Étiquette : scientific communication

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Access, ethics, and piracy

Author : Stuart Lawson

Open access has been progressively making more scholarship openly available. But a majority of journal articles are still behind paywalls so some people have turned to piracy to access them.

While some regard this practice as criminal and unethical, for others ‘liberating’ research is a justified act of civil disobedience.

This article considers both the efficacy and ethics of piracy, placing ‘guerilla open access’ within a longer history of piracy and access to knowledge.

By doing so, we can see that since piracy is not only an inevitable part of the intellectual landscape but can potentially drive progressive developments in communication practices, open access emerges as a contender for moving beyond proprietary forms of commodifying scholarly knowledge.

URL : Access, ethics, and piracy

Alternative location : https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/k483r/

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Use of the Paid Open Access Option in Hybrid Open Access Journals in Agriculture: A Mixed-Methods Study

Authors : Megan Kocher, Julie Kelly

We explore the use and usefulness of the hybrid open access publishing model in agricultural sciences using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods.

To ascertain the level of usage of the paid open access option in hybrid open access journals in agriculture, we studied the agriculture-related journals published by six commercial publishers.

These publishers offer authors the option of paying a fee, often close to $3,000 per article, to make their article immediately freely available, usually with a Creative Commons license. We defined agriculture broadly but also assigned each journal to a subspecialty (e.g., animal science) in order to see if there were differences based on these subdivisions.

For each journal we gathered data for 2014-2015 and noted the total number of research articles and the number of those that were made freely available by authors paying the open access fee.

To give context to our results we also surveyed local faculty in agricultural sciences, asking their reasons for considering the paid open access options and the sources of the funds to pay for it. Survey respondents were asked about their academic position and rank to see if there were differences to be noted.

We also investigated the findability of the open access articles, noting if each individual publisher offered a way to easily locate all the freely available articles in a particular journal and if there are other avenues to easily locate these articles.

URL : http://istl.org/16-fall/refereed2.html

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Scholarly Management Publication and Open Access Funding Mandates: a Review of Publisher Policies

Author : Jessica Lange

The open access movement has been growing steadily over the past twenty years. Recently, many national funding agencies in North America have been requiring recipients of grant-funding to make their articles open access.

On the surface this produces a potential conflict for management researchers; management faculty members are expected to publish in prestigious journals but the discipline views open access journals as being of lower quality (Hahn & Wyatt, 2014, p.98).

As such, the question arises if it is it possible for management researchers to comply with open access policies while still publishing in highly-ranked journals?

This article will compare publishing policies from top management journals to funding agencies’ open access requirements in order to determine which journals meet these conditions.

Journals will be drawn from several established journal lists such as the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) 24, the Financial Times (FT) Research Rankings, and Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science Journal Citation Reports.

Results show that 80% of journals in the sample set are compatible with open access funding mandates. Of the journals which are compatible, 48% require an APC and 52% permit self-archiving in an acceptable time-frame.

In addition to discussing open access publishing opportunities in management, this article will highlight opportunities for management librarians to develop their services and act as resources for faculty navigating this new framework.

URL : Scholarly Management Publication and Open Access Funding Mandates: a Review of Publisher Policies

Alternative location : http://ticker.mcgill.ca/article/view/19

 

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Altmetrics: The Emerging Alternative Metrics for Web Research Analysis

Authors : Ashok Kumar, J Shivarama, Mallikarjun Angadi, Puttaraj A Choukimath

The use of web 2.0 is becoming the essential part of present day life. People are spending time for many purposes and academic activities among these uses of web 2.0 social media services by users are prominent for searching, sharing, discussing, and messaging of scholarly content.

The wider use of social media has given birth to various buzz words and ‘altmetrics’ is one of them. In simple words, altmetrics provides online measurement of scholars or scholarly content derived from the web 2.0 social media platforms.

Altmetrics is diversified in nature and categorised in five categories i.e. (i) recommended (ii) cited (iii) saved (iv) discussed and (v) viewed. Altmetrics are becoming widely used by publishers (for showcasing research impact of authors over readers), librarians and repository managers (for adding value to their libraries and institutional repositories) and by the researchers (for complementing reading by instantly visualising papers online attention).

URL : http://ir.inflibnet.ac.in/handle/1944/2033

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Open-Access Mega-Journals: A Bibliometric Profile

Authors : Simon Wakeling, Peter Willett, Claire Creaser, Jenny Fry, Stephen Pinfield, Valérie Spezi

In this paper we present the first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of eleven open-access mega-journals (OAMJs).

