Open Access APCs Are Already a Scam”: Knowledge and Opinions of Open Access and Article Processing Charges From Faculty at a Large Public University

Authors : Heidi M. Winkler

Introduction:

In the 2020s, open access (OA) continues to act as a challenging force in the ever-shifting landscape of scholarly communication. The objective of this study was to survey faculty at an R1 research institution about their perspectives on OA publishing, article processing charges (APCs), and knowledge of the institutional repository (IR).

Methods:

This study employed an anonymous online survey of 415 faculty members, with a response rate of 12.77% (53 responses). The survey collected both quantitative and qualitative data from respondents.

Results and Discussion:

Results showed engagement with OA publishing but skepticism of APCs as a reasonable alternative to subscription-based funding models. Survey respondents were also mostly unaware of the library’s IR self-archiving service.

Conclusion:

For-profit OA business models do not serve academics, and they and scholarly communications librarians should better collaborate to advocate for transitioning away from APCs. The article concludes by sharing how the author changed practice based on the results of the study.

URL : Open Access APCs Are Already a Scam”: Knowledge and Opinions of Open Access and Article Processing Charges From Faculty at a Large Public University

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.17647

“Academic Publishing is a Business Interest”: Reconciling Faculty Serials Needs and Economic Realities at a Carnegie R2 University

Authors : Rachel E. Scott, Anne Shelley, Chad E. Buckley, Cassie Thayer-Styes, Julie A. Murphy

Introduction

This article explores faculty conceptions of academic publishers, their willingness to circumvent paywalls and share content, and their understanding of who holds the responsibility to pay for this body of scholarly work to which they all contribute.

Methods

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 faculty at their Carnegie R2 university to explore scholars’ perspectives with respect to the costs of serials and the responsibilities of the University and library in support of scholarly publishing.

Results

Participants reported a broad spectrum of perspectives with respect to circumventing publisher paywalls and offered nuanced practices for interacting with paywalled content. They explained which library services work well and offered suggestions on how best to support faculty needs for serial literature. Although most participants agree that the University has the responsibility of making academic literature available to the community, they differ in their conceptions of academic publishers as good-faith partners in the knowledge enterprise.

Discussion

The results suggest a great deal of ambiguity and diversity of beliefs among faculty: some would support boycotting all commercial publishers; some understand academic publishers to be integral to the dissemination of their work, not to mention tenure and promotion processes; and many acknowledge a variety of tensions in what feels to them an exploitative and fraught relationship.

These findings have implications for library services in acquisitions, collection management, scholarly communication, discovery, and access.

Conclusion

The data provide insight into the nuanced perceptions that faculty members at a Carnegie R2 hold concerning the costs of scholarly publishing and the role of academic publishers within scholarly communication.

URL : “Academic Publishing is a Business Interest”: Reconciling Faculty Serials Needs and Economic Realities at a Carnegie R2 University

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16232

Closing the Loop: Automating Links to Open Access Versions of Articles in Faculty Profiles at a Large Research Institution

Authors : Andrew M. Johnson, Don Elsborg

Introduction

Universities implement faculty profile systems for a variety of reasons, including to increase visibility of research produced at the institution. These profiles often connect with other campus systems, particularly institutional repositories.

This article describes a collaboration at the University of Colorado Boulder aimed at integrating the institutional repository with the faculty profile system, which then expanded to encompass the automated creation of profile links to open access versions of faculty articles from any journal or repository.

Description of Program

To achieve the initial project goals, a cross-campus team from the University Libraries and the Faculty Information System developed a strategy of using Unpaywall as an intermediary data source to connect the institutional repository with the faculty profile system.

This also allowed for the development of an automated process for generating links to open access content from any journal or repository, which resulted in the creation of over 35,000 links to openly available content in faculty profiles, including over 2,900 links to content in the institutional repository.

These links provide public users of the faculty profile system with a simple way to access all openly available research produced at the university. This article describes the development and implementation of this project as well as lessons learned.

