Overlay Journal Research Articles

Episciences overlay journals

Watch VIDEO. Episciences is a publishing platform for diamond open access overlay journals. The ambition is to provide scientific communities with the technical means to produce high-quality, cost-effective journals in line with FAIR principles. The process is based on open repositories (arXiv; Zenodo; HAL). All the published content of a journal is hosted on repositories. Episciences is therefore set up as a service layer for repositories, using them as input and output for open access publication. The platform was launched in 2013 as a peer review service for preprints hosted in open archives. Over the years, the list of services offered has grown and adapted to new trends in scientific publications. For example, peer review reports are now a new type of content that can be hosted in repositories, along with datasets and software code for publications. Support for these new objects in Episciences increases transparency and reproducibility of science. Support for datasets and software code also means that both data journals and software journals can be easily created on top of repositories. The platform has implemented new protocols and workflows promoted by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) Next Generation Working Group, such as COAR Notify and SignPosting. It has enabled us to build innovative new services for researchers on top of the HAL repository. We have also connected Episciences to other open science services such as OpenAIRE Graph, OpenCitations and Scholexplorer. This has allowed us to add new services at the same time for journals and the HAL repository. The presentation will explain how Episciences and overlay journals in general can be a bridge between publications, open repositories, data and software repositories - and more broadly with open science infrastructures.

Model(s) of the future? Overlay journals as an overlooked and emerging trend in scholarly communication

Abstract: Overlay journals, a potentially overlooked model of scholarly communication, have seen a resurgence due to the increasing number of preprint repositories and preprints on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) related topics. Overlay journals at various stages of maturity were examined for unique characteristics, including whether the authors submitted their article to the journal, whether the peer reviews of the article were published by the overlay journal, and whether the overlay journals took advantage of opportunities for increased discovery. As librarians and researchers seek new, futuristic models for publishing, overlay journals are emerging as an important contribution to scholarly communication.

Overlay journals: A study of the current landscape

Overlay journals are characterised by their articles being published on open access repositories, often already starting in their initial preprint form as a prerequisite for submission to the journal prior to initiating the peer-review process. In this study we aimed to identify currently active overlay journals and examine their characteristics. We utilised an explorative web search and contacted key service providers for additional information. The final sample consisted of 34 overlay journals. While the results show that new overlay journals have been actively established within recent years, the current presence of overlay journals remains diminutive compared to the overall number of open access journals. Most overlay journals publish articles in natural sciences, mathematics or computer sciences, and are commonly published by groups of academics rather than formal organisations. They may also rank highly within the traditional journal citation metrics. None of the investigated journals required fees from authors, which is likely related to the cost-effective aspects of the overlay publishing model. Both the growth in adoption of open access preprint repositories and researchers’ willingness to publish in overlay journals will determine the model’s wider impact on scholarly publishing.

