Open Access Model Research Articles

Assessing the time-sensitive impacts of energy efficiency and flexibility in the US building sector

The building sector consumes 75% of US electricity, offering substantial energy, cost, and CO2 emissions savings potential. New technologies enable buildings to flexibly manage electric loads across different times of day and season in support of a low-cost, low-carbon electric grid. Assessing the value of such technologies requires an understanding of building electric load variability at a higher temporal resolution than is demonstrated in previous studies of US building efficiency potential. We adapt Scout, an open-access model of US building energy use, to characterize sub-annual variations in baseline building electricity use, costs, and emissions at the national scale. We apply this baseline in time-sensitive analyses of the energy, cost, and CO2 emissions savings potential of various degrees of energy efficiency and flexibility, finding that efficiency continues to have strong value in a time-sensitive assessment framework while the value of flexibility depends on assumed electricity rates, measure magnitude and duration, and the amount of savings already captured by efficiency.

Smart Cities, Dumb Infrastructure: Policy-Induced Competition in Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Systems

The coinciding development of 5G wireless technology, autonomous vehicles, and smart city applications is creating commercial demand for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) systems. In theory, roadside V2I systems and sensors could provide real-time services, such as supplementary mapping information to autonomous vehicles, traffic detection, and congestion pricing. Although federal funding of V2I systems has ramped up in recent years, federal regulators have largely retreated from their top-down design of V2I services and devices. These trends — undirected government funding and private construction of V2I applications and devices — leave state and local transportation officials with powerful discretion over the construction and design of V2I systems. We describe and anticipate the tradeoffs that lawmakers, regulators, and state authorities will face as they budget for and fund V2I roadside networks. We find that public-private partnerships likely will have greater prominence in the construction of roadside V2I networks. Finally, we apply the “policy-induced competition model” to inform when public intervention into V2I funding and design is effective. We propose regulator adoption of an open access model for long-lasting roadside assets. This “dumb infrastructure” model promotes competition and innovation in V2I while minimizing use of regulator resources and public funding of networks.

Open Systems Pharmacology Community-An Open Access, Open Source, Open Science Approach to Modeling and Simulation in Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Systems pharmacology integrates structural biological and pharmacological knowledge and experimental data, enabling dissection of organism and drug properties and providing excellent predictivity. ...

ADSA® Presidential Report

ADSA® Presidential Report

Daylight glare mitigation by internal shading devices use and effects on building energy performance

Daylight glare arouses buildings’ occupants to insert internal shading devices. When solving glare issues, shading strategies can increase internal temperature and building cooling energy consumption, especially in hot climates. Indoor environmental quality has been treated through architectural and engineering projects utilising spatial-temporal metrics and controls algorithms. This article focused on investigating some interactions between user behaviour, shading devices proprieties, and their effects on building’s luminous and thermal environment. This research aimed to relate daylight glare probability’s reductions through internal shading devices uses, with their effects on the window’s solar heat gain and energy cooling demand. Using building modelling and simulation approach through Rhinoceros 3D 5.0 and plug-ins Grasshopper+DIVA, Daylight Glare Probability (DGP) hourly values were generated for an occupant, 1.5 m away from the window at a side lit-room. The open-access model is a typical private office in the multi-floors building. Window’s solar heat gains and energy cooling demands were recorded using EnergyPlus 8.4 software. The model was simulated in East, West, North and South orientations, at Florianópolis. Subtropical Brazilian city. Starting from ‘without solar control’ cases, 8 controls were applied to 4 internal shading devices: blinds 50°, blinds 0°, curtains and roller shades. Clearer and darker colours were considered by two proprieties sets. From two fixed obstruction modes (100% and 50%), DGPintolerable (>45%) and direct solar radiation (>50W/m²) were applied to proposed monthly, daily and automatic controls. DGPintolerable annual frequencies at uncontrolled condition varied from 30% to 65%. These differences pointed out design guidelines according to façades. It has been confirmed that 0° blinds don’t secure daylight glare and increase energy cooling demand. Dark roller shades, curtains and blinds 50° completely solved glare problems, controlled by ‘always 100% closed’ mode and DGPintolerable based controls. Clear devices still allowed 2% of DGPintolerable frequency. However, clear roller shades contributed to reducing annual cooling demand until 11.5% while other devices achieved until 52% increase. Dark curtains indicated maximum increased in annual window’s solar heat gain (3%). Obtained results allowed identifying some design guidelines to balance daylight glare protection and energy-efficiency, contributing to sustainable building design and low impact architecture.