OAMJs are a relatively recent phenomenon, and have been characterised as having four key characteristics: large size; broad disciplinary scope; a Gold-OA business model; and a peer-review policy that seeks to determine only the scientific soundness of the research rather than evaluate the novelty or significance of the work. Our investigation focuses on four key modes of analysis: journal outputs (the number of articles published and changes in output over time); OAMJ author characteristics (nationalities and institutional affiliations); subject areas (the disciplinary scope of OAMJs, and variations in sub-disciplinary output); and citation profiles (the citation distributions of each OAMJ, and the impact of citing journals).

We found that while the total output of the eleven mega-journals grew by 14.9% between 2014 and 2015, this growth is largely attributable to the increased output of Scientific Reports and Medicine.

We also found substantial variation in the geographical distribution of authors. Several journals have a relatively high proportion of Chinese authors, and we suggest this may be linked to these journals’ high Journal Impact Factors (JIFs).

The mega-journals were also found to vary in subject scope, with several journals publishing disproportionately high numbers of articles in certain sub-disciplines.

Our citation analsysis offers support for Björk & Catani’s suggestion that OAMJs’s citation distributions can be similar to those of traditional journals, while noting considerable variation in citation rates across the eleven titles.

We conclude that while the OAMJ term is useful as a means of grouping journals which share a set of key characteristics, there is no such thing as a “typical” mega-journal, and we suggest several areas for additional research that might help us better understand the current and future role of OAMJs in scholarly communication.

URL : Open-Access Mega-Journals: A Bibliometric Profile

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0165359

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Reproducible and reusable research: Are journal data sharing policies meeting the mark?

Author : Nicole A Vasilevsky, Jessica Minnier, Melissa A Haendel, Robin E Champieux

Background

There is wide agreement in the biomedical research community that research data sharing is a primary ingredient for ensuring that science is more transparent and reproducible.

Publishers could play an important role in facilitating and enforcing data sharing; however, many journals have not yet implemented data sharing policies and the requirements vary widely across journals. This study set out to analyze the pervasiveness and quality of data sharing policies in the biomedical literature.

Methods

The online author’s instructions and editorial policies for 318 biomedical journals were manually reviewed to analyze the journal’s data sharing requirements and characteristics.

The data sharing policies were ranked using a rubric to determine if data sharing was required, recommended, required only for omics data, or not addressed at all. The data sharing method and licensing recommendations were examined, as well any mention of reproducibility or similar concepts.

The data was analyzed for patterns relating to publishing volume, Journal Impact Factor, and the publishing model (open access or subscription) of each journal.

Results

11.9% of journals analyzed explicitly stated that data sharing was required as a condition of publication. 9.1% of journals required data sharing, but did not state that it would affect publication decisions. 23.3% of journals had a statement encouraging authors to share their data but did not require it.

There was no mention of data sharing in 31.8% of journals. Impact factors were significantly higher for journals with the strongest data sharing policies compared to all other data sharing mark categories. Open access journals were not more likely to require data sharing than subscription journals.

Discussion

Our study confirmed earlier investigations which observed that only a minority of biomedical journals require data sharing, and a significant association between higher Impact Factors and journals with a data sharing requirement.

Moreover, while 65.7% of the journals in our study that required data sharing addressed the concept of reproducibility, as with earlier investigations, we found that most data sharing policies did not provide specific guidance on the practices that ensure data is maximally available and reusable.

URL : Reproducible and reusable research: Are journal data sharing policies meeting the mark?

DOI : https://peerj.com/articles/3208/

 

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Digital Theoria, Poiesis, and Praxis: Activating Humanities Research and Communication through Open Social Scholarship Platform Design

Author : Jon Saklofske

Background

Scholarly communication has not experienced the kinds of digital enhancements enjoyed by researchers. The continuing domination of journals and monographs as primary venues of professional exchange and validation signifies lingering habits of critical perception, but also an opportunity to imagine and implement new collaborative publishing environments, models, and platforms.

Analysis

Examples of innovative projects bottlenecked by traditional reporting methods illustrate the need for such transformative practices.

Conclusion and implications

Developing flexible digital environments to establish open social scholarship as the default mode of critical inquiry and reporting is essential to the digital transformation of scholarly communication.

URL : Digital Theoria, Poiesis, and Praxis: Activating Humanities Research and Communication through Open Social Scholarship Platform Design

Alternative location : http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/252