Promoting student research at ST-OPEN

Scholars have long recognized the potential of a university repository as a new avenue of open access publishing and creating university-led journals (Bankier & Perciali, 2008). The relationship between repositories and journals is not new; an overlay journal, which acts as an “overlay” of a repository adds value to deposited publications through the peer-review process (Cassella & Calvi, 2010). In 2018, the University of Split (UNIST) recognized the potential of both models and founded the ST-OPEN overlay journal with the aim to train students in research and increase the visibility of their own research by publishing student theses after a rigorous, two-round peer-review process and translation into English (Marušić, Tomić, Gudelj, Wager, & Marušić, 2019). By 2022, two full volumes have been published, containing 23 original research articles and four editorials.Our 2021 editorial analysis discovered that the articles available on our OJS website and the Hrčak database were downloaded or visited 2472 times and that the journal had 10,153 visits overall (Gudelj, Ursić, Tomić, & Marušić, 2021). As members of the editorial team, we actively conduct editorial research to identify good practices and possibilities for improvement of our editorial and publication processes. By 2022, the 23 articles and four editorials published were downloaded or visited 13,810 times and a total of 132 manuscripts (original research articles only) were submitted to ST-OPEN. Of the 132 manuscripts, 102 (77.3%) had been previously deposited in the UNIST repository or the Croatian Dabar repository. Most submitted manuscripts (n=108, 81.8%) were students’ graduate theses. As the ST-OPEN editorial team actively screens Croatian repositories for acceptable theses (Marušić et al., 2019), most manuscripts were found through this method (n=59, 44.7%), yet a substantial number was also recommended by the editorial board (n=48, 36.4%) and submitted directly (n=25, 18.9%). While screening the repositories, we encountered the issue of access to deposited theses: 60 were open access (45.5%) and 40 limited access (30.3%) requiring institutional account to be downloaded. Fortyseven were withdrawn by authors during transformative review (35.6%), and 36 rejected by editors (27.3%). Considering that 25 (18.9%) manuscripts were published (including two published in 2022) and 8 (6.0%) were in copyediting or various other stages of review, a total of 92 (69.6%) manuscripts were rejected or the authors opted out of publishing. As ST-OPEN is a cross-department multidisciplinary journal, the published manuscripts came from various scientific fields. Most theses (n=47, 35.6%) came from humanities and social sciences, closely followed by those from biomedical and natural sciences (n=45, 34.0%).Given the high quality of the published manuscripts, the average acceptance rate, and the high number of visits and downloads in the first two years of publishing, we believe we have considerably increased the visibility of student research at UNIST. Without our journal, most theses would never be published outside the repository. Given the positive effect a journal’s tutorship can have on research skills, publication outcomes, and career advancement (Marusic, Markulin, Lukic, & Marusic, 2006; Šimić et al., 2021), we plan to continue and improve our role as educators and author facilitators (Marusic et al., 2004; Marušić et al., 2019). Some issues observed after the first published volume (Gudelj et al., 2021), such as difficulties in accessing theses and lack of contact information for authors, are still a barrier to our access to student theses. We will actively look for the ways to overcome these barriers and improve publication activities and visibility of UNIST students.

Analysing overlay journals: The state‐of‐the‐art in 2021 and possible perspectives

AbstractThe rising importance of preprints and the growing number of journals accepting them necessitate a (re)definition of an overlay journal and its place in today's publishing context. Using a snowball search strategy, we searched Web of Science and Scopus databases for articles on overlay journals. From these articles, we identified 28 overlay journals that fit the traditional overlay journal definition (they did not host articles but provided links to final versions on repositories or they searched repositories for viable preprints to publish) or that defined themselves as overlay journals. Most journals were not indexed in bibliographic databases, and crucial information such as journal ownership was not publicly available. Likewise, most journals both self‐hosted articles and provided links to final versions on repositories, which might mean repositories are more valuable in their ‘open access’ functionality than in the capacity for hosting articles. Editorial policies and practices of these overlay journals were often undeveloped or non‐existent. It seems overlay journals remain a niche publishing model in 2021, especially due to the increased number of journals accepting preprints and using preprint servers in their core functionality. However, overlay journals can take an ‘active’ approach in finding, reviewing, and publishing preprints, replacing other inefficient publishing models.

Review of Overlay journals: a study of the current landscape

Review of Overlay journals: a study of the current landscape

Overlay Journals, Overlay Reviews: Has Their Time Finally Come?

MODERATOR: Heather R Staines Independent Consultant Trumbull, Connecticut SPEAKERS: Hannah Drury Product Manager eLife/Sciety Peterborough, United Kingdom Samantha Hindle Content Manager bioRxiv and medRxiv Cofounder PREreview Stefano M Bertozzi Dean Emeritus and Professor of Health Policy and Management UC Berkeley School of Public Health Gunther Eysenbach CEO and Executive Editor JMIR Publications Toronto, Ontario, Canada REPORTER: Tony Alves Hopedale, Massachusetts The session “Overlay Journals, Overlay Reviews: Has Their Time Finally Come?” was held virtually on May 4, 2021. Moderated by Heather Staines, Senior Consultant at Delta Think, the session featured presentations by Stefano M Bertozzi, Dean Emeritus and Professor of Public Health Policy and Management at UC Berkeley; Gunther Eysenbach, CEO and Executive Editor, JMIR Publications; Samantha Hindle, Content Manager of bioRxiv and medRxiv and Co-founder of PREreview; and Hannah Drury, Product Manager of Sciety at eLife. COVID-19 has accelerated the use of preprints, and researchers and media are increasingly turning to preprint servers to get an early glimpse at new studies. Preprint servers have come under increased scrutiny, and many have risen to the challenge by implementing various forms of peer review. Another interesting and related phenomenon is the increase in “overlay journals,” which use “overlay reviews” to help validate the science in preprints, thus increasing trust and transparency in preprints. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of overlay journals, they are a type of online, open access compilation of preprints, public domain publications, and already-published open access articles. Sometimes the compilations are thematic, addressing specific topics, and […]

