Recommendations about publishing and publication procurement practices across the health and social care system

The right way to mix green and gold approaches

NIHR Open Access Policy Review Stakeholder Survey Report

Measuring the Impact of Gold and Green Open Access

Traditionally, there have been two important media of academic publishing: scholarly journals and scholarly books. The first scholarly journal, the Journal des Sçavans, was founded by Denis de Sallo, appeared already in January 1665 in Paris, reappeared after the French Revolution as the Journal des Savants, and still exists as a leading journal in the humanities. Only a few weeks later, Henry Oldenbourg, the first secretary of the Royal Society of London, established a second scholarly journal, the Philosophical Transactions, with a focus on science. The purpose of these journals was to formalize the extensive correspondence between philosophers and scientists.1 In the 18th and the 19th century, more specialized journals gained in importance, most of which were published by learned societies. At the end of the 19th century, university presses too began to publish scholarly journals. Another traditional means of academic publishing are the various types of scholarly books, in particular monographs, edited volumes, reference works (specialist dictionaries, encyclopedias, and specialty reference manuals), and technical handbooks.2 A narrow definition of academic works would exclude textbooks and books for the broader public. Shavell (2010, 337–39) employs four criteria to determine whether a journal or book is academic in nature: (1) the authors and/or the publisher are usually academics; (2) the readers are mainly academics; (3) the content is academic in character; (4) only low royalties are paid, if any. As of today, scholarly journals are the preferred mode of academic publishing in particular in the sciences and some social sciences (e.g., economics), whereas scholarly books still play an important role in the arts, the humanities, and part of the social sciences. Whereas scholarly books are published by a large number of small national publishers in a multitude of languages, the most important scholarly journals are typically in English language and published by a few large commercial publishers. Until the mid-20th century, the most important journals were published by learned societies, before commercial publishers began to enter the academic publishing market in the 1960s and 1970s by launching new titles or acquiring existing ones. This development has led to a significant concentration of (commercial) publishers in the academic journal market.3 It is difficult to say for sure how many scholarly journals are available around the world. Some sources speak of more than 100,000, others of 87,000 or 73,000.4 In August 2018, Ulrich's Web Directory listed 33,119 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals with about 3 million articles a year, complemented by an additional 9,372 journals in other languages. As an important subset, 11,655 journals with 2.2 million articles were included in the Clarivate Analytics' Journal Citation Reports (STM, 2018, 25–26). The Web of Science (WoS) database counted almost 12,500 journals in 2019 (see below, Section 2.2.1). With the mass expansion of academic education and the increasing size of faculty after World War II, publications in peer-reviewed, highly ranked journals have become an important precondition for academic careers in many disciplines, in particular in the sciences, economics, and partly in the other social sciences. In 1964, Eugene Garfield launched the Science Citation Index to calculate the impact factors of journals in science, medicine, and technology. This index was later followed by the Social Sciences Citation Index in 1973, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index in 1978 (Regazzi, 2015, 86–88), and the Emerging Sources Citation Index in 2015. These indices led to the development of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), a metric that serves to rank a scholarly journal based on the number of citations to articles in that journal by articles in other indexed journals within a certain time period. During the same time, commercial publishers have increased their market shares to the detriment of non-for-profit publishers, such as learned societies and universities, becoming the dominant players in the market for scholarly journals. Today, the "big five" commercial academic publishers—Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Sage—cover more than half of the market for scholarly journals. Since the 1980s, we have seen a sharp increase not just in the number of journals but in particular also in journal subscription prices, forcing many academic libraries to cancel serials subscriptions and to cut back on new monographs (the so-called serials crisis, cf. Eger & Scheufen, 2018, 23–29). These developments induced an increasing number of scholars, initially in the United States, to promote open access (OA) to scholarly articles as a replacement of or an addendum to the subscription model. After some individual initiatives in the late 1980s, the early 2000s saw the emergence of a global movement by scholars, librarians, and research sponsors, resulting in the "Budapest Open Access Initiative" (February 2002), the "Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing" (June 2003) and the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" (October 2003).7 Two roads to OA can be distinguished8: First, gold OA refers to electronic journals with OA for all readers, often based on creative commons licenses. The publishers' costs are covered not by subscription fees but from other sources, such as article-processing charges (APCs)9 paid by authors, libraries, learned societies, or research sponsors, or subsidies from learned societies and other sources. Hybrid OA journals, whose numbers are rising fast, allow the authors to choose between paying an APC, thereby granting the reader OA, or not paying an APC and requiring the reader to pay for access to