Étiquette : scientific communication

Catégories
EN

The African Platform for Open Scholarship Advancing Diamond Open Access and Inclusivity

Authors : Reggie Raju, Saiansha Maharaj

Geographic, language, peer review, and editorial biases have to be navigated by Global South authors to get published. Initially, the open access movement was praised for bridging the information access divide.

However, commercial publishers have hijacked the philanthropic ethos, turning it into a business model. Publishing charges add to the aforementioned biases, consolidating the exclusion of Global South scholarship. The African Platform for Open Scholarship developed by the University of Cape Town (UCT) counters these biases by offering free publishing infrastructure to advance the publishing of African scholarship without compromising academic rigor.

The platform adopts the diamond open access model to demarginalize Global South scholarship. Further, there is a discussion on the challenges and opportunities associated with creating an inclusive and equitable scholarly communication ecosystem. This paper focuses on UCT’s use of the platform to transition its commercial publishing arm (UCT Press) and to grow UCT Libraries Press. The paper will use exemplars to demonstrate the positive impact of these initiatives on the growth of diamond open access.

URL : The African Platform for Open Scholarship Advancing Diamond Open Access and Inclusivity

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18278

Catégories
FR

La visibilité des mémoires déposés sur DUMAS : une question de discipline

Auteurs : Matthieu Cisel, Nicolas Laudier

S’ils ne sont généralement pas considérés comme des écrits scientifiques de premier plan, les mémoires de Master de bonne qualité peuvent néanmoins se révéler utiles à la recherche, notamment car ils traitent souvent de sujets d’actualité et peuvent ce faisant accélérer le travail de chercheurs plus confirmés.

Encore faut-il qu’il existe des leviers de motivations susceptibles d’inciter les étudiants à mettre à disposition leur travail. Nous nous proposons ici d’explorer au prisme de la théorie de l’échange social l’un des mécanismes qui poussent les étudiant.es à mettre en ligne leur mémoire dans des archives dédiées : la visibilité du travail partagé, mesurée sur la base du nombre de téléchargements du document.

DUMAS, site français qui avait pris son essor à la fin des années 2000, centralisait en 2023 les manuscrits de plus de 50 000 étudiant.es. Via une technique de web scraping, nous avons collecté les métadonnées de l’ensemble ces manuscrits, pour mieux identifier les éléments qui déterminent la visibilité en ligne de ces travaux, tout en portant la focale sur les disciplines.

Nous montrons que les travaux relevant des sciences de gestion, bien que minoritaires dans la base, sont ceux qui attirent le plus l’attention des internautes au fil des ans, qui, au sein du répertoire, semblent rechercher avant tout des écrits à visée praxéologique.

Nous analysons au prisme de la théorie de l’activité d’Engeström les contradictions qui peuvent émerger de la possibilité pour les étudiants d’acquérir via DUMAS de la visibilité au sein du milieu académique comme en dehors de celui-ci.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13lft

Catégories
EN

Implementation of Transformative Agreements at the University of Chicago Library: A Case Study

Authors : Jessica Harris, Greg Fleming, Jennifer Hart, Adrian K. Ho, Barbara Kern,
Catherine Mardikes, Debra A. Werner

The University of Chicago Library created a working group, composed of librarians across the library, to engage in dedicated and focused work around transformative agreements, including understanding how they work and how the library should be engaging with them in a complex open access (OA) landscape.

The working group was charged with specific tasks, including determining challenges and opportunities around transformative agreements, developing criteria for determining when to use the library’s OA fund to pursue an agreement, conducting ongoing assessments of the agreements, and developing a set of recommendations to communicate this out to our wider campus community.

The group’s work included piloting several transformative agreements and establishing a rubric to evaluate these agreements. The creation of the group allowed the library to gain valuable knowledge and expertise, engage actively in new models for supporting OA, and start critical conversations on campus.

The group continues the work, with the ultimate goal of affordable OA publishing and communicating the value of OA with researchers and campus partners, as well as positioning the library as a campus leader in OA.

URL : Implementation of Transformative Agreements at the University of Chicago Library: A Case Study

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18265

Catégories
EN

Which kind of research papers influence policymaking

Author : Pablo Dorta-González

This study examines the use of evidence in policymaking by analysing a range of journal and article attributes, as well as online engagement metrics. It employs a large-scale citation analysis of nearly 150,000 articles covering diverse policy topics. The findings highlight that scholarly citations exert the strongest positive influence on policy citations.

Articles from journals with a higher citation impact and larger Mendeley readership are cited more frequently in policy documents. Other online engagements, such as news and blog mentions, also boost policy citations, while mentions on social media X have a negative effect.

