Digital Commons Network^™

The Open Access Journals Toolkit, Alex Mendonça, Andrea Chiarelli, Andy Byers, Andy Nobes, Chris Hartgerink, Clarissa França Dias Carneiro, Elle Malcolmson, Ivonne Lijano, Katie Foxall, Lucia Loffreda, Rebecca Wojturska, Solange Santos, Susan Murray, Tom Olijhoek, Wendy Patterson

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Contents: Getting Started 5 • Scope, aims and focus 5 • Choosing a title for your journal 6 • Types of content accepted 7 • Kick-off and ongoing funding 11 • Disciplinary considerations 16 • Journal setup checklist and timeline 18 • Running a journal 20 • Article selection criteria 20 • Publication frequency and journal issues 23 • Attracting authors 25 • Peer review and quality assurance 27 • The costs of running an online open access journal 31 • Running a journal in a local or regional language 34 • Flipping a journal to open access 36 • …

Ithaka S+R Us Library Survey 2022: Navigating The New Normal, Ioana G. Hulbert

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The Ithaka S+R Library Survey has examined leadership and strategic perspectives in the field by surveying library deans and directors nationally on a triennial basis since 2010. The research project’s overarching goals are to provide the library community with a valuable data source to inform decision making and track the emerging opportunities and challenges leaders face in steering their organizations. In fall 2022, we surveyed library leaders at not-for-profit four-year academic institutions across the United States, with a response rate of 42 percent based on 612 responses.

In this sixth iteration of the project, we continued to track high-level issues …

The ‘Hijacking’ Of The Scandinavian Journal Of Information Systems: Implications For The Information Systems Community [Opinion], Sune Dueholm Müller, Johan Ivar Sæbø

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Journal hijacking, which refers to the attempted brand takeover of a journal by a third party, is a nascent threat confronting the information systems (IS) community, as evidenced by cybercriminals having established an online presence, masquerading as the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS). The SJIS hijacking damages the journal's reputation, leads to payment and publication scams, involves identity theft among unsuspecting IS researchers, and results in tarnished author reputations. Beyond SJIS, journal hijacking presents a threat, not only to the IS community, but also to science and academic integrity in general if researchers and readers cannot distinguish between fake …

The Impact Of Library Publishing Through The Lens Of The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Marie O'Neill

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Abstract

As library publishing programmes expand around the world, reports and research pertaining to standards and workflows have proliferated. This paper calls for library publishing programmes to explore the impact of their pogrammes at local, national and international level in relation to their contribution to open access publishing, EDI agendas and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The presentation highlights the UN's SDG Publishers Compact and argues that the SDGs are an ideal lens through which library publishers could examine their impact as library publishers have a strong publishing record in areas such as gender, education and climate as examples.

Reimagine Descriptive Workflows: A Community-Informed Agenda For Reparative And Inclusive Descriptive Practice, Rachel L. Frick, Merrilee Proffitt

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Executive Summary

The Reimagine Descriptive Workflows project convened a group of experts, practitioners, and community members to determine ways of improving descriptive practices, tools, infrastructure, and workflows in libraries and archives. The result, this community agenda, is offered to the broad library and archives community of practice. The agenda draws together insights from the convening, related research, and operational work that is ongoing in the field. All institutions hold power to make meaningful changes in this space, and all share collective responsibility.

