Open Publishing Research Articles

ORCID in the Open Science scenario: opportunities for academic libraries

The persistent identification of authors and contributors plays a decisive role within the Open Science landscape. The increasing number of published research products and new open publishing models and infrastructures requires author identification which goes beyond fields or infrastructures and guarantees interoperability. ORCID iD is presented as a persistent identifier for researchers in this context. As information managers and organisers, many academic libraries have taken the lead in offering ORCID-related services and implementing it in their systems. This paper scans the implementation models across Europe and the actions carried out by libraries. Finally, it also depicts perspectives for integration in the Austrian library and research context.

OpenBiodiv: A Knowledge Graph for Literature-Extracted Linked Open Data in Biodiversity Science

Hundreds of years of biodiversity research have resulted in the accumulation of a substantial pool of communal knowledge; however, most of it is stored in silos isolated from each other, such as published articles or monographs. The need for a system to store and manage collective biodiversity knowledge in a community-agreed and interoperable open format has evolved into the concept of the Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System (OBKMS). This paper presents OpenBiodiv: An OBKMS that utilizes semantic publishing workflows, text and data mining, common standards, ontology modelling and graph database technologies to establish a robust infrastructure for managing biodiversity knowledge. It is presented as a Linked Open Dataset generated from scientific literature. OpenBiodiv encompasses data extracted from more than 5000 scholarly articles published by Pensoft and many more taxonomic treatments extracted by Plazi from journals of other publishers. The data from both sources are converted to Resource Description Framework (RDF) and integrated in a graph database using the OpenBiodiv-O ontology and an RDF version of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) taxonomic backbone. Through the application of semantic technologies, the project showcases the value of open publishing of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) data towards the establishment of open science practices in the biodiversity domain.

A proposal for the future of scientific publishing in the life sciences.

Science advances through rich, scholarly discussion. More than ever before, digital tools allow us to take that dialogue online. To chart a new future for open publishing, we must consider alternatives to the core features of the legacy print publishing system, such as an access paywall and editorial selection before publication. Although journals have their strengths, the traditional approach of selecting articles before publication (“curate first, publish second”) forces a focus on “getting into the right journals,” which can delay dissemination of scientific work, create opportunity costs for pushing science forward, and promote undesirable behaviors among scientists and the institutions that evaluate them. We believe that a “publish first, curate second” approach with the following features would be a strong alternative: authors decide when and what to publish; peer review reports are published, either anonymously or with attribution; and curation occurs after publication, incorporating community feedback and expert judgment to select articles for target audiences and to evaluate whether scientific work has stood the test of time. These proposed changes could optimize publishing practices for the digital age, emphasizing transparency, peer-mediated improvement, and post-publication appraisal of scientific articles.

Critically studying openness: A way forward

Critically studying openness: A way forward

PhD on Track: Open Science as a new track

PhD on Track is a web resource aimed primarily at PhD candidates and early career researchers. The ambition is to provide an accessible point of departure for beginning researchers related to searching and reviewing scholarly literature, and to sharing and publishing reports and data.It can be challenging for new candidates (or even for experienced researchers) to find their way in the tangle of new guidelines and practices on openness, data management, publishing, and adjoining issues. PhD on Track is intended to help, by collecting and organising in one resource, providing an overview of the most essential information. In our poster, we wish to focus on recent major revisions to the resource, and in particular on the new module Open Science. Revisions were made in response to important developments regarding new national and international guidelines on open publishing and data management, and in open science in general. PhD on Track, and the new Open Science module in particular, collects and organises relevant information – and discusses some of the fundamental issues on open access publishing, open archives, research data, and data management, including how to make data management plans and how to handle sensitive data. There are also sections on pre-registration, research ethics, copyright issues, and research assessment.PhD on Track is an open, freely available resource that was originally launched in 2013, as a co-operation between Norwegian and Danish institutions. From 2017, it is operated by 6 Norwegian institutions: the four university libraries in Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, and Tromsø, in addition to the libraries at NHH Norwegian School of Economics Library and Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. While PhD on Track provides more detail on Norwegian policies and guidelines, it has been designed with an international audience in mind. It will be relaunched in the autumn of 2018.