the article.10 A special branch of gold OA is mega-journals, the first one of which, PLOS One, was first published in 2006. In these journals, the peer review is restricted to examining only the soundness of the submitted articles but not their broader interest or impact. Also, mega-journals are not oriented towards a specific subject matter. The second road, green OA, refers to authors self-archiving pre-prints or post-prints of their papers on so-called OA repositories, potentially in addition to publication in traditional subscription-based journals. OpenDOAR listed 5,713 repositories in July 2021, of which 5,073 were classified as institutional repositories managed by universities, faculties, or other academic institutions, 364 as disciplinary (subject) repositories which aggregate research papers in specific disciplines (e.g., PubMed Central, arXiv, SSRN, and RepEc), 138 as aggregating repositories (including Academia and Scielo), and 139 as governmental repositories.11 Whereas institutional and disciplinary repositories generally respect the authors' or publishers' copyright, so-called Robin Hood or Pirate OA repositories do not. The most prominent example is Sci-Hub, founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, a young scholar from Kazakhstan, which made over 60 million journal articles publicly available. Due to complaints by academic publishers, Sci-Hub had to switch domains several times.12 Recent years have seen the emergence of academic social networks such as Research Gate and Mendeley, as well as a stream of new forms of disseminating scientific content, including blogs, podcasts, and Facebook posts by prominent scholars. Regarding OA books, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in June 2021 listed 43,036 academic peer-reviewed books from 621 publishers.13 The number of academic journals, as listed in the WoS database, has been growing steadily over the past two decades, from around 5,000 in 2000 to almost 12,500 in 2019 (Figure 1).14 Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) The academic journal market is dominated by a few large commercial publishers, with the "big five" accounting for more than half of the academic journals listed by the WoS in 2019: Elsevier (1,754 journals), Springer (1,406), Wiley Blackwell (1,242), Taylor & Francis (1,199), and Sage (642).15 However, due to a downturn by Elsevier that began around 2006, this dominance has declined from around 60% in 2000 to around 51.7% in 2019 (Figure 2). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) Coupled with the advent of the internet and the concurrent increasing digitization of academic works, which through the bundling of different journals and/or formats ("big deals") facilitated second-degree price discrimination, this dominance has led to a drastic increase in subscription prices since the early 1990s (Bergstrom, 2013; Eger & Scheufen, 2018; Ramello, 2010). The resulting serials crisis—with academic libraries having to cut their journal portfolio—gave rise to a new publishing regime that offers OA to journal content. The share of pure (i.e., non-hybrid) OA journals as listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (2021) has been increasing steadily, from around 3% of all WoS-listed journals in 2000 to more than 10% in 2019 (Figure 3). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) Interestingly, pure OA journals also gained ground in terms of quality. Figure 4 shows boxplots of the impact factors16 of closed access (CA) versus OA journals over time. While CA journals enjoyed an impact factor advantage over OA journals for a long time—all location scales of the impact factor for CA journals being above the ones for OA journals—OA journals are nowadays of the same quality, notwithstanding considerable differences between disciplines (see the contribution by Eger et al. to this issue). In 2019, impact factor distributions of both OA and CA journals are at the same level. Thus, advancing both in quantity and in quality, OA journals are becoming ever more relevant. The literature has identified the following advantages of an OA regime for academic works: (1) OA publications are likely read and therefore (2) cited more widely,17 which in turn (3) raises the incentives for academic authors to publish their research results as citations increase their reputation. These observations led to a broad discussion in academia as to whether the copyright regime may impede the evolution towards a universal OA regime, with very different conclusions being drawn regarding the impact of OA from a social welfare perspective (Scheufen, 2015; Shavell, 2010). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) The growing relevance of academic OA publishing warrants a closer look at the development of pure OA journals as the gold road towards OA. Figure 5 shows the number of newly launched OA journals from 2002 to 2020. Following relatively slow growth from 2002 to 2014, with fewer than 500 new OA journals per year (except 2013), the number has exceeded 1,000 in every year since, peaking in 2017, when more than 2,000 new OA journals were added to the DOAJ database. Today, the DOAJ database counts more than 16,000 OA journals in many different fields of research, published in 80 languages by publishers from 126 countries.18 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Notwithstanding this impressive development, the relevance of OA journals varies substantially across academic disciplines (Figure 6).19 The research field with the largest attributed number of OA journals is Social Sciences (3,817), followed by Health Sciences (2,785), Technology and Engineering (1,416), and Language and Literature (1,153). By contrast, the natural science fields of Mathematics & Statistics (341), Physics & Astronomy (274), and Chemistry (181) feature only few OA journals.20 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Remarkable differences also exist regarding a variety of OA journal characteristics (Table 1).21 Most (52%) OA journals leave the copyright of published works with the author, whereas