Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Stephan Stahlschmidt

Identifying and monitoring Open Access (OA) publications might seem a trivial task while practical efforts prove otherwise. Contradictory information arise often depending on metadata employed.

We strive to assign OA status to publications in Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus while complementing it with different sources of OA information to resolve contradicting cases.

We linked publications from WOS and Scopus via DOIs and ISSNs to Unpaywall, Crossref, DOAJ and ROAD. Only about 50% of articles and reviews from WOS and Scopus could be matched via a DOI to Unpaywall.

Matching with Crossref brought 56 distinct licences, which define in many cases the legally binding access status of publications. But only 44% of publications hold only a single licence on Crossref, while more than 50% have no licence information submitted to Crossref.

Contrasting OA information from Crossref licences with Unpaywall we found contradictory cases overall amounting to more than 25%, which might be partially explained by (ex-)including green OA.

A further manual check found about 17% of OA publications that are not accessible and 15% non-OA publications that are accessible through publishers’ websites. These preliminary results suggest that identification of OA state of publications denotes a difficult and currently unfulfilled task.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03937

Open data to evaluate academic researchers: an experiment with the Italian Scientific Habilitation

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Authors : Angelo Di Iorio, Silvio Peroni, Francesco Poggi

The need for scholarly open data is ever increasing. While there are large repositories of open access articles and free publication indexes, there are still a few examples of free citation networks and their coverage is partial.

One of the results is that most of the evaluation processes based on citation counts rely on commercial citation databases. Things are changing under the pressure of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), whose goal is to campaign for scholarly publishers to make their citations as totally open.

This paper investigates the growth of open citations with an experiment on the Italian Scientific Habilitation, the National process for University Professor qualification which instead uses data from commercial indexes.

We simulated the procedure by only using open data and explored similarities and differences with the official results. The outcomes of the experiment show that the amount of open citation data currently available is not yet enough for obtaining similar results.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03287