The finding that highly cited and widely read papers are also frequently referenced in policy documents likely reflects the perception among policymakers that such research is more trustworthy. In contrast, papers that derive their influence primarily from social media tend to be cited less often in policy contexts.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.18889

Catégories
EN

Invasion of the journal snatchers: How indexed journals are falling into questionable hands

Authors: Alberto Martín-Martín, Emilio Delgado López-Cózar

In recent years, a substantial number of established journals have received buyout offers from obscure entities, with some journals being acquired. Despite mounting circumstantial evidence of irregular behaviour exhibited by these journals post-acquisition, comprehensive analyses on this matter are lacking. To address this gap, this article examines the practices of Oxbridge Publishing House Ltd., a company registered in the UK in 2022.

Through an analysis of publicly available documentation, it becomes apparent that this entity is part of a complex network of recently established companies. Since 2020 this network has acquired, with the help of intermediary firms, at least 36 scholarly journals originally published in countries such Spain (7), United Kingdom (7), USA (5), India (4), Turkey (4), among others.

Targeting journals indexed in prestigious scientific databases like Web of Science and Scopus, many of these journals see significant transformations upon acquisition, such as the introduction or substantial escalation of publication fees, often coupled with increases in publication volumes. This increase stems from a surge in contributions originating outside the journal’s original academic community. Their disregard for proper publishing standards is evident in their widespread use of fake DOIs or the appropriation of DOIs from unrelated documents.

Drawing parallels to the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, we refer to journals caught in this predicament as pod journals. This type of predatory publishing practice not only contributes to over-publication but also disenfranchises legitimate academic communities and poses a threat to academic bibliodiversity.

URL : Invasion of the journal snatchers: How indexed journals are falling into questionable hands

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14766415

Catégories
EN

Geographical and disciplinary coverage of open access journals: OpenAlex, Scopus, and WoS

Authors : Abdelghani Maddi, Marion Maisonobe, Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri

This study aims to compare the geographical and disciplinary coverage of OA journals in three databases: OpenAlex, Scopus and the Web of Science (WoS). We used the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD), provided by the ISSN International Centre, as a reference to identify OA active journals (as of May 2024). Among the 62,701 active OA journals listed in ROAD, the WoS indexes 6,157 journals, Scopus indexes 7,351, while OpenAlex indexes 34,217.

A striking observation is the presence of 24,976 OA journals exclusively in OpenAlex, whereas only 182 journals are exclusively present in the WoS and 373 in Scopus. The geographical analysis focuses on two levels: continents and countries. As for disciplinary comparison, we use the ten disciplinary levels of the ROAD database. Moreover, our findings reveal a similarity in OA journal coverage between the WoS and Scopus. However, while OpenAlex offers better inclusivity and indexing, it is not without biases.

The WoS and Scopus predictably favor journals from Europe, North America and Oceania. Although OpenAlex presents a much more balanced indexing, certain regions and countries remain relatively underrepresented. Typically, Africa is proportionally as under-represented in OpenAlex as it is in Scopus, and some emerging countries are proportionally less represented in OpenAlex than in the WoS and Scopus.

These results underscore a marked similarity in OA journal indexing between WoS and Scopus, while OpenAlex aligns more closely with the distribution observed in the ROAD database, although it also exhibits some representational biases.

URL : Geographical and disciplinary coverage of open access journals: OpenAlex, Scopus, and WoS

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320347

 

Catégories
EN

The time for action is now: Equity and sustainability for diamond publishing in Aotearoa New Zealand

Authors : Luqman Hayes, Craig Murdoch

Diamond open access journals make a significant contribution to scholarship globally while enduring a precarious existence due to a lack of funding. The purpose of this study was to identify the necessary characteristics of a shared service that would deliver improved sustainability for diamond journals in Aotearoa New Zealand.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with several of the editors of journals hosted by Tuwhera, Auckland University of Technology’s diamond hosting service. We sought to understand their experiences, both positive and negative, via thematic analysis of the interview transcripts. These themes indicate that our diamond journal editors face significant burdens due to lack of funding, which threaten the unique contribution they make as journals of and from Aotearoa.

We conclude that a shared open infrastructure is the most appropriate way to ensure the sustainability of diamond journals in Aotearoa, but that it must be accompanied by shared services that address the administrative and journal production load currently experienced by editors.

We propose that such an endeavor should be funded by shifting a small percentage of existing library subscription expenditure from profit-making publishers to diamond journals.

URL : The time for action is now: Equity and sustainability for diamond publishing in Aotearoa New Zealand

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18311