Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Open Access Models, Pirate Libraries and Advocacy Repertoires: Policy Options for Academics to Construct and Govern Knowledge Commons

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Author : Melanie Dulong de Rosnay

In this article, I propose exploring open access publishing through the lenses of Knowledge Commons. Instead of focusing on users’ rights to access and reuse the output under open copyright licensing conditions, I study the governance of the academic publishing ecosystem, and its political economy, technical and labour infrastructure. Based on selected examples, I discuss how they comply with the concept of the commons.

I use analytical frameworks from the Ostromian literature of the governance of Knowledge Commons to provide insights on the various steps of academic publishing work as a process. I then analyse a scope of open access publishing projects, including gold, green, diamond, platinum and pirate libraries. Finally, I draw from practices a repertoire of advocacy actions and I make recommendations for academics to develop policies supporting Academic Commons.

URL : Open Access Models, Pirate Libraries and Advocacy Repertoires: Policy Options for Academics to Construct and Govern Knowledge Commons

DOI : https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.913

What happens when a journal converts to Open Access? A bibliometric analysis

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Authors : Fakhri Momeni, Philipp Mayr, Nicholas Fraser, Isabella Peters

In recent years, increased stakeholder pressure to transition research to Open Access has led to many journals converting, or ‘flipping’, from a closed access (CA) to an open access (OA) publishing model.

Changing the publishing model can influence the decision of authors to submit their papers to a journal, and increased article accessibility may influence citation behaviour. In this paper we aimed to understand how flipping a journal to an OA model influences the journal’s future publication volumes and citation impact.

We analysed two independent sets of journals that had flipped to an OA model, one from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and one from the Open Access Directory (OAD), and compared their development with two respective control groups of similar journals. For bibliometric analyses, journals were matched to the Scopus database.

We assessed changes in the number of articles published over time, as well as two citation metrics at the journal and article level: the normalised impact factor (IF) and the average relative citations (ARC), respectively. Our results show that overall, journals that flipped to an OA model increased their publication output compared to journals that remained closed.

Mean normalised IF and ARC also generally increased following the flip to an OA model, at a greater rate than was observed in the control groups. However, the changes appear to vary largely by scientific discipline. Overall, these results indicate that flipping to an OA publishing model can bring positive changes to a journal.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14522

Civil disobedience in scientific authorship: Resistance and insubordination in science

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Authors : Bart Penders, David M. Shaw

The distribution of credit, resources and opportunities in science is heavily skewed due to unjust practices and incentives, hardwired into science’s rules, guidelines and conventions. A form of resistance widely available is to break those rules.

We review instances of rule-breaking in scientific authorship to allow for a redefinition of the concept of civil disobedience in the context of academic research, as well as the conditions on which the label applies.

We show that, in contrast to whistleblowing or conscientious objection, civil disobedience targets science’s injustice on a more systemic level. Its further development will ease critical evaluation of deviant actions as well as helping us evaluate deviance, defiance and discontent in science beyond issues of authorship.

However, empirically, civil disobedience in science engenders uncertainties and disagreements on the local status of both act and label.

URL : Civil disobedience in scientific authorship: Resistance and insubordination in science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2020.1756787

What Have We Learned from OpenReview?

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Authors : Gang Wang, Qi Peng, Yanfeng Zhang, Mingyang Zhang

Anonymous peer review is used by the great majority of computer science conferences. OpenReview is such a platform that aims to promote openness in peer review process. The paper, (meta) reviews, rebuttals, and final decisions are all released to public. We collect 5,527 submissions and their 16,853 reviews from the OpenReview platform.

We also collect these submissions’ citation data from Google Scholar and their non-peer-reviewed versions from arXiv.org. By acquiring deep insights into these data, we have several interesting findings that could help understand the effectiveness of the public-accessible double-blind peer review process.