Open access Monographs in the library supply chain

Watch the VIDEO. Recent European studies have shown that there are a growing number open access monograph publishers, many of which can be described as New University Presses (NUPs) or Academic-Led Publishing (ALP) initiatives, in addition to other small open access presses. The majority of these presses publish open access e-books and also print-on-demand copies for sale. Key studies have shown a positive impact on the usage and discovery of open access books. Despite this evidence, NUPs, ALPs and open access presses in general, have difficulty in accessing the library supply chain - the channels that library acquisition departments use to buy print and e-book content via approved library suppliers, such as Dawson, Askews, ProQuest and EBSCO. This was evidenced in a 2017 landscape report from Jisc, Changing publishing ecologies: A landscape study of new university presses and academic-led publishing. As part of the ALP interviews for the study Rupert Gatti of Open Book Publishers noted that it would be helpful to have a service that “looks at how to bring academic content into the catalogues and the digital learning environments of the universities and to allow universities to also relate back to the publisher, so that there is a flow of information going back both ways”.As such, the Jisc report made a number of recommendations, including best practice in metadata and support with distribution/dissemination. In order to take these recommendations further, Jisc held a community workshop in July 2018 to surface issues with key stakeholders for the following problem statement:“OA publishers have difficulty accessing the channels that library acquisition departments use to buy print and e-book content”.The workshop brought together experts from NUPs, ALPs, book suppliers and distributors, metadata suppliers, libraries and other experts in OA publishing to discuss the above statement. The core aim of the workshop was to allow the experts to share their experiences and knowledge in order to get a better understanding of the supply chain and to gain insight into the problem statement. These discussions highlighted four key areas, which the group agreed needed further development. These have been captured as a set of recommendations and suggestions for best practice.This paper will introduce the ideas behind the workshop, before detailing the outcomes of the discussion sessions, which featured four round table sessions led by a NUP, an ALP, a book supplier and a library. Finally the paper will outline the four areas surfaced in the roundtable sessions. These included two practical areas, the library supply chain and metadata and two aspirational areas, cultural change in the acquisition process and new forms of content.

Tensions and challenges concerning ethics on video research with young children - experiences from an international collaboration among seven countries

This article and the four videos linked to this article are a result of the earliest experiences in establishing an international research collaboration among seven countries in the Project Social and emotional experiences in transition through the early years. We draw attention to the complex issues surrounding the many processes, beliefs and attitudes about infants in research that permeated our processes of gaining ethical approval for the international study and which posed many challenges for our project. Through a process of reflective analysis, we have identified a range of ethical tensions and issues which the different countries involved in this international study faced in gaining ethical approval from their institutional ethical committees for their collaborative participation. More specifically, we identify one persistent tension concerning the use of video data in research on young children. This tension is a result of diverse interpretations of international ethical codes, alongside local restrictions and ethics review processes. It illuminates various positions concerning the protection of infants’ privacy versus the benefits of using non-anonymous video data both in joint analysis, and even further, in open publishing. Such positions have been widely debated in research with adults, whereupon many of the ethically challenging questions have been dealt with through processes of acquiring informed consents from the participants. In case of infants, however, the role and nature of informed consents is different from research with adults, as is the role of the adult in using infant ‘data’ in research. For most cases, informed consents are acquired from the parents or the legal guardians that are not necessarily present on a day-to-day basis in the actual data collection process in early years educational settings. The question of children’s own assents for study is widely debated and this is no less so in the project we present in this paper. On the basis of the experiences in this international collaboration, and the challenges and tensions identified in between diverse cultural context and ethical review boards and practices, we propose that more dialogue in relation to research ethics on video research is needed within the diverse research communities and contexts, both locally and internationally. The dialogue is important to include also the representatives from the ethical committees, as the new (open) mediums for publishing are becoming more relevant and promising. Most important, ultimately, is the dialogue among the research participants, including where possible infants as contributors in their own right (as opposed to vulnerable subjects), and researchers in all phases of the research process.