the traditional CA regime demands that the exploitation rights are transferred to the publisher. Moreover, only around 28% of all OA journals charge APCs—a remarkable finding, as the OA regime implies the transition from a "reader pays" to an "author pays" model. Other fees (e.g., a submission fee to cover the review process) are charged by only around 2% of all OA journals. Nevertheless, author fees may constitute a significant obstacle for authors to publish in an OA venue, especially for non-tenured researchers seeking to publish in highly ranked journals, which are most likely to charge APCs (Budzinski et al., 2020). This obstacle also applies in particular to many researchers from developing countries, whose institutions rarely cover such costs. Yet 18% of OA journals provide for the possibility to waive such author fees. OA publishing may indeed be considered a form of development aid, for two reasons: First, few institutions in the developing world have so far been able to subscribe to academic journals. The OA regime can thus promote scientific participation and thereby foster the global evolution of science as a "trial and error" process. Free or cheaper access to literature for researchers in the developing world tends to increase both their output (number of publications) and input (number of references) (Mueller-Langer et al., 2020). Second, an OA regime grants access to the latest results in science for groups who were previously excluded because they are not "club" members of a university library. This includes, e.g., corporate researchers, physicians, or farmers. Notwithstanding all the changes discussed above, scholarly journals remain the most important medium of communication in many disciplines. For more than 300 years, they have been fulfilling the four key functions of registration (attribution), certification of articles (peer review), dissemination (distribution, access), and preservation (scholarly memory and permanent archiving). In recent decades, a fifth function must be added: the evaluation of researchers and their institutions.22 The increasing importance of OA articles in scholarly journals has triggered some controversial discussions, in particular regarding the questions as to whether OA negatively affects the quality of journal articles, whether OA improves the dissemination of research results, and how OA affects the competition between academic publishers as well as the distribution between academics and non-academics, between poor and rich universities, and between poor and rich countries. We shall discuss each of these questions and some related points in more detail below. In times when "alternative facts" tend to trump sound research results, academia must provide the public with reliable information. The users of this information should be sufficiently certain that the results are based on proper methods, reflect the state of science in the specific field, and were obtained independently, e.g., of any political or commercial interests.23 For that reason, strict and continuous quality control of research results is a "conditio sine qua non" for academic publishing. Facilitating the communication of content from authors to readers, the academic journal market may be characterized as a two-sided market (Rochet & Tirole, 2003). While readers look for the most important research results in their fields by top authors, the latter are interested in the journal's reputation, in wide readership, and in citations. Thus, journals with high impact factors hold the greatest attraction to both sides. With this in mind, the crucial question arises what effect, if any, OA is likely to have on the quality of academic articles. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, is very skeptical regarding the quality of OA articles, especially those that are financed by APCs: "By adding a financial component to the front end of the scholarly publishing process, the open-access movement will ultimately corrupt scholarly publishing and hurt the communication and sharing of novel knowledge" (Beall, 2013, 590). A weak form of "corruption" would to OA publishers' incentives to peer review and to more submitted papers in to increase from However, the commercial publishers' incentives to increase the number of articles to the detriment of the journal's quality at the the quality the APCs that the journal is able to as well as A form of "corruption" refers to the of some OA journal publishers have been to in particular young and who on publications for their or to allow authors to publish articles in OA journals, by articles with or peer academics on their the or of journals, and so In established a of publishers, which was in January in to not only from the publishers but also from OA who that the to to OA. this quality to be a one which exists only in some disciplines (e.g., economics), whereas in other disciplines, such as some OA journals are the ranked journals and there is of a quality researchers their and if academic institutions and research to the APCs for articles by journals, this is to A by is that OA may new and will new and of their will remain (Beall, 2013, 590). However, this is a of the process, of whether the was submitted to a traditional or an OA and many prominent which that articles are generally more likely to the review than and creative but ones. In their contribution to this special & in a two-sided that OA can be a feature of journals. The have seen an increasing both of data on any subject and of that serves to that data almost there has been a of articles in every For such articles, the peer for quality A can be made between pure the same data and the same are as in the and scientific which (1) different data but the same (2) the same data but new methods, or (3) new data and new A to a on (1) the of an or in previously published (2) the impact of the (3) the of and (4) the of to publish Whereas some years when data were on the of mainly of technical copyright and data are the of Regarding the first journals in have already been including an OA journal by University with a