Re: [GOAL] COVID IP waiver request: interesting but not entirely informed?
Thank you, Ulrich. The exception does look like it would be helpful in an emergency like COVID, and likely necessary as the default is an expectation of protection of rights and commercial exploitation; this is also on p. 102. There is a sharp contrast in the E.U. and North America between success in achieving OA as the default in dissemination of results and expectation of protecting IP for commercial exploitation. It would be interesting to have meaningful and informed discussion about this. To participate in informed discussion, participants should understand the basics about the different types of IP. For those who may be new to this area, WIPO's "What is intellectual property" page is a good starting point: https://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/ The Public Library of Science (PLOS) Terms of Use may also be helpful to OA advocates in understanding the different types of IP. Like most fully OA publishers with a firm commitment to open licensing, PLOS is very protective of their own work, including their own text on the website and their trademark. https://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/ The Google business model of advertising-supported facilitated access to free knowledge and services created by others, made possible by algorithms carefully protected as trade secrets, is another example of how different the various types of IP are. It is not unusual for a single internet search to invoke multiple different types of IP that work in very different fashion. COVID is an interesting case study. My impression (not based on substantive research) is that the world, including the traditional commercial scholarly publishing industry, has made considerable progress in open sharing of information about the virus. There is no doubt still a great deal of room for improvement, but this is an advance and should be celebrated as much. I wonder how much the success of the OA / open data movements to date contributed to the rapid development of COVID vaccines in multiple countries. Manufacturing involves patent law, and the manufacturing industries are very different from scholarly publishing. In the case of COVID vaccine manufacture, even under the current licensing regime, we have instances of what looks to me (as a non-expert) like rapid implementation of manufacture (Johnson & Johnson in Baltimore, more recently a Moderna factory in Spain creating doses for Japan) resulting in contaminated vaccines. This is not helpful in a context where vaccine hesitancy and an anti-vaccination movement are significant barriers to addressing COVID. In this case, simply opening up the rights to manufacture vaccines to anyone could do more harm than good. On the other hand, the profit-driven pharma-as-usual model may be driving a push for booster shots in rich countries that may not be necessary, when the most compassionate and smartest approach (even for the rich countries) is likely shots in arms everywhere (to reduce opportunities for new variants to develop). I see this as a good opportunity for discussion on how IP works in this area and how to do it better. Lessons from the OA movement may or may not be relevant, but understanding how to produce and distribute quality vaccines and other medicines is absolutely essential for informed discussion in this area. GOAL may or may not be the right venue for this discussion. Advice on this would be welcome. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Cross-appointed, Department of Communication Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: Ulrich Herb Sent: Friday, September 3, 2021 7:36 AM To: goal Cc: Heather Morrison Subject: Re: [GOAL] COVID IP waiver request: interesting but not entirely informed? Attention : courriel externe | external email perhaps this might be of interest: in its new research framework programme Horizon Europe the European Commission states this (https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/common/agr-contr/general-mga_horizon-euratom_en.pdf, p. 102) ... *** Where the call conditions impose additional exploitation obligations in case of a public emergency, the beneficiaries must (if requested by the granting authority) grant for a limited period of time specified in the request, non-exclusive licences — under fair and reasonable conditions — to their results to legal entities that need the results to address the public emergency and commit to rapidly and broadly exploit the resulting products and services at fair and reasonable conditions. This provision applies up to four years after the end of the action. *** As there was no such statement in t
[GOAL] COVID IP waiver request: interesting but not entirely informed?
I note with interest the request from India and South Africa for a full waiver of IP rights with respect to anything relating to COVID: https://docs.wto.org/dol2fe/Pages/SS/directdoc.aspx?filename=q:/IP/C/W669.pdf=True This sounds like the kind of initiative that OA enthusiasts might well have been involved in or support. The reason for this post is that I am hoping GOAL readers might have some background or perspective on this. Also, I worry about OA enthusiasm and the strength of the OA movement distracting people in power from the most effective ways to address the pandemic, and in the medium to long term, the impact this could have on the OA movement per se. Why do I characterize this as a distraction from effective COVID-19 action? One example: in Canada, early action on vaccination was delayed because the country has little to no vaccine manufacturing capacity. (We have since caught up, through purchase because we are a rich country, and are among the most vaccinated country in the world). Full waivers on IP by every vaccine manufacturer in the world would not have made any difference to this situation. What will make a difference in future is the development of vaccine manufacturing capacity in Canada. This will happen, most notably a forthcoming factory by the maker of the Moderna vaccine. In this context, pushing the government to support full IP waiver rather obviously would not accomplish anything in the reasonably foreseeable future. If I were in government I would see things this way: big pharma is helpful - finding, manufacturing and distributing vaccines in a time frame that is unheard of, while IP waiver advocates seem like nice, well-meaning people who are not making much sense or offering viable short-term solutions. My personal perspective is that all health care is a human right and should not be left to the corporate sector for profit-making. However, in a crisis the most important thing to do is to find and implement solutions. Fixing the economy can wait. Switching pharmaceutical development and distribution from a profit to a people centered basis is a laudable goal. This will probably take longer to accomplish than flipping scholarly communication production from the demand to the supply side for OA. The world should not have to wait decades for COVID relief. The WHO letter mentions but does not request what I suggest is a more likely approach to avoiding IP interference with addressing the pandemic in the short term: compulsory licensing. This is a flexibility already permitted under TRIPS, as the World Trade Organization (WTO) explains here: https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/public_health_faq_e.htm My personal preference is to do away with "intellectual property" altogether. However, in the short term it makes more sense to advocate for full use of a flexibility that is already available rather than pushing for a major global policy change that, it should be obvious, would be a hard sell. To get back to why I characterize this as a distraction: India & South Africa are asking for a policy change that is a hard sell when the policy per se is not likely to do very much to address the pandemic in the short term, and with respect to policy, there is an existing solution that would be a much easier sell (compulsory licensing) Background or comments, anyone? Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Cross-appointed, Department of Communication Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Irrational rationality: critique of metrics-based evaluation of researchers and universities
A unique contribution in my recently published book chapter that aims to advance critique of metrics-based evaluation of scholarly research: Critique of the concept of "impact" that underlies all metrics-based evaluation of research and researchers (traditional and altmetrics) as inherently logically flawed. For example, by any kind of metrics, the retracted study by Wakefield et al. that falsely equated vaccination with autism has had tremendous impact - numerous academic and popular media citations both before and after retraction, arguably the real-world resurgence of diseases such as measles and inspiration for the anti-vaccination movement that is problematic in the fight against COVID. In other words, impact is one thing, and quality of research something else. We understand that impact can be negative when we use the phrase "environmental impact assessment"; why do we assume that impact is positive with respect to scholarly work? This argument is developed in the latter portion of my book chapter Dysfunction in knowledge creation and moving beyond from Stack's Global University Rankings and the Politics of Knowledge. Other chapters from this book may be of interest as the areas of research impact metrics and university rankings are very much inter-related. Readers may also appreciate the pointer to an alternative approach to evaluation of research developed some time ago by the University of Ottawa and its Association of Professors (APUO) that does not rely on metrics and is flexible to address the wide variety of types of research outputs of different disciplines, from traditional (articles and books) to alternative (research-creation) and early recognition of emerging forms such as preprints. Discussion and comments on list, via e-mail or the blog are welcome. The blogpost begins with a different approach to critique of university rankings per se and can be found at https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2021/08/03/irrational-rationality-critique-of-metrics-based-evaluation-of-researchers-and-universities/ References Morrison, H. (2021). Dysfunction in knowledge creation and moving beyond. In Stack, M. (ed.) (2021). Global University Rankings and the Politics of Knowledge. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/78483 Stack, M. (ed.) (2021). Global University Rankings and the Politics of Knowledge. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/78483 best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Cross-appointed, Department of Communication Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Open access article processing charges 2011 - 2021
CAUTION: This e-mail originated outside the University of Southampton. Global Open Access list members may be interested in this preprint of a major study on APCs and/or the open datasets. Comments and questions are welcome on this list or through the blog. ~ Heather Morrison Abstract This study examines trends in open access article processing charges (APCs) from 2011 – 2021, building on a 2011 study by Solomon & Björk (2012). Two methods are employed, a modified replica and a status update of the 2011 journals. Data is drawn from multiple sources and datasets are available as open data (Morrison et al, 2021). Most journals do not charge APCs; this has not changed. The global average per-journal APC increased slightly, from 906 USD to 958 USD, while the per-article average increased from 904 USD to 1,626 USD, indicating that authors choose to publish in more expensive journals. Publisher size, type, impact metrics and subject affect charging tendencies, average APC and pricing trends. About half the journals from the 2011 sample are no longer listed in DOAJ in 2021, due to ceased publication or publisher de-listing. Conclusions include a caution about the potential of the APC model to increase costs beyond inflation, and a suggestion that support for the university sector, responsible for the majority of journals, nearly half the articles, with a tendency not to charge and very low average APCs, may be the most promising approach to achieve economically sustainable no-fee OA journal publishing. A preprint of the full article is available here: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/42327 The two base datasets and their documentation are available as open data: Morrison, Heather et al., 2021, “2011 – 2021 OA APCs”, https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/84PNSG, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V1 Citation: cite the original URL rather than this blogpost URL (article); if citing data, use the citation above. Morrison, H., Borges, L., Zhao, X., Kakou, T.L., Shanbhoug, A.M. (2021). Open access article processing charges 2020 – 2021. Preprint. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons. https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/42327 Blogpost URL: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2021/06/24/open-access-article-processing-charges-2011-2021/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Cross-appointed, Department of Communication Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Welcome to C.A.S.A.D.: Centre d'Accès aux Savoirs d'Afrique et de sa Diaspora
Please welcome a new research blog, C.A.S.A.D: Centre d'Accès aux Savoirs d'Afrique et de sa Diaspora, created by doctoral candidate Tanoh Laurent Kakou for his research: https://www.casad.ngo/ Welcome message from Sustaining the Knowledge Commons (English then French): Our Tanoh Laurent Kakou has created a blog for his own research project in open access, C.A.S.A.D.: Centre d’Accès aux Savoirs d’Afrique et de sa Diaspora<https://www.casad.ngo/>. Some articles will be familiar to readers of Sustaining the knowledge commons, as the work of the team; others are new research projects by Tanoh. The video Qu’est-ce que la revue Afroscopie<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzHK-uQYgDE=emb_title>?, an interview with Benoit Awazi, is enlightening for anyone who is interested in research in francophone Africa. Thank you and congratulations to our Tanoh Laurent Kakou, a doctoral candidate in communication<https://arts.uottawa.ca/communication/en> (and graduate of ÉSIS<https://arts.uottawa.ca/sis/>) on passing his comprehensive exam this summer! Best wishes to Tanoh and his research. Permalink: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/09/09/welcome-to-c-a-s-a-d-centre-dacces-aux-savoirs-dafrique-et-de-sa-diaspora/ Notre Tanoh Laurent Kakou a créé un blog pour son propre projet de recherche en libre accès, C.A.S.A.D.: Centre d’Accès aux Savoirs d’Afrique et de sa Diaspora<https://www.casad.ngo/>. Quelques articles seront familiers aux lecteurs de Soutenir les savoirs communs, le travail de l’équipe; d’autres sont nouveau recherche fait par Tanoh. La vidéo Qu’est-ce que la revue Afroscopie<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzHK-uQYgDE=emb_title>?, un entretien avec Benoit Awazi, est éclairante pour quiconque s’intéresse à la recherche en Afrique francophone. Merci et félicitations à notre Tanoh Laurent Kakou, candidat au doctorat en communication<https://arts.uottawa.ca/communication/fr> (et diplômé d’ÉSIS<https://arts.uottawa.ca/esi/>), qui a réussi son examen de synthèse cet été! Meilleurs voeux à Tanoh et sa recherche. Permalink:https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/09/09/bienvenue-a-c-a-s-a-d-centre-dacces-aux-savoirs-dafrique-et-de-sa-diaspora/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Cross-appointed, Department of Communication Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Knowledge & equity: key points, and the 10-minute video version
greetings ~ Dr. Rahman & I would like to thank everyone who has provided comments on our paper Knowledge and Equity: Analysis of 3 models to date. These will inform a later version. In the meantime, for those who may be too busy to read the full article, here are the key points in a nutshell and a link to a 10-minute YouTube version. Key points: * We conclude that it is possible to develop and assess open access initiatives from the perspectives of whether they are likely to help or harm knowledge equity or knowledge justice (the ability of all qualified to participate in the global scholarly conversation) * We recommend that OA initiatives and policies undertake a knowledge equity analysis The 10-minute YouTube video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIKhXL2LyNg Further comments are welcome, on the list or on the blog: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/06/26/knowledge-and-equity-analysis-of-three-models/ Attendees of the IAMCR virtual conference may wish to enter their comments there. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Cross-appointed, Department of Communication Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Knowledge and Equity: analysis of three models
Abstract: The context of this paper is an analysis of three emerging models for developing a global knowledge commons. The concept of a ‘global knowledge commons’ builds on the vision of the original Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) for the potential of combining academic tradition and the internet to remove various access barriers to the scholarly literature, thus laying the foundation for an unprecedented public good, uniting humanity in a common quest for knowledge. The global knowledge commons is a universal sharing of the knowledge of humankind, free for all to access (recognizing reasons for limiting sharing in some circumstances such as to protect individual privacy), and free for everyone qualified to contribute to. The three models are Plan S / cOAlition S, an EU-led initiative to transition all of scholarly publishing to an open access model on a short timeline; the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), a recent initiative that builds on Ostrom’s study of the commons; and PubMedCentral (PMC) International, building on the preservation and access to the medical research literature provided by the U.S. National Institutes of Health to support other national repositories of funded research and exchange of materials between regions. The research will involve analysis of official policy and background briefing documents on the three initiatives and relevant historical projects, such as the Research Council U.K.’s block grants for article processing charges, the EU-led OA2020 initiative, Europe PMC and the short-lived PMC-Canada. Theoretical analysis will draw on Ostrom’s work on the commons, theories of development, under-development, epistemic / knowledge inequity and the concepts of Chan and colleagues (2011) on the importance of moving beyond north-to-south access to knowledge (charity model) to include south-to-south and south-to-north (equity model). This model analysis contributes to build a comparative view of transcontinental efforts for a global knowledge commons building with shared values of open access, sharing and collaboration, in contrast to the growing trend of commodification of scholarly knowledge evident in both traditional subscriptions / purchase-based scholarly publishing and in commercial open access publishing. We anticipate that our findings will indicate that a digital world of inclusiveness and reciprocity is possible, but cannot be taken for granted, and policy support is crucial. Global communication and information policy have much to contribute towards the development of a sustainable global knowledge commons. Full text: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/40664 Cite as: Morrison, H. & Rahman, R. (2020). Knowledge and equity: analysis of three models. International Association of Communication and Media Researchers (IAMCR) annual conference, July 2020. Comments are welcome, either on list or on the blog: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/06/26/knowledge-and-equity-analysis-of-three-models/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Cross-appointed, Department of Communication Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] SpringerOpen 2019 - 2020
by Anqi Shi & Heather Morrison Abstract 307 SpringerOpen titles for which we have data on journals that were fully open at some point from 2010 to the present were studied, with a primary focus on pricing and status changes from 2019 – 2020 and a secondary focus on longitudinal status changes. Of the 307 titles, 226 are active, fully open access and are still published by SpringerOpen, 40 have ceased publication, 19 were transferred to another publisher, and 18 journals that were formerly open access are now hybrid. 6 of these journals transitioned from free to hybrid in the past year. An additional 2 journals were not found. An additional 2 journals were not found. Of the 226 active journals published by SpringerOpen, 51% charge APCs. The average APC is 1,233 EUR, an increase of 3% over the 2019 average. 46.5% of the 101 journals for which we have 2019 and 2020 data did not change in price; 13.9% decreased in price; and 39.6% increased in price. The extent of change in price was substantial, ranging from a 50% price drop to a 94% price increase. For links to download the full-text PDF and/or data, go to https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/06/11/springeropen-2019-2020/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Cross-appointed, Department of Communication Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] BioMedCentral 2020
BioMedCentral (BMC) 2019 – 2020 by Anqi Shi & Heather Morrison Key points * Open access commercial publishing pioneer BMC is now wholly owned by a private company with a portfolio including lines of business that derive revenue from journal subscriptions, book sales, and textbook sales and rentals * Two former BMC fully OA journals, listed in DOAJ from 2014 – 2018 as having CC-BY licenses, are now hybrid and listed on the Springer website and have disappeared from the BMC website * 67% of BMC journals with APCs in 2019 and 2020 increased in price and 11% decreased in price. * Journals with price increases had a higher average APC in 2019, i.e. more expensive journals appear to be more likely to increase in price Abstract Founded in 2000, BioMedCentral (BMC) was one of the first commercial (OA) publishers and a pioneer of the article processing charges (APC) business model. BMC was acquired by Springer in 2008. In 2015, Springer was acquired by the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group in 2015 and became part of SpringerNature. In other words, BMC began as an OA publisher and is now one of the imprints or business lines of a company whose other lines of business include sales of journal subscriptions and scholarly books and textbook sales and rentals. Of the 328 journals actively published by BMC in 2020, 91% charge APCs. The average APC was 2,271 USD, an increase of 3% over 2019. An overall small increase in average APC masks substantial changes at the individual journal level. As first noted by Wheatley (2016), BMC price changes from one year to the next are a mix of increases, decreases, and retention of the same price. In 2020, 67% of the 287 journals for which we have pricing in USD for both 2019 and 2020 increased in price; 11% decreased in price, and 22% did not change price. It appears that it is the more expensive journals that are more likely to increase in price. The average 2019 price of the journals that increased in 2020 was 2,307 USD, 18% higher than the 2019 average of 1,948 USD for journals that decreased in price. 173 journals increased in price by 4% or more, well above the inflation rate. 39 journals increased in price by 10% or more; 13 journals increased in price by 20% or more. Also in 2020, there are 11 new journals, 11 journals ceased publication, 5 titles were transferred to other publishers, 2 journals changed from no publication fee to having an APC, and 3 journals dropped their APCs. Two journals formerly published fully OA by BMC are no longer listed on the BMC website, but are now listed as hybrid on the Springer website. This is a small portion of the total but is worth noting as the opposite direction of the transformative (from subscriptions to OA) officially embraced by SpringerNature. For links to the full PDF and data: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/06/08/biomedcentral-2020/ Cite as: Shi, A. & Morrison, H. (2020). BioMedCentral 2020. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons. https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/06/08/biomedcentral-2020/ Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Cross-appointed, Department of Communication Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Frontiers 2020: one third of journals raise price 45 times the inflation rate (or more)
A third of the journals published by Frontiers in 2019 and 2020 (20 / 61 journals) have increased in price by 18% or more (up to 55%). This is quite a contrast with the .4% Swiss inflation rate for 2019 according to Worlddata.info<https://www.worlddata.info/europe/switzerland/inflation-rates.php> ; 18% is 45 times the inflation rate. This is an even more marked contrast with the current and anticipated economic impact of COVID; according to Le News<https://lenews.ch/2020/04/29/swiss-gdp-set-for-worst-fall-in-decades/>, “A team of economic experts working for the Swiss government forecasts a 6.7% fall in GDP”. (Frontiers’ headquarters is in Switzerland). This is similar to our 2019 finding that 40% of Frontier’s journals had increased in price by 18% or more (Pashaei & Morrison, 2019) and our 2018 finding that 40% of Frontier journals had increased in price by 18% – 31% (Morrison, 2018). The price increases are on top of already high prices. For example, Frontiers in Earth Science increased from 1,900 USD to 2,950 USD, a 55% price increase. Frontiers in Oncology increased from 2,490 to 2,950 USD, an 18% price increase. This illustrates an inelastic market. Payers of these fees are largely government research funders, either directly or indirectly through university libraries or researchers’ own funds. The payers are experiencing a major downturn and significant challenges such as lab closures, working from home in lockdown conditions, and additional costs to accommodate public health measures, while Frontiers clearly expects ever-increasing revenue and profit. Details and a link to the dataset can be found here: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/06/03/frontiers-2020-a-third-of-journals-increase-prices-by-45-times-the-inflation-rate/ Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Cross-appointed, Department of Communication Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Springer Nature reaches new milestone with publication of 1000th open access book
Accuracy and author reputation are as important in the realm of facts as well as other types of approach to knowledge such as theory. To take a current hypothetical example, it matters whether an expert epidemiologist does, or does not, recommend the use of hydroxychloroquine as a prophylatic in the treatment of COVID. Every advance in media technology raises both positive and negative potential uses. Social media facilitates sharing of both accurate and inaccurate information. Spreading inaccurate information can be done innocently or deliberately. I argue that the OA movement has achieved sufficient momentum that it is now timely to move beyond one-sided arguments focused solely on the benefits to encompass discussion on both the positives and negatives of particular aspects of "open". One area of emerging issues that I plan to learn a bit more about (thanks to a webinar series through the University of Ottawa's Centre for Law, Technology, and Society and speaker Suzie Dunn) is the legal and ethical issues relating to identity arising from AI and robotics. It is already fairly easy to use and/or alter someone else's identity without their permission. Many people do this at home using photoshop. This new technology creates a new threat to identity. It takes time for law to catch up with such new challenges. I predict that in future we will have stronger laws to protect our privacy and publicity rights. In the meantime, I recommend limiting risk by avoiding open licenses that actively encourage modification. What does this have to do with scholarship? Picture a robot conducting a webinar giving the illusion that they are a particular expert epidemiologist, without bothering to check with said epidemiologist. Does it make sense to assume that no one would ever do such a thing for anything other than the purest of intentions and with the level of expertise of the individual who is impersonated? I make so assumption, and recommend that scholars use every means they can to discourage such downstream uses and facilitate legal action to fight if necessary. If I understand correctly, CC "BY" clause provides a bit of protection, that is, the right for creators to demand that objectionable downstream users remove the attribution. Clarification would be appreciated. However, because CC-BY is an active invitation to downstream modifications, it increases the risk. Many scholars do not have the means to actively monitor downstream uses and take legal action if these are objectionable. For this reason, I argue that it is better to avoid the risk by avoiding the more "open" licenses. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Cross-appointed, Department of Communication Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Nicolas Pettiaux Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 4:59 PM To: goal@eprints.org Subject: Re: [GOAL] Springer Nature reaches new milestone with publication of 1000th open access book Attention : courriel externe | external email Hello, For me, it really depends on the work. I agree if the work expresses opinions. But in such a case, the licence can well be CC-BY-ND which NOT for someone like me (I am the leader of the Belgian chapter of Creative Commons and lecture regularly on the CC licenses). For nearly any work that be used as research and teaching material, I consider it really important that the work be under a free CC licenses, and there are only 2 : CC-BY and CC-BY-SA. For me, therefore, Open Access is as good as the license, that is the rights that are granted to the readers. And if the work is not free for reuse it can hardly be called OpenAccess . In French, Open is often translated in a much better way "Libre" supporting the philosophical case of freedom, much as free software (en) = logiciel libre (fr) (now only, after 20 years) = open source, that only transmit the economical benefit of openess . For me OA should have been named "accès libre" (at least in French) (this discussion has already taken place here if I remember well) and reflect the fact that the reader is allowed to do pretty much what he wants. The risk that your are mentioning is quite difficult to see in practice I suppose, because of the BY clause. Best regards, Nicolas Le 19/05/20 à 22:07, Heather Morrison a écrit : There is good reason for authors to object to making their work easy to translate, adapt and modify, and for all to support authors in this. If the translation, adaptation or modification is in
Re: [GOAL] Springer Nature reaches new milestone with publication of 1000th open access book
There is good reason for authors to object to making their work easy to translate, adapt and modify, and for all to support authors in this. If the translation, adaptation or modification is incorrect or changes the author's intent in writing there is risk to the author's own academic work and reputation. That is, the author may be understood and cited as having said something that they did not say. Avoiding this potential for misunderstanding is in the best interests of all, by reducing the risk of adding errors to our collective knowledge. As a long-time OA advocate and practitioner of open research I do not grant blanket rights to translate, modify or adapt my text-based works. Open datasets are different, in that case the purpose is downstream modification. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Cross-appointed, Department of Communication Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Nicolas Pettiaux Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 2:37 PM To: goal@eprints.org Subject: Re: [GOAL] Springer Nature reaches new milestone with publication of 1000th open access book Attention : courriel externe | external email Hello, Where can we find the sources of the books in a format that make it super easy to translate, reuse, adapt, modify, and redistribute ? Thanks Nicolas Pettiaux -- Nicolas Pettiaux, phd - gsm +32 496 24 55 01 - nico...@pettiaux.be<mailto:nico...@pettiaux.be> Avenue du Pérou 29 à 1000 Bruxelles ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] COVID budget cuts, big deals, faculty positions and salaries & bibliodiversity
Many governments are, or will, need to divert funds from the usual priorities to address the pandemic and issues arising such as economic impact. No doubt this will impact many post-secondary institutions. For example, yesterday we learned that post-secondary institutions in Manitoba have been asked to decrease expenditures by 30% https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-universities-budget-cuts-pandemic-1.5537883 Most faculty members are not involved in making decisions about library budgets. They likely see the big deals of commercial publishers as a service that they do not wish to lose, rather than high-priced services that are paid for from the same pool of funds that pay their salaries. One way to help faculty understand would be to prepare an explanation of the cost of the big deals that puts the two together, i.e. if we need to cut something, should be cut x number of faculty positions or big deal y (or x% of faculty salaries v. big deal y), for presentation to faculty associations and university administrators. Explaining the financial and academic-social benefits of an approach prioritizing bibliodiversity would be a little bit more complicated, but arguments that faculty would likely understand and support can be made. For example, instead of 100% of savings from cancelling all big deals to retain as many faculty as possible, perhaps using 80% of savings for this purpose and using the remainder to provide salaries for academics and support staff in local publishing (university press, scholarly society or library-based). I suspect this is best done proactively, early on when discussions about how to go about cuts are getting started. Is anyone doing anything like this? Thoughts? Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] COVID-19 and access to knowledge: recommending a positive approach
COVID-19 is a pandemic that is in the process of infecting and killing many people around the world. The immediate priority needs to be slowing the spread, understanding the virus, finding treatments and a vaccine. COVID-19 is also an opportune case study in areas relating to open access and sharing of knowledge. I have already shared some approaches; here are a few more thoughts. Treatments and vaccines are already under development. This is a great time to point out that we would all benefit more if these are not patented. If everyone in another country gets vaccinated, we don't need to worry about their citizens infecting ours. If another country gets their local outbreak under control, this reduces the risk for us. One type of dangerous closure in this situation is when people suppress information about the illness, probably for such reasons as to save face or to avoid economic problems. This appears to have happened with more than one government, and anecdotally I have heard that hospitals are suppressing medical professionals' information about lack of supplies and equipment. There are approaches to improve this situation arising from the open government movement, which is meant to include protection for whistleblowers. Can we get better at making it easy for people to decide to share information openly? Is the glass half empty or half full? We can point out that about half the PubMed articles on coronavirus are freely available, laud this as positive, and encourage people to free up the other half. I think this approach would be more likely to win converts to OA and get resources freed up than lamenting about the glass being half full, or worse, ignoring the fact that it's half full and lamenting the glass being empty. my two bits, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa / Cross-appointed to communication Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Coronavirus: OA progress and ideas for more
