Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Open Scholarship Practices Reshaping South Africa’s Scholarly Publishing Roadmap

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South African higher education institutions are the largest producers of research output on the African continent. Given this status, South African researchers have a moral obligation to share their research output with the rest of the continent via a medium that minimizes challenges of access; open scholarship is that medium. The majority of South African higher education libraries provide an open access publishing service. However, in most of these cases this service is via engagement with the green open access route, that is, institutional repositories (IR).

Some of the libraries have piloted and adopted gold open access services such as publishing of “diamond” gold open access journals and supporting article processing charges. The experiment with publishing open monographs is a new venture. This venture must be viewed against the backdrop of the need for open educational resources (OERs). OER is an area that is very much in a fledgling stage and is gaining traction, albeit, at a slow pace.

The growth of IRs, the growth in support for gold open access including the library acting as a publisher, the experimentation with open monographs, and OERs are all shaping South Africa’s scholarly publishing roadmap.

URL : Open Scholarship Practices Reshaping South Africa’s Scholarly Publishing Roadmap

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/publications3040263

Considering Non-Open Access Publication Charges in the “Total Cost of Publication”

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Recent research has tried to calculate the “total cost of publication” in the British academic sector, bringing together the costs of journal subscriptions, the article processing charges (APCs) paid to publish open-access content, and the indirect costs of handling open-access mandates. This study adds an estimate for the other publication charges (predominantly page and colour charges) currently paid by research institutions, a significant element which has been neglected by recent studies.

When these charges are included in the calculation, the total cost to institutions as of 2013/14 is around 18.5% over and above the cost of journal subscriptions—11% from APCs, 5.5% from indirect costs, and 2% from other publication charges. For the British academic sector as a whole, this represents a total cost of publication around £213 million against a conservatively estimated journal spend of £180 million, with non-APC publication charges representing around £3.6 million.

A case study is presented to show that these costs may be unexpectedly high for individual institutions, depending on disciplinary focus. The feasibility of collecting this data on a widespread basis is discussed, along with the possibility of using it to inform future subscription negotiations with publishers.

URL : Considering Non-Open Access Publication Charges in the “Total Cost of Publication”

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/publications3040248

The Challenges of Journal Startup in the Digital Era

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This paper aims to contribute to the evolving literature on the new landscape of scholarly journals. It builds on a series of experiences as a journal editor which span the print and digital eras, and focuses on two current activities with new journals.

One was designed as a synoptic journal in a broad multidisciplinary field, supported by a commercial publisher; the other a non-revenue journal which aims to showcase the work of undergraduates in the author’s institution. Despite the uniqueness of goals and delivery, some of the experiences—and challenges—have proved remarkably similar.

URL : The Challenges of Journal Startup in the Digital Era

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/publications3040219

Enjeux de la numérisation des herbiers pour l’information et la communication scientifiques : de la transformation des matières documentaires à l’évolution des pratiques

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Nous appréhendons les mutations entraînées par la numérisation des collections d’histoire naturelle dans la production et la communication de l’information scientifique. Notre étude s’appuie sur une analyse des herbiers comme artefacts répondant aux besoins de la conservation et de la communication de l’information entre acteurs intervenant dans la production des savoirs mobilisant les collections.

Nous analysons le statut documentaire des images à partir de leur exploitation différentielle dans les pratiques scientifiques selon les objectifs et étapes des recherches. Malgré les limites de l’exploitation des bases de données d’images pour le travail sur les spécimens, elles sont essentielles à l’accès et à l’enrichissement des informations des collections.

URL : http://lesenjeux.u-grenoble3.fr/2015-dossier/05-Chupin/index.html

The cost of reading research. A study of Computer Science publication venues

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What does the cost of academic publishing look like to the common researcher today? Our goal is to convey the current state of academic publishing, specifically in regards to the field of computer science and provide analysis and data to be used as a basis for future studies. We will focus on author and reader costs as they are the primary points of interaction within the publishing world.

In this work, we restrict our focus to only computer science in order to make the data collection more feasible (the authors are computer scientists) and hope future work can analyze and collect data across all academic fields.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.00127

Opening the Black Box of Scholarly Communication Funding: A Public Data Infrastructure for Financial Flows in Academic Publishing

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“Public access to publicly funded research” has been one of the rallying calls of the global open access movement. Governments and public institutions around the world have mandated that publications supported by public funding sources should be publicly accessible. Publishers are experimenting with new models to widen access.

Yet financial flows underpinning scholarly publishing remain complex and opaque. In this paper we present work to trace and reassemble a picture of financial flows around the publication of journals in the UK in the midst of a national shift towards open access.

We contend that the current lack of financial transparency around scholarly communication is an obstacle to evidence-based policy-making – leaving researchers, decision-makers and institutions in the dark about the systemic implications of new financial models.

We conclude that obtaining a more joined up picture of financial flows is vital as a means for researchers, institutions and others to understand and shape changes to the sociotechnical systems that underpin scholarly communication.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2690570

A new scholar’s perspective on open peer review

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This article argues that the pedagogical and scholarly benefits of open peer review far outweigh those of traditional double-blind peer review, but require a shift in our perspective of the function and value of peer review – from a gate-keeping process, toward a supportive, constructive process of collaboration between peers and mentors.

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1085857