Scholarly Communication Commons^™

Read & Let Read: An Alternative To The Transformative Agreement, Arthur Boston

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

In March 2021, the University of California and Elsevier announced a new transformative deal which included slightly-discounted article processing fees as UC's route to open access in Elsevier journals. Librarians and researchers expressed immediate concern that this deal upheld inequities in the research system. The UC/Elsevier transformative deal, however, is just one of many that include expensive pay-to-publish structures. This commentary proposes an alternative contract between libraries and publishers that would enable wider reading and lower costs, called Read & Let Read. The three main points of a Read & Let Read deal include a half-dollar valuation of individual journal …

Eartharxiv: Today And Tomorrow, Tom Narock, Rochelle Taylor, Evan Goldstein, Arthur J. Boston, Dasapta Erwin Irawan

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

EarthArXiv is a preprint service for the Earth sciences — a web-based system that enables open access publishing of non peer-reviewed scholarly manuscripts before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. In this presentation, we provide analytics on the usage of EarthArXiv across a number of sub-disciplines of Earth science. Data indicate that the service in general is growing, but with submission rates varying amongst discipline. The trend of the preprint-to-postprint ratio for each discipline also provides insight into how the various Earth science communities are using the service. We investigate were preprints are published after submission to EarthArXiv and examine how …

Interested In Institutional Open Access Policies? Coapi Can Help!, Arthur J. Boston, Jere Odell, Mona Ramonetti, Alainna Wrigley

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Open access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Institutional open access policies serve as a pledge by institutional authors to make their works open access in a repository to ensure that anyone can access and use their research—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives. Librarians that support policy implementation connect readers from far and wide to research—getting to the heart of what an academic library should be. Often trained in providing faculty guidance and familiar with scholarly publishing, librarians are well …

Thinking Politically About Scholarly Infrastructure: Commit The Publishers To 2.5%, Arthur J. Boston

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Maybe it’s unsurprising that I think about scholarly communication in terms similar to U.S. politics. I originally drafted this article for the Library Publishing Coalition blog before the 2020 election and revised it for C&RL News during the weirdly long interregnum period before the actual inauguration. The 2016 Republican National Committee was the backdrop to my becoming a scholarly communication librarian in February of that year. That’s also when I joined Twitter, to better follow politics and librarianship, and maybe that’s to blame.

The Values Of Library Publishing And Open Infrastructure: Recapping #Lpforum21, Arthur J. Boston

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Who leads, participates in, and is served by global knowledge infrastructure? Check out these takeaways from the recent Library Publishing Forum Conference from the perspective of a member of the planning committee.

Open Peer Review, Christine L Ferguson

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

In this issue of Serials Review, the Balance Point column delves into issues surrounding peer review, paying particular attention to open peer review. Beginning with some discussion of the history and development of peer review, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of traditional peer review, the column addresses open peer review (OPR) processes and the pros and cons of OPR. Topics such as the mechanisms of open peer review, faculty credit for peer review, as well as open peer review in the Library and Information Science (LIS) field are also touched on.