focus on Technology and and the Journal for in by Springer the years or a number of in several disciplines have that the results of many when published in highly ranked journals, not be many academics to speak of a The is to the quality of research by access to data so as to be able to results of and or the incentives to the in the first Another important question is whether digitization and the internet have facilitated the quality of of their scholarly and and of their the quality of academic researchers and of is based on which were to provide a metric for journals with each 2019, being a of the citations to all articles in a journal but not of the citations to the individual articles. In a few articles are cited and many articles are not cited at Moreover, an may also many citations for being and citations are 2018, For some journals the authors of submitted papers to related papers that were previously published in the same journal have this by the of several journals this focus on and their to their and the of to these and to with for the quality of research & in with a a to be a (STM, 2018, are induced to the but the The on research which from the on Science and Technology in 2014, is of the existing to research output and to research evaluation in the et al., the question whether the new and the and (OA) of academic publishing to and their Some authors the in OA publishing with a broader of readers and open For of the in the focus on a small number of highly ranked journals, for a all articles that a journal's criteria should be published and made financed by APCs or other This is the of mega-journals such as PLOS a who the 2000 in and & the between of publications in the top journals in and of in a of the top which over the the crucial question is how to articles at low especially in a OA the of available articles to choose journal of costs to some However, the of the as a of quality has been Thus, an important to academic publishing is to provide reliable on the quality of journal articles that are of the journal that published the the internet and for research evaluation also how research results are Regarding scholarly by other researchers, there is an discussion as to whether OA articles more or fewer citations than those with a to that is in the by & and by Eger et al. to this special Regarding by the broader the mainly is being complemented with which on or in the social reference such as and Mendeley, scholarly blogs, and In the transition from traditional subscription journals to OA, the crucial question is how to the between two the one high subscription fees may be with high journal publishers have to their to the or research the other low APCs may not for publishers to cover their and to a to publish journals. The is to competition to journal publishers to articles of quality at and and to the interested public. The of competition not on the and of OA publishing. there were only pure OA journals, publishers would for all authors had to cover the APCs from their the APCs would tend towards a that the publishers to However, in the publishers of pure OA journals, OA journals and CA journals with OA repositories, and APCs may be by or research these different to foster OA will have specific on the of are some (1) green OA is or an to as has been the in since January 2014, publishers of subscription journals difficult to increase their fees. 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PurposeThis paper aims to examine the level of open access (OA) adoption by researchers in Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), identify predictors of OA status (OA vs non-OA) and explore the availability of OA versions of the articles and venues used by the researches for hosting of their articles.Design/methodology/approachArticles contributed by the researchers in IITs were searched using an advance search option in the Web of Science Core collection database. The search was restricted to journal articles published in English language in the year 2015. Of the 10,049 articles retrieved, 1,023 (10 per cent of the total) were chosen randomly. Articles selected after randomizations were exported to MS Excel for further analyses. Title of each article was searched in Google Scholar to assess its OA availability and venues used by the author for self-archiving. Details of ten articles could not be traced in Google Scholar, and they were excluded from the analysis. Based on the analysis of URLs, all OA articles were classified into three categories: gold OA, green OA and both gold and green OA. The OA articles available through green route were further classified into six categories based on the analysis of the websites and the self-archiving venues used by the authors: institutional repository, subject repository, researcher or scholar’s website, organizational website, ResearchGate and other websites.FindingsOf 1,013 articles examined, OA versions were found for 68.70 per cent of articles. Of the total OA articles, 10.26 per cent articles were available through gold OA and 58.44 per cent were available through green OA, while remaining 6.21 per cent were available via both gold and green OA routes. Although researchers use different venues for self-archiving their articles, ResearchGate and institutional repositories are the most preferred choices by the researchers in IITs. Researchers in IITs are seemed to be unaware of the self-archiving policies of publishers, as more than 85 per cent self-archived articles were found as final PDF versions that are normally not allowed by the publishers.Research limitations/implicationsThis study is limited to IITs, but it offers theoretical implications for extending its scope to different subjects and institutes. The findings of the study may be useful for the publishers and institutions for formulating OA policies. The findings of the study might be used for raising awareness of OA among researchers and encouraging them to contribute their research outcome in OA outlets.Originality/valueThis is the first study in India focusing on the availability of OA research.