A PubMed search for "coronavirus" limited to the past 10 years then limited again to free full-text yields results of 55% free full-text. With no date limit, it's 46%. This search will get at research on COVID and the next most relevant research, all the other coronaviruses (mers, sars, common cold), and will be helpful for researchers and medical practitioners anywhere. China's early release of the COVID genetic code and even traditional publishers scrambling to make COVID resources free is demonstrating that people get at least some of the points of open access and open research. It would be interesting to compare publisher responses today with earlier epidemics. If I recall correctly, there is a significant change from responding to pressure to proactively making resources free without OA pressure. This is progress. It's not 100% OA but a lot more researchers and practitioners have free access to a lot more of our knowledge than was the case with the 2003 Sars epidemic. Further pressure might be helpful. Identification and analysis of the 45% PubMed results that are coronavirus but not free full-text would identify suitable targets for gentle pressure. Some such articles may have been written by authors covered by an OA policy. Such a results list would likely yield journal lists and individual articles, many of which could be deposited in repositories thanks to the efforts of green OA advocates. Librarians and others working from home can send e-mails to authors and it should be possible to add items to repositories remotely. Publishers who are green not gold should ideally work with PMC and can also send e-mails to authors reminding them of the green policy. Although research on coronavirus is urgent, university researchers who are also teachers are likely swamped due to a sudden shift to online teaching this semester. For this group, it might make sense to time communication after the semester ends. Just some ideas... Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] COVID-19, open access and open research: good progress, and what is missing
taylorandfrancis.com/coronavirus/>r: microsite that provides “links and references to all relevant COVID-19 research articles, book chapters and information that can be freely accessed on Taylor & Francis Online<https://www.tandfonline.com/> and Taylor & Francis ebooks in support of the global efforts in diagnosis, treatment, prevention and further research into COVID-19″; prioritizing rapid publication of COVID-19 research. Wiley<https://newsroom.wiley.com/press-release/all-corporate-news/wiley-opens-access-support-educators-researchers-professionals-amid> offers free access to resources until the end of the Spring 2020 term to help with online education; ” making all current and future research content and data on the COVID-19 Resource Site<https://novel-coronavirus.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/?HootPostID=a0d07a4e-7c73-43ad-91d9-0ba3a643d5dc=twitter=wileyinresearch> available to PubMed Central”. Discussion Some best practices beyond making directly relevant resources free from different companies that others could follow: * Comprehensive, company-wide COVID-19 response: RELX (Elsevier +) * Help for educational institutions facing the challenge of suddenly moving online: Wiley * Rapid publication: informa (Taylor & Francis +), RELX (Elsevier +) * PubMedCentral deposit, facilitating search by researchers and best long-term solution: Wiley, RELX (Elsevier +) Gaps * No hospital for countries most in need (another hospital in Austria is welcome, but there are many other countries with greater needs). * Resources beyond those most directly and obviously related to COVID-19. * Language: the only language mentioned besides English is RELX / Elsever, and only Mandarin is mentioned. This is the full text of a post on Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/03/30/covid-19-open-access-and-open-research-good-progress-and-what-is-missing/ Comments are welcome on the list or on the blog. I acknowledge in advance that many other publishers are doing excellent work providing resources relevant to the pandemic. The purpose of this post is to share some early analysis on best practices (copycats welcome) and gaps. Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Help ensure vital Open Science/Scholarship infrastructure
Another question (inspired by Paige's, thanks): is there a way for researchers and/or research projects like Sustaining the Knowledge Commons without funding to commit to officially endorse SCOSS? Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Mann, Paige Sent: Friday, January 24, 2020 2:53:24 PM To: goal@eprints.org Subject: Re: [GOAL] Help ensure vital Open Science/Scholarship infrastructure Attention : courriel externe | external email Hi Vanessa, How do individuals or libraries contribute to "SCOSS co-ordinated funding"? I don't see a mechanism on the SCOSS website. Does SCOSS serve more as a recommender of initiatives than a coordinating body to fund these initiatives? Thanks for clarifying, Paige Paige Mann STEM Librarian | Scholarly Communications Librarian University of Redland -Original Message- Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2020 13:53:07 +0100 From: Vanessa Proudman Subject: [GOAL] Help ensure vital Open Science/Scholarship infrastructure remains open and free To: Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Dear colleagues, Last month, SCOSS <https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scoss.orgdata=02%7C01%7CPaige_Mann%40redlands.edu%7Cc2e3ae4045944f40e6d208d7a0c50224%7C496b6d7d089e431889efd9fdf760aafd%7C0%7C0%7C637154640338673191sdata=meNdHiUrT6e2l201jkDzWHO0G%2BtGViiHj5OHrRAWfs0%3Dreserved=0> , a crowd-funding style initiative intent on helping secure the services that comprise our vital Open Science / Scholarship infrastructure, launched our second funding cycle. As a new year begins, we are working hard to continue spreading the word of this latest appeal to the international library community. SCOSS was formed in early 2017 with the purpose of providing a new co-ordinated cost-sharing framework for enabling the broader OA and OS community to support the non-commercial services on which it depends. It is committed to helping provide funding for the operation and development of key services. For this funding round, SCOSS thoroughly vetted four services that we are presenting to the international community for community funding: * The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB <https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.doabooks.org%2Fdata=02%7C01%7CPaige_Mann%40redlands.edu%7Cc2e3ae4045944f40e6d208d7a0c50224%7C496b6d7d089e431889efd9fdf760aafd%7C0%7C0%7C637154640338673191sdata=b0MtyoY9QzB2TmQPklMVLDpeLkm6v2U9VPay7dy%2FOdA%3Dreserved=0> ), a digital directory of peer-reviewed Open Access books and Open Access book publishers; and Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN <https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oapen.org%2Fhomedata=02%7C01%7CPaige_Mann%40redlands.edu%7Cc2e3ae4045944f40e6d208d7a0c50224%7C496b6d7d089e431889efd9fdf760aafd%7C0%7C0%7C637154640338673191sdata=HZol4OeYSsN25OUpm0MPqfXIW%2Fs%2BMCflsrZLohb3VQw%3Dreserved=0> ), a growing repository of freely accessible academic books; * * The Public Knowledge Project (PKP <https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpkp.sfu.ca%2Fdata=02%7C01%7CPaige_Mann%40redlands.edu%7Cc2e3ae4045944f40e6d208d7a0c50224%7C496b6d7d089e431889efd9fdf760aafd%7C0%7C0%7C637154640338673191sdata=Qq8sQZZ9%2B2SAWVTvkCeXFZWV135huNeBrseBxXHe5VY%3Dreserved=0> ), a university initiative that creates open-source software and services, including Open Journal Systems (OJS), which is used to publish more than 9,000 OA journals worldwide. * * OpenCitations <https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fopencitations.net%2Fdata=02%7C01%7CPaige_Mann%40redlands.edu%7Cc2e3ae4045944f40e6d208d7a0c50224%7C496b6d7d089e431889efd9fdf760aafd%7C0%7C0%7C637154640338673191sdata=M88Rz9ocf1sNo8ttZiog1uo01F3HPPxLjR68rBEZtZE%3Dreserved=0> , a scholarly infrastructure service that provides open bibliographic and citation data; With your help, we can help ensure that these services have the chance to continue to be free and open to us all. More than 200 of your fellow academic institutions around the world have collectively pledged more than 1.6 million Euros during the first funding cycle. This support provides essential bridge funding to the Directory of Open Access Journals and Sherpa/RoMEO while they work to achieve more secure, long-term financial footing. As a member of the community that relies on these services, we are asking that your institution consider becoming part of a voluntary endowment
[GOAL] OA APC open peer review report and invitation to participate in open peer review discussion
Thank you to those who participated in the open peer review of the OA APC dataset and its documentation. The final version of the documentation is posted here: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/11/20/oa-main-2019-dataset-documentation-and-open-peer-review-invitation/ If you are more interested in a summary of results to date, as a reminder this can be found here: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/11/27/oa-apc-longitudinal-survey-2019/ One of the comments from Heather Staines has inspired a discussion on open peer review per se. In brief, some initiatives are forging ahead with technologies to support open peer review such as the Knowledge Futures Commonspace. I applaud and support these early experiments, but also suggest it is early days and it is timely to begin a discussion about what we might want the new technologies available to us to achieve. For example, the potential of online annotation is exciting, but a technology that directs our attention to annotation strikes me as likely to focus our attention on wordsmithing and minor issues and away from more substantive issues such as critique of underlying assumptions. I invite anyone interested to read the discussion between the two of us (so far), at https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/01/08/open-peer-review-discussion/ and contribute your own perspective, whether on the blog or on the list. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] OA Main 2019: open peer review invitation reminder
greetings, ** January 15 suggested deadline ** This is a reminder that open peer review is being sought for the Sustaining the Knowledge Common's project OA main 2019 dataset and its documentation. For those who may not have time for a thorough peer review, a set of 6 questions is provided and responses to any of the questions would be welcome. This is an opportunity to participate in an experimental approach to two innovations in scholarly communication: a particular approach to open peer review, and peer review of a dataset and its documentation. The latter is considered important to encourage and reward researchers for data sharing. Although full open peer review is the default, if anyone would like to remain anonymous this should be reasonably easy to accommodate by having a friend or colleague forward your comments with an indication of their anonymity. January 15 is the deadline but if anyone interested would like to participate and needs more time, just let me know. Thank you to those who have already provided comments. Details and materials can be found here: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/11/20/oa-main-2019-dataset-documentation-and-open-peer-review-invitation/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Dramatic Growth of Open Access 2019
201[https://sustainingknowledgecommons.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/base.png?w=300=180]<https://sustainingknowledgecommons.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/base.png>9 was another great year for open access! Of the 57 macro-level global OA indicators included in The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, 50 (88%) have growth rates that are higher than the long-term trend of background growth of scholarly journals an d articles of 3 – 3.5% (Price, 1963; Mabe Amin, 2001). More than half had growth rates of 10% or more, approximately triple the background growth rate, and 13 (nearly a quarter) had growth rates of over 20%. [https://sustainingknowledgecommons.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/opendoar.png?w=300=180]<https://sustainingknowledgecommons.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/opendoar.png>Newer services have an advantage when growth rates are measured by percentage, and this is reflected in the over 20% 2019 growth category. The number of books in the Directory of Open Access Books tops the growth chart by nearly doubling (98% growth); bioRxiv follows with 74% growth. A few services showed remarkable growth on top of already substantial numbers. As usual, Internet Archive stands out with a 68% increase in audio recordings, a 58% increase in co[https://sustainingknowledgecommons.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/08d8c-doaj2barticles.png?w=320=163]llections, and a 48% increase in software. The number of articles searchable through DOAJ grew by over 900,000 in 2019 (25% growth). OpenDOAR is taking off in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and overall, with more than 20% growth in each of these categories, and SCOAP3 also grew by more than 20%. The only area indicating some cause for concern is PubMedCentral. Although overall growth of free full-text from PubMed is robust. A keyword search for “cancer” yields about 7% – 10% more free full-text than a year ago. However, there was a slight decrease in the number of journals contributing to PMC with “all articles open access”, a drop of 138 journals or a 9% decrease. I have double-checked and the 2018 and 2019 PMC journal lists have been posted in the dataverse in case anyone else would like to check (method: sort the “deposit status” column and delete all Predecessor and No New Content journals, then sort the “Open Access” column and count the number of journals that say “All”. The number of journals submitting NIH portfolio articles only grew by only 1. Could this be backtracking on the part of publishers or perhaps technical work underway at NIH? Full data is available in excel and csv format from: Morrison, Heather, 2020, “Dramatic Growth of Open Access Dec. 31, 2019”, https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/CHLOKU, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V1 References Price, D. J. de S. (1963). Little science, big science. New York: Columbia University Press. Mabe, M., Amin, M. (2001). Growth dynamics of scholarly and scientific journals. Scientometrics, 51(1), 147–162. This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series<https://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2006/08/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-series.html>. It is cross-posted from The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics. Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Scholarly research - global shift in funding
Some observations from the 2018 STM report on a global shift in countries' funding of research that might interest list members: Chin "China has overtaken the US to become the pre-eminent producer of global research papers globally, with a share of about 19%, and on current trends its research spending will also exceed the US’s by the early 2020s. The US accounts for 18% of global articles, while India has also seen rapid growth in recent years, and now produces 5% of global outputs, ahead of Germany, the UK and Japan, each on 4% (page 29)". >From the Executive Summary of: Johnson, R., Watkinson, A., & Mabe, M. (2018). The STM report: An overview of scientific and scholarly publishing 5th edition 1968 - 2018: celebrating the 50th anniversary of STM. Retrieved from The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) website: https://www.stm-assoc.org/2018_10_04_STM_Report_2018.pdf TDr.Further insights / research on this trend and its implications would be of interest. Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Linked Research
Thanks Scott. This article by Capadisli et al. is very interesting. I don't see how to interact with it as others have, so will post my comments here on GOAL. There are some apparent similarities and some important differences between these authors' perspectives on the potential of the online digital environment for scholarly communication and my own. Similarities The publisher as intermediary is no longer necessary, as it was for most of us from the time of the printing press to the early online environment. I do not need a publisher to disseminate my work and provide means for feedback. Setting up web services to accomplish these tasks is inexpensive and easy. Sharing and re-using data is one means to advance our knowledge faster than we could in the past. My recent post analyzing 2010 and 2019 APC data is an illustration: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/11/26/2010-2019-apc-update/ If all I had access to were the peer-reviewed article, in comparing with 2019 results I would only have seen that the global average APC has changed little, and would have missed the average price increase for this particular sub-set of journals. This was made possible by Solomon & Björk's willingness to share their data. Differences Use the term "open knowledge" not "open science", please. Science is only one type of knowledge, and is useless without the other types. Does science need philosophy? Logic and ethics are branches of philosophy. Would we want to rely on science practiced without logic and ethics? In my opinion, no. Cutting philosophy departments and redirecting funding to science is short-sighted. Another example: to understand why science needs other forms of knowledge to be effective, consider the contrast between scientific knowledge about climate science and our seeming inability to act on this knowledge. More here: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/38890 To evaluate research, read and think, do not rely on metrics. It is a logical fallacy to equate "impact" with "good quality", and metrics-based assessment is a perverse incentive. Consider the study falsely correlating vaccination and autism: highly cited both before and after retraction, plenty of evidence for knowledge transfer to the public - and what other researchers can claim the real-world impact of bringing back illnesses such as measles? More here: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/39088 No one size fits all - I argue that it is best to start with the research and researchers, the data, rather than trying to provide a universal framework. Even in the small research circle of APC data, my team's data (pricing gathered from publisher websites, DOAJ, other researchers' data) is not the same as the OpenAPC group's data. OpenAPC involves a group that pays APCs who have decided to share their data. A group like this can easily see the logic of standardizing data for re-use and have incentive to do so. It is their data and they can license it as they please. I have no means of compelling every OA publisher to standardize their pricing data. Publishers do not necessarily have an incentive to make this kind of research easy. Standardizing pricing data is not necessarily desirable as it may eliminate creative innovations and discount possibilities. There are some types of data, such as GIS, where standards and interoperability are highly desirable. However, there are a great many types of research data. The variables that are important (or possible) to record in one research study may not be optimal (or possible) for another one. I see dangers as well as opportunities in re-using data. Data collection is hard work; I can see researchers being tempted to simply take data others have collected and analyzing it without fully understand the data itself. This could result in reproducible but invalid analysis (make the same mistakes, get the same invalid answers). To return to similarities: openly sharing such ideas and openness to critique is helpful to advance our understanding of how to move towards open knowledge. Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Scott Abbott Sent: Thursday, November 28, 2019 1:27:15 PM To: goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Linked Research Attention : courriel externe | external email Hi all I’d like to share this work to this list in the hope of generating awareness and discussion. I’m not an author or connected to the project in any way beyond my kee
[GOAL] OA APC longitudinal survey 2019
This post presents results of the 2019 OA APC longitudinal survey and extends an invitation to participate in an open peer review process of the underlying data and its documentation. One thing that is not changing is that most OA journals in DOAJ do not charge APCs: 10,210 (73%) of the 14,007 journals in DOAJ as of Nov. 26, 2019 do not have APCs. The global average APC in 2019 is 908 USD. This figure has changed little since 2010, however this consistency masks considerably underlying variation. For example, the average APC in 2019 for the 2010 sample has increased by 50%, a rate three times the inflation rate for this time frame. The tendency to charge or not to charge, how much is charged and whether prices are increasing or decreasing varies considerably by journal, publisher, country of publication, language and currency. One surprise this year was the top 10 countries by number of OA journals in DOAJ. As usual, Europe, the US and Latin America are well represented, but Indonesia is now the second largest country in DOAJ and Poland, Iran, and Turkey are among the top 10, perhaps reflecting the work of the DOAJ ambassadors. Pricing per journal shows mixed trends; most journals did not change price between 2018 and 2019, but there were price decreases as well as increases. The UK’s Ubiquity Press stands out as having a relatively low APC (a fraction of Oxford’s, another UK-based publisher) and no price increases. https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/11/27/oa-apc-longitudinal-survey-2019/ Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Knowledge Exchange Publication on Monitoring agreements with Open Access elements
Thank you for sharing this document, this is very informative. A comment on the approach: while good intentions are obvious here and the overall goal of full open access is one that we share, the monitoring involved (demanding article-level metadata from publishers which in turn requires author and funder metadata in effect imposing upstream technical requirements) appears to be problematic for several reasons. Monitoring via publisher offsetting agreements is Inefficient in comparison with institutional OA repository and IR: when a researcher receives grant funding that is administered through a university or research organization, the organization is already tracking the individual researcher and the funding. This is necessary for accountability purposes; the primary focus of monitoring the use of funding is, and should be, ensuring that funds are spent on doing research rather than lining peoples' pockets or subsidizing vacations. Institutional OA policy and services do not require an additional layer of tracking of individual researchers and their grants. If works are deposited in the IR, OA status can be determined locally, and reported consortially or nationally if desired. As a researcher with funding, my institution and funding agency both have reporting expectations. A funding agency could simply ask for a report on how the researcher has met the OA policy as part of the final report. For some researchers, this might inspire post-hoc OA action. Similarly, an institution can ask researchers to report on OA policy compliance, just as researchers are expected to meet policy requirements for research ethics and accountability. More important, the impact of technical developments for monitoring seem highly likely to lock in what should be considered a publishing model based on print (journals and books, optimized for the printing press and postal system) that should be regarded as in the process of becoming obsolete. As an open researcher, very little of my work would be reflected in the monitoring system described. Attempting to expand the monitoring system to include new formats such as open data and research blogs would multiply the inefficiencies of monitoring and likely stifle innovation. There are compelling public interest arguments for global open access. There are a lot of details to figure out in the shift to OA, but let's not lose sight of the big picture, the potential for uniting humanity in a common quest for knowledge, in the process. Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Kant, Juliane Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2019 8:55 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Knowledge Exchange Publication on Monitoring agreements with Open Access elements Attention : courriel externe | external email Dear list, I'm happy to let you know that Knowledge Exchange<http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/> (KE) has published the article Monitoring agreements with Open Access elements: why article level metadata is important. If you are interested in monitoring OA publications and monitoring cost data for OA publications at a national or institutional level or by funder this may be an interesting article for you to read. The Knowledge Exchange (KE) Monitoring Open Access (OA) task and finish group has undertaken research on agreements with OA elements (e.g. agreements with APC discounts, offsetting agreements, read and publish agreements) set between consortia from KE countries and major publishers between 2016 and early 2019. Following recommendations from KE and ESAC it assessed agreements with OA elements to investigate what article-level metadata consortia request from publishers and what metadata publishers deliver to consortia. With Plan S research funders requiring a full transition to OA by 2021, the delivery of article-level metadata becomes critical to monitor publishers’ compliance with Plan S requirements for transformative arrangements. The research findings showed that: * Not all consortia agreements requested the article-level metadata as recommended by KE and ESAC. * Most importantly, none of the publishers provided all the metadata that the consortia requested. * Publishers also did not deliver the same metadata across countries and this may be due lack of consistency in their practices. The research findings can be used as a benchmark to monitor how major publishers were performing in KE countries until earl
[GOAL] Hindawi APC comparison 2018
Thanks to Anqi Shi ABSTRACT: 481 Hindawi journals were analyzed. 226 (47%) journals published at some point from 2010 – 2019 have ceased publication, 7 cannot be found on the Hindawi website anymore and 1 has been transferred to another publisher. In 2019, there are 247 journals actively publishing on the Hindawi website. All the journals are charging APCs. The average price is 1186.44 USD, an increase of 14% over the 2018 APC (1040.30 USD). Compared to the US inflation rate for 2018 of 2.44%(“U.S. Inflation Rate 1960-2019” n.d.), the publication fee rises more than 5 times. Among active journals, 17% of the 217 journals did not change in price; 30% journals decreased their price while more than half (53%) of the journals increased price. The amount of price increase starts from 25 USD up to 1350 USD. 14 journals appear to have switched from “no fee” to “fee”, with different APCS from 750 USD to 1350 USD. Most journals that not found on the website in 2018 now been illustrated ceased on the web page with the specific ceased year and where to find previous publication articles which could be good practice for authors who are trying to find the latest information about specific journals. it also benefits other publishers to follow the lead. Details: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/11/05/hindawi-apc-comparison-2018-2019/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Research posts on open access and Francophone Africa
Tanoh Laurent Kakou has published two brief research posts on open access in the context of Francophone Africa. Following are links and citations to Kakou's posts, brief highlights in French an English Synopses (abstract with perspective). Original posts and highlights: Kakou, T.L. (2019). Arima, une revue africaine dans Hal archives. Soutenir les savoirs communs. https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/10/23/arima-une-revue-africaine-dans-hal-archives/ Nous présentons dans cette recherche :Hal archives. Hal est une plateforme d’archives ouvertes. Elle conserve des revues sur sa plateforme Episciences.org sur laquelle l’on trouve une revue africaine Arima... English synopsis by Heather Morrison: African journals seek to create a space for themselves by disseminating their journals through online platforms and archives. There are multiple possibilities for preservation and publishing on line. One of these is electronic archiving. In this research post Kakou presents the HAL archive and explores the representation of African document. Developed and administered by the Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe (CCSD), the platform HAL is an open archive in Social Sciences. In this post, Kakou presents an overview of the services offered by HAL, including Episciences.org and Sciencesconf.org. Episciences.org offers journal publishing within the archive and supports the innovative peer-review overlay approach to journal publishing. Arima, a journal that has been supported by the North-South coalition Colloque africain pour la Recherche en Informatique et mathématiques appliquées (CARI) for twenty years, is among the 15 Episciences journals. This is « our » platform too ; Morrison’s 2018 ELPUB OA APC survey can be found in Episciences. Kakou, T.L. (2019). OpenEdition et les revues savantes d’Afrique. Soutenir les savoirs commun. https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/10/23/openedition-et-les-revues-savantes-dafrique/ Parmi les revues que OpenEdition publie, 21 revues sont africaines. Elles sont localisées dans 5 pays. Seul un pays africain (Kenya) y figure. Ce sont : Nederland (1), Portugal (2), Kenya (1), France (17), Italie (1). English synopsis by Heather Morrison: OpenEdition (formerly Revues.org) publishes 21 African journals. Only one of these journals is published in an African country (Kenya). In this post Kakou illustrates a gap in dissemination of African scholarship, particularly francophone African scholarship. For example, of the 524 journals included in African Journals Online (AJOL), 465 (89%) are published in English speaking countries and only 39 (7%) in French speaking countries. Only 12 of the 24 African countries where French is an official or co-official languages are represented in AJOL. This research illustrates the African and particularly Francophone African knowledge gap that is the focus of Kakou’s doctoral research. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] [SCHOLCOMM] Evaluation and metrics: why not (a critical perspective)
Thank you for your contribution, Lizzie! I love this quote from your The blind and the elephant... " “When using any indicator for purposes that have rewards attached – especially when the entity is small – you should use metrics with extreme care.” I agree. This is a key point that I am trying to make. Metrics based on substantive collective knowledge make sense. Let's aim to achieve the CO2 emissions reductions that are needed to avoid catastrophic climate change (and wouldn't it be nice if newspapers decided to report our collective progress on this prominently on a daily basis)? Similarly, we can assess our collective progress in preventing and treating cancer through epidemiological data. However, evaluating an individual scholar or scholarly article on the basis of citations is problematic because there are rewards attached for the small entity, the individual scholar - from job loss to promotion, prestige, grant funding. This creates an incentive to overstate positive findings, understate limitations, see patterns in data that aren't really there, and even to commit fraud. Less (or no) reliance on metrics in this case would be in the best interests of advancing our collective knowledge. Metrics (like most things) are neither good nor bad in and of themselves. Whether metrics are beneficial or otherwise depends on who is using them, how, and for what purpose. Some beneficial examples of metrics (from my perspective) are to understand and ameliorate bias in hiring, salaries, grant funding, etc. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: Elizabeth Gadd Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2019 3:54 AM To: Heather Morrison Cc: scholc...@lists.ala.org ; Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) ; Julie Bayley ; g.derr...@lancaster.ac.uk Subject: Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Evaluation and metrics: why not (a critical perspective) Attention : courriel externe | external email Hi Heather Thanks for your email! A few thoughts: 1) The UK has given the notion of measuring impact quite a lot of thought, having had this measured as part of their national research assessments since 2009. I would refer you to the brilliant work by Julie Bayley (https://juliebayley.blog/ <https://juliebayley.blog/> ) and Gemma Derrick (https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319636269) (copied in) in this space for a full exploration of all the issues, including the negative impacts you describe, something Gemma’s group have termed ‘grimpacts’. 2) With regards to your statement that the assessing of scholarly work does not require metrics, I would refer you to a piece I’ve written called ‘The Blind and the elephant: bringing clarity to our conversations about responsible metrics’. (https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/2019/05/15/the-blind-and-the-elephant-bringing-clarity-to-our-conversations-about-responsible-metrics/) In it I argue that we need to be a bit careful about sweeping statements about metrics, because there are many reasons we evaluate research (I name six) and at many different levels of granularity (individual, group, country, etc). In some settings, the use of metrics can be helpful, in others not. I would always generally argue that metrics + peer review give us the best chance of responsible assessment, as metrics can mitigate against unconscious bias in peer review. 3) To find other examples of best practice in research evaluation, DORA are compiling these on their website (https://sfdora.org/good-practices/research-institutes/). 4) For more discussion on these issues there are a number of dedicated discussion lists now. In the US, there is the RESMETIG list; in Canada the BRICS group; in the UK the LIS-Bibliometrics group, and finally an international working group looking at research evaluation called INORMS Research Evaluation Working Group. I hope this is helpful? All best Lizzie Dr Elizabeth Gadd Research Policy Manager (Publications) Research Office Loughborough University Loughborough, Leicestershire, UK T: +44 (0)1509 228594 S: lizziegadd E: e.a.g...@lboro.ac.uk On 22 Oct 2019, at 22:04, Heather Morrison wrote: Rigorous scholarly work requires periodic assessment of our underlying assumptions. If these are found to be incorrect, then any logical arguments or empirical work based on these assumptions should be questioned. Assumptions underlying metrics-based evaluation include: 1. impact is a quality of good scholarship at the level of individual works 2. aiming for impact is desirable in scholarly work Let's conside
[GOAL] Evaluation and metrics: why not (a critical perspective)
Rigorous scholarly work requires periodic assessment of our underlying assumptions. If these are found to be incorrect, then any logical arguments or empirical work based on these assumptions should be questioned. Assumptions underlying metrics-based evaluation include: 1. impact is a quality of good scholarship at the level of individual works 2. aiming for impact is desirable in scholarly work Let's consider the logic and an example. 1. Is impact a good thing? Consider what "impact" means in other contexts. Hurricanes and other natural disasters have impact; when we seek to work in harmony with the environment, we try to avoid impact. "Impact" is not essentially tied to the quality of "good". 2. Is aiming for impact at the level of individual scholarly works desirable? According to Retraction Watch, one of the top 10 most highly cited papers includes "the infamous Lancet paper by Andrew Wakefield that originally suggested a link between autism and childhood vaccines<http://retractionwatch.com/2011/01/06/some-quick-thoughts-and-links-on-andrew-wakefield-the-bmj-autism-vaccines-and-fraud/>" (from: https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard/top-10-most-highly-cited-retracted-papers/). This article has been highly cited in academic papers both before and after retraction, widely quoted in traditional and social media, and I argue can demonstrate real-world impact (in the form of the return of childhood diseases that were on track to worldwide eradication) that is truly exceptional. Any way you measure impact, this article had it. Could this be a fluke? I argue that there are logical reasons why this is would not be a fluke. When researchers are rewarded for impact, this is an incentive to overstate the conclusions, see positive and interesting results beyond what the data shows, and even outright fraud. It is important to distinguish the consequences of impact at the level of an individual research work and scholarly consensus based on a substantial body of evidence (such as climate change). It is also important to consider some of the implications of metrics-based evaluation on individual scholars. Social biases such as those based on gender, ethnic origin, and Western centrism are common in our society, including in academia. There is some recognition of this is traditional academic work and some work to counter bias (such as blind reviews), however this cannot be controlled in the downstream academic environment and it seems obvious that metrics that go beyond academic citations will tend to amplify such biases. Evaluation of the quality of scholarly work does not require metrics. Anyone who is a researcher needs to do a great deal of reading and assessment of scholarly works. Professors read and grade papers and theses. When I evaluate dossiers for scholarships or grants or tenure and promotion committees, I read and evaluate the works. The University of Ottawa has what I consider a good, non-metrics-based approach to evaluating research. Although it was written some time ago, it is still leading-edge. To obtain promotion and tenure, for example, a professor needs to demonstrate that they are contributing a sufficient amount of original research beyond their dissertation. It is recognized that there are many different kinds of knowledge generation. A scientist may publish journal articles; a professor in theatre may accomplish innovations in production of plays. There is no need to add preprints; this is already covered. If you know of other good non-metric models for evaluation, please share with the list. This e-mail is a brief piece on a topic that I've written about in quite a bit more detail. Anyone who has the time is invited to read this book chapter in the process of publication that I wrote: "What counts in research? Dysfunction in knowledge creation & moving beyond". In addition to a critical view of metrics-based evaluation (traditional and altmetrics), readers may be interested in learning about how metrics feed into university rankings and the growing role of Elsevier in this space. When the book is published, I'll refer to the work of fellow authors for an explanation of the problems associated with university rankings per se. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/39088 best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] De Gruyter / Sciendo 2019 growth, ANSInet APC decreases
