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| After 10 Years, We're Just Beginning to See The Real Value of Open Access
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Marcie Granahan,
NFAIS Executive Director
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Entering its 10th year, Open Access Week is Oct. 23 – 29 this year. Leading up to the event, NFAIS held its Open Access and Beyond conference in Old Town Alexandria this week, where two days of provocative presentations proved that innovation in OA is still on an upward trend.
Many researchers, institutions, funders, and publishers agree that OA represents the future of research dissemination. The remaining question is which approach will prove to be the most effective.
With Europe’s push towards gold open access, and countries such as the US, China and Japan favoring green open access, Elsevier has proposed a shift towards regional models of open access publishing (see full article here). Taylor and Francis, on the other hand, is focusing on choice—whether gold or green—as well as choice of licenses options so authors can decide how others will re-use their work [see presentation here]. Taylor and Francis is actively working to convert many of its journal titles to OA, offering an automatic “opt out” workflow versus the more traditional “opt-in”. The goal is to select successful titles that will go on to be even more successful as OA journals. Its recent acquisition of Dove Medical Press will also increase the company’s OA offerings [see full article here].
Laurie Goodman, Editor-in-Chief of GigaScience, believes the scholarly record of the future will focus more on the scholarly artifacts (e.g., data, images, and methods), while the scholarly article itself would serve primarily as an advertisement of the scholarship [see presentation here]. GigaScience is preparing for this future by forging partnerships with bioRxiv, Protocols.io, Code Ocean, and others that provide integrated and easy to use tools that seamlessly link from the article through digital research objects.
Jerry Sheehan, Deputy Director for Policy Development at the National Library of Medicine, agrees, and the National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine are also moving beyond basic article publication [see presentation here]. NLM encourages its investigators to use preprints and to incorporate digital research object identifiers for data and methodology that can be sited in applications, proposals and reports. The belief is that early availability will speed dissemination, enhance scientific rigor, reduce unnecessary duplication in research, and assist in interpreting and replicating research results.
Others are bypassing the journal article altogether, such as in the case of Stanford University Press, which— through a grant from the Andrew. W. Mellon Foundation—established a digital publishing program that offers scholars a way to publish and peer review academic research that involves interactive scholarship, such as interactive maps, that are not typically found in online journals [see full article here].
As OA week approaches, how are you supporting publishing’s shift to open access? While we may not have nailed all the details yet, the future of OA is promising.
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Past insights and reflections on industry developments written by NFAIS Executive Director Marcie Granahan are now archived in NFAIS Community Forum. Feel free to post your comments about these and other key topics there. |
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Times Higher Education
Elsevier has proposed a shift towards regional models of open access publishing, warning that there is no international consensus over which subscription-free approach works best.
In a blog, the company suggests that publishers could make the same article available under different terms on different continents, according to local open access preferences. Articles would most likely be made available under gold open access terms – freely available to all, in return for an article publishing charge – in Europe, where Elsevier is locked in disputes with several sectors that want to shift to this model.
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The Bookseller
Academic publisher Taylor & Francis Group, part of Informa PLC, has acquired independent Open Access (OA) publisher Dove Medical Press for an undisclosed sum.
Dove Medical Press, founded in 2003, publishes primarily in the health sciences, with additional content in science and technology. Of Dove Medical's portfolio of OA journals, 86 are indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science and 61 in PubMed. Notable titles include OncoTargets and Therapy, Clinical Epidemiology, International Journal of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and the International Journal of Nanomedicine.
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Stanford News
Stanford University Press is redefining the world of traditional academic publishing through an innovative publishing program. The press was the first academic publishing group to offer scholars a way to publish and peer review academic research that involves digital tools not usually found in online journals. The idea for the program, launched last year with the help of a $1.2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, came out of press director Alan Harvey’s desire to “break the box of publishing.”
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Digital Trends
Compressing all of artificial intelligence (AI) into 10 “moments to remember” isn’t easy. With hundreds of research labs and thousands of computer scientists, compiling a list of every landmark achievement would be, well, a job for a smart algorithm to handle.
With that proviso taken care of, however, we’ve scoured the history books to bring you what we think are the top 10 most significant milestones in the history of AI.
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The Conversation
Technology blogs and financial news networks are buzzing about blockchain, a cryptographic, distributed trust technology. The key innovation is how it reduces the need for central third-party institutions to serve as central authorities of trust — banks, courts, large corporations, stock markets and even governments, for example.
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Research Information
More than two decades ago, client server computing toppled mainframe computing from its lofty pedestal. But today, service-oriented architectures and browser-based interfaces, deployed through cloud-based infrastructure, have usurped this mighty model and fundamentally re-shaped technology platforms.
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LSE Impact Blog
There are now more than 13 million users registered to the ResearchGate platform, which doubles as a venue to display one’s academic achievements and a social networking site where scientists can interact with one another. Enrique Orduna-Malea, Alberto Martín-Martín, Mike Thelwall and Emilio Delgado López-Cózar scrutinise one of its key features, the much-maligned RG Score. While the computation of this metric is not transparent, closer analysis suggests it rewards participation in the platform, especially in its Q&A section, above all else.
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Boston Globe
Want to add a bit of science to your resume? Some unethical publishers are willing to sell authorship on the articles they print. The revelation is the result of a sting by Pravin Bolshete, a medical writer in India. Bolshete wanted to see just how far so-called “predatory” publishers would go, so he sent letters to more than 300 houses and journals saying that he needed papers to get promoted but was too busy to do the writing himself.