The agenda is not a “how-to guide,” but it is constructed to instruct and chart a path toward …

Checklist For Open Access Publishers On Implementing The Unesco Recommendation On Open Science, Unesco, Oaspa

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Within the subset of open scientific knowledge, this document refers to scientific publications that include, inter alia, journal articles and books, research reports and conference papers. These publications may be, contain or be accompanied by original scientific research results, research data, software, source code, source materials, workflows and protocols, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material. According to the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, access to scientific knowledge should be as open as possible, and may need to be restricted, in specific circumstance, for example to protect human rights, confidentiality, intellectual property rights, personal information, threatened …

Research Information Management In The United States: Part One, Findings And Recommendations, Rebecca Bryant, Jan Fransen, Pablo De Castro, Brenna Helmstutler, David Scherer

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Research information management (RIM) is a rapidly growing area of investment in US research universities. RIM systems that support the collection and use of research outputs metadata have been in place for many years. Globally, the RIM ecosystem is quite mature in locales where national research assessment exercises like the United Kingdom’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) require institutions to collect and report on the outputs of institutional research. A pan-European community of practice is led by euroCRIS.

This report describes six discrete RIM use cases detailed in the companion report:

• Faculty …

Copyright And State Sovereign Immunity: A Report Of The Register Of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter

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In March 2020, the Supreme Court held in Allen v. Cooper that Congress had exceeded its constitutional authority when it enacted legislation authorizing copyright infringement suits for damages against states.1 The Court based its decision on the legal doctrine of sovereign immunity, which generally precludes a federal court from hearing a suit against a state without the state’s consent. The Court noted that Congress has the power to abrogate state immunity, including to prevent or remedy deprivations of property without due process in violation of the Constitution. To do so, however, Congress generally must develop a legislative record demonstrating a …

Unesco Recommendation On Open Science

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1. The aim of this Recommendation is to provide an international framework for open science policy and practice that recognizes disciplinary and regional differences in open science perspectives, takes into account academic freedom, gender-transformative approaches and the specific challenges of scientists and other open science actors in different countries and in particular in developing countries, and contributes to reducing the digital, technological and knowledge divides existing between and within countries.

2. This Recommendation outlines a common definition, shared values, principles and standards for open science at the international level and proposes a set of actions conducive to a fair and …

Introducing The Copyright Anxiety Scale, Amanda Wakaruk, Céline Gareau-Brennan, Matthew Pietrosanu

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Navigating copyright issues can be frustrating to the point of causing anxiety, potentially discouraging or inhibiting legitimate uses of copyright-protected materials. A lack of data about the extent and impact of these phenomena, known as copyright anxiety and copyright chill, respectively, motivated the authors to create the Copyright Anxiety Scale (CAS). This article provides an overview of the CAS’s development and validity testing. Results of an initial survey deployment drawing from a broad cross-section of respondents living in Canada and the United States (n = 521) establishes that the phenomenon of copyright anxiety is prevalent and likely associated with …

Research 4.0: Research In The Age Of Automation, Rob Procter, Ben Glover, Elliot Jones

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Executive Summary

There is a growing consensus that we are at the start of a fourth industrial revolution, driven by developments in Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, robotics, the Internet of Things, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, 5G, new forms of energy storage and quantum computing. This wave of technical innovations is already having a significant impact on how research is conducted, with dramatic change across research methods in recent years within some disciplines, as this project’s interim report set out.

Whilst there are a wide range of technologies associated with the fourth industrial revolution, this report primarily seeks to understand what …

Antiracism Toolkit For Allies

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While a growing awareness of racial disparities has resulted in a groundswell of support for inclusivity in scholarly publishing, we believe that the resulting initiatives would be more effective if our professional associations were able to provide training materials to help transform our workplaces and organizational cultures. As evidence of the interest and need, the project leaders of this guide have been contacted by individuals across scholarly publishing asking for resources about how to replicate workplace equity groups, what to do in cases of discrimination or microaggressions, and how to begin conversations about race. In support of necessary change, the …

Ithaka S+R Us Library Survey 2019, Jennifer K. Frederick, Christine Wolff-Eisenberg, Ithaka S+R

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Executive Summary

The Ithaka S+R Library Survey 2019 examines strategy and leadership issues from the perspective of academic library deans and directors. This project aims to provide academic librarians and higher education leaders with information about chief librarians’ visions and the opportunities and challenges they face in leading their organizations. In fall 2019, we invited library deans and directors at not-for-profit four-year academic institutions across the United States to complete the survey, and we received 662 responses for a response rate of 46 percent. In this survey cycle, we added new coverage of three key topics: equity, diversity, and inclusion …