Case Open UEF – To do together

At the University of Eastern Finland (UEF) Library, the national Open Science and Research initiative (2014–2017, Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland) triggered the planning and construction of open science related research support services. Planning of support services with themes of open access scholarly publishing, open research data and open study material began at full throttle at the UEF Library in November 2015. Information specialists were grouped into teams, which orientated to separate aspects of open science and shared their knowledge by training the whole library staff. Teamwork continued actively over the year 2016. Open science continuously brings new tasks for the Library and has already notably changed the job profiles of the library specialists.Advancing open science has been considered highly important not only at the library but also at the university level. UEF has offered resources e.g. by recruiting new information specialists and a data protection officer and internal auditor. UEF Library has a vital role in conducting open science but it is practiced in close collaboration with University Services, especially that of Development Services, General Administration and Legal Services and IT Services. Open Science team has landed the departments to share information and to discuss about open science practices at UEF. Nowadays these roadshows concerning UEF publishing and data policy, open access (OA) publishing as well as research data management and sharing are our focal operation.Work continues but the results can already be seen: In the OA ranking of research organisations in Finland (Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland), UEF has achieved level four in the five-level maturity model. Also, UEF researchers can order tailored training sessions about open research and support services from the diverse training menu offered by the Library. Updated Open UEF web pages are available for everyone and multi-channeled informing directed to UEF staff and students continues online. One concrete output from conducted open science and active campaigning about self-archiving is UEF institutional publication repository, UEF//eRepository, which was launched in February 2017. At the moment about 31% of UEF scientific publications are open access, but substantial increase is expected. The next big challenge in open research is data management and opening. UEF Library is starting to build a metadata portal for research data in order to conceive the data produced by UEF researchers and to help finding data for potential reuse.Open science will also be included in information retrieval studies of master's degree and doctoral students. To encourage students and teachers in OA publishing, during the international open access week, one student publishing master's thesis openly will be rewarded with a stipend by the Library. Department having the highest rate of OA master's theses will also be adorned with flowers.Open science is a matter of teamwork, committing and keeping up to date.

Increased impact for Open Publishing

Watch the VIDEO here. Presenter - Susanne Mikki.PurposeBased on the scholarly output in Norway, we aim to determine the total amount of articles freely available online, and prove whether there exists a citation advantage for these. We also investigate whether these articles receive more mentions on social platforms such as tweets or blogposts.DesignThe total scholarly publication output of Norway is indexed in CERES, the Current Information System in Norway. Based on these publication data, we searched a) Google Scholar and denoted a document as freely available, when a link to a full-text was provided, and b) altmetric.com to detect mentions of these articles. We analyzed the extracted data by publishing year, citations, availability, provider and mentions on different platforms.FindingsDependent on subject field, we find that almost 70 % of all articles are freely available. Articles behind paywalls belong to the most prestigious publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Routledge and Universitetsforlaget (the main Norwegian academic publisher). According to Google Scholar’s link resolver, ResearchGate and academia.edu are the most frequent providers. In addition, institutional repositories seem to play a major role in posting free article versions.We find a clear advantage for open publishing; on average, these documents received almost 30 % more mentions on social media platforms and twice as many citations, indicating that open access is the future in publishing.

Scholarly publications beyond pay-walls: increased citation advantage for open publishing

First, we aim to determine the total amount of scholarly articles freely available on the internet. Second, we aim to prove whether there exists a citation advantage for open publishing. The total scholarly publication output of Norway is indexed in Cristin, the Current Information System in Norway. Based on these data, we searched Google Scholar by either DOIs or titles and denoted a document as open available (OAv), when a link to a full-text was provided. We analysed the extracted data by publishing year, citations, availability and provider. Based on additional information indexed in Cristin, we furthermore analysed the data by year, institution, publisher and discipline. We find that the total share of freely available articles is 68%. Articles not available belong to prestigious publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Routledge and Universitetsforlaget (the largest Norwegian academic publisher), which may be particularly essential for scholars worldwide. The largest provider, according to Google Scholar’s main link provision, is ResearchGate. In addition, institutional repositories play a major role in posting free article versions. Articles belonging to natural sciences and technology, and medicine and health were more likely to be open than articles belonging to the social sciences and humanities. Their respective OAv-shares are 72, 58 and 55%. We find a clear citation advantage for open publishing; on average, these documents received twice as many citations, indicating that open access is the future in publishing. This study is limited to scholarly articles only. Books and book chapters, which are usual publication formats for the humanities and social sciences, are excluded. Results do therefore not adequately reflect the situation for these disciplines. Furthermore, this study is limited to documents freely available on the internet, independent of the “legal” status of the posted full-text. With the data at hand, we were not able to distinguish between gold, green, hybrid, purely pay-walled and illicitly posted documents. Usually, articles indexed in Web of Science or SCOPUS are objects of investigation. However, these databases do not sufficiently cover the humanities and social sciences, and therefore cannot be representative of the total scholarly article output. This study captures the total article output of a country, independent on discipline and provides new insight into open publishing.