Overlay Journals: Overlooked or Emergent?

Overlay journals are not a new concept but have been experiencing a recent resurgence because of the increase in the number of preprint servers and the increase in the number of preprints on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) related topics. This study examines overlay journals at various stages of maturity for unique characteristics, including whether the authors submitted their article to the journal and whether the reviews of the article are published by the overlay journal. Whether they are considered overlooked or emergent, overlay journals are becoming an important contribution to scholarly communication.

Preprint as the Material for an Overlay Journal

The Open access movement has a long history. In 2002 the Budapest Open access initiative was first announced. However, the problem of Open access has not yet been fully and definitively resolved. In 2018 The European Union has adopted Plan S, which calls for making Open access a reality by 2020. Plan S emphasizes the importance of self-archiving of articles and the role of Preprint’s archives (servers) for scientific results placement. It is noted that Preprint archives have a great potential for editorial and publishing innovations. Scientific journals with limited reader access that operate on a commercial basis do not give up their positions. But even here we see some progress. Journals have become less rigid in their policy towards preprints and post-prints. More and more foreign scientists are becoming adherents of the "Fair open access" movement, which offers a new organizational solution. The journal must have a scientific organization or non-profit Foundation as a founder, that hires a group of executors to provide editorial and publishing services. Editors and publishers should not have their own commercial interests. The scientific journal should be funded from the general contribution of organizations. The article considers a modern type of online scientific journal — the overlay journal. The cost of an issue of the overlay journal is so low that the journal can easily implements the "free for the author, free for the reader" scheme. The overlay journal is based on the public servers of preprints. The online overlay journal reviews the article received from the archive. If the article is accepted for publication, the article metadata is published on the journal website, and the full text of corrected article is re-archived. This way of working does not overload the archive functionality, but it allows to reduce the financial burden on the overlay journal.

The Episciences journals: an overview

Episciences (https://www.episciences.org/) is a hosting platform of open access journals created in 2013 and developed by the Center for Direct Scientific Communication (CCSD), a joint unit of French public research organisms (CNRS, INRIA, INRA and Lyon University).The Episciences project is organized with a steering committee and epi-committees, whose role is to promote the creation of editorial committees. It is built as an overlay (epi-) publishing service upon an open repository, currently arXiv and HAL. The platform is free of charge and offers a comprehensive set of tools for managing the journal, from organizing peer reviewing to disseminating its contents. Episciences allows research communities to experiment with innovative ways to publish and disseminate contents: authors first submit their preprints in an open archive and then submit them to the overlay journal of their choice.Episciences now hosts 11 journals in Mathematics, Informatics, Social and Human sciences. There are new journals originally created in Episciences and existing journals that have migrated on it.In April 2018 – five years after the launch of Episciences – the CCSD conducted a survey of the editorial teams regarding their uses of Episciences and their expectations. The survey was a Google Form sent to the chief editors of the 11 active journals. The objective was to collect at least one answer for each journal, representative of the positions of the editorial team. All the 11 teams have answered. The survey was intended to test their satisfaction, to better know how they use the main software features, and to test their opinion about emerging practices such as open peer review.The poster will present the main results of this survey. The main weakness of Episciences is the workflow imposing a two-stage submission process (in the repository and after in the journal). The strengths are the great assets of the economic model and the editorial support teams.