Open Access (OA) was conceived to democratize scientific knowledge, yet concerns have arisen about how different OA models affect research integrity. This study examines the relationship between two major publishing pathways – Gold OA and Green OA – and academic integrity across 60 countries and multiple disciplines from 2014 to 2023, drawing on Scopus-indexed journal publications. Gold OA, often operating under a pay-to-publish model, has been criticized for creating incentives that potentially erode the quality of peer review, fostering predatory journals, and disadvantaging authors lacking financial resources. Green OA, on the other hand, allows researchers to self-archive their work, thereby reducing financial barriers and potentially promoting transparency and reproducibility. To gauge research integrity, we use a composite score based on the share of publications in journals that Scopus has discontinued for quality concerns, and the share of retracted articles, giving heavier weight to retractions. Regression analyses reveal a statistically significant negative association between Gold OA share and the transformed integrity score, whereas a higher Green OA share correlates positively with research integrity. However, the explanatory power of these variables is moderate (Adj. R² ≈ 0.288), indicating that other factors also play pivotal roles. Further stratified analyses by discipline show that both Gold and Green OA practices vary by field, but the link between OA model and integrity indicators remains consistent overall: Gold OA tends to correlate with lower integrity, while Green OA is generally associated with higher integrity. National research culture appears to be especially influential, possibly due to varying systems of performance evaluation, career advancement, and ethical oversight. These findings underscore the need for careful policy considerations in promoting OA. While OA can expand accessibility and foster more equitable knowledge dissemination, the manner in which OA is implemented can have unintended consequences for scholarly standards.

Open access publications are those where following the publication itself, the publishers allow anyone to access the article or publication to read, or download without any restriction. It is believed that publishing in open access journals can increase the visibility of the publication, although uncertainties prevail. In a bid to improve the PBRF ratings, the College research committee in its monthly meeting agreed to organise an Open Access Seminar in the college. The seminar was organised on 4th of June, 2015, Thursday. Four speakers were identified. They were: Peter Lund and Anton Angelo from the University of Canterbury Central Library and Researcn Unit, Peter Binfield from PeerJ, and Viriginia Barbour from Australian Open Access Support Group. The topics of the seminar included a brief introduction to open access publishing and the state of the scenario in NZ and Australia and exploration of the issues around green and gold open access, and future directions as to what can be done to increase participation in open access. The seminar was also designed to be an open to all, and free flowing discussion. This seminar followed a format of webinar and on the spot presentations, questions and answers. A web based page was set up using the openly accessible Adobe Connect "room" where participants could connect even if they were not able to attend in person. Dr Binfield and Barbour were overseas speakers and they connected using the webinar (Adobe Connect). Mr Lund and Angelo were local speakers and they came to the meeting hall directly and spoke. A resource website was set up and the event was recorded for later viewing. The event was publicised across the university and through online channels. About 30 individuals attended the meeting in person, and ten participants joined online. Mr Lund introduced the concept of open access at the University of Canterbury, and introduced the concepts of gold and green open access; Mr Angelo introduced the concepts of creative commons, and Drs Binfield and Barbour discussed models of open access and the situation in Australia. The floor was open for questions, and clarifications and discussions from the audience participation. Key takeaway lessons from the seminar included: at the University of Canterbury, scholars are active in publishing in Open Access channels; green open access is popular in Australia and in New Zealand; newer channels and novel publishing models uitlising the Open Access formats are emerging and becoming popular; while some reservations about quality in open access exist, quality of peer review in OA journals were at par.

