Scholarly Communication Commons^™

Open Access: “Information Wants To Be Free”?, Richard Poynder

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The main points made in this document:

- Internet mantras like information wants to be free misled OA advocates about what is possible in an online world. Amongst other things, these mantras led to the mistaken belief that publishing would be very much cheaper on the internet.

- BOAI was intended to achieve three things: to resolve the longstanding problems of affordability, accessibility, and equity that have long dogged scholarly communication.

- It now seems unlikely that the affordability and equity problems will be resolved, which will impact disproportionately negatively on those in the Global South. And if the geopolitical …

Economic Analyses Of Federal Scientific Collections: Methods For Documenting Costs And Benefits, David E. Schindel, Economic Study Group Of The Interagency Working Group On Scientific Collections

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Federal object-based scientific collections have been created to serve agency missions and, in a few cases, to comply with legislative and regulatory mandates. “Project collections” (those managed by the researchers who obtained them for restricted use) and their costs and benefits were considered too varied for standard methodologies that assess costs and benefits. In a few cases, departments and agencies are required by legislation or regulations to retain objects in long-term “institutional collections.” In most cases, decisions to retain objects are based on long-term costs relative to the perceived potential for benefits to taxpayers. Federal collections vary in their philosophies …

Copyright, Andrea Wallace

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Copyright is intended to incentivize the production of new creative works and protect authors’ connection to them. In return, the author receives exclusive rights over the creative work and can commercialize or release them for various uses. Once the copyright expires, these works pass into the public domain and can be used by anyone to produce new creative works and knowledge.

GLAMs (Galleries, Archives, Libraries, and Museums) protect, preserve, and extend access to these works (and many other materials) for the appreciation of current and future generations. This is often facilitated today by digitizing collections and making them available online. …

The State Of Altmetrics: A Tenth Anniversary Celebration, Kathy Christian, Euan Adie, Gemma Derrick, Fereshteh Didegah, Paul Groth, Cameron Neylon, Jason Priem, Shenmeng Xu, Zohreh Zahedi, Yin-Leng Theng, Saeed-Ul Hassan, Naif R. Aljohani, Timothy D. Bowen, Vanesh M. Patel, Robin Haunschild, Lutz Bornmann, Mike Taylor, Liesa Ross, Stacy Konkiel

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Altmetric’s mission is to help others understand the influence of research online.We collate what people are saying about published research in sources such as the mainstream media, policy documents, social networks, blogs, and other scholarly and non-scholarly forums to provide a more robust picture of the influence and reach of scholarly work. Altmetric works with some of the biggest publishers, funders, businesses and institutions around the world to deliver this data in an accessible and reliable format.

Contents

Altmetrics, Ten Years Later, Euan Adie (Altmetric (founder) & Overton)

Reflections on Altmetrics, Gemma Derrick (University of Lancaster), Fereshteh Didegah (Karolinska Institutet …

Open Is Not Forever: A Study Of Vanished Open Access Journals, Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, Najko Jahn

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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 towards 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 purpose of this exploratory study is to systematically study the phenomenon of vanished journals, something that has not been done before. For the analysis, we consulted several major bibliographic indexes, such as Scopus, …

Open Access: An Analysis Of Publisher Copyright And Licensing Policies In Europe, 2020, Chris Morrison, Jane Secker, Brigitte Vézina,, Ignasi Labastida I Juan, Vanessa Proudman

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This report investigates the copyright retention policy amongst publishers, self-archiving policies and records publisher policies on open licensing, also as relating to the Plan S requirements on rights and licensing. It should be understood as a snapshot in time informing on the current policy status. It also provides policy development guidance to funders, institutions, publishers and their authors for positive change towards immediate OA.

Over the past decade, Europe has seen a significant growth in activity to establish and advance Open Access (OA) policies, this includes the relatively recent formation of the funder coalition, cOAlition S, and its Plan S …

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 …

The State Of Journal Production And Access 2020: Report On Survey Of Society And University Publishers

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“The State of Journal Production and Access” survey ran between March and June 2020 and received 63 responses from individuals working with academic organizations that publish one or more peer-reviewed journals independently (i.e., not outsourced to a separate publisher). The survey encompassed questions in two areas: 1. journal production, including article formatting, layout, and metadata tagging practices and priorities; and 2. journal access, including publishers’ current access and funding models as well as respondents’ perceptions of the viability of alternate options. Among the main findings on the topic of journal production were: • Less than half of publishers surveyed reported …

A List Of Zea Books, Published By University Of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Zea Books

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94 published titles (2005-2020), plus 1 forthcoming this fall.

Zea Books are produced by the Office of Scholarly Communications, and published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries.

With links to online pdf editions and Lulu.com print-on-demand online storefront.

