Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Open is not forever: A study of vanished open access journals

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Authors : Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, Najko Jahn

The preservation of the scholarly record has been a point of concern since the beginning of knowledge production. With print publications, the responsibility rested primarily with librarians, but the shift toward digital publishing and, in particular, the introduction of open access (OA) have caused ambiguity and complexity.

Consequently, the long‐term accessibility of journals is not always guaranteed, and they can even disappear from the web completely. The focus of this exploratory study is on the phenomenon of vanished journals, something that has not been carried out before.

For the analysis, we consulted several major bibliographic indexes, such as Scopus, Ulrichsweb, and the Directory of Open Access Journals, and traced the journals through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

We found 174 OA journals that, through lack of comprehensive and open archives, vanished from the web between 2000 and 2019, spanning all major research disciplines and geographic regions of the world.

Our results raise vital concern for the integrity of the scholarly record and highlight the urgency to take collaborative action to ensure continued access and prevent the loss of more scholarly knowledge.

We encourage those interested in the phenomenon of vanished journals to use the public dataset for their own research.

URL : Open is not forever: A study of vanished open access journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24460

Large-scale comparison of bibliographic data sources: Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic

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Authors : Martijn Visser, Nees Jan van Eck, Ludo Waltman

We present a large-scale comparison of five multidisciplinary bibliographic data sources: Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic. The comparison considers scientific documents from the period 2008-2017 covered by these data sources. Scopus is compared in a pairwise manner with each of the other data sources.

We first analyze differences between the data sources in the coverage of documents, focusing for instance on differences over time, differences per document type, and differences per discipline.

We then study differences in the completeness and accuracy of citation links. Based on our analysis, we discuss strengths and weaknesses of the different data sources. We emphasize the importance of combining a comprehensive coverage of the scientific literature with a flexible set of filters for making selections of the literature.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.10732

Large coverage fluctuations in Google Scholar: a case study

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

Unlike other academic bibliographic databases, Google Scholar intentionally operates in a way that does not maintain coverage stability: documents that stop being available to Google Scholar’s crawlers are removed from the system.

This can also affect Google Scholar’s citation graph (citation counts can decrease). Furthermore, because Google Scholar is not transparent about its coverage, the only way to directly observe coverage loss is through regular monitorization of Google Scholar data.

Because of this, few studies have empirically documented this phenomenon. This study analyses a large decrease in coverage of documents in the field of Astronomy and Astrophysics that took place in 2019 and its subsequent recovery, using longitudinal data from previous analyses and a new dataset extracted in 2020.

Documents from most of the larger publishers in the field disappeared from Google Scholar despite continuing to be available on the Web, which suggests an error on Google Scholar’s side. Disappeared documents did not reappear until the following index-wide update, many months after the problem was discovered.

The slowness with which Google Scholar is currently able to resolve indexing errors is a clear limitation of the platform both for literature search and bibliometric use cases.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.07571

Decolonizing Scholarly Communications through Bibliodiversity

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Authors : Shearer Kathleen, Becerril-García Arianna

Diversity is an important characteristic of any healthy ecosystem. In the field of scholarly communications, diversity in services and platforms, funding mechanisms and evaluation measures will allow the ecosystem to accommodate the different workflows, languages, publication outputs and research topics that support the needs of different research communities.

Diversity also reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, which leads to monopolization and high prices. Yet this ‘bibliodiversity’ is undermined by the fact that researchers around the world are evaluated according to journal-based citation measures, which have become the major currency of academic research.

Journals seek to maximize their bibliometric measures by adopting editorial policies that increase citation counts, resulting in the predominance of Northern/Western research priorities and perspectives in the literature, and an increasing marginalization of research topics of more narrow or local nature.

This contribution examines the distinctive, non-commercial approach to open access (OA) found in Latin America and reflects on how greater diversity in OA infrastructures helps to address inequalities in global knowledge production as well as knowledge access.

The authors argue that bibliodiversity, rather than adoption of standardized models of OA, is central to the development of a more equitable system of knowledge production.

URL : Decolonizing Scholarly Communications through Bibliodiversity

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4423996

Journal Open Access and Plan S: Solving Problems or Shifting Burdens?

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Authors : Shina Caroline Lynn Kamerlin, David J. Allen, Bas de Bruin, Etienne Derat, Henrik Urdal

This academic thought piece provides an overview of the history of, and current trends in, publishing practices in the scientific fields known to the authors (chemical sciences, social sciences and humanities), as well as a discussion of how open access mandates such as Plan S from cOAlition S will affect these practices.

It begins by summarizing the evolution of scientific publishing, in particular how it was shaped by the learned societies, and highlights how important quality assurance and scientific management mechanisms are being challenged by the recent introduction of ever more stringent open access mandates.

The authors then discuss the various reactions of the researcher community to the introduction of Plan S, and elucidate a number of concerns: that it will push researchers towards a pay‐to‐publish system which will inevitably create new divisions between those who can afford to get their research published and those who cannot; that it will disrupt collaboration between researchers on the different sides of cOAlition S funding; and that it will have an impact on academic freedom of research and publishing.

The authors analyse the dissemination of, and responses to, an open letter distributed and signed in reaction to the introduction of Plan S, before concluding with some thoughts on the potential for evolution of open access in scientific publishing.

URL : Journal Open Access and Plan S: Solving Problems or Shifting Burdens?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12635

Cite Unseen: Theory and Evidence on the Effect of Open Access on Cites to Academic Articles Across the Quality Spectrum

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Authors : Mark J. McCabe, Christopher Snyder

Our previous paper (McCabe and Snyder 2014) contained the provocative result that, despite a positive average effect, open access reduces cites to some articles, in particular those published in lower-tier journals.

We propose a model in which open access leads more readers to acquire the full text, yielding more cites from some, but fewer cites from those who would have cited the article based on superficial knowledge but who refrain once they learn that the article is a bad match.

We test the theory with data for over 200,000 science articles binned by cites received during a pre-study period. Consistent with the theory, the marginal effect of open access is negative for the least-cited articles, positive for the most cited, and generally monotonic for quality levels in between.

Also consistent with the theory is a magnification of these effects for articles placed on PubMed Central, one of the broadest open-access platforms, and the differential pattern of results for cites from insiders versus outsiders to the article’s field.

URL : https://www.nber.org/papers/w28128

The move to open: medical library leadership in scholarly communication

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Author : Chris Shaffer

Over the years, health sciences librarians have been change agents, leading the charge on issues of importance to the profession and the communities we serve. From its founding in 1898 with the Exchange, the Medical Library Association (MLA) has been dedicated to improving access to health information.

In 2003, the Board of Directors published a statement supporting open access to information generated from federally funded scientific and medical research and maintained that having access to timely, relevant, and accurate information is vital to the health of the nation and its education and research programs.

At some financial risk, the association made the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) open access and published the entire archive of JMLA and its predecessor, the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, in PubMed Central. Nearly two decades later, the promise of open access and open science finally seems to be coming to fruition.

In the 2020 Janet Doe Lecture, Chris Shaffer, AHIP, described the ways that MLA has led the profession, standing behind a shared vision and “walking the walk.” In challenging listeners to embrace open science, he affirmed that, as leaders in improving access to health sciences information since 1898, medical librarians must work in the open science arena to realize our vision “that quality information is essential for improved health.”

URL : The move to open: medical library leadership in scholarly communication

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2021.1127