Metajournals. A federalist proposal for scholarly communication and data aggregation

While the EU is building an open access infrastructure of archives (e.g. Openaire) and it is trying to implement it in the Horizon 2020 program, the gap between the tools and the human beings – researchers, citizen scientists, students, ordinary people – is still wide. The necessity to dictate open access publishing as a mandate for the EU funded research – ten years after the BOAI - is an obvious symptom of it: there is a chasm between the net and the public use of reason. To escalate the advancement and the reuse of research, we should federate the multitude of already existing open access journals in federal open overlay journals that receive their contents from the member journals and boost it with their aggregation power and their semantic web tools. The article contains both the theoretical basis and the guidelines for a project whose goals are: 1. making open access journals visible, highly cited and powerful, by federating them into wide disciplinary overlay journals; 2. avoiding the traps of the “authors pay” open access business model, by exploiting one of the virtue of federalism: the federate journals can remain little and affordable, if they gain visibility from the power of the federal overlay journal aggregating them; 3. enriching the overlay journals both through semantic annotation tools and by means of open platforms dedicated to host ex post peer review and experts comments; 4. making the selection and evaluation processes and their resulting data as much as possible public and open, to avoid the pitfalls (e. g, the serials price crisis) experienced by the closed access publishing model. It is about time to free academic publishing from its expensive walled gardens and to put to test the tools that can help us to transform it in one open forest, with one hundred flowers – and one hundred trailblazers.

Metajournals: A Federalist Proposal for Scholarly Communication and Data Aggregation

While the EU is building an open access infrastructure of archives (e.g. Openaire) and it is trying to implement it in the Horizon 2020 program, the gap between the tools and the human beings – researchers, citizen scientists, students, ordinary people – is still wide. The necessity to dictate open access publishing as a mandate for the EU funded research – ten years after the BOAI - is an obvious symptom of it: there is a chasm between the net and the public use of reason. To escalate the advancement and the reuse of research, we should federate the multitude of already existing open access journals in federal open overlay journals that receive their contents from the member journals and boost it with their aggregation power and their semantic web tools. The article contains both the theoretical basis and the guidelines for a project whose goals are: 1. making open access journals visible, highly cited and powerful, by federating them into wide disciplinary overlay journals; 2. avoiding the traps of the “authors pay” open access business model, by exploiting one of the virtue of federalism: the federate journals can remain little and affordable, if they gain visibility from the power of the federal overlay journal aggregating them; 3. enriching the overlay journals both through semantic annotation tools and by means of open platforms dedicated to host ex post peer review and experts comments; 4. making the selection and evaluation processes and their resulting data as much as possible public and open, to avoid the pitfalls (e. g, the serials price crisis) experienced by the closed access publishing model. It is about time to free academic publishing from its expensive walled gardens and to put to test the tools that can help us to transform it in one open forest, with one hundred flowers – and one hundred trailblazers.

New journal models and publishing perspectives in the evolving digital environment

Open access combined with Web 2.0 networking tools is fast changing the traditional journal’s functions and framework and the publisher’s role. As content is more and more available online in digital repositories and on the web, an integrated, interconnected, multidisciplinary information environment is evolving and Oldenburg’s model disintegrates: the journal is no longer the main referring unit for scholarly output, as it used to be, for Scientific, Technical, and Medical disciplines, but scholars’ attention is now more focused on the article level. New journals models are thus evolving. The first part of this paper discusses these new experimental journal models, i.e. overlay journals, interjournals and different levels journals. The second part directs readers’ attention to the role commercial publishers could play in this digital seamless writing arena. The authors consider that publishers should concentrate much more on value-added services for authors, readers and libraries, such as navigational services, discovery services, archiving and evaluation services.