Effects of journal choice on the visibility of scientific publications: a comparison between subscription-based and full Open Access models

This study analyses the performance of journals and publications based on their type of archiving policies. The main objective is the assessment of the feasibility of the journal typologies with a special emphasis on the comparison of both the subscription-based and the Open Access models. The analysis is backed by the combination of data contained in four of the main bibliographic databases to offer comprehensive, new and updated data on OA (Sherpa-RoMEO, DOAJ, Web of Science and Scopus). A total of 18.3 million articles and reviews were analysed between 2005 and 2015. In the comparison of Web of Science and Scopus, we found that the proportion of OA publications is 5% inferior in WoS. The growth of the total number of documents published in Gold OA journals is noteworthy in the period analysed. However, the study of the proportion of publications and citations in both databases revealed that Gold OA journals only increased their proportion of publications but not the proportion of citations. Trends in the proportion of highly cited publications (top 1%) depicted that OA journals were unable to exceed of this expected 1% in the 11 years under analysis.

Open access principles and practices benefit conservation

AbstractOpen access is often contentious in the scientific community, but its implications for conservation are under‐discussed or omitted entirely from scientific discourse. Access to literature is a key factor impeding implementation of conservation research, and many open access models and concepts that are little‐known by most conservation researchers may facilitate implementation. Conservation professionals working outside academic institutions should have more access to research so that conservation is better supported by current science. In this perspective, I present elements missing from current discussions of open access and suggest potential pathways for journal publishers and researchers to make conservation publications more open. There are many promising avenues for open access to play a larger role in conservation research, including archiving pre‐prints and post‐prints, more permissive “green” open access policies, and increasing access to older articles. Collectively supporting open access practices will benefit our profession and the species we are working to protect.

Are open access models able to assess today's energy scenarios?

The current transition towards a low-carbon energy system requires an increasingly complex energy system framework. This is accompanied by the demand for high result reproducibility in order to provide transparency to decision-makers in terms of assumptions and methodological issues. Given this background, Open Access Models (OAMs) are increasingly entering the market that already have a high degree of diversity. This study analyses and compares the methodological framework of different OAMs to assess long-term energy scenarios. In a first step, selected OAMs are typified and characterised based on predefined criteria. In general, the analysis reveals that OAMs with a high level of accessibility appear to have a rather low level of complexity and often focus on the analysis of a single target year. In a second step, we underline our findings of the model overview by applying a well-established OAM (DESSTinEE - Demand for Energy Services, Supply and Transmission in EuropE) to a current energy scenario for Germany. Overall, we conclude that current OAMs can already be applied to a large variety of research questions. However, comparing OAMs to conventional models applied in the field of energy system analysis reveals that there is still a significant performance gap in terms of the degree of methodological sophistication.

Does open access citation advantage depend on paper topics?

Research topics vary in their citation potential. In a metric-wise scientific milieu, it would be probable that authors tend to select citation-attractive topics especially when choosing open access (OA) outlets that are more likely to attract citations. Applying a matched-pairs study design, this research aims to examine the role of research topics in the citation advantage of OA papers. Using a comparative citation analysis method, it investigates a sample of papers published in 47 Elsevier article processing charges (APC)-funded journals in different access models including non-open access (NOA), APC, Green and mixed Green-APC. The contents of the papers are analysed using natural language processing techniques at the title and abstract level and served as a basis to match the NOA papers to their peers in the OA models. The publication years and journals are controlled for in order to avoid their impacts on the citation numbers. According to the results, the OA citation advantage that is observed in the whole sample still holds even for the highly similar OA and NOA papers. This implies that the OA citation surplus is not an artefact of the OA and NOA papers’ differences in their topics and, therefore, in their citation potential. This leads to the conclusion that OA authors’ self-selectivity, if it exists at all, is not responsible for the OA citation advantage, at least as far as selection of topics with probably higher citation potentials is concerned.