Unconditional data sharing, plus peer review transparency, is key to research reproducibility

Since our first issue in 1977, with founding editor Michael Harloe, IJURR has been at the forefront of critical urban debates. The year 2015 marks an important moment for the journal since we stand at a crossroads between an increasingly corporate publishing environment, in which many journals are becoming online only, their academic content trapped behind expensive electronic pay walls, and an alternative pathway towards a defence of the modern journal as a printed publication, affordable and accessible to a wide range of readers. Many libraries, for example, especially from the global South, continue to rely on print-only subscriptions. At our most recent editorial board meeting held in Mexico City we had a wide-ranging discussion about the future of academic publishing and reaffirmed our commitment to IJURR as a high-quality academic journal available in both print and online formats. The cornerstone of our defence of IJURR in an increasingly challenging publishing environment is our comprehensive redesign. This has been developed over the last two years in collaboration with the Austrian designer Paulus M. Dreibholz, who has extensive experience with cutting-edge architectural and cultural publications, across a variety of different formats. As part of the IJURR redesign each article will work effectively either as an individual electronic document or as a printed version contained within a specific journal issue. The dual approach extends to precise details of the font, layout and pagination. Given the intense pressures on space we have had to find a solution that does not significantly affect our annual page range for the journal. A key element of the redesign has involved changing the existing typefaces. We have replaced the Times New Roman typeface, which is amongst the least distinctive available, with the clearer and more contemporary Mercury (1997), developed by the New York based typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler. For the headings, captions and block quotes, which had been set in Interstate (used for American road signage), we have switched to Avenir Next (2007), a typeface developed by Adrian Frutiger and Akira Kobayashi, which adds greater versatility between print and digital formats than Frutiger's original Avenir (1988) but retains key elements of geometric sans-serif typefaces such as Erbar (1922) and Futura (1927). With our new look we are aiming to make IJURR more distinctive, more readable, and also more closely engaged with cutting-edge developments in design and publishing, including the necessity to connect with wider audiences such as practitioners and urbanists outside the academy. Our redesign also marks a more serious engagement with the use of visual materials ranging from architectural sketches, film stills and photographs to various explanatory figures and tables. We are not only interested in the quality and legibility of these materials, both for print and online readers, but also their precise role in the context of key urban debates. Additionally, each issue of the journal will feature three images on the cover, connected to the articles, but also providing an opportunity to reflect on broader themes in urban culture. We also intend to use this ‘gallery space' to signal the distinctiveness of key debates or symposia. In parallel with changes to the journal we have also worked with the German web designer Corinna Reetz to revamp our website: gone is the clutter and garish maroon banner. In its place we hope that readers will find the site clearer and more navigable. We will be making greater use of our website in future to enable complementary commentaries and shorter interventions to accompany themes developed within the journal itself but also to allow faster interaction with contemporary debates of potential interest to our readers. As part of our commitment to improving IJURR we have also upgraded the paper quality for the printed journal––contrary to recent publishing trends––to ensure that the journal is attractive, readable, and earns its place on our bookshelves. We are keen that the journal should be available for sale in individual bookshops, alongside other critical journals, and we have negotiated a special single-issue price to facilitate this way of reaching wider readerships. We are also introducing a choice of referencing systems between the Chicago (footnote) and Harvard (in-text citation) models to reflect our commitment towards widening the range of disciplines we wish to feature in these pages: we hope that scholars from anthropology, history, science and technology studies (STS) and other disciplines will consider IJURR as a suitable outlet for innovative work that has hitherto been largely published elsewhere. This flexibility is important because it enables us to handle a wider range of data sources, methodological approaches and styles of writing: we are interested in countering the creeping uniformity of academic scholarship and the tendency towards highly formulaic modes of exposition. Another important area of change in academic publishing that affects IJURR directly is the introduction of ‘open access publishing'. This change is being driven mainly by demands that publications derived from publicly funded research activity should be freely available in digital format. At present, there are two ‘open access' options available: ‘green' and ‘gold'. Under ‘green open access', authors can make the peer-reviewed version of their article (i.e. the accepted version before copy editing and formatting) openly available in institutional and not-for-profit repositories after a set embargo period. Under ‘gold open access', authors who have institutional funds available to pay the so-called ‘Article Publication Charge' can make the published version of their article openly available immediately upon publication. IJURR fully embraces the move to green open access. However, our editorial board has raised significant concerns that the payment of exorbitant fees for gold open access is an integral part of the neoliberal drift in higher education and academic publishing. It is also discriminatory, since it will disproportionately benefit scholars from wealthier institutions in the global North