Zea Books are online at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/

Print-on-demand editions are available @ http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/unllib

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 …

Accessibility In Institutional Repositories, Laura Waugh, Colleen Lyon, Abigail Shelton, Kristi Park, William Hicks, Nerissa Lindsey

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Purpose

Institutional repositories (IRs) are widely used for archiving, preserving, and disseminating scholarly works and making them available on the web. Much of the research and development in IRs has focused on platforms, workflows, and policies for adding content. In this study, the focus is to gauge practices to ensure accessibility of the digital content made available in IRs.

The purpose of this study is to:

1. Understand the current landscape of accessibility practices in institutional repositories in academic libraries.

2. Identify the average level of content accessibility implemented in institutional repositories in academic libraries.

For the purpose of this …

Labour Of Love: An Open Access Manifesto For Freedom, Integrity, And Creativity In The Humanities And Interpretive Social Sciences, Andrea E. Pia, Simon Batterbury, Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, Marcel Laflamme, Gerda Wielander, Filippo M. Zerilli, Melissa Nolas, Jon Schubert, Nicholas Loubere, Ivan Franceschini, Casey Walsh, Agathe Mora, Christos Varvantakis

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Over the next decade, Open Access (OA) is likely to become the default in scholarly publishing. Yet, as commercial publishers develop new models for capturing revenue (and as policy initiatives like Plan S remain reluctant to challenge their centrality), researchers, librarians, and other concerned observers are beginning to articulate a set of values that critically engages the industry-driven project of broadening access to specialist scholarship. While alternative genealogies exist, conversations about OA in the Global North have largely been concerned with the model of the STEM disciplines, lately shifting to focus on the development of infrastructural fixes that transcend traditional …

Open Access Uptake By Universities Worldwide, Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, Rodrigo Costas, Thed N. Van Leeuwen

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The implementation of policies promoting the adoption of an open science (OS) culture must be accompanied by indicators that allow monitoring the uptake of such policies and their potential effects on research publishing and sharing practices. This study presents indicators of open access (OA) at the institutional level for universities worldwide. By combining data from Web of Science, Unpaywall and the Leiden Ranking disambiguation of institutions, we track OA coverage of universities' output for 963 institutions. This paper presents the methodological challenges, conceptual discrepancies and limitations and discusses further steps needed to move forward the discussion on fostering OA and …

Biomedcentral (Bmc) 2019 – 2020, Anqi Shi, Heather Morrison

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Key points

• Open access commercial publishing pioneer BMC is now wholly owned by a private company with a portfolio including lines of business that derive revenue from journal subscriptions, book sales, and textbook sales and rentals
• Two former BMC fully OA journals, listed in DOAJ from 2014 – 2018 as having CC-BY licenses, are now hybrid and listed on the Springer website and have disappeared from the BMC website
• 67% of BMC journals with APCs in 2019 and 2020 increased in price and 11% decreased in price.
• Journals with price increases had a higher average APC in 2019, i.e. more …

Response To White House Office Of Scientific And Technical Policy Request For Information: Public Access To Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications, Data And Code Resulting From Federally Funded Research, Paul Royster, Sue A. Gardner

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The current 12-month embargo period is widely disregarded. It is observed by PubMed Central (PMC), but the existence of preprint servers and academic social network sites (ResearchGate or Academia.edu) makes it possible for most authors to distribute peer-reviewed manuscripts at will. While enforcement of the embargo is lax or non-existent, its elimination would have a negative impact on publishers’ cooperation—pushing them to replace so-called “green” open access with author-pays models. The 12-month embargo allows PubMed Central time to prepare accurate and standardized versions of accepted author manuscripts. Requiring immediate access would not eliminate the PMC production time; there would still …

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 …

Fostering Bibliodiversity In Scholarly Communications: A Call For Action!, Kathleen Shearer, Leslie Chan, Iryna Kuchma, Pierre Mounier

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Diversity is an important characteristic of any healthy ecosystem, including scholarly communications. Diversity in services and platforms, funding mechanisms, and evaluation measures will allow the scholarly communication system to accommodate the different workflows, languages, publication outputs, and research topics that support the needs and epistemic pluralism of different research communities. In addition, diversity reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, which inevitably leads to monopoly, monoculture, and high prices. Bibliodiversity has been in steady decline for decades.1 Far from promoting diversity, the dominant “ecosystem” of scholarly publishing today increasingly resembles what Vandana Shiva (1993) has called the “monocultures of the mind”2, …

The Conspiracy Theory Handbook, Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook

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Conspiracy theories attempt to explain events as the secretive plots of powerful people. While conspiracy theories are not typically supported by evidence, this doesn’t stop them from blossoming. Conspiracy theories damage society in a number of ways. To help minimize these harmful effects, The Conspiracy Theory Handbook, by Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook, explains why conspiracy theories are so popular, how to identify the traits of conspiratorial thinking, and what are effective response strategies.