Editorial

We are excited to announce that, starting with this issue 17(1), our journal Studies in Communication Sciences (SComS) will be published Open Access on the HOPE platform of the Hauptbibliothek of the University of Zurich; you can access our new SComS at www.scoms.ch. HOPE refers to Hauptbibliothek Open Publishing Environment. Located in and managed by a Swiss academic institution, this platform provides full open access to SComS contents, with a strong commitment to a transparent and qualitatively excellent publication process, whilst guaranteeing no publishing fees for our authors. We are grateful to Elsevier for our collaboration, which lasted from 2012 to 2016; now the moment has come for us to be open to the future. Paper copies of our new SComS will still be available – for example, in the main libraries at Swiss universities; but all the contents will be also freely available for everybody to download from our website.

Open Access as a Reassertion of the Values of Science

This paper traces the formation and eventual rupture of an implicit agreement between science and commercial publishers resulting in the rise of the open access movement within broader advocacy for a more open science. Open access, it is suggested, can be interpreted as a push from within the academy to restore the communal role of publishing within science, and to establish new publishing arrangements that embed the core values of science. The paper concludes that while systemic change may be slow, open access scientific publishing cannot be dismissed as fad; the alignment between the core values of science and an approach to the dissemination of knowledge that is more communal, ensures the disruptive and restorative power of open access scientific publishing.

Mapping of E-books in Science & Technology: An Analytical Study of Directory of Open Access Books

A detailed study of e-books in Science and Technology indexed in Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) till May 15, 2016 is presented. Open access publishers, licenses and language-wise distribution of e-books indexed in DOAB is examined. The data collected only on the subjects listed in DDC-23 under Science and Technology domain. The results depicts that there are 1052 e-books indexed in Science and Technology in DOAB. The collection includes e-books that are both made-digital and born digital. Maximum books are on health sciences and published in English only. Mostly e-books have creative commons license. Moreover, Frontier Media SA is the most active open access e-book publisher. The study shall be helpful to library and information professionals as well as open access publishers.

The Tinker tool for graphical tactic development

PSGraph (Grov et al. in LPAR. Springer, Berlin, pp 324–339, 2013) is a graphical language to support the development and maintenance of proof tactics for interactive theorem provers. By using labelled hierarchical graphs this formalisation improves upon analysis and maintenance found in traditional tactic languages. Tool support for PSGraph is achieved by Tinker (Grov et al. in UITP 2014, ENTCS, vol 167. Open Publishing Association, London, pp 23–34, 2014; Lin et al. in Tools and algorithms for the construction and analysis of systems. Springer, Berlin, pp 573–579, 2016): a theorem prover-independent system, which is connected to several different provers, with a graphical user interface including novel features to develop and debug proof tactics graphically. In this paper we provide a detailed and formal account of PSGraph and show how theorem prover independence is achieved by Tinker. We then show practical use of PSGraph and Tinker by developing several proof patterns using the language and tool.

Commercial or non-commercial? Trends in funding and distributing Finnish academic journals

Watch the VIDEO of the presentation.This paper examines trends in funding and distributing academic journals in Finland. Scholarly societies have been major actors in the field of academic publishing since the nineteenth century. First, they funded their own journals but the system of government subsidies was created already in the middle of the nineteenth century. Hence, the societies were freed of the necessity of selling publications. Instead, publications were distributed by exchanging them with other societies and institutions. At the time, the scholarly community was often called “Republic of Letters” – the concept mirrored an ideal of free, egalitarian and collaborative world of researchers. Exchange of publications was a part of this ideal. Commercial scientific publishing began to prosper in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. Only in the 1980s, did the trend towards commercial distribution strengthen in Finland. Bookstore Tiedekirja was founded to promote selling and marketing society publications. Societies were advised to restrict the number of exchanges and promote selling instead. The government subsidy was restricted to cover only a minor share of costs of publishing. The national service for electronic distribution of journals “Elektra” was based on the license fees paid by the research libraries. Yet, the income of sales and licenses remained modest. The subscription fees were very low. Income from Elektra was far from sufficient so that the journals had to maintain their printed versions. The international Open Access movement, which actually is not so far from the old ideal of the “Republic of Letters”, was introduced in Finland, in 2004. Its first agents were libraries and some universities. In the 2010s, it became the policy of the ministry of education and major research funders. Yet, the structures of commercial distribution created in the 1980s and 1990s proved to be an obstacle in making the scholarly journals open. Even though the money involved in publishing was insignificant in comparison with major international publishers, the societies were cautious in abandoning the sources of income they had managed to establish. Therefore, to promote Open Access publishing, a new funding model is needed. The history of academic publishing can be understood as a closing circle – from the non-commercial system of exchanges via period of commercializing to the non-commercial open world. This vision supports the funding system where journals or articles are funded collectively, e.g. via a consortium of institutions which need the domestic journals as a publication forum. Another way to look at history is to see varying trends, which leads one to predict an era of commercial interests. In the era of open publishing, the commercial vision probably manifests in funding by article processing charges.