Two recent posts on the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons blog that may be of interest: De Gruyter and Sciendo open access journals expanding in 2019 by Hamid Pashaei and Heather Morrison Abstract De Gruyter is a well-known traditional academic publisher with 270 years of experience. We first noted the dramatic expansion of De Gruyter into open access publishing in 2016 (French: Dumais-DesRosiers, M. & Brutus, W. (2016); English: Morrison (2016). In 2014, there were no De Gruyter titles listed in DOAJ; by the end of 2015, De Gruyter was the third largest publisher in DOAJ. In 2019, De Gruyter’s expansion into open access is even more remarkable, primarily through De Gruyter’s new imprint Sciendo, which has added more than 300 OA journals in 2019. The majority of De Gruyter / Sciendo journals (57%) do not charge APCs. In many cases we were not able to ascertain whether or not there is a fee. Details: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/10/16/de-gruyter-and-sciendo-open-access-journals-expanding-in-2019/ Finding: article processing fees decreased by ANSInet by Anqi Shi Highlights According to the Asian Network for Scientific Information (ANSInet) website, the article processing charges (APCs) for almost all the listed journals dropped from 625 USD in 2018 to 325 USD in 2019 which is 48 percent decrease...ANSInet is included in our study as this publisher was formerly in DOAJ. ANSInet no longer listed in DOAJ... Details: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/10/16/finding-article-processing-charges-apcs-decreased-in-ansinet/ Comments are appreciated, on the blog is the best way to communicate with the authors. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group
Thank you Peter. For the benefit of others, I would like to highlight that this is an argument for open licensing for free use of scholarly works for commercial advertising purposes. I argue that this is highly problematic from the perspective of moral and economic rights. If blanket free use for commercial advertising is permitted by open licensing, this applies to many other situations besides pharma promotion, such as weight loss or health supplement social media advertising. This might conflict with the moral rights of human research subjects, authors and funders, and CC does provide some possible remedies. However, it is easier to avoid this by not using open licensing than hiring a lawyer and pursuing moral rights after the harm is done. In this case, CCC would be doing a disservice if the only consideration were economic rights. I don't know if this is the case. >From an economic perspective, advertising is one potential source of income >for open access publishers. This is a potential for small not-for-profit >journals, not just Elsevier. Until we have a good stable source of income for >such journals, it is best for the economic sustainability of open access to >reserve commercial rights. Whether free use of material for pharma promotion is or should be a goal of open access is a separate question that I set aside for now to focus on the fact that blanket downstream rights are by definition not limited to one industry. I do note since we started this conversation with transparency that no pharma company has yet spoken up about their own use and expectations. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Peter Murray-Rust Sent: Friday, September 13, 2019 1:00:50 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group Attention : courriel externe | external email On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 5:33 PM Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: Peter (or others). You refer to pharma companies paying tens of thousands of dollars to re-use open access works. Can you explain / provide examples? If works are free-to-read, even with All Rights Reserved copyright, pharma companies and their researchers can read and benefit from knowledge produced to date to further knowledge at no cost. See https://twitter.com/petermurrayrust/status/1172554433202458625?s=20 6000 USD for re-use of figures from an NC Cell article in pharma promotion. This is not "voluntary" I have said quite enough on this. If anyone cares about price-gouging by publishers feel free to re-use my tweet under CC BY. -- "I always retain copyright in my papers, and nothing in any contract I sign with any publisher will override that fact. You should do the same". Peter Murray-Rust Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group
Peter (or others). You refer to pharma companies paying tens of thousands of dollars to re-use open access works. Can you explain / provide examples? If works are free-to-read, even with All Rights Reserved copyright, pharma companies and their researchers can read and benefit from knowledge produced to date to further knowledge at no cost. If pharma companies wish to use articles arising from research they have sponsored, they can specify retention of these specific rights in their contracts with researchers (bottom up similar to Harvard but slightly different terms). By "voluntary payment", I mean that one can opt to pay 181 USD and use the figures, or not pay and not use the figures. The proposed tariff in Canada is meant to be compulsory. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Peter Murray-Rust Sent: Friday, September 13, 2019 11:26:58 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group Attention : courriel externe | external email On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 4:14 PM Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: This may help to explain why universities are avoiding the license in spite of the risk of expensive litigation, and why I suggest that a voluntary $181 USD fee for re-use of 5 figures is, in comparison, a model of transparency and a bargain. *** voluntary***??? This is no more voluntary than a paywall or subscription. Copyright collectives are organizations that have a particular approach and culture. People in other countries may find their local collectives easier to work with. Authors, publishers, and teachers do need to use works that are under copyright, sometimes in ways that go beyond fair use / fair dealing. Open licensing simplifies matters for some works, but not all works are, or ever will be, openly licensed. An organization like CCC makes it possible to find out who owns the rights and obtain permission. This saves time and sometimes makes to possible to re-use works when otherwise the use would be abandoned due to the complexity of finding copyright owners and negotiating use. CCC are purely a rent-extractor whose only concern is maximising income for publishers. By making re-users pay for Open Access they are destroying the credibility of Open Access. All those who argue for restricted re-use (NC, ND) must realise that this pours huge amounts of money into publishers which are contributing nothing. An there is no logic in the world that says that pharma companies should pay tens of thousands to publishers for "open access" however much you feel they can pay. And this destroys so much re-use for teaching, new books, new research, etc.. It's about time that others take up this issue. There is no excuse for paying Elsevier or many other publishers for OpenAccess re-use. best, Heather Morrison From: goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org>> on behalf of Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> Sent: Friday, September 13, 2019 8:20:52 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) mailto:goal@eprints.org>> Subject: Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group Thank you, the Cell example is helpful. If you look up Cell on Sherpa Romeo you will see that authors can self-archive their preprint on noncommercial servers such as arXiv and bioRxiv at no cost and with no delay: https://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php?source=journal=6580=en=|=simple<https://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php?source=journal=6580=en=%7C=simple> In brief: this is what I recommend to authors and funders. Details: Relyx (Elsevier's parent company) is a corporation with a mandate to return profit to shareholders. In the case of Cell, revenue and profit is derived from selling the journal through subscriptions and selling re-use rights. For-profit scholarly publishers by definition must make a profit. 181 USD for the use of 5 figures is a model of transparency and a bargain in comparison with legally obligatory non-transparent blanket licensing as Canada's copyright collectives are demanding for limited rights that might not cover this case. If the figures are in an arXiv version and the downstream author cannot afford the 181 USD, they can cite the arXiv version at no cost. There is a small cost in in
Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group
Following is some background on the Canadian context that may be helpful to some readers. One of the Canadian copyright collectives, Access Copyright, has proposed a tariff (like a tax, something one is obliged to pay), for 2014 - 2017 of $35 per FTE students or $25 for colleges. For a university like mine with about 40,000 students, that's $1.4 million dollars per year. What does this get us? Examples of rights are the right to copy up to 10% of a work and up to 20% in course content. This is absurd in the context where most works are purchased in electronic form under negotiated license agreements. There are strong arguments that what is covered is under fair dealing and/or licenses and in many cases is less rights than we have under current licenses. Links to the propose tariff from here: https://www.accesscopyright.ca/educators/access-copyright-proposed-post-secondary-tariffs/ The model is based on print. The idea was that a university that paid for a single print book could not make and distribute copies to every student in a class without paying royalties. This model does not make sense when universities are paying, usually at a premium, for site-wide access for all students and staff. The model also assumes that there are a group of entities, publishers and authors, who create works and that universities are the consumers. As a number of people pointed out in the latest Canadian copyright consultation, university faculty and students are the largest group of creators in the country, and we generally give away our work. uO students have made more than 10,000 theses open access through our institutional repository so far this decade. If the point is to direct $ to creators of copyrighted works, universities should receive cheques not invoices. This model also assumes a static and (to me) outdated approach to teaching, passive textbook and lecture style. In active learning, students are expected to do research, write, share their works via blogs, student journals, Wikipedia etc. This may help to explain why universities are avoiding the license in spite of the risk of expensive litigation, and why I suggest that a voluntary $181 USD fee for re-use of 5 figures is, in comparison, a model of transparency and a bargain. Copyright collectives are organizations that have a particular approach and culture. People in other countries may find their local collectives easier to work with. Authors, publishers, and teachers do need to use works that are under copyright, sometimes in ways that go beyond fair use / fair dealing. Open licensing simplifies matters for some works, but not all works are, or ever will be, openly licensed. An organization like CCC makes it possible to find out who owns the rights and obtain permission. This saves time and sometimes makes to possible to re-use works when otherwise the use would be abandoned due to the complexity of finding copyright owners and negotiating use. best, Heather Morrison From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Heather Morrison Sent: Friday, September 13, 2019 8:20:52 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group Thank you, the Cell example is helpful. If you look up Cell on Sherpa Romeo you will see that authors can self-archive their preprint on noncommercial servers such as arXiv and bioRxiv at no cost and with no delay: https://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php?source=journal=6580=en=|=simple In brief: this is what I recommend to authors and funders. Details: Relyx (Elsevier's parent company) is a corporation with a mandate to return profit to shareholders. In the case of Cell, revenue and profit is derived from selling the journal through subscriptions and selling re-use rights. For-profit scholarly publishers by definition must make a profit. 181 USD for the use of 5 figures is a model of transparency and a bargain in comparison with legally obligatory non-transparent blanket licensing as Canada's copyright collectives are demanding for limited rights that might not cover this case. If the figures are in an arXiv version and the downstream author cannot afford the 181 USD, they can cite the arXiv version at no cost. There is a small cost in inconvenience, but no loss of knowledge. Elsevier appears to be interpreting NC as necessary to their downstream commercial re-use rights. This is a matter of interpretation. NC/ND with author copyright means authors retain these rights, not publishers. CC licenses with no NC grant blanket commercial rights to anyone. Under CC-BY for example, anyone could charge whatever they like for the 5 figures. Whether they could do this through CCC per se depends on CCC policy and practice, not the license. With blanket downstream commercial rights, anyone can set up a for-pay image database. My recommendation: authors of Cell
Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group
Thank you Peter. I respectfully disagree. If Elsevier is retaining copyright and using an NC license, they have a right to sell the work and CCC has a right to coordinate. Elsevier practice is copyright in the name of the author with exclusive rights granted to Elsevier. If articles are CC licensed without NC, anyone can sell them. This is the most common meaning of commercial rights in copyright; selling the work or rights to read or use the work. Author copyright retention means that authors retain all rights. My solo authored blog IJPE under ARR is a clear-cut example. It is not clear that full author copyright retention is compatible with OA journal and book licensing. Do we want authors to have a right that their work be removed from a journal or book? If not, the publishers of journals and books need to have some rights. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Peter Murray-Rust Sent: Friday, September 13, 2019 4:38:48 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group Attention : courriel externe | external email Here's another example of the appalling misuse of CC-NC. Same article (copyright owned by the authors). I put in for a product description for a device company: >>Permission Not Allowed >>According to the policies of Elsevier, use of this content in the manner you >>are requesting is not allowed. PMR> Elsevier are acting as if they are the owners of the copyright, they are soaking the world for thousands of dollars and creatin a monopoly. If anyone should be controlling the re-use it's the author. It's absolutely certain that the author has no idea what Elsevier and CCC are doing with the authors' content. IMO this is close to theft. It's not Elseviers content and CCC has no rights to exact ths rent. CCC+publishers are a major cause of the destruction of science and medicine. Closed access is bad enough but uncontrolled faux "open access" is worse. Elsevier asserts complete control over the re-use and sale of this material and yet the world goes along with the fiction it's "open access". Remember the authors have paid Elsevier or "open access" and what Elsevier is actually creating is the total opposite. It's greed and theft. A necessary but not sufficient condition is that there is formal regulation. I have been banging on for 10 years and it's about time the world woke up and asserted its right. On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 6:46 AM Guédon Jean-Claude mailto:jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca>> wrote: It seems to me, Rob, that if you were aware that it "might be contentious" (), you might have also considered mentioning the fact, if only for the sake of honest transparency... Practising some analog of the caveat emptor philosophy in the field of copyright is not a good starting point. Jean-Claude Guédon On 2019-09-12 2:20 p.m., Rob Johnson wrote: Dear Jean-Claude, Heather, In haste, but thanks for flagging the concern on the NDA clause, I was aware this might be contentious, and will feed this back. Certainly there are similar transparency requirements in the UK to those you describe in Ontario, including freedom of information requests and disclosure of salary information on high earners. These tend to apply to public bodies and charities, including higher education institutions, but the extent to which these are cascaded down to commercial entities is variable, and generally a matter of contract law rather statute or regulation. That said, expectations of greater transparency are well-established in other sectors where commercial actors provide public services, and/or where there is not a well-functioning market. As far as I’m aware there’s no fundamental reason why this couldn’t be extended to academic publishing if it’s deemed to be in the public interest to do so, it just hasn’t happened to date. Best wishes, Rob From: goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> <mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> On Behalf Of Heather Morrison Sent: 12 September 2019 18:09 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <mailto:goal@eprints.org> Subject: Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group Thank you for pointing out the NDA clause, Jean-Claude. Copyright collectives such as CCC lobby for legislation that in effect directs $ to their members. At least t
Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group
Thank you, the Cell example is helpful. If you look up Cell on Sherpa Romeo you will see that authors can self-archive their preprint on noncommercial servers such as arXiv and bioRxiv at no cost and with no delay: https://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php?source=journal=6580=en=|=simple In brief: this is what I recommend to authors and funders. Details: Relyx (Elsevier's parent company) is a corporation with a mandate to return profit to shareholders. In the case of Cell, revenue and profit is derived from selling the journal through subscriptions and selling re-use rights. For-profit scholarly publishers by definition must make a profit. 181 USD for the use of 5 figures is a model of transparency and a bargain in comparison with legally obligatory non-transparent blanket licensing as Canada's copyright collectives are demanding for limited rights that might not cover this case. If the figures are in an arXiv version and the downstream author cannot afford the 181 USD, they can cite the arXiv version at no cost. There is a small cost in inconvenience, but no loss of knowledge. Elsevier appears to be interpreting NC as necessary to their downstream commercial re-use rights. This is a matter of interpretation. NC/ND with author copyright means authors retain these rights, not publishers. CC licenses with no NC grant blanket commercial rights to anyone. Under CC-BY for example, anyone could charge whatever they like for the 5 figures. Whether they could do this through CCC per se depends on CCC policy and practice, not the license. With blanket downstream commercial rights, anyone can set up a for-pay image database. My recommendation: authors of Cell articles should self-archive preprints for open access and take advantage of pre-submission peer review (a community practice in arXiv) in order to post a preprint that has been peer reviewed. For the future: further develop this model and eliminate the role of the for-profit publisher. I do not recommend paying for Elsevier postprint OA under any license. Their use of NC and ND is problematic. but so is their use of CC-BY. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Peter Murray-Rust Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2019 5:02:15 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group Attention : courriel externe | external email Typical example, Skimmed through Cell to the first CC - NC - ND article: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.05.055 Copyright © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. User License Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/> | How you can reuse<https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30626-9#> [Information Icon] Go to RightsLInk Enter as academic author writing a book with CUP and requiring 5 figures. CCC requires me to pay 181 USD to Elsevier / CCC Try it yourself It's irrelevant in practice who s the copyright owner , the total transparency is that Elsevier can extort rent for all CC -NC they pubish even if the author has copyright. Transparency = daylight robbery -- "I always retain copyright in my papers, and nothing in any contract I sign with any publisher will override that fact. You should do the same". Peter Murray-Rust Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group
ent and growth of open access publishing predates funder policies with preference for open access publishing. Peter may be correct about publisher misuse of NC and ND; evidence to prove this point would be useful. If this is happening, I agree in principle that this is a problem, but differ in my analysis. To me, the problem is not the license but the granting of exclusive rights to publishers (with or without nominal copyright for the author). There are good reasons for researchers to avoid granting blanket downstream rights for commercial use and derivatives, such as protecting the rights of human subjects and third party works. Avoiding open licensing altogether may be preferable to using more restrictive licenses, at least this is my perspective with respect to my own work, having given such matters a great deal of thought. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Peter Murray-Rust Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2019 2:13 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group Attention : courriel externe | external email A few more points about CCC. * it is totally unregulated by external bodies. * it takes 15% of income so it has an incentive to generate as much income as possible * it is a total monopoly - there is no other org that manages rights * all the income goes to the publisher (and CCC). None to authors * the restrictions on re-use are everywhere. Many publishers use CCC to charge the actual authors for reusing their own work in books, teaching etc. * it is massively unjust to the Global South * CC NC and CC ND licences are treated as effectively controlled by the publisher. NC does NOT prevent the publisher contracting with the author so the publisher has the sole right to charge for re-use. This mechanism prevents competitors charging. NC and ND are a means of enforcing The process is legal. I have my own views on the morality and ethics of monopolistic charges which restrict re-use so lecturers and authors and libraries are frightened to use the scholarly literature. And I remain to be convinced that the Advisory Board is anything other than marketing. But if you approve of the Robber-baron model of philanthropy - grow massively rich by monopolistic rent-seeking and then become philanthropic you may have a different view. -- "I always retain copyright in my papers, and nothing in any contract I sign with any publisher will override that fact. You should do the same". Peter Murray-Rust Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group
Thank you for pointing out the NDA clause, Jean-Claude. Copyright collectives such as CCC lobby for legislation that in effect directs $ to their members. At least this is the case in Canada where local copyright collectives believe they should have a legal right to demand that blanket licensing be a legal requirement for all educational institutions and to unilaterally set the price and conditions. Transparency should be (and generally is) a requirement for any organization that wishes to benefit from public funding. In Ontario, this even applies to individuals. By law, the salary of anyone earning more than $100,000 in a public institution is publicly disclosed on an annual basis. Universities and government in Canada operate under Access to Information / Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy legislation. Information is open by default, whether published or available by request; non-disclosure is an option only under very specific, limited circumstances such as when it is necessary to protect the legitimate privacy rights of individuals. It would be interesting to hear about laws and expectations in other countries if list members have time and knowledge to report. Are organizations in your area allowed to accept $ that comes from public funding and keep this a secret? If CCC would like to interact with the open access movement, removing the NDA clause would be a good start. If there are good reasons for using CCC to transfer $ to certain publishers then it would be helpful to understand what they are. It would be appropriate to publish the details. If publishers do not wish to disclose this kind of information, refraining from participation in copyright collectives like CCC and their lobbying efforts is a choice that is available to them, and one that I recommend. I can think of one good reason for discussing the use of a collective to transfer $ to open access publishers. Commercial downstream users such as Elsevier (Scopus) and other aggregators (e.g. EBSCO) could be required to transfer $ to journals that do not choose to grant blanket downstream commercial rights. I am not advocating that this happen, rather stating that this should be up for discussion so that everyone involved can have a better understanding of the underlying issues and perhaps come up with better solutions. This discussion would be most likely to be fruitful if held in public where all parties can follow and participate. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Guédon Jean-Claude Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2019 11:34 AM To: goal@eprints.org Subject: Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group Attention : courriel externe | external email I just would like to attract the attention of the readers of this group to the last line of the first screen of the application form (https://www.surveygizmo.eu/s3/90158934/OA-Advisory-Panel). It simply says: Some of the work carried out as part of this Group will be confidential. Therefore, you would be asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) should you be selected to participate. My!!! my Jean-Claude Guédon On 2019-09-11 2:59 a.m., Rob Johnson wrote: Dear all (with apologies for cross-posting), Copyright Clearance Centre<http://www.copyright.com/> (CCC) is seeking research professionals, including researchers, librarians and research funders, with experience in defining, using or implementing OA publication and science policy to participate in a new, volunteer international Advisory Group that will work with CCC staff to identify pragmatic solutions to the pressing and evolving issues facing the research community today. This Advisory Group is one of the many ways CCC is looking to gain input from different stakeholders in the scholarly communications ecosystem. Advisory Group participants will advise on themes and concepts central to the open scholarly communication debates. The Group’s work will give participants an opportunity to establish and grow their network and engage in regular discussion with emerging leaders in the research and publishing communities. Participation in this Advisory Group will offer participants the opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership within their respective institution or organization. For further information please see the press release at: http://www.copyright.com/publishers/international-open-access-research-advisory-group/. We’re working with CCC to put the
Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group
Good point, thanks Peter. The Copyright Clearance Center is only one of many such organizations around the world. They have their own international organization, the International Federation of Reproductive Rights Organizations - website here: https://www.ifrro.org/ These organizations are a factor in the cost of scholarly communication (purchase of material and rights), and CCC is not the only organization to have sued universities. In Canada, local copyright collectives Access Copyright and Copibec are working to use legal means to require all educational institutions (including K-12 and universities) to be required to pay a blanket license for copying. Many universities and the K-12 sector strongly disagree with the approach and cost ask, in part because most materials are purchased for site-wide access or are available open access, so a model based on assumptions of print and photocopiers does not make sense and certainly does not justify higher prices. In this instance, CCC is helpful because they provide per-item licensing which is one of the options for universities to avoid blanket licenses. Two universities that refused blanket licenses have been sued. One case is settled, the other is in progress. A key concept is fair dealing, that is, the idea that copyright law should be balanced, with readers as well as authors having some re-use rights. For me as a scholar, fair dealing is and will always be essential to my work. For example, even publishers with strict CC-BY licenses for articles they publish typically have All Rights Reserved for material on their website. I need fair dealing in order to work with their price lists and copy wording from their websites when needed as evidence for my research. In the U.S. an important case that I think is still in progress involves 3 publishers that sued George State University for providing students with excerpts of material that they had paid for - 2018 brief update here: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/30/georgia-state-and-publishers-continue-legal-battle-over-fair-use-course-materials In Canada in 2012 there were major gains in fair dealing for the educational sector through a series of Supreme Court lawsuits. Prior to this, fair dealing in Canada was far less generous than fair use in the U.S. This does not settle the matter - a statutory review of the Copyright Act last year resulted in close to 200 submissions, with reproductive rights organizations and some publishers pushing to reduce or eliminate fair and educational institutions, researchers and some other publishers pushing to retain or expand fair dealing. There are substantial stakes involved ($ and our ability to work and create), and so I do not think that either the discussion or the litigation will be over anytime soon. This is another reason why learning about copyright is a good career move for future academic librarians. best, Heather From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Peter Murray-Rust Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2019 12:41 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group Attention : courriel externe | external email I would direct readers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clearance_Center to get an overview if CCC, which is a for-profit company and has sued universities (and lost). I would think that this new venture is a case of Openwashing of a business model that is directly opposed to GOAL and many of its readers. On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 2:38 PM Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: Peter Murray-Rust raises the important point that the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC)'s basic model fits with perpetual copyright, the antithesis of open access. However, I argue that the open access movement needs to engage with the issues that will or might be raised by this group. Following is a bit of background, concluding with a recommendation that copyright for scholarly works should be led by the research community not industry groups, perhaps coordinated by bodies such as Canada's Tri-Council of national research funding agencies. Many advocates of open access also advocate for the most liberal of open licenses. From my perspective, this is naive because some of the most liberal of open licenses, in particular immediate dedication to public domain and CC licenses granting downstream commercial use rights (CC-0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) grant to anyone the right to sell the works. This is already happening as open access works are included in toll access packages such as Elsevier's Scopus. Creators are giving away their works using CC licenses thinking they are contributing to a commons. The problem with this is that lack of restrictions means, for example, that images in CC-BY licensed works can be included either in Wikimedia commons for free s
Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts
Thank you for your comments, Dirk, but I disagree with your main point and implicit valuation of journal venues. Our ability to choose which venues to publish in is dependent on both the market and our means, whether we are discussing cars, houses, or academic publishing. When funding agencies across countries meet to discuss open access policy, it is important to note that some countries (e.g. Germany, and the UK) are in conflict of interest position because for these countries the high profit publishing industry is a positive balance-of-trade. Germany is the home of SpringerNature/Macmillan while Relyx, the parent company of Reed Elsevier is under the UK Corporate Governance Code (from Relyx Corporate Governance) https://www.relx.com/investors/corporate-governance/corporate-governance-and-structure It is in their financial interest of these countries to maintain the high profits while transitioning the industry. These are the countries that benefit from high-paying jobs and taxes. For most countries, including Canada, the opposite is true: it's a negative balance of trade, a net cost for taxpayers. If the APC model prevails and prices are high due to successful lobbying by the countries benefiting from the profits, this has a negative impact on other countries and their funders and individual scholars in the form of high costs and/or loss of publishing opportunities. With respect to your list of publications, I suggest that this reveals a bias that does not reflect either publishing quality or the most likely choices most authors would make. For example, while Nature and Science per se are coveted publication venues, it is not clear that Nature Communications has the same status; this journal likely benefits from the cachet of Nature. Most authors' first choice is likely to be based on academic discipline. OJS is a publishing system that is used by about half the open access journals in DOAJ; as of Jan. 2019, about 5,000 listed OJS as their publishing platform (others use the software but may have a different platform). Many OJS journals are published by independent researchers, scholarly societies and universities. These are the kind of journals that I would recommend as most likely to prioritize scholarly quality. In my field, many of the top journals that I recommend as publication venues or reading for students use OJS: the International Journal of Communication, published by University of California - Annenberg School; TripleC; and the Democratic Communiqué, published by Florida Online Journals (supported by Florida libraries). To repeat, these journals are not just okay if one cannot get into the good journals; they are the best. PLOS and PLOS One have made some important contributions to open access publishing. However, I would not consider PLOS ONE as a publishing venue for my own work based on my experiences with their peer review system, which I would describe as an interesting but unfortunate experiment with attempting to fully automate peer review coordination that reduces review to a forced checklist (that I consider inappropriate from an academic standpoint) and treats human reviewers as appendages to PLOS algorithms. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Pieper, Dirk Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2019 10:25 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts Attention : courriel externe | external email Dear all, thank you for bringing this up again. I´m not sure if you could compare the market behaviour of demanders and suppliers on the market for houses or cars with the market for academic publications. There are some similarities, but there are some differences in the market structures as well. And in the end, the prices, which are paid by the consumers, are a result of demand and supply and the choices and decisions, the players on a market are making. If I would buy a car, a house or if I want to publish an academic article I would check my preferences, my budget and the prices. Comparing prices and services of publishers is helpful for my decision. If I would have the choice to pay 4,500 EUROs for my article in e.g. Nature Communications or in a journal of a predatory publisher, I would choose the first option like most of us. But pretty sure my article would not be accepted by Nature Communications, what would be my next decision? Maybe I would choose a mega journal like PLOS One, a OA
Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group
Peter Murray-Rust raises the important point that the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC)'s basic model fits with perpetual copyright, the antithesis of open access. However, I argue that the open access movement needs to engage with the issues that will or might be raised by this group. Following is a bit of background, concluding with a recommendation that copyright for scholarly works should be led by the research community not industry groups, perhaps coordinated by bodies such as Canada's Tri-Council of national research funding agencies. Many advocates of open access also advocate for the most liberal of open licenses. From my perspective, this is naive because some of the most liberal of open licenses, in particular immediate dedication to public domain and CC licenses granting downstream commercial use rights (CC-0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) grant to anyone the right to sell the works. This is already happening as open access works are included in toll access packages such as Elsevier's Scopus. Creators are giving away their works using CC licenses thinking they are contributing to a commons. The problem with this is that lack of restrictions means, for example, that images in CC-BY licensed works can be included either in Wikimedia commons for free sharing or to create a for-pay image databank. If OA venues are lost in future, the toll access versions may be the only ones available. As I noted recently, the attrition rate at SpringerOpen is 16%, with most ceased journals de-listed by both SpringerOpen and DOAJ and content available through Springer's subscriptions site: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/07/22/springer-open-ceased-now-hybrid-oa-identification-challenges/ The trend towards market concentration that was evident for subscription based publishers is beginning to be seen with open access publishers as well. Examples: Versita was bought by De Gruyter; Medknow was bought by Wolters Kluwer; Co-Action was bought by Taylor & Francis; Libertas Academic was bought by Sage; BMC was bought by Springer; as we report regularly, many of the OA journals by commercial publishers have no APC due to partnerships with universities and societies, indicating that traditional publishers are pursuing such partnerships on a global basis. Plus many commercial initiatives once thought of as OA friendly (Mendeley, SSRN, Bepress) have been bought by Elsevier. Both perpetual copyright and the most liberal forms of open licensing are problematic for scholarly works. Members of CCC, OASPA, and other industry groups (e.g. STM, ALPSP) are in a conflict of interest position when advocating for particular approaches to copyright / licensing, that is, members stand to benefit or lose financially. It is problematic for any of these groups to lead research and decision-making on matters of copyright. Leadership should come from the research community. Researchers need time to devote to such activity and in particular to coordinate. In Canada, coordination of consultation on this topic might best be led by Canada's Tri-Council of national research funders, perhaps in cooperation with similar groups in other countries. Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Peter Murray-Rust Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2019 7:32 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group Attention : courriel externe | external email What is the relation of this group to the actual activities of CCC? Does it have the power to advise that it extends copyright and licensing to areas what those practices do great harm, and that the prices for re-use are often extortionate (one article in NEJM apparently generated over 1 million USD for re-use of a scholarly article). If the advisory group were to recommend that CCC's activities be transparently regulated with price caps I might have some sympathy. As it is CCC will have to convince me that it is more than an unregulated rent-seeker. (It's also the antithesis of Open Access - the theme of this list) -- "I always retain copyright in my papers, and nothing in any contract I sign with any publisher will override that fact. You should do the same". Peter Murray-Rust Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.e
Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts
Ulrich raises an important point. Those of us who assumed transparency in pricing would inspire lower pricing may have been mistaken. Another example: When homes are for sale here, the list price is publicly available, and some brokers advertise their percentages. Housing crises in cities like Toronto and Vancouver (rapid inflation due largely to speculation leading to unaffordable housing) have emerged in a context of transparent pricing. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: Ulrich Herb Sent: Tuesday, September 10, 2019 6:12:27 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: Heather Morrison Subject: Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts Attention : courriel externe | external email Dear Heather, even though I share your thoughts on APCs, I doubt that transparent pricing will always lower prices. Conversely, it can also lead to higher prices, e.g. by better market analysis. If I remember right, Australia's FuelWatch (an open-access database for fuel prices) did not cause prices to fall. But maybe someone here knows more. Best regards, Ulrich Herb Am 2019-09-04 19:41, schrieb Heather Morrison: > Exactly, Lisa. Scholarly communication does not have to be a market, > and I argue it is better if it is not. > > Dr. Heather Morrison > Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of > Ottawa > Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université > d'Ottawa > Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC > Insight Project > sustainingknowledgecommons.org > heather.morri...@uottawa.ca > https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 > [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] > > - > > From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of > Lisa Hinchliffe > Sent: Wednesday, September 4, 2019 1:28:40 PM > To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) > Subject: Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts > > Attention : courriel externe | external email > > I agree these are interesting projects/products/goods. However, as > examples they aren't examples of a market are they? > > ___ > > Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe > lisalibrar...@gmail.com > > On Wed, Sep 4, 2019 at 12:22 PM Heather Morrison > wrote: > >> Two examples of transparent pricing: >> >> SSHRC Aid to Scholarly Journals (Canad): >> > http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/scholarly_journals-revues_savantes-eng.aspx >> [1] >> >> This is a peer-reviewed journal subsidy program. The $ value, >> journal eligibility, application and review process, are all clearly >> articulated. Canada is not unusual in subsidizing journal >> publishing. In areas such as the social sciences, humanities and >> arts, this is necessary because local knowledge is important >> (everywhere). Law is an important topic in every country, but >> Canadian law is most relevant in Canada and for scholarship to >> flourish in this area, scholars need publication venues. This is >> true of history, culture/arts, local social and environmental >> issues. Some knowledge is universal; some knowledge is specific to a >> particular region, group, environment, etc. >> >> One key benefit of this model is cost. The base - maximum per >> journal is $30 - $35,000 per year (Cdn). At the mid-point of >> $32,500, a journal publishing 40 peer-reviewed articles per year >> would receive about $850 Canadian per article. Per-journal funding >> eliminates the need to count articles and gives journals flexibility >> to increase or decrease volume based on need. The funding in >> Canadian dollars gives journals budgeting stability, as costs such >> as local journal hosting and staffing costs are in Canadian dollars >> as well. Currency fluctuations are a problem in budgeting for many >> journals. As Salhab & I discussed here, >> > https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/13/how-a-flat-apc-with-no-price-increase-for-3-years-can-be-a-6-77-price-increase/ >> >> PLOS One's flat pricing in USD over 3 years was in effect a 6 - 77% >> price increase for authors and funders based on country and local >> currency. >> >> To illustrate the potential with a full flip using this kind of >> approach: >> >> The
Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts
Exactly, Lisa. Scholarly communication does not have to be a market, and I argue it is better if it is not. Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Lisa Hinchliffe Sent: Wednesday, September 4, 2019 1:28:40 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts Attention : courriel externe | external email I agree these are interesting projects/products/goods. However, as examples they aren't examples of a market are they? ___ Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe lisalibrar...@gmail.com<mailto:lisalibrar...@gmail.com> On Wed, Sep 4, 2019 at 12:22 PM Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: Two examples of transparent pricing: SSHRC Aid to Scholarly Journals (Canad): http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/scholarly_journals-revues_savantes-eng.aspx This is a peer-reviewed journal subsidy program. The $ value, journal eligibility, application and review process, are all clearly articulated. Canada is not unusual in subsidizing journal publishing. In areas such as the social sciences, humanities and arts, this is necessary because local knowledge is important (everywhere). Law is an important topic in every country, but Canadian law is most relevant in Canada and for scholarship to flourish in this area, scholars need publication venues. This is true of history, culture/arts, local social and environmental issues. Some knowledge is universal; some knowledge is specific to a particular region, group, environment, etc. One key benefit of this model is cost. The base - maximum per journal is $30 - $35,000 per year (Cdn). At the mid-point of $32,500, a journal publishing 40 peer-reviewed articles per year would receive about $850 Canadian per article. Per-journal funding eliminates the need to count articles and gives journals flexibility to increase or decrease volume based on need. The funding in Canadian dollars gives journals budgeting stability, as costs such as local journal hosting and staffing costs are in Canadian dollars as well. Currency fluctuations are a problem in budgeting for many journals. As Salhab & I discussed here, https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/13/how-a-flat-apc-with-no-price-increase-for-3-years-can-be-a-6-77-price-increase/ PLOS One's flat pricing in USD over 3 years was in effect a 6 - 77% price increase for authors and funders based on country and local currency. To illustrate the potential with a full flip using this kind of approach: The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) spends approximately $100 million per year on subscriptions / purchase and some OA transitional funding. CRKN is just one of the academic library sources of funding in Canada. There are other regional consortia, such as the Ontario Council of University Libraries. Also, large university libraries such as the University of Ottawa and University of Toronto also spend considerably sums. If the CRKN's 100 million per year were transformed to support a subsidy program modeled on that of SSHRC, this amount could subsidize over 3,000 scholarly journals (at the rate in between the base and maximum). This example is meant just as an illustration; we also need to fund book publication and new forms of publication such as research blog archiving and data publication, but it is not clear that Canada would need 3,000 journals and there are there existing sources of funding as mentioned in the paragraph above. Another important advantage of this model is ensuring academic leadership and hence prioritizing quality. Journal-level peer-review, by academics, greatly reduces the likelihood of predatory publishing. Journal publishing by academic editors whose promotions depend on the quality of their scholarship is more likely to prioritize quality than commercial outfits seeking APC $ for profit. B This model also provides local jobs and leadership opportunities for local academics and their universities. Further detail from publishers of such journals via interviews is available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/leap.1015 Another example of transparent costing is the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems. The software per se is open source and free for anyone to download, use, and contribute to the community. PKP also offers a journal hosting service; prices are posted on the website that detail what is provided for each service: https://pkpservices.sfu.ca/content
Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts
Two examples of transparent pricing: SSHRC Aid to Scholarly Journals (Canad): http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/scholarly_journals-revues_savantes-eng.aspx This is a peer-reviewed journal subsidy program. The $ value, journal eligibility, application and review process, are all clearly articulated. Canada is not unusual in subsidizing journal publishing. In areas such as the social sciences, humanities and arts, this is necessary because local knowledge is important (everywhere). Law is an important topic in every country, but Canadian law is most relevant in Canada and for scholarship to flourish in this area, scholars need publication venues. This is true of history, culture/arts, local social and environmental issues. Some knowledge is universal; some knowledge is specific to a particular region, group, environment, etc. One key benefit of this model is cost. The base - maximum per journal is $30 - $35,000 per year (Cdn). At the mid-point of $32,500, a journal publishing 40 peer-reviewed articles per year would receive about $850 Canadian per article. Per-journal funding eliminates the need to count articles and gives journals flexibility to increase or decrease volume based on need. The funding in Canadian dollars gives journals budgeting stability, as costs such as local journal hosting and staffing costs are in Canadian dollars as well. Currency fluctuations are a problem in budgeting for many journals. As Salhab & I discussed here, https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/13/how-a-flat-apc-with-no-price-increase-for-3-years-can-be-a-6-77-price-increase/ PLOS One's flat pricing in USD over 3 years was in effect a 6 - 77% price increase for authors and funders based on country and local currency. To illustrate the potential with a full flip using this kind of approach: The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) spends approximately $100 million per year on subscriptions / purchase and some OA transitional funding. CRKN is just one of the academic library sources of funding in Canada. There are other regional consortia, such as the Ontario Council of University Libraries. Also, large university libraries such as the University of Ottawa and University of Toronto also spend considerably sums. If the CRKN's 100 million per year were transformed to support a subsidy program modeled on that of SSHRC, this amount could subsidize over 3,000 scholarly journals (at the rate in between the base and maximum). This example is meant just as an illustration; we also need to fund book publication and new forms of publication such as research blog archiving and data publication, but it is not clear that Canada would need 3,000 journals and there are there existing sources of funding as mentioned in the paragraph above. Another important advantage of this model is ensuring academic leadership and hence prioritizing quality. Journal-level peer-review, by academics, greatly reduces the likelihood of predatory publishing. Journal publishing by academic editors whose promotions depend on the quality of their scholarship is more likely to prioritize quality than commercial outfits seeking APC $ for profit. B This model also provides local jobs and leadership opportunities for local academics and their universities. Further detail from publishers of such journals via interviews is available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/leap.1015 Another example of transparent costing is the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems. The software per se is open source and free for anyone to download, use, and contribute to the community. PKP also offers a journal hosting service; prices are posted on the website that detail what is provided for each service: https://pkpservices.sfu.ca/content/journal-hosting There are other examples, and I encourage others on the list to point to them. I am providing just a couple of examples that I am familiar with and consider good models. These are not perfect models, there is always room for improvement, but good models that are easily overlooked. This is because academic-led publishing is led by academics who will tend to go to their disciplinary conferences and participate in disciplinary discussions, so you will not meet many of them at conferences like OASPA, ALPSPS, SSP, etc., or hear from them on the GOAL discussion list. In the interests of full disclosure, my funder (SSRHC) is responsible for the Aid to Scholarly Journals program and provided the seed funding for what is now the Public Knowledge Project. As of a few years ago, about half the fully open access journals in the world were using PKP's Open Journal Systems, so I argue that this modest research funding was a very valuable global contribution (thanks to founder John Willinsky, now at Stanford). best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ot
Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts
hi Lisa, Thanks for the question. If one individual author, institution, or funder looks at the publisher's website and sees a price (list price), but do not know that others do not pay that price, that is a lack of transparency. This is similar to going to buy a car and thinking the sticker price is the price, not knowing that negotiation is common or how much to ask for. The savvy buyer (perhaps a rich person who buys lots of cars) may pay less and/or get more options than the non-savvy buyer. If publishers are negotiating pricing with institutions and funders, and list price is the starting point for negotiations, this is an incentive to increase the list price for the next negotiation. For example, double the price so you can offer the next group buyer a 50% discount. The early bird institution / funder can argue for historical funding to keep prices down but newer entrants are stuck at a higher historical basis. OpenAPC does help in making what people pay open, assuming that downstream negotiators are aware of this. Publishers have no incentive to educate on this point. These kinds of strategies were and probably still are used for subscriptions, and are not unique to publishing. This is understandable, but the result is a non-transparent market that seems likely to continue the dysfunctional elements of the subscriptions market into OA. List members who feel they do not have the background to understand things like business and nonprofit approaches to pricing strategy probably know more than they realize. Some common real-world examples: When you sell a house or a car, you will probably seek the highest price you can, what the market will bear. This is the same strategy Elsevier uses when they quote you the highest price they think you will pay, or MDPI charges the highest APC they think authors will pay. In any of these cases, the seller may start with a high quote as it is easy to reduce the price but very difficult to increase it after a low initial offer. When a government funds a public university on the basis of the number of FTE students, on the assumption that it cost x amount to provide an education, that is cost-based budgeting. Similarly, if a research institution receives x annual funding (from a government or philanthropic institution), on the assumption that this will accomplish certain research goals, that is cost-based budgeting. In scholarly publishing, buyers (libraries, institutions, funders) tend to be under cost-based budgeting while commercial publishers (subscriptions or OA) work under market conditions. This is a fundamental conflict that led to dysfunction in the subscriptions market (serials crisis) and may do the same in OA, assuming commercial market-oriented publishers. Potential remedies include non-commercial approaches such as library hosted publishing services and modest cost-based journal subsidies, and institutional open access archives and new services based on them. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Lisa Hinchliffe Sent: Wednesday, September 4, 2019 10:51:10 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts Attention : courriel externe | external email Heather, can you explain a bit your claim that different people paying different prices means the market isn't transparent? Is that inherently non-transparent? Or, are you suggesting the issue is that it isn't publicly known what the different prices are? Lisa ___ Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe lisalibrar...@gmail.com<mailto:lisalibrar...@gmail.com> On Wed, Sep 4, 2019 at 9:37 AM Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: Dirk says with respect to OpenAPCs: "the real costs for academic institutions and funders...deviate from list prices for various reasons". If correct, as I assume it is, this is not a transparent market. For example, I assume this means authors who are not covered by institutions or funders are expected to pay list price (unless they negotiate an individual waiver), and different institutions and funders pay different prices for the same service, based on their ability to negotiate. The information on a publisher's website gives the list price and often has a waiver of 50% for authors from low to middle income countries. Is this half of a price that no one in the richest institutions actually pays? Is it sometimes more than a rich institution actually pays for one of its author
Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts
Dirk says with respect to OpenAPCs: "the real costs for academic institutions and funders...deviate from list prices for various reasons". If correct, as I assume it is, this is not a transparent market. For example, I assume this means authors who are not covered by institutions or funders are expected to pay list price (unless they negotiate an individual waiver), and different institutions and funders pay different prices for the same service, based on their ability to negotiate. The information on a publisher's website gives the list price and often has a waiver of 50% for authors from low to middle income countries. Is this half of a price that no one in the richest institutions actually pays? Is it sometimes more than a rich institution actually pays for one of its authors? best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Pieper, Dirk Sent: Wednesday, September 4, 2019 4:30:09 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts Attention : courriel externe | external email Dear Heather, thank you, I fully agree. Just some additional remarks: The monitoring of publishers list prices is very important, the approach of OpenAPC is to monitor the real costs per article for academic institutions and funders, which deviate from list prices for various reasons. Both ways should be regarded as complementary. I also see the biggest challenge at the moment in creating the above mentioned cost transparency for articles within transformative agreements, especially if they are mixed up with costs for reading access and when historical subscription expenditures of consortia and participating institutions are involved. APCs and so called PAR fees are different of course but in the end they both put a price tag on an OA article. Funders and academic institutions then can make their decisions, which way of OA transition or which publishers they can support with public money within their limited budgets. Leaving out authors is always a mess. I remember editors in our university, who could not read their own journals, because we as a library were not able to pay the license for reading … Best, Dirk Von: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] Im Auftrag von Heather Morrison Gesendet: Dienstag, 3. September 2019 21:07 An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Betreff: Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts Every model for transitioning to open access has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the potential benefits of the article processing charge method is transparency, which in theory could lead to more price and cost sensibility as Dirk describes. I was more optimistic about this potential in the past than I am today. OA journals and publishers' websites are full of information about APCs being paid for by institutions, funders, not out of authors' pockets. If funders pay for APCs, the cost may be transparent to authors and universities, but who pays attention when someone else is paying? In the transformative (subscriptions + open access) deals, APCs are no more transparent than subscriptions, and based on my prior experience negotiating licensing deals, these combined deals may make both the subscriptions and the APC costs more obscure, because ultimately, buyers and sellers of big deals are agreeing on a bundled price rather than a cost structure, never mind a transparent cost structure. Such deals have a strong potential to alter the APC market, because low APCs might seem to publishers as a weakness in negotiating. Also, for traditional scholarly publishers who have extensive back lists of works for which they own copyright (a major financial asset), the best case scenario is complete failure of the open access movement. New publishers who rely on APCs (e.g. PLOS, Hindawi, MDPI) have incentive to transform the entire system, but not traditional highly profitable publishers like SpringerNature and Elsevier. One of the strong drawbacks of APC is leaving out authors who cannot afford the fees. This is not just authors in low income countries. As Peter Murray-Rust helpfully pointed out recently, active retiree scholars like PMR do not have funding for APCs, either. This is also likely to be true of emerging scholars in the developed world who are in the process of trying to establish a career. Even if every university and research institution covered APCs for regular full-time r
Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts
rongly encourage consideration of other models. For example, direct subsidy models such as providing infrastructure for publishing and archives at the university or research organization and supporting editorial work (e.g. modest subsidy to pay for support staff) is much more efficient than APC, which is in effect an indirect subsidy model. If transparency is sought, universities and funding agencies, at least in my part of the world, have a solid reputation for seeking accountability for every cost incurred. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Pieper, Dirk Sent: Monday, September 2, 2019 4:00 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts Attention : courriel externe | external email Dear all, (a)even in “richer” countries it is necessary to reduce APC prices because of limited budgets of academic institutions and funder policies. In many cases authors and libraries are successful to get reduced APCs from publishers (b) I agree that APCs are in most cases not related to the costs of producing an article, but they indicate the costs for institutions or authors to publish OA in journals with certain publishers. That is a progress compared to the subscription system, because this is slowly leading to more price and cost sensibility. That is why I like APCs :)) … Best, Dirk Von: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] Im Auftrag von Peter Murray-Rust Gesendet: Samstag, 31. August 2019 17:18 An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: wam...@list.nih.gov; radicalopenacc...@jiscmail.ac.uk; scholcomm Betreff: Re: [GOAL] How to manage APC waivers and discounts Thank you Chris, I feel exactly as you do, maybe more. This is wrong on several counts. (a) as you say it requires the underprivileged (the "scholarly poor") to beg. Some journals give lower prices for World Bank LMIC countries - but often Brasil and India are classified as high-income. Even reducing the price to half is impossible for many countries. (b) the APC is NOT cost-related (see another post form me about DEAL). DEAL pays Springer the price of an article (2750 E) whereas the cost of processing is ca 400 E (Grossman and Brembs, 2019) Costs are almost never transparent, therefore cause prices to be whatever the publisher can get away with. This adds another layer of injustice. I am affected by the APCs. I am on the board of two journals and being retired have to pay and APC myself. I feel diminished if I have to ask to get a waiver, and in any case it looks very unethical to gve waivers to the board. I therefore cannot publish in the journals that I give my time freely to. The system is now completely out of date. Many places and organizations CAN run platinum journals (no fee open to all). It's more ethical equitable and makes knowledge fully available. 70% of climate papers are behind paywalls. Making a no-fee publish system is the only way to get the knowledge flowing. My software can read 1 papers in a morning, but the broken societal system prevents that. P. On Sat, Aug 31, 2019 at 2:17 PM Chris Zielinski mailto:ch...@chriszielinski.com>> wrote: (Apologies for cross-posting) This is to raise a question about how editors of Open Access journals that demand an article processing charge (APC) should deal with discounts for non-institutional authors or those from poorer countries. The offering of substantial APC waivers to authors from specific countries or to researchers with financial constraints in specific cases is familiar. My question relates to the way in which such discounts are offered. Usually, a researcher needs to assert or demonstrate his/her inability to pay the APC before getting relief. The problem is that obliging researcher to request a lower or zero APC feels a bit like inviting them to beg – and the result often seems to depend on the benevolence and good humour of the editor, responding on an individual, case-by-case basis, rather than by applying some pre-established rule. This is surely not good enough. It can’t be correct and ethical scientific practice to require unsupported authors to face the embarrassment of having to turn out their pockets and demonstrate the holes in their socks before they get a discount. Any views on this? Should there be a norm among OA journals that each should adopt a standardized system to determine APC charg
Re: [GOAL] Informed consent and open licensing: some questions for discussion
Thank you very much, Marc. It helps a lot to have knowledge from someone who actually does the work. Good luck with writing up your survey, this sounds like a very important line of research. My perspective is that we're only beginning a learning curve that is actually itself in a process of growth. As an example, I teach first year MIS students a bit of the basics of copyright. One thing I like to do is to find examples that illustrate this growing complexity. Anecdotally, I find it gets easier to find such examples every year. Last year all I had to do was go to the Ottawa Public Library website, go to electronic resources, and there at the very top is a service called "Artist Works". This is a tool for learning how to create art and music, so users post their own content. The license (which virtually no one will read) focuses on users' responsibility regarding not only copyright, but also privacy and publicity rights and contracts (users' contracts, i.e. think before posting music if you have a contract with a record label), plus the usual "whatever we didn't think of". I try not to overwhelm students so I left out the easy and obvious "look for a journal provided by University of Ottawa Library and find examples of conflicting and/or incorrect information about usage rights with respect to the journal". uO library is not different from any other large university library that needs to provide simple answers to complex questions for a very large number of resources, and often obtains journals from multiple sources covered by contracts with different terms. As libraries and other information services tend to work with creators more often, rather than just published material, the kinds of IP and related rights we need to work with are increasing. Patent and industrial design law are highly relevant in the Makerspace context. Social media changes the social context. Publicity rights developed in a context where public sharing of photos was mostly done by professional photographers and publishers and so mostly focused on celebrities. Today, the easy sharing of digital images means that publicity rights are becoming highly relevant to everyone. Laws and policy will need to evolve. This usually takes time, and follows rather than leads social practice. The growing complexity and relevance of various types of IP and related rights is challenging to work with, but for this reason, I see it as a career growth area for librarians and other information professionals with an interest in and aptitude for policy work. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Couture, Marc Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2019 11:57 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Informed consent and open licensing: some questions for discussion Attention : courriel externe | external email Hi all, Heather Morrison raises in this thread some relevant and important issues regarding open licenses: How they are displayed? How to treat works combining elements bearing various licenses (some of them being possibly “all rights reserved”)? She asks: “who is using embedded licensing metadata (as opposed to displayed), and how?” Licensing metadata embedding, though not explicitly part of its “best practice”, is suggested by DOAJ, and is a condition for obtaining the DOAJ Seal. This can be done by including basic HTML code in the article (and/or abstract) pages, and by importing XMP metadata in the PDF (see https://doaj.org/rights). I was in charge of this task for our small journal (http://ijthe.org) when we had to reapply to DOAJ, and we did qualify for the Seal. However, I didn’t see any way to embed, in the (HTML) abstract page or the PDF, anything other than a global license applying to the whole article. Embedding licensing metadata of individual elements is probably easier in the HTML versions of the articles, but as we offer only PDFs (and HTML abstracts), I didn’t try to find how to do it. Maybe others can pitch in. We do include in the CC mention displayed in the journal footer the disclaimer (“Except when otherwise noted...”), and we clearly display in the articles (as it’s usually done in scholarly publishing) the status of any element not covered by our CC licence. However, I didn’t find anything about embedding in the PDF such a disclaimer, which would be useless anyway if the licensing info of individual elements is not also embedded.