Accept Me, Accept Me Not: What Do Journal Acceptance Rates Really Mean?, Rachel Herbert

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Journal acceptance rates should not be used as evaluative metrics for journals: we find no evidence that acceptance rates are a reliable signal of quality or impact. Journal acceptance rates are useful for submitting authors and ICSR recommends that they be made publicly available where possible. Gold open access journals do tend to have lower acceptance rates than other open access types, but these also tend to be younger journals: as these journals age, will those acceptance rates increase, or will the open access model influence the acceptance rate? ...

We identified the fact that low acceptance rates are demonstrated …

Who’S Writing Open Access (Oa) Articles? Characteristics Of Oa Authors At Ph.D.-Granting Institutions In The United States, Anthony J. Olejniczak, Molly J. Wilson

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The open access (OA) publication movement aims to present research literature to the public at no cost and with no restrictions. While the democratization of access to scholarly literature is a primary focus of the movement, it remains unclear whether OA has uniformly democratized the corpus of freely available research, or whether authors who choose to publish in OA venues represent a particular subset of scholars—those with access to resources enabling them to afford article processing charges (APCs). We investigated the number of OA articles with article processing charges (APC OA) authored by 182,320 scholars with known demographic and institutional …

Achieving An Equitable Transition To Open Access For Researchers In Lower And Middle-Income Countries, Andrea Powell, Rob Johnson, Rachel Herbert

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Introduction

The origins of this White Paper can be traced to a discussion started in mid-2019 between a number of scholarly publishers and the Publisher Coordinator for Research4Life (a role that is supported financially by the STM Association). These interlocutors voiced concern that while the publishing and research communities in the developed world were making steady and positive progress towards universal Open Access based on a ‘pay to publish’ model, those same communities in the less developed lower and middle-income countries (often referred to as the “Global South”) were being excluded from these discussions. Following discussions at the STM Board …

Open Access: Could Defeat Be Snatched From The Jaws Of Victory?, Richard Poynder

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When news broke early in 2019 that the University of California had walked away from licensing negotiations with the world’s largest scholarly publisher (Elsevier), a wave of triumphalism spread through the OA Twittersphere. The talks had collapsed because of Elsevier’s failure to offer UC what it demanded: a new-style Big Deal in which the university got access to all of Elsevier’s paywalled content plus OA publishing rights for all UC authors – what UC refers to as a “Read and Publish” agreement. In addition, UC wanted Elsevier to provide this at a reduced cost.1 Given its size and influence, UC’s …

A Roadmap For Action: Academic Community Control Of Data Infrastructure, Sparc, Claudio Aspesi, Nicole Allen, Raym Crow, Shawn Daugherty, Heather Joseph, Joseph Mcarthur, Nick Shockey

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The need for academic institutions to act to retain control of infrastructure, data and data analytics is here to stay. It is critical for academic leaders to acknowledge that data and its uses play a central role in the operations and the future of their institutions, and take control of how it is managed as a strategic asset.

The time to act is now. Many of the actions outlined in the Risk Mitigation section of this roadmap can be taken relatively quickly, and many institutions already have a head start on these processes in response to GDPR or other requirements. …

Open And Equitable Scholarly Communications: Creating A More Inclusive Future, Nancy Maron, Rebecca Kennison, Paul Bracke, Nathan Hall, Isaac Gilman, Kara Malenfant, Charlotte Roh, Yasmeen Shorish

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For many years, the academic and research library workforce has worked to accelerate the transition to more open and equitable systems of scholarship. While significant progress has been made, barriers remain. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) seeks to stimulate further advances through this action- oriented research agenda, which is designed to provide practical, actionable information for academic librarians; include the perspectives of historically underrepresented communities in order to expand the profession’s understanding of research environments and scholarly communication systems; and point librarians and other scholars toward important research questions to investigate. This report represents a yearlong process …