Our results can potentially help writing a paper, reviewing it, and deciding on its acceptance.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.05885v4

Novelty, Disruption, and the Evolution of Scientific Impact

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Authors : Yiling Lin, James Allen Evans, Lingfei Wu

Since the 1950s, citation impact has been the dominant metric by which science is quantitatively evaluated. But research contributions play distinct roles in the unfolding drama of scientific debate, agreement and advance, and institutions may value different kinds of advances.

Computational power, access to citation data and an array of modeling techniques have given rise to a widening portfolio of metrics to extract different signals regarding their contribution. Here we unpack the complex, temporally evolving relationship between citation impact alongside novelty and disruption, two emerging measures that capture the degree to which science not only influences, but transforms later work.

Novelty captures how research draws upon unusual combinations of prior work. Disruption captures how research comes to eclipse the prior work on which it builds, becoming recognized as a new scientific direction.

We demonstrate that: 1) novel papers disrupt existing theories and expand the scientific frontier; 2) novel papers are more likely to become “sleeping beauties” and accumulate citation impact over the long run; 3) novelty can be reformulated as distance in journal embedding spaces to map the moving frontier of science.

The evolution of embedding spaces over time reveals how yesterday’s novelty forms today’s scientific conventions, which condition the novelty–and surprise–of tomorrow’s breakthroughs.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.03398

Only two out of five articles by New Zealand researchers are free-to-access: a multiple API study of access, citations, cost of Article Processing Charges (APC), and the potential to increase the proportion of open access

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Authors : Richard Kenneth Alistair White, Anton Angelo, Deborah Jane Fitchett, Moira Fraser, Luqman Hayes, Jess Howie, Emma Richardson, Bruce Duncan White

We studied journal articles published by researchers at all eight of New Zealand universities in 2017 to determine how many were freely accessible on the web. We wrote software code to harvest data from multiple sources, code that we now share to enable others to reproduce our work on their own sample set.

In May 2019, we ran our code to determine which of the 2017 articles were open at that time and by what method; where those articles would have incurred an Article Processing Charge (APC) we calculated the cost if those charges had been paid.

Where articles were not freely available we determined whether the policies of publishers in each case would have allowed deposit in a non-commercial repository (Green open access). We also examined citation rates for different types of access. We found that, of our 2017 sample set, about two out of every five articles were freely accessible without payment or subscription (41%).

Where research was explicitly said to be funded by New Zealand’s major research funding agencies, the proportion was slightly higher at 45%. Where open articles would have incurred an APC we estimated an average cost per article of USD1,682 (for publications where all articles require an APC, that is, Gold open access) and USD2,558 (where APC payment is optional, Hybrid open access) at a total estimated cost of USD1.45m.

Of the paid options, Gold is by far more common for New Zealand researchers (82% Gold, 18% Hybrid). In terms of citations, our analysis aligned with previous studies that suggest a correlation between publications being freely accessible and, on balance, slightly higher rates of citation.

This is not seen across all types of open access, however, with Diamond OA achieving the lowest rates. Where articles were not freely accessible we found that a very large majority of them (88% or 3089 publications) could have been legally deposited in an institutional repository.

Similarly, only in a very small number of cases had a version deposited in the repository of a New Zealand university made the difference between the publication being freely accessible or not (125 publications).

Given that most New Zealand researchers support research being open, there is clearly a large gap between belief and practice in New Zealand’s research ecosystem.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.23.164004

Virtual conferences raise standards for accessibility and interactions

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Author : Sarvenaz Sarabipour

Scientific conferences have an important role in the exchange of ideas and knowledge within the scientific community. Conferences also provide early-career researchers with opportunities to make themselves known within their field of research.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has brought traditional in-person conferences to a halt for the foreseeable future, the growth of virtual conferences has highlighted many of the disadvantages associated with the in-person format and demonstrated the advantages of moving these events online.

Here, based on data from in-person and virtual conferences in a range of subjects, we describe how virtual conferences are more inclusive, more affordable, less time-consuming and more accessible worldwide, especially for early-career researchers.

Making conferences more open and inclusive will provide both immediate and long-term benefits to the scientific community.

URL : Virtual conferences raise standards for accessibility and interactions

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.62668