Editorial: Best papers from Milan

In this issue of IFLA Journal we present the first group of Milan Congress papers selected for publication by the Editorial Committee from 26 papers recommended by Section Committees for possible publication. The chosen congress papers and the other contributions in this issue all focus on the digital environment from a variety of standpoints. In the first paper, ‘New journal models and publishing perspectives in the evolving digital environment’, Maria Cassella and Licia Calvi note that the functions and framework of traditional journals, and the publishers’ role, are fast changing under the influence of open access and Web 2.0 networking tools. The first part of the paper discusses new experimental journal models, i.e. overlay journals, interjournals and different levels journals, while the second part focuses on the role that commercial publishers could play in this ‘‘digital seamless writing arena’’, concentrating much more on value-added services for authors, readers and libraries, such as navigational services, discovery services, archiving and evaluation services. The second paper, ‘The Cataloging Cultural Objects experience: Codifying practice for the cultural heritage community’, by Erin Coburn, Elisa Lanzi, Elizabeth O’Keefe, Regine Stein and Ann Whiteside, examines the influence of the manual, Cataloguing Cultural Objects: a Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images (CCO) since its publication in 2003. CCO is a manual for describing, documenting, and cataloguing cultural works and their visual surrogates. While its primary focus is art and architecture, CCO also covers many other types of cultural works, including archaeological sites, artifacts, and functional objects from the realm of material culture. This paper presents three examples of the implementation of CCO, showing how emerging CCO cataloguing practice has resulted in a significant body of records from the museum and image library communities headed for library/archive/museum integrated access environments. The authors comment on how cataloguing decision-making (e.g. differing concepts about a ‘work’) may impact the convergence of records in these environments. In the third paper, ‘Content development in an indigenous digital library: A case study in community participation’, Elizabeth Greyling and Sipho Zulu present a case study in community participation in developing content for a digital library of local indigenous knowledge in a South African community. They highlight the interaction between the library, the community and the technology used, discuss the implementation challenges, results and lessons learnt and point out the benefits to the community. The authors conclude that, by providing an online, contextually-based information service to local communities, public libraries in Africa will ensure future-oriented access to cultural heritage resources through 21st century information communication technologies (ICTs). The potential to reduce the digital divide will be enhanced and African communities will be introduced to the global information society. We return to the field of journal publishing with the next paper, ‘Interactive open access publishing and public peer review: The effectiveness of transparency and self-regulation in scientific quality assurance’, by Ulrich Poschl. The author notes that traditional forms of scientific publishing and peer review do not live up to the demands of efficient communication and quality assurance in the world of science of today. They need to be complemented by interactive and transparent forms of review, publication, and discussion that are open to the scientific community and to the public. The paper discusses the principles, key aspects and achievements of interactive open access publishing and describes how the benefits and viability of this approach are demonstrated by the highly successful interactive open access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and a growing number of sister journals launched by the publisher Copernicus and the European Geosciences Union. The author I F L A

Reinventing Academic Publishing, Part 2

One possible model for scientific publishing is the overlay journal, which takes some interdisciplinary theme and provides links to papers published elsewhere. By providing links rather than republishing, the overlay journal provides a service to both the reader, by linking to many publications, and the publishers, by bringing more eyeballs to their sites.

The “Green” and “Gold” Roads to Open Access: The Case for Mixing and Matching

Recent discussions on Open Access (OA) have tended to treat OA journals and self-archiving as two distinct routes. Some supporters of self-archiving even suggest that it alone can bring about full Open Access to the world's scientific literature. In this paper, it is argued that each route actually corresponds to a phase in the movement toward Open Access; that the mere fact of self-archiving is not enough; that providing some branding ability to the repositories is needed. However, doing so will eventually bring about the creation of overlay (or database) journals. The two roads, therefore, will merge to create a mature OA landscape.

The “Green” and “Gold” Roads to Open Access: The Case for Mixing and Matching

Recent discussions on Open Access (OA) have tended to treat OA journals and self-archiving as two distinct routes. Some supporters of self-archiving even suggest that it alone can bring about full Open Access to the world's scientific literature. In this paper, it is argued that each route actually corresponds to a phase in the movement toward Open Access; that the mere fact of self-archiving is not enough; that providing some branding ability to the repositories is needed. However, doing so will eventually bring about the creation of overlay (or database) journals. The two roads, therefore, will merge to create a mature OA landscape.