Re: [GOAL] Informed consent and open licensing: some questions for discussion
Thank you Martyn, this is very helpful. As an author, I have appreciated MDPI's flexibility with respect to licenses. I am sure that other publishers have similar situations where re-use of material and/or accommodating particular authors requires flexibility with respect to licensing. This mixed licensing environment raises a number of questions, mostly technical ones. Fully answering the questions requires an understanding of who proposes to use these works, and how. Following are 2 questions that I hope will further understanding of the issues, one for MDPI and other publishers and one for everyone. 1. For MDPI and other publishers: based on the Jan. 31, 2019 DOAJ metadata, it appears that all or nearly all of MDPI journals have answered "yes" to "Machine-readable CC licensing information embedded or displayed in articles". Q: can you explain how embedding works when the CC license does not apply to all of the content in the article, as is the case when re-use of an item like an image requires permission and must be under All Rights Reserved terms? For example, do the elements that require separate licensing have separate metadata embedded licensing? Does the embedded metadata at the article level state the default license only or does it speak to the separately licensed material, in specific or general terms? 2. Everyone: who is using embedded licensing metadata (as opposed to displayed), and how? Are there hopes or expectations of how this metadata will be used in future for which there are no examples yet? Further discussion - answers or more questions - is encouraged. Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Martyn Rittman Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2019 7:02 AM To: goal@eprints.org Subject: Re: [GOAL] Informed consent and open licensing: some questions for discussion Attention : courriel externe | external email Heather raises a good point here related to certain types of images. MDPI provides a sample consent form (you can access the link e.g. at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijms/instructions#ethics) in which we try to make clear the implications of publishing in open access, but when it comes to reuse there are clearly other rights that should be enforced for the protection of patients. I don't recall a case where this has been flagged as an issue, but we have had similar cases with images taken by someone other than the authors and numerous cases of previously published images where the authors needed permission to republish. Here, a more restrictive copyright (e.g. all rights reserved) can be applied to the image than to the rest of the text. I would suggest that this could provide a solution in most cases. Best regards, Martyn -- Martyn Rittman, Ph.D. Publishing Director, MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66, 4052 Basel, Switzerland +41 61 683 77 35 ritt...@mdpi.com<mailto:ritt...@mdpi.com> www.mdpi.com<http://www.mdpi.com> On 27/08/2019 17:09, Heather Morrison wrote: > > The purpose of this post is to encourage sharing of knowledge and > ideas > > on the topic of modifying informed consent when working with > human > > subjects to accommodate open licensing. Questions can be found > at the end > > of the post. > > > Researchers who work with human subjects, as is common > > in disciplines > such as health sciences, education, and social sciences, > > are expected > to obtain informed consent from subjects prior to starting > > research > for ethical and legal reasons. > > > To obtain informed consent, > > researchers must explain what will happen > with the subject's information > > and material (if applicable) and the > potential consequences for the > > subject (beneficial and potential > harm). > > > Consent in the context of > > traditional publishing meant consent to > publish in one specific venue, > > typically under All Rights Reserved > copyright. Policies and procedures > > for informed consent developed in > this context will need to be modified > > in order for authors to publish > using open licenses that actively invite > > re-use (and sometimes > modification) through human and machine-readable > > licenses, in some > cases for commercial use. > > > To illustrate the > > difference: an educational researcher might wish to > obtain and use a > > phot
[GOAL] Informed consent and open licensing: some questions for discussion
%99-best-practices-ensuring-consent-publishing-medical-case-reports These principles are designed to protect journals and their publishers, and only speak to one particular type of sensitive material. For me, this raises some questions. If anyone on the list has answers or ideas, I would love to hear them, on or off-list. If you reply off-list and would prefer to be anonymous, please let me know. If warranted, I will summarize responses. Questions: 1. COPE's guidance is for the education and protection of journals. Is anyone aware of efforts for the education and protection of authors and their institutions on the topic of informed consent for open licensing? 2. Do other publishers or organizations serving publishers have policies, guidance, sample forms, etc. to deal with informed consent and open licensing? 3. Have any research ethics boards (or similar bodies) revised their guidance to accommodate informed consent and publication under open licenses? 4. Is anyone aware of cases or analysis of potential implications of licensing for re-use for other types of material involving human subjects besides case reports? 5. Do you have any other ideas or insights on this or closely related topics that I haven't asked about? Blog version: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/08/27/informed-consent-in-the-context-of-open-licensing-some-questions-for-discussion/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] DOAJ is what it is: acknowledging contributions and highlighting limitations
DOAJ has been a valuable service to the open access movement over the years, in tracking and linking to a select set of open access journals and providing metadata that is helpful for researchers like me and to include DOAJ content in library services. Like any service or initiative, DOAJ has its limitations. Based on recent discussions, I gather that there is no interest in discussing the limitations, brainstorming potential solutions, or exploring underlying assumptions and whether the current approach is optimal. This discussion is at an impasse. DOAJ is what it is, and this is within the rights of the people who make DOAJ decisions. To conclude my portion of this discussion, I would like to highlight two limitations of DOAJ that to me represent important problems for the future of scholarly communication with no current solution: 1. As a list of suitable OA journals for authors to publish in, DOAJ presents some risk to the author as a journal in DOAJ at the time the author decides on a submission venue may be removed from DOAJ at a later date. This could be a problem for the author if they wish to prove that they publish OA, for example to fulfill an open access mandate, or to establish their credibility as an OA author. Taking into account funder and institutional requirements for OA, this can have a negative financial (loss of grants) and promotional impact on the researcher. One solution is for funders and universities to exclusively use green OA policies (as I always recommend). Recently, I wrote about 33 SpringerOpen journals (13% of their titles) that have ceased publication; 31 of the journals are no longer listed either on SpringerOpen or DOAJ. I submit that this is a disservice to authors who published in these journals. https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/07/22/springer-open-ceased-now-hybrid-oa-identification-challenges/ 2. As a list to direct authors to content, DOAJ's exclusions are problematic for searchers. DOAJ has rejected one of the top fully open access journals in my field (The International Journal of Communication) and several smaller fully open access journals that I consider essential content. As a researcher, this diminishes the usefulness of DOAJ for me. As a professor, I would hesitate to refer students to a list that rejects this content. It is nice to know which journals are fully open access, active, and meet the DOAJ criteria, but this is not sufficient for research purposes. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] DOAJ: handmaiden to despots? or, OA, let's talk
Thank you, Paige. Some further perspective on my comment "the open access movement has developed a habit of viewing all feedback / critique as anti-open access and reacting defensively, as if every critic were an enemy" reflects the history of the OA movement. There has been substantial opposition to OA, and in the early days there were few advocates. There still is opposition, just less opposition and a great many more advocates and practitioners. Actual opposition often took the form of partial agreement. One form of argument used early on, whether as deliberate deception or as wishful thinking, was the argument that OA simply was not happening. I don't recall the exact details but I remember sometime around 2003 or 2004 there was a discussion about OA in a UK government context where one publisher said (in November) there were no new OA journals created this year and the BioMedCentral rep pointed out that BMC alone had created 11 new journals so far that year. DOAJ has served an invaluable function over the years as documentation of the existence and growth of OA journals. For this reason, I have used DOAJ for macro level numbers on the numbers and growth of OA journals in my series The Dramatic Growth of Open Access since about 2005. Data can be downloaded from here: https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dataverse/dgoa Until recently, I posted a quarterly update on my blog The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics. Today I am at the office and am blocked from accessing my blog. I see this as an early indication of a likely rising problem for OA. That is, as internet security concerns are noted and addressed, other OA works could be blocked as well. This ongoing documentation of the growth of OA was intended to help OA advocates see the advances and not just the daily hard work, to counter the disappointment of the occasional backsliding journal with a focus on the ongoing momentum. I continue to collect and share data, but don't do the commentary regularly anymore, because I think it's no longer necessary. OA journals face significant challenges from the ease of flight-by-night commercial operators setting up scam journals and making a profit by charging authors. This is the reason for DOAJ's "get tough" policy. In my opinion, the OA movement still has work to do to address this problem. One of my projects is a longitudinal study of OA journals. When DOAJ discards journals and publishers, I don't. For this reason, I see that some of the largest publishers I track are "no longer in DOAJ" but appear to still be active, while as noted earlier in this thread, exclusion of small independent journals with a good reputation for scholarly quality is problematic as well. This is important because this is a side-effect of the author-pays model and a reason to consider other models for OA journal support. To summarize, OA advocates and initiatives have faced opposition, even attacks. It is not surprising that we (yes, me too) have tended to become defensive. Old friends may seem puzzled by my dramatic change from the regular announcement of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access to my current critical stance. This is not an attack, and no need to be defensive. Rather, it is my assessment that OA has come of age. 20 years ago, the term "open access" had not yet been coined. Librarians had not begun to dream about what their roles might be in an open access future. Today there are thousands of OA journals and publishers, so many OA policies that (as Poynder's interview with Edith Hall notes), a researcher's work might fall under multiple OA policies, and "scholarly communications" and/or "open access" have become a significant part of the work, and sometimes the job title, of librarians. OA is becoming the default; it is time to move beyond advocacy to developing and refining policy, services and practices for the future. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Mann, Paige Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2019 2:20 PM To: goal@eprints.org Subject: Re: [GOAL] DOAJ: handmaiden to despots? or, OA, let's talk Attention : courriel externe | external email While I fully appreciate concerns that "DOAJ does what it can with the resources it has (and it does all this very well", applaud, and benefit from DOAJ, I also appreciate Heather Morrison's thoughtful reflections that raise questions and concerns. Others may share her thoughts, but may be less likely to raise them in such a public forum. DO
Re: [GOAL] DOAJ: handmaiden to despots? or, OA, let's talk
Where I am coming from is thinking about the questions of how to develop and sustain a global knowledge commons, which I define as a global sharing of the knowledge of humankind, as open as possible and inclusive in that all who are qualified are welcome to contribute. My perspective is that the open access movement has developed a habit of viewing all feedback / critique as anti-open access and reacting defensively, as if every critic were an enemy. THere are historical reasons for this reaction, however in my opinion, this is not healthy and it is time for change. There are many questions to consider to develop and sustain a global knowledge commons. In the meantime, there is tremendous change take place in technology (e.g. AI / Internet of Things), society (e.g. rise of far right / closing of borders), and the physical environment (climate change). Discussion, debate, feedback on services and initiatives in place, are all needed. My questions about DOAJ are not meant just for DOAJ; they are for everyone who expects or demands things of DOAJ. Many of the questions in the DOAJ application process are very technical in nature, and are based on assumptions about what journals should be responsible for that warrant questioning, as these assumptions raise the bar for journal publishing in terms of technical (rather than scholarly) expertise that I suggest disadvantage scholar-led publishing. Some examples, given that both DOAJ and small independent journals have limited resources: * Why is DOAJ building a searchable article database if it is not clear that this makes any sense as a discovery tool for content? * Why is DOAJ asking question about preservation services e.g. LOCKSS, National Archives? Academic libraries have been at the forefront of the open access movement - shouldn't this be their responsibility rather than the journals / DOAJ? Why not ask countries about National Archives rather than DOAJ and the journals? IFLA has advocated for OA; this seems a good fit for IFLA. * Why is DOAJ asking about technical matters such as article download statistics and time from submission to publication? Healthy organizations and initiatives adjust to the environment, the communities they serve and work with, and address questions like managing demands and resources. Feedback is an important part of the process. I appreciate the feedback on my open research in the form of blog comments and listserv responses. This is particularly valuable when I'm wrong or I've missed something. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Guédon Jean-Claude Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2019 8:39 AM To: goal@eprints.org Subject: Re: [GOAL] DOAJ: handmaiden to despots? or, OA, let's talk Attention : courriel externe | external email So, Heather is pointing all of us to further sources of information, and that is all very good. However, Heather should also acknowledge that DOAJ does what it can with the resources it has (and it does all this very well, thank you). I am also quite sure that DOAJ's leaders monitor parallel projects, if only to steer DOAJ better and position it more effectively. Elementary, my dear Watson, but thank you for the putative help! Of course, if Heather finds ways to respond to her own wish for "ideally with appropriate economic support", and manages to garner the needed funds for DOAJ, I am sure DOAJ will be very appreciative... :-) In conclusion, the way Heather is taking on DOAJ is a bit of a puzzle. Where is she coming from? Aren't there more important issues in the OA world than trimming details about DOAJ's operations, especially when you don't have the means to do the trimming? Has DOAJ become a point of obsession for her (a bit like her focus on CC-by)? Jean-Claude Guédon On 2019-08-20 5:10 p.m., Heather Morrison wrote: Thank you Lars. DOAJ has been an important contributor to the open access movement over the years, and I understand that DOAJ conducted a weeding process a few years ago as a partial response to the predatory publishing phenomenon. However, there are some important limitations to DOAJ, and I argue that it is timely to re-think solutions for the future, for what some of us are describing as the second generation of open access. Options for such solutions could include expanding or modifying DOAJ (ideally with appropriate economic support), developing complementary services that could interact with DOAJ at the search level, and/or developing new kinds of services that might build on DOAJ. This po
Re: [GOAL] DOAJ: handmaiden to despots? or, OA, let's talk
Thank you Lars. DOAJ has been an important contributor to the open access movement over the years, and I understand that DOAJ conducted a weeding process a few years ago as a partial response to the predatory publishing phenomenon. However, there are some important limitations to DOAJ, and I argue that it is timely to re-think solutions for the future, for what some of us are describing as the second generation of open access. Options for such solutions could include expanding or modifying DOAJ (ideally with appropriate economic support), developing complementary services that could interact with DOAJ at the search level, and/or developing new kinds of services that might build on DOAJ. This post focuses on the limitations of DOAJ and highlights existing and historical more inclusive approaches. Discovery tool for content: DOAJ currently provides a means of searching for (some) fully open access journals and for articles in some of the journals. This is useful, however a discovery tool limited to articles in fully open access journals that are currently active and whose publishers / editors have successfully completed the DOAJ application focus, is a very limited discovery tool. Examples of more inclusive open access focused journal lists: Jan Szcepanski was a pioneer in collecting open access journals and magazines and one of the major contributors to DOAJ in the early years. Szcepanski wrote about this work and motivation at my request here: http://oalibrarian.blogspot.com/2005/12/jan-szczepanski-collecting-for-world.html Szcepanski's lists included journals with open access to back issues. This is valuable content. These lists also included journals and magazines of academic interest that are not peer-reviewed. It was through Szcepanski's work that I, while living in British Columbia and very much interested in works by or about local First Nations, learned of the Ha-Shilth-Sa Newsletter, the official letter of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council, based on the West Coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia: https://hashilthsa.com/ A list that includes relevant non-peer-reviewed journals and magazines is a more useful service that a more exclusive list. Traditionally, indexing services and library bundled databases have included resources of academic interest such as trade magazines along with peer-reviewed literature. The Electronic Journals Library (EZB) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of libraries that provides members with cross-searching of subscriptions and "64352 journals which are accessible free of charge to anyone" (in contrast with DOAJ's just over 13,000 journals) - details here: http://ezb.uni-regensburg.de/about.phtml?bibid=A=7=en The important point about EZB is that, like DOAJ, it is a vetted list, but after vetting finds close to 5 times more journals that are both free of charge and worthy of inclusion. That is the kind of list that I, as a researcher, would prefer to search myself, and the cross-search with subscribed material is also a very useful service. No serious researcher would prefer to be ignorant of the existence of research just because it is not open access. Libraries in North America typically load DOAJ into local discovery services so that the journals are cross-searched along with subscriptions content. PubMed indexes all of the medical literature from vetted sources, with direct instant access to material that is freely available. This is the model I think we need to aim for, free indexing with links to open access content wherever available. If the indexing is not free of charge, we may end up having to pay for toll access services like Elsevier's Scopus to discover freely available content. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Lars Bjørnshauge Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2019 7:30 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] DOAJ: handmaiden to despots? or, OA, let's talk Attention : courriel externe | external email Heather, It is correct that in the handling of an application of a journal it is a requirement that a journal has published 5 articles in the previous year. However we are not policing this after the acceptance of the journal on a daily basis. If we discover that a journal has ceased publication for 1-2 years, we will remove the journal after communication to the publisher. DOAJ is actually spending considerable resources to help smaller journals to produce a good application, an application that can be a basis for the assessment of t
Re: [GOAL] DOAJ: handmaiden to despots? or, OA, let's talk
Thanks Lars. DOAJ de-lists journals that fall below a certain level of activity (5 articles per year, right?) If people are relying on DOAJ to identify quality journals, this is problematic from a number of perspectives. This conflates quality and size. Frequency of publication is an indicator of activity, not quality. There are traditional scholarly communities that are small and have bi-annual conferences. A traditional list (Ulrich's) recognizes such journals. The more people rely on DOAJ, the greater the disadvantage for small journals. Over time, I anticipate that this will lead to disappearance of small independent journals and feed the existing tendency towards market concentration. There are many reasons why a small journal could become less active or inactive. In the case of an editor under a dictatorship, cessation of publication and an unresponsive editor could reflect actions of a dictator against an editor perceived as unfriendly to the government such as firing (hence loss of work email) or imprisonment of the editor. Removing a journal is this context effectively assists the dictator in the task of censorship. Would DOAJ consider retaining small and inactive journals? I recommend this simple step as a courtesy to small journals, to avoid inadvertently helping dictators, and to make DOAJ a more valuable service. Metadata elements for "ceased publication", "predecessor" for title changes and "active / inactive" are common in journal lists such as Ulrich's and the PMC journals. Currently DOAJ metadata includes multiple URLs for each journal. Fewer URLs and more of the information above would be helpful for people seeking content or publication venues. Fewer requests for URLs would make the application process less onerous for small journals. Last time I checked, the DOAJ application process requested 15 different URLs for each journal. This is a lot to ask of a small journal, especially if the editor's first language is not English. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Lars Bjørnshauge Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2019 8:55:34 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] DOAJ: handmaiden to despots? or, OA, let's talk Attention : courriel externe | external email Hello Heather, We agree that “Achieving the goals of the movement requires critical reflection and occasional changes in policy and procedure”. Over the years DOAJ has done this, listening to the changed and increasing demands from the community, for instance when in 2014 we implemented substantially stronger criteria for inclusion which were based on extensive feedback from the community: https://blog.doaj.org/2019/08/05/myth-busting-doaj-indexes-predatory-journals/ Earlier today we responded to your statement that we reject open access journals that would be "suitable venues for critics of the despotic government”. DOAJ wants to index good quality open access journals, but they must apply and meet the selection criteria in order to be included. We might also discuss the issue about “despotic governments”, but currently we would find it very hard to 1) create selection criteria for DOAJ defining what constitutes a journal sponsored by a “despotic government” and 2) agree on a list of such governments. Best Lars Bjørnshauge Managing Director DOAJ On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 8:08 AM Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: As any movement grows and flourishes, decisions made will turn out to have unforeseen consequences. Achieving the goals of the movement requires critical reflection and occasional changes in policy and procedure.The purpose of this post is to point out that the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) appears to be inadvertently acting as a handmaiden to at least one despotic government, facilitating dissemination of works subject to censorship and rejecting open access journals that would be suitable venues for critics of the despotic government. There is no blame and no immediately obvious remedy, but solving a problem begins with acknowledging that a problem exists and inviting discussion of how to avoid and solve the problem. OA friends, please consider this such an invitation. Sustaining the knowledge commons full post: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/08/14/doaj-handmaiden-to-despots-or-oa-we-need-to-talk/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Scien
[GOAL] DOAJ: handmaiden to despots? or, OA, let's talk
As any movement grows and flourishes, decisions made will turn out to have unforeseen consequences. Achieving the goals of the movement requires critical reflection and occasional changes in policy and procedure.The purpose of this post is to point out that the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) appears to be inadvertently acting as a handmaiden to at least one despotic government, facilitating dissemination of works subject to censorship and rejecting open access journals that would be suitable venues for critics of the despotic government. There is no blame and no immediately obvious remedy, but solving a problem begins with acknowledging that a problem exists and inviting discussion of how to avoid and solve the problem. OA friends, please consider this such an invitation. Sustaining the knowledge commons full post: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/08/14/doaj-handmaiden-to-despots-or-oa-we-need-to-talk/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] SpringerOpen pricing trends 2018 - 2019
GOAL list members: assistance with additional data (e.g. current academic salaries in Egypt), peer review of part or all of this post, further developing alternative scenarios for sponsoring partners in the final section, would be welcome and helpful to the project of figuring out how to transition the underlying economics of scholarly publishing to support OA. The title is a bit misleading as this is broader than pricing trends. Abstract 270 SpringerOpen journals were studied. 33 (12%) have ceased publication, 15 have been transferred to another publisher, and 7 are now hybrid. Of the 215 active journals published by SpringerOpen, 54% charge APCs. The average APC was 1,212 EUR, an increase of 8% over the 2018 average, 6 times the EU inflation rate for June 2019 of 1.3%. 58% of the 96 journals for which we have 2018 and 2018 data did not change in price; 5% decreased in price; and 36% increased in price. Price increases for journals that increased in price ranged from 3% to 109% (double the inflation rate to double in price). Journals with the highest volume of publishing were the most likely to have increased in price. This will amplify the effective percentage of articles with price increases for APC payers. 40% of the journals are sponsored by a university, society, government, or other not-for-profit partner, and have no publication fee. The sustainability of these sponsorships is not clear. 12 journals appear to have recently switched from “no APC” to “now APC”, with APCs only slightly below the SpringerOpen average. The affordability of the SpringerOpen partnership approach is called into question. SpringerOpen’s average APC does not compare favorably either to average academic salaries in a low to middle income country (with Egypt as an example) or to OJS Premium journal hosting services (the break-even point is 2 articles per year, i.e. a journal that publishes 3 articles per year saves money with OJS Premium as compared to SpringerOpen). Even a sponsor based in Germany only pays half the APC, raising a question about whether SpringerOpen sponsorships are sustainable anywhere. Details: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/08/13/springeropen-pricing-trends-2018-2019/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] No-fee inclusive journals, and disappointment with DOAJ
Abstract This post highlights two living models for inclusive, no-fee journals. One is a global network of not-for-profit journals that are diverse in language and content (the Global Media Journalnetwork). The other is an English language journal with content that is global in scope (the International Journal of Communication, IJOC). These two examples were selected because the journals are fully open access, inclusive, have no publication charges, and are the journals that I would recommend irrespective of OA and fee status. They are in my discipline and I am acquainted with some of the members of their highly qualified editorial boards and have discussed with them their involvement in these journals. I am disappointed to find that most of these journals are no longer listed in DOAJ. If journals like these are not included in DOAJ, in my field, another list is needed. Recommended actions for sustainability of not-for-profit no-fee inclusive journals like these: re-direct financial support from the large for-profit commercial publishers to provide support for these journals (library journal hosting, a common practice in North America, can be part of the solution); reach out to understand their needs, recognizing that a small not-for-profit no-fee journal has no funds to send staff to OASPA or lobby on their behalf; include in listings like DOAJ for maximum dissemination of their works; and find examples of journals like these and make them a priority in open access education. This post is inspired by the useful information provided by Egyptian scholarly ElHassan ElSabry to the Global Open Access List (GOAL) in August 2019, which can be found here: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2019-August/005195.html Details: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/08/13/no-fee-inclusive-journals-and-disappointment-with-doaj/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Scholars at risk Re: SpringerOpen, Egypt and academic freedom
Thank you, Victor. Internationally, there is a network called Scholars at Risk that provides the kind of support Victor describes... Information can be found here: https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/ The University of Ottawa is involved and has hosted scholars at risk. Direct sponsorship of open access by a government that actively directs research is not necessarily problematic, i.e. most of this research is likely valid and should be published. However, there are two major potential problems arising from government interference with scholarly research. Government control of research is an example of control by a party that may benefit or be harmed by the results. This is a conflict of interest. An example of a similar situation from pharma: if the pharmaceutical industry has control over pharma research, side effects that could have a negative impact on drug approval can be downplayed or omitted. Similarly, a government that actively directs research can prohibit publication of facts that could discourage investment in a country. This is what as known colloquially as a "fox guards henhouse" scenario. If readers are only aware of the works that a censoring government decides to permit, this in effect makes it possible for the government to give the world's academic community a false picture of the government and the country. To prevent this it appears to me that active attention to the matter of censorship and ensuring that critical perspectives are available appear to be necessary. Both of these problems are major ones for understanding the world we live in, and illustrate why academic freedom is needed for all of us, not just particular individual academics. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: Radical Open Access on behalf of Victor Venema Sent: Monday, August 12, 2019 5:25 PM To: radicalopenacc...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Re: [GOAL] SpringerOpen, Egypt and academic freedom Attention : courriel externe | external email Dear all, ElHassan makes a good point about the propaganda value of the initiative. Otherwise I am missing arguments why making it easier for Egyptian researchers to publish in Open Access journals is a threat to their freedom of research. Governments having physical access to the researchers is the threat. Germany has foundations that help scientists (as well as authors, artists and journalists) under threat to take a sabbatical. I hope other countries have similar schemes and that everyone has a watch out for possibly threatened colleagues they know. Under the Trump regime already many climate scientists have lost their position. I try to provide some counter weight by spreading this information on social media. Are there other effective ways to support the freedom of research in other countries? Publishing under a Creative Commons Attribution license should be no problem. The license gives others the right to spread the original. If there is any risk from it being known who wrote article X, it would stem from the original. No matter which license is used, the authors may opt to use pseudonyms. If I recall correctly papers have been retracted for authors not using their real names. I wish all publishers would allow the use of pseudonyms to support researchers under threat. Only if pseudonyms hide a conflict of interest I see a problem. And maybe the ORCID system could have an option where a researcher can later claim credit for articles published under a pseudonym once the situation is saver again. With best regards, Victor Venema -- <>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<> Victor Venema Grassroots Journals Chair WMO TT-HOM & ISTI-POST Grassroots Open Post-Publication Peer Review Journals http://grassroots.is WMO, Commission for Climatology, Task Team on Homogenization http://tinyurl.com/TT-HOM ISTI Parallel Observations Science Team http://tinyurl.com/ISTI-POST Meteorological Institute University of Bonn Auf dem Huegel 20 53121 Bonn Germany http://www2.meteo.uni-bonn.de/victor E-mail: victor.ven...@grassroots.is https://twitter.com/Grassr_Journals https://twitter.com/VariabilityBlog http://variable-variability.blogspot.com There is no need to answer my mails in your free time. <>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>
Re: [GOAL] SpringerOpen, Egypt and academic freedom
hi Yvonne, The vision of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative states: "The public good... is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge". (from https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read) That was 2002. Since then, OA has moved beyond just peer-reviewed journal literature to include books, data, and other open research approaches. I am arguing that it is time to move beyond what is published to consider the question of what scholars are able to research and share at all (academic freedom). This is essential to "uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and question for knowledge" (the goal of Sustaining the Knowledge Commons). I argue that this is timely for two reasons: 1) the global knowledge commons must include scholars at risk and their works and 2) the OA movement has tended to be dominated by those who pay for scholarly publishing, policy-makers, and publishers, and needs to engage the people who do the work of research, academics and organizations that represent academics (faculty associations, unions, and scholarly societies). Attacks on academic freedom are not limited to Egypt. As Reisberg pointed out in a 2017 article in Inside Higher Ed: "And then there is the United States. For decades, we have prided ourselves for taking “the high road” in matters of academic freedom, judging other countries harshly where free speech and unrestricted scholarship are not guaranteed...We now have a president who undermines science at every turn. In this administration, ideology “trumps” science when public research funds are distributed. Influence may also accompany financial gifts that come from organizations like the Charles Koch Foundation." (the Kochs are conservative libertarians and oil industry billionaires). from: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/world-view/academic-freedom-reconsidered This is very similar to what has been happening in Canada in the past decade. This 2018 piece from Democracy Watch is a good intro to the muzzling of government scientists, a problem that began with our previous government but has not been entirely addressed - 53% of government scientists still feel muzzled: https://democracywatch.ca/former-information-commissioner-legault-rules-harper-conservatives-violated-policy-by-muzzling-government-scientists-and-trudeau-liberals-ignoring-recommendations-needed-to-stop-muzzling/ The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was very helpful in raising awareness about the muzzling of government scientists in Canada. The OA movement has tended to see transition of scholarly society publishing as simply a matter of transitioning the works and has not to date (in my opinion) acknowledged the importance of the work of societies and addressed the question of economic support for societies in a transition to open access. Loss of independent scholarly societies, in my opinion, is loss of an important potential source of support for academic freedom at a time when the need for this support may be increasing. It is time to bring this into the conversation. The Canadian Association of University Teachers maintains a website on our ongoing fight for academic freedom by university teachers in my country: https://www.caut.ca/latest/publications/academic-freedom If authors' governments engagement in human rights violation and suppression of information about such violation means that authors' works cannot be shared, an honest approach would significantly limit sharing of our knowledge. Canada is often critical of human rights violations in other countries, but has only recently acknowledged our own genocide of First Nations peoples, and even today our First Nations peoples often need to speak to the United Nations to get attention to ongoing human rights violations at home. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Yvonne Nobis Sent: Thursday, August 8, 2019 11:47:13 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] SpringerOpen, Egypt and academic freedom Attention
Re: [GOAL] SpringerOpen, Egypt and academic freedom