with access to sources of research funding and institutions that can support (and indeed demand) the payment of gold open access fees. Nevertheless, we had to weigh our deep concern about gold open access against the need to find a solution that will not deter publicly funded research from being published in IJURR. Within this complicated publishing terrain we decided to offer green open access to all our authors, and gold open access to those authors who have to comply with gold open access requirements posed by their institutions or research funding bodies. At the same time, we actively explore ways in which gold open access fees can be redistributed to benefit authors from different institutional and geographical settings, in consultation with the charitable wing of our activities, the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies. In recognition that academic publishing, along with its wider institutional and public policy context, is in a state of flux at present we shall regularly review these developments to try and mitigate some of the more iniquitous effects. We are conscious that IJURR is embedded in an asymmetrical environment but do not wish to exacerbate these inequalities further. One additional question linked to the open access debate, is the way in which open access content can be handled in the print version of the journal. As noted earlier, we remain committed to retaining a high quality well-designed print journal, in an era in which commercial and technical advances push for the full ‘digitalization' of academic publications. But what does ‘being open access' mean to subscribers of the print only version of the journal, or to readers who do not have access to digital formats? Although it hinges upon addressing complex legal and institutional issues, we are committed to continue exploring ways for offering equal opportunities for open access to authors and readers alike independently of their geographic location or institutional setting. The significant increase in the quantity of submissions, combined with the increase in quality of papers we receive is a welcome development. Although in 2013 and 2014 we published almost twice our normal content in order to accommodate the increasing number of excellent papers we received, we are now also very close to accepting just 10% of articles submitted. This means we publish only articles that are judged to be truly exceptional in terms of empirical, methodological or conceptual originality and critical insight. What is also important to note, however, is that the journal's high quality is the result of the collective effort and labour put into it not only by authors, editors, and the editorial board and office, but also by our referees, who offer critical comments to improve papers. IJURR is one of the few journals that engage referees at every stage of the reviewing process by communicating all comments and editorial decisions to referees as well as authors. This is made possible thanks to the outstanding support offered by Mel Goodsell and Angela Yeap, under the guidance of Terry McBride, our managing editor. By sharing the anonymized version of the decision letter we send to authors with our international body of referees, we hope to foster the growth of an international community of critical scholars who are sometimes trained in different reviewing traditions. As they can see the comments written by their peers, our reviewers can engage in an international dialogue. Problems of urban and regional development are of growing visibility on a world scale, in rich and poor, socialist and capitalist countries alike. Often … they directly derive from processes which operate on an international level. This journal will compare and contrast such problems as they occur in widely differing situations and social systems. International dialogue has been our mission since the very beginning, a dialogue between scholars from various disciplines and origins, and a dialogue between scholars and activists (and they are oftentimes the same people). In 1998, the editors published a statement reflecting on how IJURR developed with regards to its original objectives. They wrote: ‘Despite the recurrent taste for simple universal models (which can be seen as an indirect form of intellectual domination), we have respected the diversity of urban experience and the usefulness of comparative analysis to enable understanding of the more familiar by contrast to the less familiar'. In 2009, the editors highlighted that international dialogue was more and more reflected in the composition of the editorial board, as well as in the range of articles published in the journal. Moreover, they note that technological changes now allow the journal to be accessible around the world. But, as they note, ‘internationalization is surely above all about acknowledging that theories derived from the experiences of North-West Europe and North America may not be universally applicable, and that those regions may be exceptional from a global perspective. Internationalization is thus a process of reconsidering and challenging theory on a range of levels'. Over the years, the very meaning of IJURR's international mission has changed because the world has profoundly changed. If the language we use to speak of the world has evolved, we remain stuck in dichotomies, despite many calls to break them down. Our efforts in the last decade have been placed on fostering scholarship that attempts to do away with these capitalist/socialist, first world/third world, developed/under-developed, core/periphery, north/south dichotomies in innovative ways. This has meant opening our pages to new epistemological traditions produced outside Europe and North America and in the new transdisciplinary frontiers of social knowledge production. The challenges are great because of language barriers and the continued dominance of English-speaking ways of writing papers and conducting research, which transpires in the reviews we receive. But the journal pursues its work towards internationalization by, for instance, relying on more and more reviewers from outside of Europe and North America. We have recently begun to organize IJURR lectures in other languages than English. The first of such, held in Mexico City in October 2014, will be available online shortly.