Next Steps

The ongoing collaboration provides additional opportunities to unlock data for monitoring rates of open access publishing and self-archiving, informing library collection development decisions, and connecting to other data sources to reveal further insights.

URL : Closing the Loop: Automating Links to Open Access Versions of Articles in Faculty Profiles at a Large Research Institution

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.17242

Data services at the academic library: a natural history of horses and unicorns

Authors : Jeffrey Oliver, Fernando Rios, Kiriann Carin, Chun Ly

Objective

Increases in data-intensive research at colleges and universities is driving demand for data services provided by academic libraries. The current work investigates the distribution of library data services, how such services are offered, and the effect of resourcing on the amount of services offered by a library.

Methods

We used a web-based inventory of 25 academic libraries at U.S. Research 1 (R1) Carnegie institutions to assess the state of data services at university libraries. We categorized and quantified services, and tested for an effect of library resourcing on the size of library data service portfolios.

Results

Support for data management and geospatial services was relatively widespread, with increasing support in areas of data analyses and data visualization. There was significant variation among services in the modality in which they were offered (web, consult, instruction) and library resourcing had a significant effect on the number of data services a library offered.

Conclusions

While a core subset of these data services are offered at most academic libraries, more specialized topics are restricted to well-resourced libraries. In light of the influence of resource scarcity on the number of services a library can offer, intra- and inter-campus partnerships will be critical to ensure campus support for data service needs.

URL : Data services at the academic library: a natural history of horses and unicorns

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.780

The Effects of Research Data Management Services: Associating the Data Curation Lifecycle with Open Research Output

Authors : Nicolas Pares, Peter Organisciak

This study seeks to understand the relationship between research data management (RDM) services framed in the data curation life cycle and the production of open data. An electronic questionnaire was distributed to US researchers and RDM specialists, and the results were analyzed using Chi-Square tests for association.

The data curation life cycle does associate with the production of open data and shareable research, but tasks like data management plans have stronger associations with the production of open data. The findings analyze the intersection of these concepts and provide insight into RDM services that facilitate the production of open data and shareable research.

URL : The Effects of Research Data Management Services: Associating the Data Curation Lifecycle with Open Research Output

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.84.5.751

Data Management Librarians Role in a Large Interdisciplinary Scientific Grant for PFAS Remediation: Considerations and Recommendations

Authors : Jennifer Chaput, Renee Walsh

This article explores the conflicts, disparities, and inequalities experienced by two librarians when collaborating on a federal grant proposal. The authors discuss concerns related to time and salary expectations and the inequities that can occur during faculty and staff collaborations on research grants.

The bureaucratic structure and the job classifications of staff at academic institutions in addition to the contract limitations of non-faculty status librarian positions can hinder successful collaborations. The authors also describe data management needs that may occur when working with interdisciplinary research teams and detail the type of work that is included in writing a data management grant.

This article concludes with considerations and recommendations for other data librarians who may undertake similar projects with a focus on ways to create parity between faculty and staff collaborators.

URL : Data Management Librarians Role in a Large Interdisciplinary Scientific Grant for PFAS Remediation: Considerations and Recommendations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.616

Analysis of U.S. Federal Funding Agency Data Sharing Policies 2020 Highlights and Key Observations

Authors : Reid I. Boehm, Hannah Calkins, Patricia B. Condon, Jonathan Petters, Rachel Woodbrook

Federal funding agencies in the United States (U.S.) continue to work towards implementing their plans to increase public access to funded research and comply with the 2013 Office of Science and Technology memo Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research.

In this article we report on an analysis of research data sharing policy documents from 17 U.S. federal funding agencies as of February 2021. Our analysis is guided by two questions: 1.) What do the findings suggest about the current state of and trends in U.S. federal funding agency data sharing requirements? 2.) In what ways are universities, institutions, associations, and researchers affected by and responding to these policies?

Over the past five years, policy updates were common among these agencies and several themes have been thoroughly developed in that time; however, uncertainty remains around how funded researchers are expected to satisfy these policy requirements.

URL : Analysis of U.S. Federal Funding Agency Data Sharing Policies 2020 Highlights and Key Observations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v17i1.791