This may help to explain the problem: DOAJ lists the journals published by SpringerOpen that are sponsored by the Government of Egypt. We have reason to believe that this government actively interferes with academic research and in particular suppresses critique. This means that people who rely on DOAJ for research on matters pertaining to Egypt will be exposed to government approved research and no indication that critique is suppressed. If we do not acknowledge and address this, we are in effect unwittingly collaborating with a repressive, censoring government. DOAJ is not at fault. SpringerNature faces similar dilemmas to other commercial companies working in non-democratic countries. This is a difficult problem, but an important one and we can start by acknowledging that the problem exists. Dr. Heather Morrison From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Heather Morrison Sent: Thursday, August 8, 2019 10:26:00 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] SpringerOpen, Egypt and academic freedom As a reminder, SpringerOpen publishes journals in partnership with the Government of Egypt, a government that represses and sometimes even kills its scholars. Should we boycott SpringerOpen? My main point is that academic freedom is essential to open access. The OA movement has been around for more than two decades, I argue it is time for more nuanced discussion. A white list of journals based on meeting technical requirements can mask much greater problems than it solves. I do not have a quick fix to protect scholars who might be targeted, rather I raise this an important question for discussion and note that attribution, generally desirable in scholarship, can sometimes be problematic. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of David Prosser Sent: Thursday, August 8, 2019 9:26:34 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] SpringerOpen, Egypt and academic freedom Attention : courriel externe | external email Heather You specifically raised CC-BY in this context. Do you believe that a researcher making a piece of research public under CC-BY is potentially at more risk of harm than if they made it public under a different CC licence or even under full All Rights Reserved? David On 8 Aug 2019, at 14:07, Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: Reader caution: discussion of matters like attacks on academic freedom as found in this thread may upset some people. This is a response to David Prosser's comments. Comment: I am sorry that David is not feeling well. If others feel sick about what is happening to academics in Egypt, I understand. That's how I feel about this, too. There are many things that happen in the world that I find disturbing. My approach, with respect to events that intersect my areas of expertise, is to think about such events, ask questions and propose potential solutions to make the world a better place. In this spirit, I repeat the specific question that David alludes to. Question: is attribution necessarily desirable for scholars? This is part of the larger question of the relationship between academic freedom and open access. My argument is that academic freedom is essential to open access. We live in a world where academics can be targeted for what they study or what they say about what they study. This doesn't only happen in countries like Egypt. Governments in North America have recently begun taking exception to climate change research. In Canada, under the former Conservative government, government scientists were muzzled. In the U.S., I have heard about a professor's watchlist targeting liberal professors. No academics have killed in North America that I know of, but otherwise there is some similarity with what is happening in Egypt today. This is important in the context of scholarly publishing because some of the latest technological developments appear to assume that matters such as attribution are neutral or beneficial. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org<http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/> heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca> https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 __
Re: [GOAL] SpringerOpen, Egypt and academic freedom
As a reminder, SpringerOpen publishes journals in partnership with the Government of Egypt, a government that represses and sometimes even kills its scholars. Should we boycott SpringerOpen? My main point is that academic freedom is essential to open access. The OA movement has been around for more than two decades, I argue it is time for more nuanced discussion. A white list of journals based on meeting technical requirements can mask much greater problems than it solves. I do not have a quick fix to protect scholars who might be targeted, rather I raise this an important question for discussion and note that attribution, generally desirable in scholarship, can sometimes be problematic. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of David Prosser Sent: Thursday, August 8, 2019 9:26:34 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] SpringerOpen, Egypt and academic freedom Attention : courriel externe | external email Heather You specifically raised CC-BY in this context. Do you believe that a researcher making a piece of research public under CC-BY is potentially at more risk of harm than if they made it public under a different CC licence or even under full All Rights Reserved? David On 8 Aug 2019, at 14:07, Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: Reader caution: discussion of matters like attacks on academic freedom as found in this thread may upset some people. This is a response to David Prosser's comments. Comment: I am sorry that David is not feeling well. If others feel sick about what is happening to academics in Egypt, I understand. That's how I feel about this, too. There are many things that happen in the world that I find disturbing. My approach, with respect to events that intersect my areas of expertise, is to think about such events, ask questions and propose potential solutions to make the world a better place. In this spirit, I repeat the specific question that David alludes to. Question: is attribution necessarily desirable for scholars? This is part of the larger question of the relationship between academic freedom and open access. My argument is that academic freedom is essential to open access. We live in a world where academics can be targeted for what they study or what they say about what they study. This doesn't only happen in countries like Egypt. Governments in North America have recently begun taking exception to climate change research. In Canada, under the former Conservative government, government scientists were muzzled. In the U.S., I have heard about a professor's watchlist targeting liberal professors. No academics have killed in North America that I know of, but otherwise there is some similarity with what is happening in Egypt today. This is important in the context of scholarly publishing because some of the latest technological developments appear to assume that matters such as attribution are neutral or beneficial. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org<http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/> heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca> https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org>> on behalf of David Prosser mailto:david.pros...@rluk.ac.uk>> Sent: Thursday, August 8, 2019 5:20:24 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) mailto:goal@eprints.org>> Cc: radicalopenacc...@jiscmail.ac.uk<mailto:radicalopenacc...@jiscmail.ac.uk> mailto:radicalopenacc...@jiscmail.ac.uk>> Subject: Re: [GOAL] SpringerOpen, Egypt and academic freedom Attention : courriel externe | external email Dr Morrison’s arguments against the CC-BY licence are well known to readers of this list and I acknowledge her sincerely held, and consistent, views on this. But I’m afraid that I find using the murder of students to further, however tangentially, that argument quite sickening. David On 7 Aug 2019, at 23:01, Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: SpringerOpen is currently publishing 13 journals sponsored by the Government of Egypt. This is an opportunity to discuss some issues of relevance to the goals and s
Re: [GOAL] SpringerOpen, Egypt and academic freedom
Reader caution: discussion of matters like attacks on academic freedom as found in this thread may upset some people. This is a response to David Prosser's comments. Comment: I am sorry that David is not feeling well. If others feel sick about what is happening to academics in Egypt, I understand. That's how I feel about this, too. There are many things that happen in the world that I find disturbing. My approach, with respect to events that intersect my areas of expertise, is to think about such events, ask questions and propose potential solutions to make the world a better place. In this spirit, I repeat the specific question that David alludes to. Question: is attribution necessarily desirable for scholars? This is part of the larger question of the relationship between academic freedom and open access. My argument is that academic freedom is essential to open access. We live in a world where academics can be targeted for what they study or what they say about what they study. This doesn't only happen in countries like Egypt. Governments in North America have recently begun taking exception to climate change research. In Canada, under the former Conservative government, government scientists were muzzled. In the U.S., I have heard about a professor's watchlist targeting liberal professors. No academics have killed in North America that I know of, but otherwise there is some similarity with what is happening in Egypt today. This is important in the context of scholarly publishing because some of the latest technological developments appear to assume that matters such as attribution are neutral or beneficial. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of David Prosser Sent: Thursday, August 8, 2019 5:20:24 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: radicalopenacc...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Re: [GOAL] SpringerOpen, Egypt and academic freedom Attention : courriel externe | external email Dr Morrison’s arguments against the CC-BY licence are well known to readers of this list and I acknowledge her sincerely held, and consistent, views on this. But I’m afraid that I find using the murder of students to further, however tangentially, that argument quite sickening. David On 7 Aug 2019, at 23:01, Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: SpringerOpen is currently publishing 13 journals sponsored by the Government of Egypt. This is an opportunity to discuss some issues of relevance to the goals and sustainability of open access, starting with academic freedom. As described by Holmes and Aziz (2019) there are very serious problems with academic freedom in Egypt, ranging from tight government control over what is studied and published to extrajudicial killings of 21 students in the last few years. The University of Liverpool considered, then rejected, a lucrative offer to set up a campus in Egypt due to concerns about reputational damage. This raises some interesting questions. Academic freedom is critical to any kind of meaningful open access. Nothing could possibly be more in opposite to open access than a dead student whose research was destroyed because of what was studied. Why is SpringerOpen partnering with the Government of Egypt? Should academics boycott SpringerOpen because of this partnership? What, if anything, can academics do to support academic freedom in a country like Egypt? Some believe that the Creative Commons license CC-BY (attribution only) is the best for open access (I don’t agree, but this is a separate topic). If your research could get you killed, attribution might not be a good idea. Today, some of us might assume that these kinds of problems would never happen in our own countries; but times change, and it has happened that places that enjoyed freedom at one point in time came under the control of a dictator. Following is the list of titles which state on the SpringerOpen site that they are supported by the “Specialized Presidential Council for Education and Scientific Research (Government of Egypt), so author-payable article-processing charges do not apply”. Journals supported by the Government of Egypt published by SpringerOpen as of July 2019 Ain Shams Journal of Anesthesiology Bulletin of the National Research Centre Egyptian Journal of Biological Pest Control Egyptian Journal of Forensic Sciences Egyptian Journal of Medical Human Genetics Egyptian Journal of Neurosurgery Egyptian Journal of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine Egyptian Pediatric Association Gazette Journal of the Eg
[GOAL] SpringerNature and Macmillan: one company, two directions: open access and IP maximization
SpringerNature, owner of Springer Open, Nature, and BioMedCentral, positions itself as a leader in the open access movement. However, Springer, Nature, and BMC are only 3 of the brands of the parent company, SpringerNature Group. The purpose of this post is to raise awareness about the dual approach of the parent company with respect to copyright and intellectual property - positioning itself as both a leader in open access and a leader in IP maximization, and to encourage those with a sincere interest in the goal of open access to learn about, and question, organizations with an interest in serving this area. While the SpringerNature site today states that it is: "A new force in research publishing Springer Nature is the world’s largest academic book publisher, publisher of the world's most influential journals, and a pioneer in the field of open research" (from: https://group.springernature.com/gp/group; ...another of the company's brands, Macmillan, is sending letters to creators complaining that library lending is cannibalizing sales, and is further restricting paid library use of works. See the Canadian Urban Libraries' Council on this matter here: http://www.culc.ca/cms_lib/CULC%20Statement%20on%20Macmillan%20US%20Lending.pdf Following are the brands listed on the SpringerNature group site as of today: Our brand sites * Springer<https://www.springer.com/> * Nature Research<http://www.nature.com/> * BiomedCentral<http://www.biomedcentral.com> * Palgrave Macmillan<http://www.palgrave.com> * Macmillan Education<http://www.macmillaneducation.com> * Springer Healthcare<http://www.springerhealthcare.com/> * Scientific American<http://www.scientificamerican.com> In addition to open access, this company is involved in toll access textbook publishing and rentals and educational services that appear to compete with public education services. Even among the 3 brands involved in open access, 2 (Springer and Nature Research) have a long history of making money through subscriptions and sales. Even today, this is probably a much larger source of income than open access, and one of these brands' main assets is copyright ownership of a large corpus of works. To understand the potential futures of open access, it is important to understand the nature of the players involved. The friendly staff of Springer Open are no doubt a pleasure to work with for people in the OA movement, and sincere in their embrace of OA. However, when they tell you that true open access requires open licensing granting blanket downstream permission for commercial uses, they might not be aware that some of these commercial uses could involve for-profit textbook sales and rentals. Unlike Elsevier, SpringerNatureGroup does not post financial information on its website. As a publicly traded corporation, Elsevier is obliged to provide this kind of transparency, including profits and business strategy. The corporation as a form of business can be viewed as an early form of openness in business; anyone can buy shares and participate in profits and decision-making. Springer is privately owned, and has no such obligation. In this respect, Springer is far less open than Elsevier. This will be re-posted on the sustainingknowledgecommons.org blog. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] SpringerOpen: ceased, now hybrid, and OA identification challenges
Abstract SpringerNature, owner of Nature Publishing Group, Springer Open, and BioMedCentral, is the world’s largest fully open access journal publisher as measured by number of journals. The purpose of this post is to underscore what appears to be a significant open access attrition rate at SpringerOpen (15% OA attrition in the past few years) and raise questions about challenges to finding and identifying these journals as open access. Ceased journals that were always open access are listed on the SpringerLink (mostly subscriptions) site, not the SpringerOpen website. Subscriptions articles are clearly marked as such; the OA status of an article is not stated on the journal home page. Information provided by a library about License Terms may not mention or resemble a CC license. Details: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/07/22/springer-open-ceased-now-hybrid-oa-identification-challenges/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re-use of photos of people requires consent
This BBC news article today about a man who discovered that pictures of his amputated leg had been used in ads without his consent may help to illustrate one of the problems with pushing for OA with ubiquitous licensing. I have no idea if the image was CC licensed or not; that is not the point, rather the point is to give more thought to the implications of re-use. In brief, with such images other rights are often involved besides copyright, such as privacy and publicity rights. Article here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49029845 If researchers and publishers use CC licenses that actively invite re-use of material, they increase the chances of situations like this for human subjects. Researchers in Canada have an ethical obligation to protect human subjects; I submit that this is reason to avoid open licensing with such material. People who have consented to participate in a weight loss study have not consented to have their photos used in targeted advertising to their friends on social media by weight loss companies. I argue that a weight loss company would have good reason to interpret CC-BY as an invitation to this kind of downstream commercial use. This is also a legal risk for researchers, their employers, publishers and policy-makers who require open licensing, because a problematic downstream re-user could use the open license as a defence. This could start a chain of lawsuits (I thought this was ok because CC-BY: sue author; author used CC-BY because advised or required to do so by journal or policy-maker, author sues journal or policy-maker...) It is naive to think that a blanket invitation to re-use material from scholarly works will be used exclusively or even primarily for the purposes of advancing knowledge. Common uses of material such as images of people in social media include (along with many beneficial uses) cyberbullying, doxing, revenge porn, targeted advertising, posting, re-posting and tagging photos without permission, and altering photos without permission, to name a few not-so-social uses of new media. I wish we lived in a world where mutual respect and consideration could be taken for granted. Today, it is not clear that we can expect this standard even from elected leaders. For human subjects, it is not much to ask that we take the small step of avoiding attaching licenses granting blanket downstream re-use rights to anyone, to reduce the risk of harm and to make it as easy as possible to use legal remedies to stop harm, should this be necessary. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] corrected URLs Re: Latin America: long-time peerless leader in open access
oops - corrected URLs below From: Radical Open Access on behalf of Heather Morrison Sent: Monday, July 15, 2019 4:37:33 PM To: radicalopenacc...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Latin America: long-time peerless leader in open access This post is a public response to Debat and Babini's article Plan S in Latin America: A precautionary note and invitation to participate in open peer review. In brief: Latin America has long been a leader in open access. Debat and Babini are experts without peers; their article should be read carefully by open access policy-makers not only in Latin America, and those involved with PlanS in Europe, but everywhere else, too. Latin America: long-time peerless leader in open access: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/07/15/latin-america-long-time-peerless-leader-in-open-access/ Should the authors desire a full open peer review, it would be an honour for me to undertake this work, under the conditions explained in the following post (e.g. my work must be OA with ARR copyright - no CC license, with All Rights Reserved copyright: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/07/15/open-peer-review-a-preliminary-review-an-open-offer-observations-and-discussion/ This has inspired me to update a 2005 post (building on prior work of Harnad and others) on open peer review, with ideas, links and an invitation to participate in experimentation and discussion, which can be found here: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/07/15/open-peer-review-a-model-an-invitation-2019-update/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 To unsubscribe from the RADICALOPENACCESS list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=RADICALOPENACCESS=1 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Latin America: long-time peerless leader in open access
This post is a public response to Debat and Babini's article Plan S in Latin America: A precautionary note and invitation to participate in open peer review. In brief: Latin America has long been a leader in open access. Debat and Babini are experts without peers; their article should be read carefully by open access policy-makers not only in Latin America, and those involved with PlanS in Europe, but everywhere else, too. Latin America: long-time peerless leader in open access: https://wordpress.com/post/sustainingknowledgecommons.org/3463 Should the authors desire a full open peer review, it would be an honour for me to undertake this work, under the conditions explained in the following post (e.g. my work must be OA with ARR copyright - no CC license, with explanation): https://wordpress.com/post/sustainingknowledgecommons.org/3463 This has inspired me to update a 2005 post (building on prior work of Harnad and others) on open peer review, with ideas, links and an invitation to participate in experimentation and discussion, which can be found here: https://wordpress.com/post/sustainingknowledgecommons.org/3463 best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members
Thank you PMR. I think we agree that it is problematic for Elsevier (or other publishers) to retain copyright, with or without CC licenses. It appears that we agree that publishers can use CC licenses with what is in effect a copyright transfer. That is, if Elsevier uses CC-NC licenses to reserve commercial rights for Elsevier, this means that E. is the owner of commercial rights, the Licensor (therefore copyright ownership at least implied) of the CC license. Did I get this right? If so, I argue that this is problematic, contrary to the common belief that CC licenses in scholarly communication involve author copyright retention, and something that merits further discussion and analysis. best, Heather From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Peter Murray-Rust Sent: Monday, July 8, 2019 5:01 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members Attention : courriel externe | external email Scopus does not only index Elsevier journals https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/11274/supporthub/scopus/ "Over 24,000 titles, including 4,200 Open Access journals from more than 5,000 international publishers." So the CC BY licence is irrelevant - the ability for Elsevier to index will depend on the agreement between the 5000 publishers and Elsevier. I expect these are confidential and how much is paid. I assume that other indexers could set up similar deals - and this would allow competition at a price. The main problem with non-CC BY "open access" in Elsevier journals (e.g. CC NC ) is that forbids anyone else re-use the content, but because Elsevier has a contract with the authors they have a monopoly on re-use (often tens of thousands of dollars in reprints). That's the absolute downside of CC NC ND. P. On Mon, Jul 8, 2019 at 9:18 PM Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: Thank you Christian. Following are some points of agreement and relevant research, and follow-up questions. I think we agree that re-directing funding from subscriptions / purchase to fund production (shift economics from demand to supply side) is key to OA transition - I made this point with a broad brush global analysis illustrating the potential to do so with considerable cost savings for libraries / institutions in First Monday in 2013: https://firstmonday.org/article/view/4370/3685 Houghton et al. conducted an economic analysis of the potential transition for the UK using 3 models (gold, green, transformative system building peer review on archives) and found the transformative approach the most cost-effective by far. This work used to be open access, but today this funded study now appears to be limited to access in specific reading rooms: J. Houghton, B. Rasmussen, P. Sheehan, C. Oppenheim, A. Morris, C. Creaser, H. Greenwood, M. Summers, and A. Gourlay, 2009a. “Economics implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefit” (27 January), at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx, accessed 7 February 2010. To get back to your points on Elsevier, some questions: 1. You are assuming global and permanent cancellation by academic and research libraries to all Elsevier journal subscriptions. Correct? 2. What about Science Direct? It integrates journal subscriptions, but it is a search service. Do you assume global and permanent cancellation of Science Direct as search service too? 3. What about Scopus? This service is used in rankings as well as for searching - customers include universities for institutional ranking purposes and third party ranking services. If the idea of global and permanent cancellations to subscriptions is a success, but Elsevier proprietary content is a key market advantage for this type of product, this might eliminate the transformative potential hoped for from global and permanent subscription cancellations. 4. What about Elsevier published content to date? If Elsevier no longer distributes such content, what will happen with this content and access to it? As a reminder, almost all Elsevier journals allow author self-archiving: http://sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php best, Heather Morrison From: goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org>> on behalf of Christian Gutknecht mailto:christian.gutkne...@bluewin.ch>> Sent: Monday, July 8, 2019 3:25:05 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members Attention : courriel externe | external email Well, I propose the following: 1. Academic Institutions should eventually stop paying for subscriptions (like Germany, UC etc) 2. Then the free money should be use to fund
Re: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members
Thank you Michelle. It is helpful to know that Scopus is included in research4life, and I note the good work of this initiative. For the purposes of analysis of the appropriateness of CC-BY for open access, please note that CC-BY materials are likely being accessed today through a toll access service, Scopus, whether through fully paid services, or partially or fully subsidized services in select low income countries. In the latter case, these works are accessed not as open access, but rather as part of a service which requires registration and access provisions which I gather are similar to subscription services, i.e. reading requires providing evidence of being a member of a particular institution. The difference in vision of open access and research4life is illustrated by the research4life answer to the FAQ question "are there other initiatives for accessing online journals"? https://www.research4life.org/faq/ There is no mention here of open access. There are two links provided for other resources (scroll to the bottom). One link is to the Liblicense Developing Nations Initiatives webpage; the other (not working) is to the program pages. The Liblicense page does not mention open access and does not list major open access sources such as the Directories of Open Access Journals, Books, Repositories, the Bielefeld Open Access Search Engine, PubMed/PubMedCentral, arXiv, etc. etc. Of course it is possible that this is an oversight and that research4life, if notified of the omission, would welcome an update of the FAQ to reflect open access and the widespread availability of OA resources. Although research4life is doing good work, it may be worth noting that according to its website there is commitment on the part of partners to continue this work only until 2025. Also, while charity is wonderful, equity is better. My vision of OA includes a level playing field - everyone can access the resources (recognizing infrastructural and education inequities that also need to be overcome), and everyone qualified can contribute on an equal basis. The latter might be an interesting discussion for another time. best, Heather Morrison From: Leonard, Michelle M Sent: Monday, July 8, 2019 11:37 AM To: Heather Morrison Subject: RE: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members Attention : courriel externe | external email Hello, I encourage you to check out the Research4Life: https://www.research4life.org and find that Elsevier DOES offer Scopus and thousands of other journals/book access to participating, under-represented countries (contrary to your statement below). Other publishers also offer thousands of journals/books to underrepresented counties. Here is a few videos that we developed for our faculty who are working on a USAID grant to Feed the Future. http://livestocklab.ifas.ufl.edu/events/webinars-on-literature-access/ Warm regards, Michelle Michelle Leonard Associate University Librarian Liaison to Animal Sciences, M.E. Rinker, Sr., School of Construction Management, Civil & Coastal Engineering, Entomology & Nematology, Geological Sciences, Soil & Water Sciences Marston Science Library University of Florida mleon...@uflib.ufl.edu<mailto:mleon...@uflib.ufl.edu>; 352-273-2866 (ph) http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/msl/about/faculty/mleonard.html orcid.org/-0002-9017-3591 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org On Behalf Of Christian Gutknecht Sent: Monday, July 8, 2019 11:14 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members Hi Heather Sorry, I can’t follow you on that: Increase in monopoly power for Elsevier: anyone can use the CC licensed material to create a competitor to Scopus, however only Elsevier can use their copyrighted work. CC-BY reduces the likelihood of successful competition. The problem here is obviously not the CC-BY content, but the the non-open content of Elsevier. So forcing Elsevier also to use CC-BY for their „own“ content would enable competition for analysis tools like Scopus. Best regards Christian Am 08.07.2019 um 15:39 schrieb Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>>: In related news: Elsevier's toll access service Scopus now includes 5,393 open access journals. This is helpful to illustrate and analyze some of the implications of blanket downstream commercial re-use (e.g. CC-BY): Extra profit for Elsevier: no need to pay CC-BY journals, and open licensing reduces their costs for clarifying permissions. Increase in monopoly power for Elsevier: anyone can use the CC licensed material to create a competitor to Scopus, however only Elsevier can use their copyrighted work. CC-BY reduces the likelihood of successful competition. Development of underdevelopment: authors f
Re: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members
Thank you Christian. Following are some points of agreement and relevant research, and follow-up questions. I think we agree that re-directing funding from subscriptions / purchase to fund production (shift economics from demand to supply side) is key to OA transition - I made this point with a broad brush global analysis illustrating the potential to do so with considerable cost savings for libraries / institutions in First Monday in 2013: https://firstmonday.org/article/view/4370/3685 Houghton et al. conducted an economic analysis of the potential transition for the UK using 3 models (gold, green, transformative system building peer review on archives) and found the transformative approach the most cost-effective by far. This work used to be open access, but today this funded study now appears to be limited to access in specific reading rooms: J. Houghton, B. Rasmussen, P. Sheehan, C. Oppenheim, A. Morris, C. Creaser, H. Greenwood, M. Summers, and A. Gourlay, 2009a. “Economics implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefit” (27 January), at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx, accessed 7 February 2010. To get back to your points on Elsevier, some questions: 1. You are assuming global and permanent cancellation by academic and research libraries to all Elsevier journal subscriptions. Correct? 2. What about Science Direct? It integrates journal subscriptions, but it is a search service. Do you assume global and permanent cancellation of Science Direct as search service too? 3. What about Scopus? This service is used in rankings as well as for searching - customers include universities for institutional ranking purposes and third party ranking services. If the idea of global and permanent cancellations to subscriptions is a success, but Elsevier proprietary content is a key market advantage for this type of product, this might eliminate the transformative potential hoped for from global and permanent subscription cancellations. 4. What about Elsevier published content to date? If Elsevier no longer distributes such content, what will happen with this content and access to it? As a reminder, almost all Elsevier journals allow author self-archiving: http://sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php best, Heather Morrison From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Christian Gutknecht Sent: Monday, July 8, 2019 3:25:05 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members Attention : courriel externe | external email Well, I propose the following: 1. Academic Institutions should eventually stop paying for subscriptions (like Germany, UC etc) 2. Then the free money should be use to fund pure OA (through APCs, memberships, or any other well working OA business models out there) 3. Funders and Institutions should then refine and tackle the issues of Gold OA, like the cost transparency of publishing services, requirements for metadata, formats, workflows, archiving, tdm, licences (like CC-BY requirement as defined in Berlin and Budapest). The subscription model, and hence the exclusiveness of Elsevier’s content only exists because academic institutions and especially libraries let Elsevier have this power by keep subscribing and ignoring alternatives. Best regards Christian Am 08.07.2019 um 17:38 schrieb Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>>: hi Christian, Thank you for your contribution... Regarding your argument: "forcing Elsevier also to use CC-BY for their „own“ content would enable competition for analysis tools like Scopus", I have some questions. Let's start with: Are you and/or others proposing to force Elsevier to use CC-BY for their "own" content?** If so, how do you propose to do this and which of Elsevier's content? best, Heather Morrison ** Side note: this is problematic, but let's leave this for now. From: goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org>> on behalf of Christian Gutknecht mailto:christian.gutkne...@bluewin.ch>> Sent: Monday, July 8, 2019 11:14 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members Attention : courriel externe | external email Hi Heather Sorry, I can’t follow you on that: Increase in monopoly power for Elsevier: anyone can use the CC licensed material to create a competitor to Scopus, however only Elsevier can use their copyrighted work. CC-BY reduces the likelihood of successful competition. The problem here is obviously not the CC-BY content, but the the non-open content of Elsevier. So forcing Elsevier also to use CC-BY for their „own“ content would enable competition for analysis tools
Re: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members
hi Christian, Thank you for your contribution... Regarding your argument: "forcing Elsevier also to use CC-BY for their „own“ content would enable competition for analysis tools like Scopus", I have some questions. Let's start with: Are you and/or others proposing to force Elsevier to use CC-BY for their "own" content?** If so, how do you propose to do this and which of Elsevier's content? best, Heather Morrison ** Side note: this is problematic, but let's leave this for now. From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Christian Gutknecht Sent: Monday, July 8, 2019 11:14 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members Attention : courriel externe | external email Hi Heather Sorry, I can’t follow you on that: Increase in monopoly power for Elsevier: anyone can use the CC licensed material to create a competitor to Scopus, however only Elsevier can use their copyrighted work. CC-BY reduces the likelihood of successful competition. The problem here is obviously not the CC-BY content, but the the non-open content of Elsevier. So forcing Elsevier also to use CC-BY for their „own“ content would enable competition for analysis tools like Scopus. Best regards Christian Am 08.07.2019 um 15:39 schrieb Heather Morrison mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>>: In related news: Elsevier's toll access service Scopus now includes 5,393 open access journals. This is helpful to illustrate and analyze some of the implications of blanket downstream commercial re-use (e.g. CC-BY): Extra profit for Elsevier: no need to pay CC-BY journals, and open licensing reduces their costs for clarifying permissions. Increase in monopoly power for Elsevier: anyone can use the CC licensed material to create a competitor to Scopus, however only Elsevier can use their copyrighted work. CC-BY reduces the likelihood of successful competition. Development of underdevelopment: authors from poor countries get the benefit of increased exposure with OA, but are locked out of the next generation of services built on this such as Scopus. CC-BY is not sufficient to achieve the vision of sharing the knowledge of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich; this license facilitates one-way sharing of the poor with the rich, as it lacks a means of ensuring reciprocity. (CC-BY-SA does not ensure reciprocity either; it means use the same license for derivatives, not share like I have. A re-used OA article with CC-BY-SA can be re-used in a TA environment). I recommend against the use of licenses allowing blanket commercial re-use to authors, journals, OA advocates and policy-makers. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org<http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org> heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca> https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org>> on behalf of Bernie Folan mailto:bernie.fo...@oaspa.org>> Sent: Monday, July 8, 2019 7:01:54 AM To: Bernie Folan Subject: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members Attention : courriel externe | external email ***With apologies for cross posting *** OASPA has published a new blog post summarising the results of a recent OA article data collection exercise carried out with input from OASPA members. You can find the post at https://oaspa.org/growth-continues-for-oaspa-member-oa-content/ Some highlights: * Total growth in output by OASPA members is 23%. This does include some new contributors but on the whole, they were small numbers so don't count much towards the total. * Growth in CC BY articles published in fully OA journals is 18% so this is slightly higher than it has done for the past 5 years. * Over a quarter of a million CC BY articles were published by OASPA members in fully OA journals last year. Do feel free to share within your networks. Best wishes, Bernie Bernie Folan Events and Communications Coordinator, OASPA bernie.fo...@oaspa.org<mailto:bernie.fo...@oaspa.org> ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members
In related news: Elsevier's toll access service Scopus now includes 5,393 open access journals. This is helpful to illustrate and analyze some of the implications of blanket downstream commercial re-use (e.g. CC-BY): Extra profit for Elsevier: no need to pay CC-BY journals, and open licensing reduces their costs for clarifying permissions. Increase in monopoly power for Elsevier: anyone can use the CC licensed material to create a competitor to Scopus, however only Elsevier can use their copyrighted work. CC-BY reduces the likelihood of successful competition. Development of underdevelopment: authors from poor countries get the benefit of increased exposure with OA, but are locked out of the next generation of services built on this such as Scopus. CC-BY is not sufficient to achieve the vision of sharing the knowledge of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich; this license facilitates one-way sharing of the poor with the rich, as it lacks a means of ensuring reciprocity. (CC-BY-SA does not ensure reciprocity either; it means use the same license for derivatives, not share like I have. A re-used OA article with CC-BY-SA can be re-used in a TA environment). I recommend against the use of licenses allowing blanket commercial re-use to authors, journals, OA advocates and policy-makers. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Bernie Folan Sent: Monday, July 8, 2019 7:01:54 AM To: Bernie Folan Subject: [GOAL] Results of OA article data collection from OASPA members Attention : courriel externe | external email ***With apologies for cross posting *** OASPA has published a new blog post summarising the results of a recent OA article data collection exercise carried out with input from OASPA members. You can find the post at https://oaspa.org/growth-continues-for-oaspa-member-oa-content/ Some highlights: * Total growth in output by OASPA members is 23%. This does include some new contributors but on the whole, they were small numbers so don't count much towards the total. * Growth in CC BY articles published in fully OA journals is 18% so this is slightly higher than it has done for the past 5 years. * Over a quarter of a million CC BY articles were published by OASPA members in fully OA journals last year. Do feel free to share within your networks. Best wishes, Bernie Bernie Folan Events and Communications Coordinator, OASPA bernie.fo...@oaspa.org<mailto:bernie.fo...@oaspa.org> ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] The dialectic of open