GIS-analysis of ground transport accessibility of fire stations at regional scale

Abstract. Geospatial approaches are widely used to organize access and to manage the extinguishing of forest fires globally. Term “transport accessibility” is used in a variety of geographical and economic researches. Assessment of transport accessibility is directly related to the feasibility study to locate the fire stations in a particular region. Location analysis of objects relative to other objects, while taking into account various quantitative and qualitative parameters, is a classical problem solved by geoinformation systems.Present research work is aimed to be used to improve the situation with forest fires in Russia where one of the main asset of operational regional firefighting in the forests is a fire-and-chemical (fire) station. Traditionally station placement is under the responsibility of Russian region to which stations are administratively subordinate. The location of fire station is determined taking into account the species structure of forests, natural fire danger, road infrastructure and some other factors. Irkutsk region, one of the territories with the constant perennial fire danger in the forests, was chosen as a test area.Using this area as a typical example of regional extent, an analysis of fire stations placement then planning the ground movement of fire brigades from a station to the forest fire locations has been carried out. Previously obtained results to create the shortest routes within three-hour accessibility for the fire hazardous seasons 2002–2017 are used. Russian regulatory documents of the forest industry are applied. Thus, topic of GIS analysis serves as a continuation of the study (http://cepl.rssi.ru/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Podolskaya-E.S.-et.-al..pdf, in Russian) and various aspects of transportation problem are considered on the example of Irkutsk region.We used the following input data: point layer of fire stations, road network (including roads of different classes and forest glades), and archive of forest fires detected using the spectroradiometer MODIS from the Aqua and Terra spacecraft. Additional data were collected from the open regional Internet sources. GIS analysis used ArcGIS ArcMap Desktop extensions such as Network Analyst, Spatial Analyst, and ArcGIS tools like ET GeoWizards (https://www.ian-ko.com/).We have developed and have used a forest fire transport model of ground access by trucks for the Irkutsk region with the spatial arrangement of fire stations, two protection zones and road network. Speed of the forest fire trucks is classified into 5 groups, taking into account the official permissions and road class. Also every segment of road has its attributive data of speed “adjusted” by the elevation value of the ETopo2, an open-access model (https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/etopo2.html). Taking into consideration these relief data allows to decrease the vehicle’s speed in the mountainous conditions.Based on the regional specifics and available data for a fire hazardous season, the following set of evaluation parameters was proposed, namely:Road network: roads existence, length, density, and configuration;Spatial distribution of detected forest fires;Territory of fire stations servicing.All the listed parameters are interconnected to each other and, in combination, jointly impact the stations ground transport accessibility assessment at the regional level. We have used GIS-analysis methods such as buffering, allocation, and density, as well as geographic and directional distribution. Time frame of analysis is the full fire hazardous season. Undertaken analysis for the forest fires detected within the ground protection zone (archive of 2002–2017) has shown that the fire stations’ distribution was appropriate. The analysis was based on the assumption that stations had the same weight, geographical and transport location of the stations was reviewed in conjunction to the thematical forestry recommendations. To go further in the GIS analysis some characteristics (work force and technical resources) of the weighted stations could be added.Additional factors of influence can be the location of protected areas with their specific access regime, seasonality of road use, forest fire zoning, forestry boundaries, economic criteria, placement of fire stations in the populated area, etc. It is advisable to conduct a fire stations placement analysis as a preparation event before and after the end of the fire-hazardous season to summarize the effectiveness of actions to extinguish forest fires in the region. Practical results of the study can be used as well to prepare the regional forestry development programs and plans.

On the bibliometric nature of a foreseeable relationship: open access and education

The open access (OA) publication model is evolving and gaining support in the international scientific community. However, there is no evidence regarding the open access pathways being used in educational research or regarding the relationship between its subject categories and various scientometric indicators. The objective of this study was to use InCites to analyse documents published in journals from 2010 to 2016 in the SSCI categories of ‘Education and Educational Research’, ‘Education, Scientific Disciplines’ and ‘Education, Special’. The percentage of documents published in the Gold OA model increased gradually over the period studied and was higher than in the Green OA model. ‘Education, Scientific Disciplines’ was the subcategory with the highest percentage of documents published in the Gold OA. There was greater international collaboration on articles and reviews in Gold OA, especially in the pure model (publications in Gold Open Access journals), and the percentage of articles cited was higher in the Green OA and Gold OA models than in a non-OA model. There was no evidence that the Gold OA hybrid was cited more often than Green OA, and both had more impact than Gold OA pure. The Category Normalized Citation Impact values and the presence of documents in first quartile journals were higher in OA than in non-OA models. A more detailed analysis of the percentiles of the most cited publications clearly demonstrates that OA publications dominated the top percentiles of most cited articles to a greater degree than non-OA publications. The ‘Education, Special’ subcategory showed the greatest international collaboration and the highest percentage of cited documents.