To question the efficacy of 'gold' open access to published articles. Open access is unrestricted access to academic, theoretical and research literature that is scholarly and peer-reviewed. Two models of open access exist: 'gold' and 'green'. Gold open access provides everyone with access to articles during all stages of publication, with processing charges paid by the author(s). Green open access involves placing an already published article into a repository to provide unrestricted access, with processing charges incurred by the publisher. This is a discussion paper. An exploration of the relative benefits and drawbacks of the 'gold' and 'green' open access systems. Green open access is a more economic and efficient means of granting open access to scholarly literature but a large number of researchers select gold open access journals as their first choices for manuscript submissions. This paper questions the efficacy of gold open access models and presents an examination of green open access models to encourage nurse researchers to consider this approach. In the current academic environment, with increased pressures to publish and low funding success rates, it is difficult to understand why gold open access still exists. Green open access enhances the visibility of an academic's work, as increased downloads of articles tend to lead to increased citations. Green open access is the cheaper option, as well as the most beneficial choice, for universities that want to provide unrestricted access to all literature at minimal risk.

This paper aims to examine the availability of Open Access (OA) research literature in the field of digital library. In order to analyse the availability of OA research literature in the field of digital library, a search was conducted on Web of Science’s Core collection database on June 11, 2019. In response to a topic search TS = “Digital Library” using the advanced search option, 849 articles were retrieved. Of the 849 articles examined, the details of 26 articles were not found in the Google Scholar. Therefore, 823 articles were selected for further analyses. After examining the Websites of OA articles, they were classified into three categories: gold OA, green OA, and both gold and green OA. Furthermore, all the green OA articles were systematically organised into six groups for the examination of the self-archiving venues used by the researchers for self-archiving. Out of 823 articles analysed, OA versions were found for 64.76 per cent of articles. This study found that 26.68 per cent of OA articles were available through gold OA and 60.39 per cent articles were available through green OA, while 36.53 per cent articles were accessible via both OA journals and self-archiving (gold & green OA). Although researchers used various OA platforms for self-archiving of their research work, publishers’ Websites were found as the most preferred choice for self-archiving of research work by the authors in the field of digital library. Computer Science discipline has the highest share of OA copies available through self-archiving. However, it is important to point out that more than 78 per cent of self-archived articles were found as the final publisher’s PDF versions of the article which publishers never allow for self-archiving.

 

Open access (OA) mandates are policies that require researchers to provide free, unrestricted access to their published research by including it in OA journals (gold OA) or depositing it in freely available disciplinary or institutional repositories (green OA). This study measures the degree of compliance with a Spanish government OA mandate 2.5 years after its implementation. A total of 58.4% of articles resulting from publicly funded research had at least one OA copy available 1 year after publication. Among these, 23.8% were in gold OA, 21.8% in green OA and 12.8% in gray OA, i.e., posted on websites and social networks. Most of the green OA articles were in 2 disciplinary repositories: arXiv and PubMed Central. Just 14.4% of the articles resulting from publicly funded research were available in institutional repositories, although more than 90% of the articles in the data set were the result of projects carried out at institutions that have such an archive. There is great potential for growth in green OA, because over two thirds of the articles that were not available as OA were published in journals whose publishers allow a preprint or a postprint copy to be deposited.

Open Access and the <i>Journal of Industrial Ecology</i>

In the abstract Results section (p.1948), there is an error in the reported predicted increase in citation counts for Green and Gold open access (OA).It states, "Both Green OA and Gold OA significantly predicted a 2.70 and 5.21 respective increase in citation counts compared to Closed Access manuscripts (p < .001)."The correct values should be reported as, "Both Green OA and Gold OA significantly predicted a 2.70 and 7.29 respective increase in citation counts compared to Closed Access manuscripts (p < .001)."In the second sentence of the abstract Results, there is an error in the reported p value of the marginally significant predicted increase in altmetric scores for Green OA.The sentence states, "Green OA was only marginally significant (p = .68)in predicting a 1.44 increase in altmetric scores relative to Closed Access manuscripts."The correct reporting should be, "Green OA was only marginally significant (p = .068)in predicting a 1.44 increase in altmetric scores relative to Closed Access manuscripts."This p value is correctly reported in the Results section. Effect of OA Status on Citation Count and Altmetric ScoreIn the Effect of OA Status on Citation Count section (p.1952) and in Figure 1 (p.1953), the reported predicted increase in Gold OA citation count from Closed Access is also written as 5.21.The correct reporting should be 7.29.