Possibly of interest: my most recent presentation on the logical contradictions inherent in the concept of "open" in our current capitalist society, using the method of critical dialectics developed by the Frankfurt School (aka open dialectics). Abstract In contemporary Western society the word open is used as if the concept were essentially good. This is a logical fallacy; the only concept that is in essence good is the concept good itself. In this paper I will argue that this is a dangerous fallacy that opens the door to misdirection and co-optation of genuine advocates of the public good accidentally through misconception and deliberately by actors whose motives are far from open, that a critical dialectic approach is useful to unravel and counter such fallacies, and present a simple pedagogical technique that I have found to be effective to teach critical thinking to university students in this area. The province of Ontario under the Ford government describes itself as open for business. In this context, open means open for exploitation, and closure is protection for the environment and vulnerable people. This is one example of openwashing, taking advantage of the use of the term by large numbers of “open” advocates whose work is based on very different motives. Open access, according to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, is a potential unprecedented public good, a collective global sharing of the scholarly knowledge of humankind. A sizable portion of the open access movement is adamant that open access requires nothing less than all of the world’s scholars making their work not only free of charge, but free for downstream manipulation and re-use for commercial purposes. This frees up knowledge for creative new approaches to more rapidly advance our knowledge; it is also a new area for capitalist expansion and can be seen as selling out scholarship. Is this necessary, sufficient, or even desirable to achieve the vision of global sharing of open access? Open education can be seen as the next phase in the democratization of education, a new field for capitalist expansion, a tool for authoritarian control and/or a tool for further control of the next generation proletariat or precariat. Open government can facilitate an expansion of democracy, to further engage citizens in decision-making, a means of enhancing and improving government services, and/or another means of transitioning public services to the private sector that is typical of the (perhaps post) neoliberal era. Proactive open government can mean more transparent, accountable government; it can also mean open access to the documents and data that those in power choose to share. This paper will analyze the rhetoric of key documents from the open movements, evidence presented to support these beliefs, and explore whether these belief systems reflect myth based on misconception and/or misdirection by actors with ulterior motives using a theoretical lens drawn from the political economics, particularly Hegelian dialectics in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and contemporary Marxist analysis. Link to full presentation: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/39300 Questions and comments are welcome, on the GOAL list or the blogpost: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/06/12/the-dialectic-of-open/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Metrics, old and new: a critical perspective
One of the long-term challenges to transitioning scholarly communication to open access is reliance on bibliometrics. Many authors and organizations are working to address this challenge. The purpose of this post is to share some highlights of my work in progress, a book chapter (preprint) designed to explain the current state of bibliometrics in the context of a critique of global university rankings. Some reflections in brief that are new and relevant to advocates of open access and changes in evaluation of scholarly work follow. Impact:it is not logical to equate impact with quality, and further, it is dangerous to do so. New metrics (or altmetrics) serve many purposes and should be developed and used, but should be avoided in the context of evaluating the quality of scholarship. New metrics are likely to change scholarship, but not necessarily in the ways anticipated by the open access movement. It is possible to evaluate scholarly research without recourse to metrics. The University of Ottawa’s collective agreement with full-time faculty reflects a model that not only avoids the problems of metrics, but is an excellent model for change in scholarly communication as it is recognized that scholarly works may take many forms. The full blogpost and a link to the book chapter preprint can be found here: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/05/22/what-counts-in-research-dysfunction-in-knowledge-creation-moving-beyond/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] BMC update: 66% of journals increased APC from 2018 - 2019, 61% far above inflationary rates
We thank Springer Nature's Christopher Pym for his opinion on the GOAL list regarding of analysis of BMC price increases from 2018 - 2019: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2019-May/005123.html Errors are always possible with this type of work, and so I conducted a second analysis, this time limited to 260 BMC journals for which we have APC data for both 2018 and 2019, using GBP (for historical reasons, we use this as the main currency for BMC). Findings in brief: This re-analysis confirms our original finding of a sharp increase in APCs. 66% of BMC journals for which we have APC data in GBP for both 2018 and 2019 have increased their APCs; 61% have increased their APCs at far beyond inflationary levels, causing the overall average (including journals that did not change APCs or lowered APCs) to increase by 15%, a rate far beyond inflationary levels. We thank Christopher Pym for his interest in our research. Please note that slight changes in method (sampling limited to journals for which we have APCs for both years, currency selection), result in some differences in results, while both approaches support the conclusion of "sharp increases in APCs". Details and a table showing the BMC journals price changes in decreasing order by % change are posted here: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/04/30/biomed-central-in-2019-sharp-increase-in-article-processing-charge/ Further inquiries are welcome and helpful. This is a form of open peer review. Having publishers check our findings is a type of rigorous critique that typical academic peer review could easily miss. <https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/04/30/biomed-central-in-2019-sharp-increase-in-article-processing-charge/>best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Frontiers and BioMedCentral APC prices 2019
Two recent posts that might be of interest (thanks to Hamid Pashaei): BioMedCentral in 2019: sharp increase in article processing charge Abstract: Our recent analysis of BioMed Central publishing company journals reveals a sharp increase both in number of open access journals and also article processing fees. BMC currently publishes 330 open access journals that comparing to 2018 data shows an increase of 11% in number of journals. While 25 journals have no article processing fee for authors to publish their articles, there has been a 57% increase in average article processing charge comparing to the last year, as the average processing fee was $1402 in 2018 and now it is $2200. Comparing to the last year, 264 journals have increased and 5 journals have decreased in APC (article processing charge). The average APC increase for journals is $917 and the average decrease is $124. Details: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/04/30/biomed-central-in-2019-sharp-increase-in-article-processing-charge/ <https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/04/30/biomed-central-in-2019-sharp-increase-in-article-processing-charge/>Frontiers Abstract: The data for 2019 shows that while most 2019 journals by Frontiers incurred no changes in article processing charge comparing to 2018, but the increase in APC of 23 journals (40% of Frontier journals) is significant, with APC increases of 18% – 31%. Frontiers currently publishes 62 journals that shows 10% growth in the number of journals comparing to 56 journals in 2018. Of these, 23 journals (40%) have an increase of $774 in article processing charges but the other journals have no change in comparison to 2018 data. Therefore, the overall increase in Article processing journals for all Frontiers open access journals is 3 percent. Details: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/04/30/frontiers-in-2019-3-increase-in-average-apc/ Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] URL correction Fw: Open access versus the commons
The correct URL for this post is: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/04/23/open-access-versus-the-commons-or-steps-towards-developing-commons-to-sustain-open-access/ Open access versus the commons, or steps towards developing commons to sustain open access<https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/04/23/open-access-versus-the-commons-or-steps-towards-developing-commons-to-sustain-open-access/> sustainingknowledgecommons.org by Heather Morrison Abstract The concept of open access is complementary to, and in opposition to the commons. The similarities and overlap appear to be taken for granted; for example, many people … From: Heather Morrison Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 4:27 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Open access versus the commons Abstract The concept of open access is complementary to, and in opposition to the commons. The similarities and overlap appear to be taken for granted; for example, many people assume that open access and Creative Commons just go together. The purpose of this post is to explore the essential opposition of the two concepts. The so-called “tragedy of the commons” is actually the tragedy of unmanaged open access. Understanding this opposition is helpful to analyze the potential of commons analysis to develop and sustain actual commons (cool pool resources) to support open access works. Ostrom’s design principles for common pool resources are listed with comments and examples of open access supports that illustrate the principles and a proposed modified list design to meet the needs of open access infrastructure is presented. Details: https://wordpress.com/post/sustainingknowledgecommons.org/3430 best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Open access versus the commons
Abstract The concept of open access is complementary to, and in opposition to the commons. The similarities and overlap appear to be taken for granted; for example, many people assume that open access and Creative Commons just go together. The purpose of this post is to explore the essential opposition of the two concepts. The so-called “tragedy of the commons” is actually the tragedy of unmanaged open access. Understanding this opposition is helpful to analyze the potential of commons analysis to develop and sustain actual commons (cool pool resources) to support open access works. Ostrom’s design principles for common pool resources are listed with comments and examples of open access supports that illustrate the principles and a proposed modified list design to meet the needs of open access infrastructure is presented. Details: https://wordpress.com/post/sustainingknowledgecommons.org/3430 best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Plan S: APC and service level
hi Victor, Thank you for raising a suggestion about connecting APCs to service levels, i.e. journals with more services charging more for APCs. Some thoughts on this subject follow. In brief, I agree with Babini that the APC model is problematic for OA. I argue that the APC model is not consistent with the vision or GOAL for OA, and has the potential to continue or exacerbate market problems with scholarly publishing. Research funder policies requiring OA are welcome, but in my opinion should focus exclusively on OA archiving and in particular should avoid encouraging or financially supporting APCs. Details Vision The first paragraph of the original Budapest Open Access Initiative (see below) is the best brief description of what I consider the GOAL of open access (or the global knowledge commons, the term I use): https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read "An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge". Comment: a commons as described by Bambini is a better fit to achieve this vision than an APC market. Fostering APCs and allowing journals with more services to charge more is an "even more for the rich" approach, the exact opposite of "laying the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation". Transitioning market dysfunction? The transition to open access is taking place in the context of a scholarly communication ecosystem that has been dysfunctional for at least half a century. The market has become very concentrated, and a few large commercial scholarly publishers have gained large profits in an inelastic market, arguably at the expense of access and dissemination, not-for-profit university presses, smaller journals and societies, and the less well endowed humanities and social sciences. In the process of transition to open access via APCs, there are 2 reasonable hypotheses that we are exploring through the longitudinal APC project. Will APCs introduce competition and lower prices because they are more transparent than subscriptions? OR, will a transition to APCs simply transfer the must-purchase imperative that created an inelastic subscriptions market to an equally (or possibly more) dysfunctional must-pay-to-publish in system. To date, our evidence is far from conclusive. Recent evidence (large percentage price increases by some APC publishers) tends to support the hypothesis of transitioning an inelastic market. Any approach that focuses on transitioning the existing large commercial publishers seems likely to transition the marketing strategies of these companies. To minimize this possibility, I recommend an exclusive policy focus on OA archiving and dissemination via OA archives; leave the market (and the commons) to adjust. Some OA journals and publishers are successfully using APCs. Most OA journals do not use them. There are, in my opinion, better models. For example, I recommend direct subsidies as either APCs or subscriptions / purchase are essentially less-efficient indirect subsidy models, because in the case of scholarly publishing the authors and readers are largely the same group. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Victor Venema Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 11:39:39 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Plan S: APC and service level Dear colleagues, One of the discussions of Plan S is about its impact on researchers from less wealthy institutions. The article below is typical and I found the comment below insightful. It made me wonder, would it be possible to link APCs to the service level? We could make a system where you can only ask for the maximum APC mentioned in plan S if you provide all services requ
[GOAL] Why I oppose conflating open access and open licensing
In brief, my reasons for opposing conflation of open access and open licensing is that open licenses are not sufficient, necessary, or always desirable for open access. Not sufficient: there are two reasons why open licenses are not sufficient. One is that there is nothing in CC licenses that obligates any copyright holder or downstream re-user to continue to make a work available at all, never mind free of charge. For example, an obvious beneficiary of works made available for commercial downstream re-use is Elsevier through their toll access search service Scopus. If we consider “free of charge” to be an essential element of open access (I do), CC licenses allowing downstream commercial use are not enough. The second reason is that scholars will always need to study and draw from works that are beyond the scope of research, and for this reason we need strong fair use / fair dealing provisions in copyright. For example, while PLOS is a model for open licensing with respect to articles published, as a scholar in the area of open access economics, I need to be able to quote language from the PLOS website in this area, and the PLOS website per se is All Rights Reserved; my work requires fair dealing rights. PLOS is not unusual in this; differential licensing is common for “CCBY by default” publishers. Not necessary: works that are online, free to read and free of most technological restrictions on re-use are in effect sufficient for most of the intended purposes of open licensing. Consider what Google is able to do with internet-based works without having to restrict searching to works that are openly licensing. A work in HTML or XML with no technological protection measures (TPM) and no copyright statement (automatic All Rights Reserved copyright in any Berne country) can be used for text mining and portions of the work can be copied, with attribution, under fair dealing. In contrast, a work with an open license that is produced in a format that includes TPMs is less available for the purposes intended by open licensing than many works that are openly licensed. It is important to understand that TPMs are used not only to protect copyright, but also to protect the integrity of works, for example to look and feel of graphics as well as their position with respect to text. Not necessarily desirable: open licensing, I argue, is not always desirable. For example, researchers who work with human subjects (very common in the social sciences) have a primary ethical duty to protect their subjects from harm. There is a wide range of sensitivity of information shared with researchers, ranging from quasi-public to extremely sensitive. Material such as stories and images shared with researchers for the purposes of advancing knowledge should not be made available on a blanket basis for re-use including commercial purposes. In developing policy attention should be paid to common commercial uses of this kind of material, particularly in the area of social media. Decisions about open licensing are in effect decisions about balancing the benefits of open licensing and our ethical duty to protect human subjects. I argue that our ethical duty to protect human subjects requires a conservative approach, in individual research projects, research support services, and policy-making. This post is an excerpt of a recent open peer review, presented by way of explanation of why I am posting an open peer review in a journal with a default license of CC-BY under All Rights Reserved copyright. The remainder of the sections of this open review that are relevant to copyright are posted below. An open peer review of “Few open access journals are Plan S compliant”: third and final round by Dr. Heather Morrison, Associate Professor, University of Ottawa School of Information Studies, and Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project. Copyright Dr. Heather Morrison, All Rights Reserved (explanation below)… Copyright Dr. Heather Morrison, All Rights Reserved: explanation The default license for MDPI’s Publications is CC-BY. From the perspective of many open access advocates, open licensing is an inherent part of open access. As discussed by the authors, this assumption forms part of the Plan S compliance criteria; compliance requires CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, or CC-0 licensing, with recognition that funded researchers cannot impose open licensing on third party copyright owners whose works are include in Plan S funded researchers’ works. I argue that conflating open access and open licensing is a major strategic error for the open access movement, and that it is important for open access advocates to understand that arguments opposing open licensing requirements can reflect a strong position in favour of open access. It is a mistake to think that because traditional subscription-based publishers oppose open licensing
[GOAL] Open to closed: analysis of public domain government data
Boettcher & Dames (2018) raise some important issues regarding public domain government data. In brief, the U.S. federal government releases data into the public domain by default. This raises 2 potential types of issues: * privacy and security of individuals' data * potential for enclosure / privatization of free public services if the government's data is released as open data but the government does not maintain a free human readable version From: Boettcher, J. C., & Dames, K. M. (2018). Government Data as Intellectual Property: Is Public Domain the same as Open Access? Online Searcher, 42(4), 42–48. https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/1051174 Abstract Public domain and open data policies and how they are made. Current status of open data policies in the Federal government are changing with new laws. What is HR4174/S4047 and what does it say and mean? What are trends in government data policies regarding access to that statistical data? This article will give the reader an understanding of federal policies and laws regarding data. best, Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Science, let's talk: your friend, all the other knowledges.
The purpose of the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons research program is to help in the process of transitioning to a stable global knowledge commons, through which everyone can access all of our collective knowledge free-of-charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions and to which all who are qualified are welcome to contribute. One common problem that I see in the open access movement and in the scientific community (OA or not) is a tendency to conflate knowledge and science. I argue that this is a serious problem not only for other forms of knowledge, but a potential immanent existential threat to science itself. At a recent talk I presented a brief explanation of the argument. Abstract: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/04/09/science-lets-talk-your-friend-all-other-knowledges/ Presentation: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/38890 Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Acknowledging a downside to APC: opening for exploitation
Brainard (2019) in an April 3, 2019 article in Science, reports that a U.S. judge has ruled that a "deceptive" publisher [OMICS] should pay $50 million in damages. This is a timely opportunity to acknowledge a downside of the APC business model, that is, opening up scholarship to further commercial exploitation, including exploitation by publishers that do not or may not meet reasonable standards for academic quality and ethics in publishing, and to make recommendations to limit this potential for exploitation. Abstract The SKC team often focuses on the article processing charges (APC) business model for OA journal publishing, in order to observe and analyze trends. However, this focus is not an endorsement of either OA publishing (as opposed to OA archiving), or the APC business model that is used by a minority of fully OA journals. This post acknowledges a major downside to the APC model. APC "opens up" scholars and scholarly works for further commercial exploitation by traditional and new publishers that offers a wide range of quality in academic terms, ranging from excellent to mediocre and including a few with unethical practices that are not compatible with advancing our collective knowledge.This judge's ruling provides an opportune moment to acknowledge this flaw in the APC business model, and to discuss potential remedies. I argue that it is essential for scholarly publishing to be scholar-led so that advancing scholarship is the primary priority. One model that I recommend as one to build on and expand is the SSHRC Aid to Scholarly Journals<http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/scholarly_journals-revues_savantes-eng.aspx> program. This program provides modest funding to scholarly journals that are under the direction of qualified Canadian academics. This funding is awarded through a competitive process that in effect serves as a journal-level academic peer review process. OA initiatives where key decisions are made by the research community (directly or through librarian representatives) are more likely to ensure high quality and ethical services than policies favouring and/or providing support for OA publishing with no clear vetting process of publication venues. Full post: https://wordpress.com/post/sustainingknowledgecommons.org/3419 best, Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Sage Open Access
Zero embargo sounds promising. Can someone from Sage explain what this means? Possible interpretations: - No embargo on self-archived articles - No embargo on Sage's fully OA journals - No embargo on Sage titles in transformative deal - No embargo on Sage titles in subscription packages (Sage packages or 3rd party bundles) - Sage plans to become an all-OA publisher best, Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Valerie McCutcheon Sent: Thursday, April 4, 2019 7:07:26 AM To: goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Sage Open Access I have just been on a panel with Tom Merriweather of Sage this AM. He says they are going zero embargo for journals. Valerie -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org On Behalf Of goal-requ...@eprints.org Sent: 04 April 2019 12:00 To: goal@eprints.org Subject: GOAL Digest, Vol 89, Issue 2 Send GOAL mailing list submissions to goal@eprints.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to goal-requ...@eprints.org You can reach the person managing the list at goal-ow...@eprints.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of GOAL digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Sage OA 2019: growing number of OA journals, still expensive, APC based, complex pricing trends (Heather Morrison) -- Message: 1 Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2019 17:15:33 +0000 From: Heather Morrison Subject: [GOAL] Sage OA 2019: growing number of OA journals, still expensive, APC based, complex pricing trends To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" Review of Sage Open access database in 2019 shows that the number of their open access journals is growing, they are still following article processing charge model and their payment model is still pricey. Sage currently publishes 1,200 journals. Of these, 200 journals (about 17%) are fully open access. Compared to the last year?s data, there is a net increase of 41 open access journals (26% increase) published by Sage. Out of all open access journals, 185 journals (92 percent) have publication fees, 14 journals have no publication charges and 1 journal lacks the information whether it has processing fee or not. Some journals from the previous years ceased publication and Sage has removed them from their database, but only a few of them are accessible through clockss.org archive. by Hamid Pashaei and Heather Morrison Full post: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/03/30/sage-in-2019-growing-in-oa-journals-still-expensive-complex-pricing-trends/ Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agr?g?, ?cole des Sciences de l'Information, Universit? d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20190403/649823b7/attachment-0001.html -- ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal End of GOAL Digest, Vol 89, Issue 2 *** ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Sage OA 2019: growing number of OA journals, still expensive, APC based, complex pricing trends
Review of Sage Open access database in 2019 shows that the number of their open access journals is growing, they are still following article processing charge model and their payment model is still pricey. Sage currently publishes 1,200 journals. Of these, 200 journals (about 17%) are fully open access. Compared to the last year’s data, there is a net increase of 41 open access journals (26% increase) published by Sage. Out of all open access journals, 185 journals (92 percent) have publication fees, 14 journals have no publication charges and 1 journal lacks the information whether it has processing fee or not. Some journals from the previous years ceased publication and Sage has removed them from their database, but only a few of them are accessible through clockss.org archive. by Hamid Pashaei and Heather Morrison Full post: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/03/30/sage-in-2019-growing-in-oa-journals-still-expensive-complex-pricing-trends/ Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] MDPI: price increases, some hefty, more to come in July
In brief: MDPI has increased prices, in many cases quite substantially (some prices have more than tripled). Even more price increases are anticipated in July 2019, which will have the effect of doubling the average APC and tripling the most common APC. Unlike other publishers’ practices, there are no price decreases. Comment and recommendation: open access advocates, along with policy makers and research funders, and keen to support a transition to open access. In my opinion, the enthusiasm of payers to support APC journals is causing an unhealthy and unsustainable distortion in the market. My advice: stick with green OA policy. Require deposit of funded works in an open access repository. This is a better means to ensure ongoing preservation and open access, and exerts market pressure in a way that is more suited to the development of an economically sustainable open access system. For details and data, see: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/02/13/mdpi-2019-price-increases-some-hefty-and-more-coming-in-july/ MDPI 2019: price increases, some hefty, and more coming in July<https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/02/13/mdpi-2019-price-increases-some-hefty-and-more-coming-in-july/> sustainingknowledgecommons.org In brief: MDPI has increased prices, in many cases quite substantially (some prices have more than tripled). Even more price increases are anticipated in July 2019, which will have the effect of do… Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] PLOS 2018: 3 - 7% APC price increases
Possibly of interest: >From December 2017 to December 2018, APC prices for all PLOS journals were >increased by $100 USD, resulting in percentage increases from 3% – 7%. All >price increase percentages are higher than the U.S. Department of Labour >Statistic’s 2.2% Consumer Price Index increase from November 2017 – December >2018<https://www.bls.gov/cpi/>. The majority of percentage price increases >(4/8) are higher than the average increase in a U.S. faculty member’s salary >according to the American Association of University Professors of 3% ><https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/04/11/aaups-annual-report-faculty-compensation-takes-salary-compression-and-more> > (from April 2018). The most surprising increase from my perspective is the 7% >increase to the APC of PLOS ONE (twice the increase of faculty salaries, >thrice the US CIP increase), because as PLOS’ pioneering megajournal, PLOS >ONE’s practice is peer review limited to assessing whether the science is >sound. Peer review is done by volunteers and coordinated by PLOS using a >highly automated approach; it is difficult to understand how PLOS’ >contribution to PLOS ONE articles justifies an APC of approximately $1,600 USD. Data and links are posted on the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons blog: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2018/12/19/plos-apcs-2018-3-7-price-increases/ <https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2018/12/19/plos-apcs-2018-3-7-price-increases/><https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2018/12/19/plos-apcs-2018-3-7-price-increases/>best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/ heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] OA journals, commercial publishers and society / university partnerships: contrasting trends
Some recent observations from the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons team that may be of interest to list members: Medknow in 2018 - growing fast! by Hamid Pashaei and Heather Morrison Medknow<http://www.medknow.com/> is a commercial scholarly journal publisher based in India, which was acquired by Wolters Kluwer in 2011. The analysis of Medknow’s journals in 2018 shows that there has been a significant increase in number of their journals, with 23% increase comparing to 2017. It appears that most of Medknow’s journals are published in collaboration with different universities and societies in the field of medical research. Details: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2018/12/13/medknow-in-2018-growing-fast/ Elsevier 2018: decrease in OA journals Highlights: in 2017, we found that Elsevier was publishing a large number of fully open access journals with no article processing charges due to society or university sponsorships. In 2018, 88 of these titles have been transferred back to the society or university. There has been a drop in the number of fully OA journals published by Elsevier, from 416 to 328 journals. The majority of Elsevier’s fully OA journals are still non-charging. The average APC for Elsevier fully OA journals in 2018 is $1,470 USD, up 6% from 2017. Details: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2018/12/13/elsevier-in-2018-decrease-in-number-of-fully-oa-journals/ best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa heather.morri...@uottawa.ca Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons sustainingknowledgecommons.org https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Predatory Publishing
Richard, thank you for raising the question of what we might do to help authors who are victims of "predatory publishers". It is likely that the vast majority are good, ethical researchers committed to open access who were not aware of this problem. If their work was not peer reviewed, this doesn't mean it isn't good work or that the author meant to avoid review. Here is a suggestion to help authors of articles in journals that are considered predatory: post-publication peer review. Authors could submit their articles for peer-review and publications of corrections even if they are not able to re-publish their paper due to having given away their copyright. Given the imperfections of the peer review system at its best (see Retraction Watch https://retractionwatch.com for examples), a broader service like this, not limited to questionable journals or requests from authors, could be a high-value service to scholarship. This approach would also fit well with the publication of pre-prints with peer review overlay approach. Who might provide such a service? Perhaps: institutional repositories (for their own authors and students), reputable OA publishers, or other OA services. Funders could help by providing targeted funding for the development of such services. best, Heather Morrison From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Richard Poynder Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2018 9:21:44 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Predatory Publishing Thanks for posting this Falk. I have yet to see concerted action taken anywhere to support researchers who become victims of predatory publishers. I also do not think I see any recognition of their plight, or details of what is being planned to help them, in your document. Perhaps I missed it. Anyway, I have blogged about the topic here: https://poynder.blogspot.com/2018/07/falling-prey-to-predatory-oa-publisher.html Richard Poynder On Wed, 25 Jul 2018, 13:51 Reckling, Falk, mailto:falk.reckl...@fwf.ac.at>> wrote: The Austrian Science Board and the FWF Respond to the Recent Media Reports on the Questionable Practices of Several Scholarly Publishers https://www.fwf.ac.at/en/news-and-media-relations/news/detail/nid/20180724-2314/ ___ Falk Reckling, PhD Head of Department Strategy - Policy, Evaluation, Analysis FWF Austrian Science Fund 1090 Vienna, Sensengasse 1, Austria T: +43 1 505 67 40 8861 M: +43 664 530 73 68 falk.reckl...@fwf.ac.at<mailto:falk.reckl...@fwf.ac.at> CV via ORCID https://orcid.org/-0002-1326-1766 BE OPEN - Science & Society Festival 50 years of top research funded by FWF Sep 8 to 12, 2018 | Vienna | www.fwf.ac.at/beopen<https://www.fwf.ac.at/beopen> [https://www.fwf.ac.at/fileadmin/files/Images/fwf-Logos/beopen_signatur.png] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Why translating all scholarly knowledge for non-specialists using AI is complicated
It is easy to cherry-pick some examples of where this might work and not be problematic. This is useful as an analytic exercise to demonstrate the potential. However it is important to consider and assess negative as well as positive possible consequences. With respect to violation of author's moral rights, under Berne 6bis http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/text.jsp?file_id=283698 authors have the right to object to certain modifications of their work, that may impact the authors reputation, even after transfer of all economic rights. Reputation is critical to an academic career. Has anyone conducted research to find out whether academic authors consider Wikipedia annotations to be an acceptable modification of their work? As an academic author, after using CC licenses permitting modifications for many years, after careful consideration, I have stopped doing this. Your work for me reinforces the wisdom of this decision. I do not wish my work to be annotated or automatically summarized by your project. I suspect that other academic authors will share this perspective. This may include authors who have chosen liberal licenses without realizing that they have inadvertently granted permission for such experiments. CC licenses with the attribution element include author moral rights and remedies for violation of such rights. My advice is to limit this experiment to willing participants. For the avoidance of doubt: I object to your group annotating or automatically summarizing my work. Thank you for the offer to contribute to your project. These posts to GOAL are my contribution. best, Heather Morrison From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Jason Priem Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 1:35:51 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Why translating all scholarly knowledge for non-specialists using AI is complicated Thanks Heather for your continued comments! Good stuff in there. Some responses below: HM: Q1: to clarify, we are talking about peer-reviewed journal articles, right? You are planning to annotate journal articles that are written and vetted by experts using definitions that are developed by anyone who chooses to participate in Wikipedia / Wikidata, i.e. annotating works that are carefully vetted by experts using the contributions of non-experts? Correct. An example may be useful here: The article "More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas" was published in 2017 by PLOS ONE [1], and appeared in hundreds of news stories and thousands of tweets [2]. It's open access which is great. But if you try to read the article, you run into sentences like this: "Here, we used a standardized protocol to measure total insect biomass using Malaise traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 nature protection areas in Germany (96 unique location-year combinations) to infer on the status and trend of local entomofauna." Even as a somewhat well-educated person, I sure don't know what a Malaise trap is, or what entomofauna is. The more I trip over words and concepts like this, the less I want to read the article. I feel like it's just...not for me. But Wiktionary can tell me entomofauna means "insect fauna," [3] and Wikipedia can show me a picture of a Malaise trap (it looks like a tent, turns out) [4]. We're going to bring those kinds of descriptions and definitions right next to the text, so it will feel a bit more like this article IS for me. This isn't going to make the article magically easy to understand, but we think it will help open a door that makes engaging with the literature a bit more inviting. Our early tests with this are very promising. That said, we're certainly going to be iterating on it a lot, and we're not actually attached to any particular implementation details. The goal is to help laypeople access the literature, and do it responsibly. If this turns out to be impossible with this approach, then we'll move on to another one. For us, the key to the Explanation Engine idea is to be modular and flexible, using multiple layered techniques, in order to reduce risk and increase speed. [1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 [2] https://www.altmetric.com/details/27610705 [3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/entomofauna [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaise_trap Q2: who made the decision that this is safe, and how was this decision made? Hm, perhaps I should've been more careful in my original statement. Apologies. There's certainly no formal Decision here...I'm just suggesting that we think the risk of spreading misinformation is relatively low with this approach. That's why we'll start there. But the proof will need to be in the pudding, of course. We'll need to implement this, test it, and so on. Maybe I'm wrong and this is actually a horrible, dang
Re: [GOAL] Why translating all scholarly knowledge for non-specialists using AI is complicated