Academic publishing and open access: Costs, benefits and options for publishing research

This article briefly sets out a political economy of academic publishing, exploring what the costs and benefits of this model are/were for the academic community. It then moves to explore forms of open access publication available to the social science (politics and international relations) community in the United Kingdom and beyond. The article concludes by asking why (given its likely advantages), the open access model is not ubiquitous and suggests that the future of publication lies in the hands of early career researchers.

Mundo Agrario, un modelo de sustentabilidad de revista académica de calidad en acceso abierto

This work analyzes the trajectory of Mundo Agrario magazine in the context of Latin American magazines about the rural world. In the first part the evolution of the magazine from its foundation to the present is related. From another perspective, the historical development of the agrarian themes is studied from the different contributions that were included in these 19 years. The processes of indexing and inclusion in the various databases are analyzed, as well as their scope, impact and national, regional and international visibility. Finally, some perspectives on the projection of future growth of the journal are presented. We conclude that Mundo Agrario has achieved a substantial growth in all the items analyzed, the model of institutional management and open access is maintained and an academic projection is expected that prioritizes problems that integrate the local global perspective.

Revistas científicas argentinas de acceso abierto y circulación internacional. Un análisis desde la teoría de los campos de Pierre Bourdieu

This work analyzes the open access model adopted by Argentine scientific journals with international circulation from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. To achieve this, the set of Argentine scientific journals published in April of 2015 that were available in Latindex Catalogo, Nucleo Basico de Revistas Cientificas Argentinas and in the indexing services of DOAJ, Redalyc, Dialnet, SciELO Argentina, Scopus, and Web of Science Core Collection was collected, to establish the subset of open access journals with international circulatios ad hoc were applied. The open access model implemented corresponded to the highest gradation: open and free to readers, without temporary embargoes, without author publication fees and and without retention of reproduction rights. Although the model is highly inclusive, the low participation of the economic field in the productive-scientific-editorial environment results in the lack of funding of the journals and in the exclusion of the publishing field. Changing the current scenario would require not only state agencies to recognize the existence of the problem, but that groups become social actors that can integrate and challenge the various dimensions of the problem to be able to dispute the resources and political actions necessary to address it.

Article Processing Charge Hyperinflation and Price Insensitivity: An Open Access Sequel to the Serials Crisis

Open access publishing has frequently been proposed as a solution to the serials crisis, which involved unsustainable budgetary pressures on libraries due to hyperinflation of subscription costs. The majority of open access articles are published in a minority of journals that levy article processing charges (APCs) paid by authors or their institutions upon acceptance. Increases in APCs is proceeding at a rate three times that which would be expected if APCs were indexed according to inflation. As increasingly ambitious funder mandates are proposed, such as Plan S, it is important to evaluate whether authors show signs of price sensitivity in journal selection by avoiding journals that introduce or increase their APCs. Examining journals that introduced an APC 4-5 years after launch or when flipping from a subscription model to immediate open access model showed no evidence that APC introduction reduced article volumes. Multilevel modelling of APC sensitivity across 319 journals published by the four largest APC-funded dedicated commercial open access publishers (BMC, Frontiers, MDPI, and Hindawi) revealed that from 2012 to 2018 higher APCs were actually associated with increased article volumes. These findings indicate that APC hyperinflation is not suppressed through market competition and author choice. Instead, demand for scholarly journal publications may be more similar to demand for necessities, or even prestige goods, which will support APC hyperinflation to the detriment of researchers, institutions, and funders.