A Cope Study (2019): Exploring Publication Ethics Issues In The Arts, Humanities, And Social Sciences, Committee On Publication Ethics

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COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) is a non-statutory body which aims to provide practical publication ethics guidance for journal editors working in all research disciplines. COPE was first conceived by an editor of a specialist medical journal at the BMJ Publishing Group but has since grown to become a fully multidisciplinary organisation. As a result of perceptions within COPE that some members not in Science Technology and Medicine (STM) disciplines might not consider COPE to be as relevant, in early 2019 COPE, with the support of Routledge (part of the Taylor & Francis Group), commissioned primary research to better understand …

Fractional Authorship & Publication Productivity, Kate Gasson, Rachel Herbert, Alex Ponsford

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Authors divide their research output across publications, contributing via research collaborations

The trend is for authors to produce more publications per year (increased fractionalization) but for the overall number of publications per author to decrease

We suggest that the effort required to participate in research collaborations is a factor in the decrease in publications per author

Are authors collaborating more in response to the pressure to publish?

Growth in the number of scholarly publications each year has been well documented (e.g., Bornmann & Mutz, 2015, Figure 1). But how has that growth been achieved? Is it purely due to increasing …

The Need For Speed: How Quickly Do Preprints Become Published Articles?, Rachel Herbert, Kate Gasson, Alex Ponsford

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bioRxiv’s option for authors to submit biology preprints directly to journals typically speeds up publication of articles by nearly 2 weeks—an advantage for authors who are keen to get their work published quickly

Authors approach ‘preprinting’ in different ways: while most post a preprint before submitting to a journal, just over a third of preprints were submitted to and accepted by a journal before the preprint appeared on bioRxiv

Biology preprints with just one version are published 2 weeks more quickly than those with multiple versions

Future Of Scholarly Publishing And Scholarly Communication: Report Of The Expert Group To The European Commission, Directorate-General For Research And Innovation (European Commission), Jean-Claude Guédon, Jubb Consulting, United Kingdom, Bianca Kramer, Mikael Laakso, Birgit Schmidt, Elena Šimukovič, Jennifer Hansen, Robert Kiley, Anne Kitson, Wim Van Der Stelt, Kamilla Markram, Mark Patterson,

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The Expert Group on the Future of Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Communication was set up to support the policy development of the European Commission on Open Science. The Expert Group was asked to assess the current situation with regard to scholarly communication and publishing and to establish general principles for the future. This report analyses the recent past and present states of scholarly communication and publishing. It proposes ten principles through which a vision for scholarly communication is shaped over the next 10-15 years. These principles also serve as a way to examine shortcomings of the current scholarly communication and …

Why We Publish Where We Do: Faculty Publishing Values And Their Relationship To Review, Promotion And Tenure Expectations, Meredith T. Niles, Lesley A. Schimanski, Erin Christy Mckiernan, Juan P. Alperin

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Using an online survey of academics at 55 randomly selected institutions across the US and Canada, we explore priorities for publishing decisions and their perceived importance within review, promotion, and tenure (RPT). We find that respondents most value journal readership, while they believe their peers most value prestige and related metrics such as impact factor when submitting their work for publication. Respondents indicated that total number of publications, number of publications per year, and journal name recognition were the most valued factors in RPT. Older and tenured respondents (most likely to serve on RPT committees) were less likely to value …

Regulation Of Artificial Intelligence In Selected Jurisdictions, Jenny Gesley, Tariq Ahmad, Edouardo Soares, Ruth Levush, Gustavo Guerra, James Martin, Kelly Buchanan, Laney Zhang, Sayuri Umeda, Astghik Grigoryan, Nicolas Boring, Elin Hofverberg, Clare Feikhert-Ahalt, Graciela Rodriguez-Ferrand, George Sadek, Hanibal Goitom