Further questions / comments for Jason Priem (JP) and anyone who cares to participate... JP: So the first part will be the annotation of difficult words in the text, which is just a mash-up of basic named-entity recognition and Wikipedia/Wikidata definitions. Pretty easy, pretty safe. HM: Q1: to clarify, we are talking about peer-reviewed journal articles, right? You are planning to annotate journal articles that are written and vetted by experts using definitions that are developed by anyone who chooses to participate in Wikipedia / Wikidata, i.e. annotating works that are carefully vetted by experts using the contributions of non-experts? Q2: who made the decision that this is safe, and how was this decision made? Comments: I submit that this is not safe. There are reasons for careful vetting of expertise, through a long process of education and examination, review in the process of hiring, making decisions about tenure, promotion, and grant applications, and then peer review and editing of the work of those qualified to have their work considered. Mine is not an elitist perspective. There are areas where the expertise does not lie in the academy at all; examples include traditional knowledge and native languages. If the author has not given permission, this is a violation of the author's moral rights under copyright. This includes all CC licensed works except CC-0. JP: Another set of features will be automatically categorizing trials as to whether they are double-blind RCTs or not, and automatically finding systematic reviews. These are all pretty easy technically, and pretty unlikely to point people in the wrong directions. But the start adding value right away, making it easier for laypeople to engage with the literature. HM: this does not seem problematic and seems likely to be primarily useful to scholars. I am not opposed to your project, just the assumption that a two-year project is sufficient to create a real-world system to translate all scholarly knowledge for the lay reader. JP: From there we'll move on to the harder stuff like the automatic summarization. Cautiously, and iteratively. We certainly won't be rolling anything out to everyone right away. It's a two-year grant, and we're looking at that as two years of continued development, with constant feedback from users as well as experts in the library and public outreach worlds. If something doesn't work, we throw it away. Part of the process. HM: this is highly problematic. A cautious and iterative approach is wise; however this is not feasible in the context of a two-year grant. May I suggest a small pilot project? Try this with a few articles in an area where at least one member of your team has a doctorate. Take the time to evaluate the summaries. If they look okay to your team, plan a larger evaluation project involving other experts and the lay readers you are aiming to engage (because what an expert thinks a summary says may not be the same as how a non-expert would interpret the same summary). Thank you for posting openly about the approach and for the opportunity to comment. best, Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca> https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 _ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Why translating all scholarly knowledge for non-specialists using AI is complicated
Agreed - one has to start somewhere, and research on using AI to advance knowledge makes a lot of sense. Self-driving cars is a good analogy. Start with research on how-to and the issues that arise (like getting machines to make decisions about who to kill), then you do a lot of testing before you release cars into streets where human beings are walking, cycling, and driving. The same principle applies to scholarly knowledge. If you produce an automated translation of a medical research article into lay language for the non-specialist, first test to ensure that this will do no harm. This will take a lot of time, and will require the involvement of many specialists in medicine. best, Heather Morrison From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Donald Samulack - Editage Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2018 4:03 PM To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Subject: Re: [GOAL] Why translating all scholarly knowledge for non-specialists using AI is complicated Yes, but you have to start somewhere! There is a quote out there (whether accurate or not) that if Henry Ford had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse. Who would ever have thought of a self-driving car, or even a flying car… well, many, actually – and they made it happen! My point is that you have no idea what an exercise of this manner will spin off as a result of the effort – that is why it is called “research”. The goal is a lofty one, but there will be huge wins in scientific language AI along the way. Who knows, it may be necessary for multi-year journeys for lay-person trips to Mars, if something goes wrong with the spaceship along the way (communication delays will be prohibitive to effect any value from Earth; AI will be required for local support). Cheers, Don - Donald Samulack, PhD President, U.S. Operations Cactus Communications, Inc. Editage, a division of Cactus Communications From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2018 1:49 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Why translating all scholarly knowledge for non-specialists using AI is complicated On July 10 Jason Priem wrote about the AI-powered systems "that help explain and contextualize articles, providing concept maps, automated plain-language translations"... that are part of his project's plan to develop a scholarly search engine aimed at a nonspecialist audience. The full post is available here: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2018-July/004890.html We share the goal of making all of the world's knowledge available to everyone without restriction, and I agree that reducing the conceptual barrier for the reader is a laudable goal. However, I think it is important to avoid underestimating the size of this challenge and potential for serious problems to arise. Two factors to consider: the current state of AI, and the conceptual challenges of assessing the validity of automated plain-language translations of scholarly works. Current state of AI - a few recent examples of the current status of AI: Vincent, J. (2016). Twitter taught Microsoft's AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day. The verge. https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist Wong, J. (2018). Amazon working to fix Alexa after users report bursts of 'creepy' laughter. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/07/amazon-alexa-random-creepy-laughter-company-fixing Meyer, M. (2018). Google should have thought about Duplex's ethical issues before showing it off. Fortune http://fortune.com/2018/05/11/google-duplex-virtual-assistant-ethical-issues-ai-machine-learning/ Quote from Meyer: As prominent sociologist Zeynep Tufekci put it<https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/994233568359575552>: “Google Assistant making calls pretending to be human not only without disclosing that it’s a bot, but adding ‘ummm’ and ‘aaah’ to deceive the human on the other end with the room cheering it… horrifying. Silicon Valley is ethically lost, rudderless and has not learned a thing.” These early instances of AI applications involve the automation of relatively simple, repetitive tasks. According to Amazon, "Echo and other Alexa devices let you instantly connect to Alexa to play music, control your smart home, get information, news, weather, and more using just your voice". This is voice to text translation software that lets users speak to their computers instead of using keystrokes. Google's Duplex demonstration is a robot dialing a restaurant to make a dinner reservation. Translating scholarly knowledge into simple plain text so that everyone can understand it is a lot more complicated, with the degree of complexity depending on
[GOAL] Why translating all scholarly knowledge for non-specialists using AI is complicated
On July 10 Jason Priem wrote about the AI-powered systems "that help explain and contextualize articles, providing concept maps, automated plain-language translations"... that are part of his project's plan to develop a scholarly search engine aimed at a nonspecialist audience. The full post is available here: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2018-July/004890.html We share the goal of making all of the world's knowledge available to everyone without restriction, and I agree that reducing the conceptual barrier for the reader is a laudable goal. However, I think it is important to avoid underestimating the size of this challenge and potential for serious problems to arise. Two factors to consider: the current state of AI, and the conceptual challenges of assessing the validity of automated plain-language translations of scholarly works. Current state of AI - a few recent examples of the current status of AI: Vincent, J. (2016). Twitter taught Microsoft's AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day. The verge. https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist Wong, J. (2018). Amazon working to fix Alexa after users report bursts of 'creepy' laughter. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/07/amazon-alexa-random-creepy-laughter-company-fixing Meyer, M. (2018). Google should have thought about Duplex's ethical issues before showing it off. Fortune http://fortune.com/2018/05/11/google-duplex-virtual-assistant-ethical-issues-ai-machine-learning/ Quote from Meyer: As prominent sociologist Zeynep Tufekci put it<https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/994233568359575552>: “Google Assistant making calls pretending to be human not only without disclosing that it’s a bot, but adding ‘ummm’ and ‘aaah’ to deceive the human on the other end with the room cheering it… horrifying. Silicon Valley is ethically lost, rudderless and has not learned a thing.” These early instances of AI applications involve the automation of relatively simple, repetitive tasks. According to Amazon, "Echo and other Alexa devices let you instantly connect to Alexa to play music, control your smart home, get information, news, weather, and more using just your voice". This is voice to text translation software that lets users speak to their computers instead of using keystrokes. Google's Duplex demonstration is a robot dialing a restaurant to make a dinner reservation. Translating scholarly knowledge into simple plain text so that everyone can understand it is a lot more complicated, with the degree of complexity depending on the area of research. Some research in education or public policy might be relatively easy to translate. In other areas, articles are written for an expert audience that is assumed to have spent decades acquiring a basic knowledge in a discipline. It is not clear to me that it is even possible to explain advanced concepts to a non-specialist audience without first developing a conceptual progression. Assessing the accuracy and appropriateness of a plain-text translation of a scholarly work intended for a non-specialist audience requires expert understanding of the work and thoughtful understanding of the potential for misunderstandings that could arise. For example, I have never studied physics. I looked at an automated plain-language translation of a physics text I would have no means of assessing whether the translation was accurate or not. I do understand enough medical terminology, scientific and medical research methods to read medical articles and would have some idea if a plain-text translation was accurate. However, I have never worked as a health care practitioner or health care translation researcher, so would not be qualified to assess the work from the perspective of whether the translation could be mis-read by patients (or some patients). In summary, Jason and I share the goal of making all of our scholarly knowledge accessible to everyone, specialists and non-specialists alike. However, in the process of developing tools to accomplish this it is important to understand the size and nature of the challenge and the potential for serious unforeseen consequences. AI is in very early stages. Machines are beginning to learn on their own, but what they are learning is not necessarily what we expected or wanted them to learn, and the impact on humans has been described using words like 'creepy', 'horrifying', and 'unethical'. The task of translating complex scholarly knowledge for a non-specialist knowledge and assessing the validity and appropriateness of the translations is a huge challenge. If this is not understood and plans made to conduct rigorous research on the validity of such translations, the result could be widespread dissemination of incorrect translations. best, Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of
Re: [GOAL] Announcing: $850k grant from Arcadia Fund to build new scholarly search engine for public
hi Jason, Congratulations!!! Comment: This is a VERY ambitious goal, even for an $850,000 project; this strikes me as Google-size ambition that calls for a Google-size budget (but I would be happy to be proved wrong). Question: if this succeeds, what is the long-term business strategy? To date, developing interesting projects then selling to Elsevier seems to be the go-to business plan (Mendeley, SSRN, bepress, Plum Analytics...). What's your plan? best, Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org on behalf of Jason Priem Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2018 11:38 AM To: goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Announcing: $850k grant from Arcadia Fund to build new scholarly search engine for public Hi all, Thought you might be interested in this new OA project! This scholarly search engine will be a little different than the (many) already out there: it's aimed at a nonspecialist audience of citizen scientists, patients, K-12 teachers, and so on. To do that we'll need to rely not just on OA, but also on a set of AI-powered systems that help explain and contextualize articles, providing concept maps, automated plain-language translations (think automatic Simple Wikipedia<https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>), structured abstracts, and so on. The goal is that by making the products of research accessible (in every sense of the word) to the public, we can help deliver on some of the bolder promises of OA to really transform knowledge. More info is at http://gettheresearch.org. Would love to hear any criticisms, suggestions, and ideas! Apologetically cross-postingly yours, Jason -- Jason Priem, co-founder Impactstory<http://impactstory.org/>: We make tools to power the Open Science revolution follow at @jasonpriem<http://twitter.com/jasonpriem> and @impactstory<http://twitter.com/impactstory> ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Ceased and transferred publications and archiving: best practices and room for improvement
New post on Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, inspired by gathering data on OA APCs earlier this year - readers are invited to help in the process of figuring out better practices, particularly with regard to copyright and creative commons. https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2018/07/05/ceased-and-transferred-publications-and-archiving-best-practices-and-room-for-improvement/ Highlights In the process of gathering APC data this spring, I noticed some good and some problematic practices with respect to journals that have ceased or transferred publisher. There is no reason to be concerned about OA journals that do not last forever. Some scholarly journals publish continuously for an extended period of time, decades or even centuries. Others publish for a while and then stop. This is normal. A journal that is published largely due to the work of one or two editors may cease to publish when the editor(s) retire. Research fields evolve; not every specialized journal is needed as a publication venue in perpetuity. Journals transfer from one publisher to another for a variety of reasons. Now that there are over 11,000 fully open access journals (as listed in DOAJ<https://www.doaj.org>), and some open access journals and publishers have been publishing for years or even decades, it is not surprising that some open access journals have ceased to publish new material. The purpose of this post is to highlight some good practices when journals cease, some situations to avoid, and room for improvement in current practice. In brief, my advice is that when you cease to publish a journal, it is a good practice to continue to list the journal on your website, continue to provide access to content (archived on your website or another such as CLOCKSS, a LOCKKS network, or other archiving services such as national libraries that may be available to you), and link the reader interested in the journal to where the content can be found. This is an area where even the best practices to date leave some room for improvement. CLOCKSS archiving is a great example of state-of-the-art but CLOCKSS’ statements and practice indicate some common misunderstandings about copyright and Creative Commons licenses. In brief, author copyright and CC licenses and journal-level CC licensing are not compatible. Third parties such as CLOCKSS should not add CC licenses as these are waivers of copyright. CC licenses may be useful tools for archives, however archiving requires archives; the licenses on their own are not sufficient for this purpose. I have presented some solutions and suggestions to move forward below, and peer review and further suggestions are welcome. For details and my preliminary list of suggestions, see the blogpost here: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2018/07/05/ceased-and-transferred-publications-and-archiving-best-practices-and-room-for-improvement/ Comments are welcome on the blogppost or to this list. best, Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 sustainingknowledgecommons.org poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Dramatic Growth of Open Access June 30, 2018
The Dramatic Growth of Open Access for June 30, 2018 is now available: https://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2018/07/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-june-2018.html Highlights: DOAJ recently surpassed a a milestone of 3 million articles searchable at the article level, and added a net of 7 titles per day in the past quarter. Newcomer bioRxiv is really taking off. 38 of the limited number of indicators I track are growing at double or more the baseline rate of growth of scholarly journals and articles. There are 2 indicators with negative growth; reader help in interpreting would be appreciated. A PubMed search for "cancer" with no date limit returns 1% less free full-text than March 31 (the same search with recent data limiters shows growth). Internet Archive images have grown quite substantially in the past year, but decreased by 18% this quarter. best, [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J04C734NlpU/Wz1dqp8IkTI/BWI/J90U-4pZres40YLaE74zZOEepfm2XHznQCLcBGAs/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/biorxiv.png]<https://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2018/07/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-june-2018.html> Dramatic Growth of Open Access June 2018<https://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2018/07/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-june-2018.html> poeticeconomics.blogspot.com Congratulations to DOAJ for recently surpassing a milestone of over 3 million articles searchable at the article level! The outstand... Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 sustainingknowledgecommons.org poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa
Thanks Richard and Falk. This model is a good mixture of diverse support for different forms of open access. The data showimg more articles in APC journals is from 2013 - 2015 and refers to the science fund. Are articles from the humanities and social sciences included? What about books, which are more common in HSS? The FWF information page for sciences does not tell researchers which journals to publish in, but it does refer exclusively to the APC model and points to APC based publishers with whom FWF has arrangements. It seems reasonable to assume that this approach will have an impact on whether funded researchers choose APC journals, as well as whether they are aware that APC is not the only model for OA publishing. What if FWF were to highlight their support for arXiv and DOAJ and provide information and encouragement for non-APC approaches on their page for recipients of science funding? What if the support program for non-APC journals were expanded to include sciences? To find the funding for this expansion, consider cancelling subscription big deals and redirecting funds. best, Heather Morrison Original message From: "Reckling, Falk" <falk.reckl...@fwf.ac.at> Date: 2018-04-27 2:48 AM (GMT-05:00) To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal@eprints.org> Subject: Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa Hi Heather, an we run programme support OA journals without APCs in Social Sciences and Humanities, Best Falk Von: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] Im Auftrag von Richard Poynder Gesendet: Freitag, 27. April 2018 08:34 An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal@eprints.org> Betreff: Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa Hi Heather, I am not sure I follow your logic. As I read it, FWF-funded researchers publish in non-APC journals too, but fewer of them. I don't think you are suggesting that researchers are told by FWF which publishers they are supposed to publish with? What I take from the FWF figures is that most of the OA journals that researchers want to publish in charge an APC. By the way, FWF also supports models that do not charge an APC: https://www.fwf.ac.at/de/forschungsfoerderung/open-access-policy/open-access-publikationsmodelle/ Richard On 26 April 2018 at 22:56, Heather Morrison <heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: Thanks Richard. I see that the FWF makes funding available for open access article processing charges and targets particular publishers that use the APC method. Details here: https://m.fwf.ac.at/en/research-funding/fwf-programmes/peer-reviewed-publications/ This is a tautological argument: FWF pays APCs because they fund APCs. I would expect the same in the UK. The RCUK has provided block funding to pay for APCs. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that this approach results in APC payments and a tendency to find that UK funded research will be found in APC journals. Scielo is a journal subsidy model. When countries subsidize journals for OA, the tendency is to not charge APCs. In other words, what model(s) to support is a policy decision with real-world impacts. best, Heather Morrison Original message From: Richard Poynder <richard.poyn...@gmail.com<mailto:richard.poyn...@gmail.com>> Date: 2018-04-26 5:28 PM (GMT-05:00) To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal@eprints.org<mailto:goal@eprints.org>> Subject: Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa Hi Marc, Thanks for providing these figures. Maybe we could consider them alongside some figures produced by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) here: http://beta.briefideas.org/ideas/f2e9ebaa34cd5655203c7de332618061. I quote: Problem: There is an ongoing debate on the share of OAJ and OAA charging APC from authors. It has been shown that 67% of OAJ listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) work without APC and costs get subsidised by other resources. But it is still unclear what the actual share of OAA in OAJ with and without APC is Data: We analysed this question for OAA published via FWF funded projects from 1/2013 to 8/2015. The sample includes 730 pure OAA published in 224 OAJ (Hybrid OAA are excluded). Results: 83.0% (186) of the OAJ charge APC, while 17.0% (38) of the OAJ don’t. On the article level, 93.6% (683) of the articles were published with and 6.4% (47) without APC. This is driven by the fact that 84.9% (620) of all articles are published in journals from just 15 publishers charging APC by default. Richard On 26 April 2018 at 17:32, Marc Couture <jaamcout...@gmail.com<mailto:jaamcout...@gmail.com>> wrote: Peter Murray-Rust wrote : > I suspect that the "mos
Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa
Thanks Richard. I see that the FWF makes funding available for open access article processing charges and targets particular publishers that use the APC method. Details here: https://m.fwf.ac.at/en/research-funding/fwf-programmes/peer-reviewed-publications/ This is a tautological argument: FWF pays APCs because they fund APCs. I would expect the same in the UK. The RCUK has provided block funding to pay for APCs. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that this approach results in APC payments and a tendency to find that UK funded research will be found in APC journals. Scielo is a journal subsidy model. When countries subsidize journals for OA, the tendency is to not charge APCs. In other words, what model(s) to support is a policy decision with real-world impacts. best, Heather Morrison Original message From: Richard Poynder <richard.poyn...@gmail.com> Date: 2018-04-26 5:28 PM (GMT-05:00) To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal@eprints.org> Subject: Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa Hi Marc, Thanks for providing these figures. Maybe we could consider them alongside some figures produced by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) here: http://beta.briefideas.org/ideas/f2e9ebaa34cd5655203c7de332618061. I quote: Problem: There is an ongoing debate on the share of OAJ and OAA charging APC from authors. It has been shown that 67% of OAJ listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) work without APC and costs get subsidised by other resources. But it is still unclear what the actual share of OAA in OAJ with and without APC is Data: We analysed this question for OAA published via FWF funded projects from 1/2013 to 8/2015. The sample includes 730 pure OAA published in 224 OAJ (Hybrid OAA are excluded). Results: 83.0% (186) of the OAJ charge APC, while 17.0% (38) of the OAJ don’t. On the article level, 93.6% (683) of the articles were published with and 6.4% (47) without APC. This is driven by the fact that 84.9% (620) of all articles are published in journals from just 15 publishers charging APC by default. Richard On 26 April 2018 at 17:32, Marc Couture <jaamcout...@gmail.com<mailto:jaamcout...@gmail.com>> wrote: Peter Murray-Rust wrote : > I suspect that the "most journals have no APCs " are in the long tail of the distribution. If you correlate volume of articles against APC you will resolve this. > To get a (much) more detailed description of the OA world, I use the works of Walt Crawford, who did incredibly thorough studies of OA journals. Yes, I know it’s not peer-reviewed research, but don’t let me start on this (besides, I have reviewed a few papers on the subject for various journals, and Walt’s work certainly meets the usual scientific standards). Thus, according to his comprehensive study GOAJ2 - Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2016 (http://waltcrawford.name/goaj.html) In 2016 : 1. Among the 8.4k journals listed in DOAJ and having published articles that year, for a total of ~520k articles, 68 % of the journals, publishing 43% of the articles, had no APCs. 2. The 700 largest (> 150 articles/y) journals (8% of total) published 280k articles (54% of total). Among these, 220 journals (31%), publishing 63k articles (22%), had no APCs. 3. The 7.7k smallest (< 150 articles/y) journals (92 % of total) published 240k articles (46% of total). Among these, 5.5k journals (72%), publishing 160k articles (67%) had no APCs. In brief, one can say that the “long tail” of small OA journals (92% of total) published a little bit less than half of the articles, 2/3 of those without APCs (compared to less than 1/4 for the large journals). There is a wealth of information and data in Walt Crawford’s study that allows the interested reader to explore issues like differences between domains, publisher types, regions, etc. And, in the spirit of open science, the underlying data are available. Marc Couture De : goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org>] De la part de Peter Murray-Rust Envoyé : 25 avril 2018 11:56 À : Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Objet : Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa I agree with Ricky and Hilda that the "most journals charge no APCs" is misleading. It's been around for years and has worried me. Assuming the normal power-law distribution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law) the following are by statistical definition true: * most journals have small volumes * most papers are published in a few large volume journals That's true regardless of whether they are Open Access or not. I suspect that the "most journals have no APCs " are in the long tail of the distribution. If you correlate volume of articles agai
Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa
hi Richard, I think it is reasonable to assume that PLOS bloggers are part of the PLOS community, whether they are paid by PLOS or not. Perhaps PLOS can speak to their policies and practices with respect to the PLOS blog. Although I am an OA advocate, I strongly oppose some of PLOS' advocacy positions. I argue that CC-BY as default for OA is a major strategic error that invokes ethical and legal concerns. I am not opposed to APC, but it is not the only model and I do not support policies that favour this model exclusively. I do not like PLOS One's to me excessively automated approach to peer review and object strongly to being in their system. PLOS has not invited me to participate in their blog, even though I frequently comment on matters related to open access. Is this because my views do not reflect those of the PLOS community? Has PLOS reached out to those who prefer traditional publishers such as Elsevier and asked them to contribute to the PLOS blog? Have they reached out to the editors of OA journals that don't use CC-BY and/or APCs and asked them to contribute their perspective to the PLOS blog? I hope that Hilda enjoys a nice income. If PLOS is not paying their regular bloggers, perhaps they should. best, Heather Original message From: Richard Poynder <richard.poyn...@gmail.com> Date: 2018-04-25 12:21 PM (GMT-05:00) To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal@eprints.org> Subject: Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa Heather, I could be wrong, but I am thinking that you are implying that Hilda Bastian is an employee, or some kind of spokesperson, for PLOS. If so, you have inferred incorrectly. See this tweet: https://twitter.com/PLOS/status/989174553657032704?s=19 Richard On Wed, 25 Apr 2018, 16:21 Heather Morrison, <heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: The Public Library of Science has done important work in the areas of open access advocacy and open access publishing. However, it is important to understand that PLOS is also a publishing business, even if it is not-for-profit. Their business model is based on APCs. PLOS staff arguing on the importance of APCs and discounting arguments for other business models is essentially the same thing as traditional commercial publishers arguing for the subscriptions model and discounting arguments for any OA business model. PLOS, in this respect, is understandably looking out for their own interests. I am a recently tenured professor with many friends who are emerging scholars, students who would like to go on to tenured positions, and a workload that is impacted by university hiring (or lack thereof) of new professors and support staff. When I argue for funding for university hiring, I am arguing for my own interests and the interests of this sector, one that in my experience has been under-represented in open access discussions. best, Heather From: goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> <goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org>> on behalf of Richard Poynder <richard.poyn...@gmail.com<mailto:richard.poyn...@gmail.com>> Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2018 10:46:48 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa Heather, Personally, I think that any statement that says that most OA journals do not charge an APC needs to be set alongside the following blog post by Hilda Bastian: http://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2018/04/02/a-reality-check-on-author-access-to-open-access-publishing/ Extract: 'Technically, the “most journals don’t charge authors” statement could well be true. Most open access journals may not charge authors. The source that’s used to support the claim is generally DOAJ – the Directory of Open Access Journals. One of the pieces of meta-data for journals in DOAJ is whether or not the journal levies an APC – an author processing charge for an open access (OA) publication. But I think this is a data framing that’s deeply misleading. And it does harm. As long as people can argue that there are just so many options for fee-free publishing, then there will be less of a sense of urgency about eliminating, or at least drastically reducing, APCs. As Kyle Siler and colleagues show in the field of global health research, the APC is adding a new stratification of researchers globally, between those who can afford open publishing in highly regarded journals, and those who can’t.' Richard On 25 April 2018 at 15:16, Heather Morrison <heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: Correction: Chris, you have the proportion of OA journals with APCs in reverse. Data and calculations follow. 73% of fully OA
Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa
The Public Library of Science has done important work in the areas of open access advocacy and open access publishing. However, it is important to understand that PLOS is also a publishing business, even if it is not-for-profit. Their business model is based on APCs. PLOS staff arguing on the importance of APCs and discounting arguments for other business models is essentially the same thing as traditional commercial publishers arguing for the subscriptions model and discounting arguments for any OA business model. PLOS, in this respect, is understandably looking out for their own interests. I am a recently tenured professor with many friends who are emerging scholars, students who would like to go on to tenured positions, and a workload that is impacted by university hiring (or lack thereof) of new professors and support staff. When I argue for funding for university hiring, I am arguing for my own interests and the interests of this sector, one that in my experience has been under-represented in open access discussions. best, Heather From: goal-boun...@eprints.org <goal-boun...@eprints.org> on behalf of Richard Poynder <richard.poyn...@gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2018 10:46:48 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa Heather, Personally, I think that any statement that says that most OA journals do not charge an APC needs to be set alongside the following blog post by Hilda Bastian: http://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2018/04/02/a-reality-check-on-author-access-to-open-access-publishing/ Extract: 'Technically, the “most journals don’t charge authors” statement could well be true. Most open access journals may not charge authors. The source that’s used to support the claim is generally DOAJ – the Directory of Open Access Journals. One of the pieces of meta-data for journals in DOAJ is whether or not the journal levies an APC – an author processing charge for an open access (OA) publication. But I think this is a data framing that’s deeply misleading. And it does harm. As long as people can argue that there are just so many options for fee-free publishing, then there will be less of a sense of urgency about eliminating, or at least drastically reducing, APCs. As Kyle Siler and colleagues show in the field of global health research, the APC is adding a new stratification of researchers globally, between those who can afford open publishing in highly regarded journals, and those who can’t.' Richard On 25 April 2018 at 15:16, Heather Morrison <heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: Correction: Chris, you have the proportion of OA journals with APCs in reverse. Data and calculations follow. 73% of fully OA journals (about three quarters) do not charge APCs. To calculate go to DOAJ Advanced Search, select journals / articles select journals, and click on Article Processing Charges. As of today, April 25, 2108, the response to the DOAJ question of whether a journal has an APC is: 8,250: no (73%) 2,979 yes (26%) 65: no information (.5%) Total # of journals in DOAJ: 11,294 (Note rounding error) OA journals with no APCs have a variety of business models. Direct and indirect sponsorship appears to be common. For example in Canada our Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has an Aid to Scholarly Journals Program. Journals can apply for grants; these applications go through a journal-level peer review process. This program has been in place for many years. Originally all supported journals were subscription-based. The trend is towards open access, with many journals now fully OA and all or almost all have free access after an embargo period. I recommend this model as a means of support for open access journals that also ensure high-level academic quality control. Regions with no existing program in place would probably find it easier to start with an OA requirement than those with legacy programs like SSHRC. Local journals are important to ensure publishing venues are available for research of local significance. Canadian law, politics, culture, history, local environmental and social conditions are important matters to study, but not high priority for readers outside Canada. Articles on these topics risk rejection from international journal due to selection based on reader interest rather than the quality or importance of the work. Local publishing does not exclude global scholarly engagement. Canada has a large francophone population; our researchers in language, culture, and history often work with scholars in West Africa, France, Haiti, Belgium, etc. For Canada's arctic researchers, "local" has geographic rather than local significance. This is reflected in authorship and editorial boards. A journal hos
Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa
Correction: Chris, you have the proportion of OA journals with APCs in reverse. Data and calculations follow. 73% of fully OA journals (about three quarters) do not charge APCs. To calculate go to DOAJ Advanced Search, select journals / articles select journals, and click on Article Processing Charges. As of today, April 25, 2108, the response to the DOAJ question of whether a journal has an APC is: 8,250: no (73%) 2,979 yes (26%) 65: no information (.5%) Total # of journals in DOAJ: 11,294 (Note rounding error) OA journals with no APCs have a variety of business models. Direct and indirect sponsorship appears to be common. For example in Canada our Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has an Aid to Scholarly Journals Program. Journals can apply for grants; these applications go through a journal-level peer review process. This program has been in place for many years. Originally all supported journals were subscription-based. The trend is towards open access, with many journals now fully OA and all or almost all have free access after an embargo period. I recommend this model as a means of support for open access journals that also ensure high-level academic quality control. Regions with no existing program in place would probably find it easier to start with an OA requirement than those with legacy programs like SSHRC. Local journals are important to ensure publishing venues are available for research of local significance. Canadian law, politics, culture, history, local environmental and social conditions are important matters to study, but not high priority for readers outside Canada. Articles on these topics risk rejection from international journal due to selection based on reader interest rather than the quality or importance of the work. Local publishing does not exclude global scholarly engagement. Canada has a large francophone population; our researchers in language, culture, and history often work with scholars in West Africa, France, Haiti, Belgium, etc. For Canada's arctic researchers, "local" has geographic rather than local significance. This is reflected in authorship and editorial boards. A journal hosted and with editorial leadership in Canada will often include international content and reviewers. Journals produced locally can be read anywhere, especially if they are open access. best, Heather Morrison Associate Professor, University of Ottawa School of Information Studies Sustaining the Knowledge Commons - a SSHRC Insight Project Sustainingknowledgecommons.org Original message From: Chris Zielinski <ch...@chriszielinski.com> Date: 2018-04-25 6:38 AM (GMT-05:00) To: richard.poyn...@cantab.net Cc: goal@eprints.org Subject: Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa Richard, In this context, you may be interested in a post I recently submitted to the Healthcare Information for All (HIFA) list in the context of a HIFA discussion of this topic: -- Original Message -- To: HIFA - Healthcare Information For All <h...@dgroups.org> Date: 18 April 2018 at 19:33 Subject: Re: [hifa] Open Access Author Processing Charges (3) In the bad old days before Open Access (OA), a developing country author wrote a paper and submitted it to a journal and, if the paper was good enough, the generous people at the journal organized peer review, redid/redesigned the tables and most of the graphics, and maybe even did some language editing - at no cost to the author. Then they published the journal, charging for access to the paper version and pay-walling any online version. From the author's perspective, thus, there was no barrier to publication, although there were cost barriers to reading the paper subsequently, which was particularly onerous in poorer countries. So the situation in developing countries was good for authors - who simply had to write well - and bad for librarians and readers, who had to find the money to buy the content. Now that Open Access is making serious inroads, we are finding the situation reversed - librarians and readers bask in an avalanche of cost-free online papers, while authors are scrambling to find the resources to pay for publication.From the commentary on this list it is clear that authors in developing countries are being restrained from publishing by the "Article Processing Charge" (APC). Zoe Mullan, Editor of The Lancet Global Health makes the point that "we assume that this cost will be borne by the funding body". This seems to be rather more likely in industrialized countries than in developing ones. Basic research is much more frequently carried out in industrialized countries and supported by the sort of international funding that pays for papers. But the kind of health research that is essential in developing countries - health services and health systems research - is g