Open Access Mega-Journals: Quality, Economics and Post-publication Peer Review Infrastructure

As the publishing industry evolves towards the predominant open access (OA) model, publishers are establishing OA journal power-houses, the OA mega-journals (OAMJs), which are wide in scope, with larger-than-usual editor boards, and that pump out large numbers of papers. OAMJs are thus able to accommodate a surge in submissions, or transfers from other journals within the same publisher’s fleet. OAMJs represent a simple but effective publishing model that can also be an effective business model. We question whether the peer review system is robust enough to accommodate for effective post-publication peer review in OAMJs. As examples, we examine Scientific Reports, PLOS One, Heliyon, F1000Research, PeerJ, and BMJ Open, as well as a possible developing OAMJ, eLife, for clues to the dynamics of OAMJs and the possible links to quality control via peer review or post-publication peer review. We also take a closer look at the economics of OA publishing that might be driving the expansion of the OAMJ market.

Open Access Medical Journals: Promise, Perils, and Pitfalls.

The number of both print and electronic open access (OA) journals has increased dramatically. Although electronic availability of information on the Internet may offer greater potential for information sharing, it also gives rise to "predatory" journals and deceptive publishers. In this Invited Commentary, the authors describe both the opportunities and potential perils that come with OA publications.Definitions for four models of legitimate OA are provided: the gold model, the green model, the platinum model, and the hybrid model. Benefits and risks of each model are discussed. The authors also distinguish between legitimate OA journals and predatory journals, highlighting several existing tools and resources for distinguishing between the two.Finally, the authors provide a checklist to help authors evaluate the policies and processes of journals and thereby avoid predatory publications.

La comunicación científica en América Latina es abierta, colaborativa y no comercial. Desafíos para las revistas

América Latina, en donde la investigación y la difusión de los resultados se financian principalmente con fondos públicos, es la región del mundo con mayor adopción del sistema de acceso abierto a los contenidos en revistas científicas. Se destacan iniciativas regionales surgidas en el ámbito académico tales como Latindex, SciELO y Redalyc, que se complementan con portales nacionales e institucionales de revistas de acceso abierto, todas ellas iniciativas colaborativas sin fines comerciales. En base a la experiencia de CLACSO en la región y a su participación en los debates internacionales sobre el futuro de las comunicaciones científicas, en este artículo se comparten reflexiones sobre algunos de los desafíos que se plantean a este modelo colaborativo de acceso abierto en América Latina. Por ejemplo: los nuevos requerimientos que surgen desde la ciencia abierta, la necesidad de contar con indicadores de acceso abierto para que los procesos de evaluación puedan valorar esa producción publicada en revistas de la región y la urgencia de fortalecer la gestión regional colaborativa del acceso abierto y sus indicadores, sin fines comerciales.

The Two-Way Street of Open Access Journal Publishing: Flip It and Reverse It

As Open access (OA) is often perceived as the end goal of scholarly publishing, much research has focused on flipping subscription journals to an OA model. Focusing on what can happen after the presumed finish line, this study identifies journals that have converted from OA to a subscription model, and places these “reverse flips” within the greater context of scholarly publishing. In particular, we examine specific journal descriptors, such as access mode, publisher, subject area, society affiliation, article volume, and citation metrics, to deepen our understanding of reverse flips. Our results show that at least 152 actively publishing journals have reverse-flipped since 2005, suggesting that this phenomenon does not constitute merely a few marginal outliers, but instead a common pattern within scholarly publishing. Notably, we found that 62% of reverse flips (N = 95) had not been born-OA journals, but had been founded as subscription journals, and hence have experienced a three-stage transformation from closed to open to closed. We argue that reverse flips present a unique perspective on OA, and that further research would greatly benefit from enhanced data and tools for identifying such cases.

Let It Flow: The Monopolization of Academic Content Providers and How It Threatens the Democratization of Information

ABSTRACTThe monopolization of academic journal publishers concentrates power and valuable information into the hands of a few players in the marketplace. It has detrimental effects on how information flows and is accessed. This, in turn, has profound effects on how a nation progresses. Placed in a theoretical framework, utilizing the marketplace of ideas and the economies that coincide, this article takes a look at the history of Elsevier in order to chart this course toward monopolization. It exhibits the effect it has already had on the academic community, while offering two models of Open Access as a much sounder option.