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The Scholarly Kitchen
The promise of portable peer review took a fatal blow earlier this year as Rubriq, the company that began a radical experiment to disrupt the peer review process, quietly closed its service after years of unremarkable uptake.
When I last reported on Rubriq earlier this year, just 30 manuscripts were reviewed over the prior three months. According to Damian Pattinson, VP of Publishing Innovation at Research Square — the owners of Rubriq, the service has not gone away, just focused entirely on providing peer review and other editorial services to publishers.
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Science Magazine
Once you’ve submitted your paper to a journal, how important is it that the reviewers know who wrote it?
Surveys have suggested that many researchers would prefer anonymity because they think it would result in a more impartial assessment of their manuscript. But a new study by the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) in London shows that only one in eight authors actually chose to have their reviewers blinded when given the option.
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Inside Higher Ed
Denounced by some as “clickbait” and others as poor scholarship, a new article on the supposed benefits of Western colonialism has prompted calls for retraction. And while detractors are plentiful and pointed in their criticism, the debate and others like it has some wondering if retraction threatens to replace rebuttal as the standard academic response to unpopular research.
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Gizmodo
Recently, when the biotech firm Human Longevity published a controversial paper claiming that it could predict what a person looks like based on only a teeny bit of DNA, it was just a little over a week before a second paper was published discrediting it as flawed and false. The lightening speed with which the rebuttal was delivered was thanks to bioRxiv, a server where scientists can publish pre-prints of papers before they have gone through the lengthy peer-review process. It took only four more days before a rebuttal to the rebuttal was up on bioRxiv, too.
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The Scholarly Kitchen
We live in an age of corporate consolidation — big companies continue to acquire or merge with smaller firms at a rapid pace.
The scholarly publishing business is quite consolidated as well, and becoming more so day by day. Ten companies control more than 75 percent of the market, and notifications about journal transfers from societies to the larger publishers sprinkle our emails. Yet, talk to most editors and publishers, and they think we’d be better off with a diverse market made up of many players — university presses, society publishers and successful non-profits.
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Nature
International projects account for at least 20 percent of national government spending on scientific research. Some countries spend as much as 50 percent of these funds on international collaborations. The number of internationally co-authored papers is growing rapidly. For countries at the forefront of research, the fraction of papers that are entirely "home grown" is falling.
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PRWeb
The 2018 Serials Price Projection Report from EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is now available. The report projects that the overall effective publisher price increases for academic and academic/medical libraries are expected to be in the range of five to six percent (before currency impact). EBSCO releases the Serials Price Projections based on surveys of a wide range of publishers and reviews of historical serials pricing data to assist information professionals as they make budgeting decisions for the renewals season
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The New York Times
Twitter’s defining attribute has long been its brevity: 140 characters in a post and no more.
That is now set to change. Twitter said recently that it would test extending the text limit of a post on its service to 280 characters. Twitter said the goal was to eliminate what it viewed as constraints that kept people from tweeting more frequently. One significant barrier, according to Twitter’s internal research, has been the stringent limit on character count.
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SAGE Publishing
Today’s researchers need a range of new skills to embrace the data revolution. To support social science researchers and equip them with these skills, SAGE Publishing has launched SAGE Campus, a new series of online data science courses.
“SAGE is passionate about social science research and we believe a major shift is taking place as a result of the increasing availability of data and the advances in tools and methods for analyzing massive datasets. SAGE Campus courses are one of the ways that SAGE is responding to these changes – by offering social scientists who want to learn data science skills courses tailored to their needs”, commented Katie Metzler, Head of Methods Innovation at SAGE.
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Datanami
The push for open government data got a boost this week with passage of a budget bill that includes language codifying open data requirements for the federal government.
Senate passage of the Defense Department spending authorization package included an amendment incorporating the text of the Open, Permanent, Electronic and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act.
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EurekAlert!
Oxford University Press (OUP) is partnering with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) as they launch their Emergency Access Initiative (EAI) to provide free access to biomedical research for healthcare professionals and aid workers responding to hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, and the earthquake in Mexico.
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Earth & Space Science News
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) and Atypon, a developer of online scholarly publishing tools, have announced a joint initiative to develop a community server for the open dissemination of Earth and space science pre-prints and conference presentations. The partners have named this new server the Earth and Space Science Open Archive (ESSOAr).
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Clarivate Analytics
According to the 2017 State of Innovation Report: The Relentless Desire to Advance, released today, analysis of year-over-year research and patent activity across 12 key industries shows that the growth rate has slowed in 2016. Patent volume is still on an upward trajectory, with over 2.6 million published patents in 2016. This indicates that global corporations, universities, government agencies and research institutions are continuing to relentlessly contribute new solutions to address the world's biggest problems.
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NFAIS
Managing Digital Objects in an Expanding Science Ecosystem
Webinar November 15, 2017
Lunch & Learn: Are Your Communicating for Consent? Preparing for the EU GDPR
Single Presenter Event November 28, 2017
NFAIS 2018 Annual Conference
Information Transformation: Open. Global. Collaborative
Wednesday, Feb 28, 2018 1 p.m. - Friday, Mar. 2, 2018 2 p.m.
The NFAIS Career Center is the premier one-stop place for employers and job-seekers in the information services field to make the right connections. Click here to view all job opportunities or to post an open position.
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