The Handbook distills the most important research findings and expert advice on dealing with conspiracy theories. It also introduces the abbreviation CONSPIR which serves as a …

Scraping Bepress: Downloading Dissertations For Preservation, Stephen Zweibel

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This article will describe our process developing a script to automate downloading of documents and secondary materials from our library’s BePress repository. Our objective was to collect the full archive of dissertations and associated files from our repository into a local disk for potential future applications and to build out a preservation system.

Unlike at some institutions, our students submit directly into BePress, so we did not have a separate repository of the files; and the backup of BePress content that we had access to was not in an ideal format (for example, it included “withdrawn” items and did not …

Roadmap For Open Science (Canada), Mona Nemer

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The objective of the Roadmap for Open Science is to provide overarching principles and recommendations to guide Open Science* activities in Canada. The recommendations are intended for science and research funded by federal government departments and agencies.

The Roadmap for Open Science was developed in the context of the Directive on Open Government, the Model Policy on Scientific Integrity and the Data Strategy Roadmap for the Federal Public Service. It builds on the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications and the Statement of Principles on Digital Data Management. A federal approach to supporting Indigenous data strategies is outlined in the …

Osi 2019 Annual Report, Glenn Hampson

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OSI’s 2019 work focused on building a bridge to 2020—continuing our pivot from being an organization focused on understanding facts and perspectives, to one poised to pursue a significant, global reform agenda. This is a challenge for any group—doubly so for a group like OSI at the pioneering edge of a nebulous field, while also trying to maintain a republic format where all participants are co-equal leaders. OSI’s strategy in 2019 focused primarily on these three agenda items:

1. Find sustainable financing.

2. Help coordinate the construction of a new global roadmap for open.

3. Prepare for and start work …

Dear President Trump,, Coalition Of Open Access Policy Institutions (Coapi)

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We strongly endorse updating existing U.S. policy to eliminate the current 12-month embargo period on articles that report on publicly funded research, as instituted by the Obama administration, and to ensure that they are made immediately available to the public.

Copyright, Fair Use, And Creative Commons: An Active-Learning Exercise For Studio Art Students, Arthur J. Boston

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

This article describes an active-learning exercise intended to help teach copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons licenses. In the exercise students use a worksheet to draw original pictures, create derivative pictures on tracing paper, select Creative Commons licenses, and explore commercial usage, fair use, and copyright infringement. Librarian-instructors may find the completed worksheets to be useful aids to supplement copyright lectures; student perspectives will be integral because they are generating the examples used in discussion. Although a scholarly communication librarian developed this exercise to help introduce some basic copyright information to an undergraduate studio art and design class, the exercise …

Mplp: From Practice To Theory, Kyna Herzinger

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Most American archivists are familiar with More Product, Less Process or MPLP and are sensible of its strengths and weaknesses, while applying its time-saving methods. Minimal methods are currently justified over more time-honored, time-consuming ones by applying MPLP’s now largely accepted practices in an effort to maximize resources and prioritize competing workplace demands.

This paper traces MPLP’s development through four broad observations and seeks to reframe how archivists engage with MPLP and its diverse approaches. MPLP’s larger impact is considered by encouraging a conversation around how professional values have found a voice in MPLP and, in turn, considers MPLP’s impact …

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 …

The Trust Principles For Digital Repositories, Dawei Lin, Jonathan Crabtree, Ingrid Dillo, Robert R. Downs, Rorie Edmunds, David Giaretta, Marisa De Giusti, Hervé L'Hours, Wim Hugo, Reyna Jenkyns, Varsha Khodiyar, Maryann E. Martone, Mustapha Mokrane, Vivek Navale, Jonathan Petters, Barbara Sierman, Dina V. Sokolova, Martina Stockhause, John Westbrook

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As information and communication technology has become pervasive in our society, we are increasingly dependent on both digital data and repositories that provide access to and enable the use of such resources. Repositories must earn the trust of the communities they intend to serve and demonstrate that they are reliable and capable of appropriately managing the data they hold.

Following a year-long public discussion and building on existing community consensus , several stakeholders, representing various segments of the digital repository community, have collaboratively developed and endorsed a set of guiding principles to demonstrate digital repository trustworthiness. Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, …

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 …

The Debunking Handbook 2020, Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Ullrich Ecker, Dolores Albarracín, Panayiota Kendeou, Eryn J. Newman, Gordon Pennycook, Ethan Porter, David G. Rand, David N. Rapp, Jason Reifler, Jon Roozenbeek, Philipp Schmid, Colleen M. Seifert, Gale M. Sinatra, Briony Swire-Thompson, Sander Van Der Linden, Thomas J. Wood, Maria S. Zaragoza

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For more information on The Debunking Handbook 2020 including the consensus process by which it was developed, see https://sks.to/db2020.

In November 2011, we published The Debunking Handbook. As the update notice on that page already shows, more research has come in since then and the time had finally come for a complete overhaul of this very popular handbook (it still gets downloaded a couple of thousand times in most months!). The two authors of the original handbook - Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook - got in touch with other researchers who look into how best to counter misinformation and …