Editorial] Open Publishing in Engineering

Editorial] Open Publishing in Engineering

Impact Factors

Tracking the metrics of a more open publishing world will be key to selling “open” and encouraging broader adoption of open solutions. Will more openness mean lower impact, though (for whatever reason—less visibility, less readability, less press, etc.)? Why or why not? Perhaps more fundamentally, how useful are impact factors anyway? What are they really tracking, and what do they mean? What are the pros and cons of our current reliance on these measures? Would faculty be satisfied with an alternative system as long as it is recognized as reflecting meaningfully on the quality of their scholarship? What might such an alternative system look like?

The Journal Impact Factor and its discontents: steps toward responsible metrics and better research assessment

A small, self-selected discussion group was convened to consider issues surrounding impact factors at the first meeting of the Open Scholarship Initiative in Fairfax, Virginia, USA, in April 2016, and focused on the uses and misuses of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), with a particular focus on research assessment. The group’s report notes that the widespread use, or perceived use, of the JIF in research assessment processes lends the metric a degree of influence that is not justified on the basis of its validity for those purposes, and retards moves to open scholarship in a number of ways. The report concludes that indicators, including those based on citation counts, can be combined with peer review to inform research assessment, but that the JIF is not one of those indicators. It also concludes that there is already sufficient information about the shortcomings of the JIF, and that instead actions should be pursued to build broad momentum away from its use in research assessment. These actions include practical support for the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) by research funders, higher education institutions, national academies, publishers and learned societies. They also include the creation of an international “metrics lab” to explore the potential of new indicators, and the wide sharing of information on this topic among stakeholders. Finally, the report acknowledges that the JIF may continue to be used as one indicator of the quality of journals, and makes recommendations how this should be improved.OSI2016 Workshop Question: Impact FactorsTracking the metrics of a more open publishing world will be key to selling “open” and encouraging broader adoption of open solutions. Will more openness mean lower impact, though (for whatever reason—less visibility, less readability, less press, etc.)? Why or why not? Perhaps more fundamentally, how useful are impact factors anyway? What are they really tracking, and what do they mean? What are the pros and cons of our current reliance on these measures? Would faculty be satisfied with an alternative system as long as it is recognized as reflecting meaningfully on the quality of their scholarship? What might such an alternative system look like?

Libraries and Faculty Collaboration: Four Digital Scholarship Examples

ABSTRACTAbout twenty years ago, the Internet began to change the way people create, access, publish, and share information. The impact of this information revolution has been felt in every industry. For instance, the Internet has enabled new models in the publishing sector, which has subsequently impacted education and changed the landscape of teaching and learning. About a decade ago, the introduction of new buzzwords such as open access, electronic publishing, digital humanities, and digital scholarship continued to challenge the scholarly production and dissemination of knowledge. Undoubtedly, these changes also created new opportunities for collaboration among multidisciplinary groups including researchers, scholars, students, technologists, librarians, and others. In this article, the author discusses four successful faculty-driven digital scholarship projects that his library system has supported in the last two years. His team's work serves as an example of how academic libraries and centers for digital scholarship at undergraduate institutions can support digital humanities and digital scholarship initiatives. Additionally, the case examples can contribute to the ongoing discussion of new roles for librarians and technologists in working with scholars and students to gain the skills necessary to implement digital scholarship projects.

Editorial 2016: Changes for the Future

Abstract By changing its editorial system, the Croatian Journal of Fisheries continues to move towards a more rigorous review which is slowly but surely strengthening its quality and impact. New editors-in-chief have been elected and a co-operation with De Gruyter Open publishers has been established. The official abbreviation of the Journal – CROAT J FISH – was released and it indicated an important change in the manuscript submission process. Also, this Editorial provides information on the articles published in 2015, as well as a list of reviewers who participated in the review process.