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Comparative Summary

This report examines the emerging regulatory and policy landscape surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) in jurisdictions around the world and in the European Union (EU). In addition, a survey of international organizations describes the approach that United Nations (UN) agencies and regional organizations have taken towards AI. As the regulation of AI is still in its infancy, guidelines, ethics codes, and actions by and statements from governments and their agencies on AI are also addressed. While the country surveys look at various legal issues, including data protection and privacy, transparency, human oversight, surveillance, public administration and services, autonomous vehicles, …

A Grand Challenges-Based Research Agenda For Scholarly Communication And Information Science [Mit Grand Challenge Pubpub Participation Platform], Micah Altman, Chris Bourg

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Identifying Grand Challenges

A global and multidisciplinary community of stakeholders came together in March 2018 to identify, scope, and prioritize a common vision for specific grand research challenges related to the fields of information science and scholarly communications. The participants included domain researchers in academia, practitioners, and those who are aiming to democratize scholarship. An explicit goal of the summit was to identify research needs related to barriers in the development of scalable, interoperable, socially beneficial, and equitable systems for scholarly information; and to explore the development of non-market approaches to governing the scholarly knowledge ecosystem.

To spur discussion and …

Mdpi Annual Report 2017, Mdpi

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Contents: Message from the CEO ● MDPI at a Glance ● Key Figures ● 19 Journals Launched in 2017 ● Preprints.org in 2017 ● Scilit in 2017 ● Sciforum in 2017 ● Institutional Open Access Program in 2017 ● OA Initiatives in 2017 ● Top MDPI Books in 2017 ● Journal Development in 2017 ● Journals Tracked for Impact Factor in 2018 ● Electronic Conferences in 2017 ● Call for Expression of Interest ● Physical Conferences in 2017 ● About MDPI ● Corporate Social Responsibility at MDPI ● Upcoming Physical Conferences in 2018 ● Collaborations with Societies ● JAMS ● …

Osi2018 Summary Report On The 1st Summit Meeting Of The Global Open Scholarship Initiative, March 12-14, 2018, The Open Scholarship Initiative, Glenn Hampson

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When the roadmap for OSI was first being developed in 2015, our original intent was to hold a series of 10 annual meetings beginning in 2016. After the first two meetings, however, it became apparent that the next step in this process should be to pause and have just the summit group meet to formally discuss and plan out what comes next instead of having this complex conversation online (which we had been doing since mid-2017) or amongst a group of several hundred participants. This decision was also necessitated by the lack of a large enough budget to put together …

Spec Kit 357 Libraries, Presses, And Publishing November 2017, Laurie N. Taylor, Brian W. Keith, Chelsea Dinsmore, Meredith Morris-Babb

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Many Association of Research Libraries (ARL) members have robust and long-standing publishing activities, often in collaboration with or running parallel to the press of the larger institutional entity. As reported in the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) 2015–2016 annual report, 30 AAUP member presses are in libraries. Eighty-one institutions are both ARL and AAUP members, and at 21 of those institutions, the press reports to the library. Other libraries—including Amherst College Press and the University of Cincinnati Press—launched new presses within libraries. Most of the 123 ARL member libraries are engaged in publishing or publishing support activities such as …

Ithaka S+R Us Faculty Survey 2015, Christine Wolff, Alisa B. Rod, Roger C. Schonfeld

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The Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey has tracked the changing research, teaching, and information usage practices of faculty members since the early days of the digital transformation. In this sixth triennial cycle, we survey a random sample of US higher education faculty members, adding medical scholars to our population to provide even more comprehensive coverage of US higher education.

Our first look at medical faculty members in the 2015 cycle shows that respondents sometimes have attitudes and practices that parallel their colleagues in the social sciences and physical sciences, but often are unique in the way that they discover and …