Authors
Cenyu ShenEmail, Bo-Christer Björk
Short Description
A negative consequence of the rapid growth of scholarly open access publishing funded by article processing charges is the emergence of publishers and journals with highly questionable marketing and peer review practices. These so-called predatory publishers are causing unfounded negative publicity for open access publishing in general. Reports about this branch of e-business have so far mainly concentrated on exposing lacking peer review and scandals involving publishers and journals. There is a lack of comprehensive studies about several aspects of this phenomenon, including extent and regional distribution. After an initial scan of all predatory publishers and journals included in the so-called Beall’s list, a sample of 613 journals was constructed using a stratified sampling method from the total of over 11,000 journals identified. Information about the subject field, country of publisher, article processing charge and article volumes published between 2010 and 2014 were manually collected from the journal websites. For a subset of journals, individual articles were sampled in order to study the country affiliation of authors and the publication delays.
Access
Gold
Reference
Shen, C., & Björk, B. C. (2015). ‘Predatory’open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. BMC medicine, 13(1), 230.
DOI
10.1186/s12916-015-0469-2
Link
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-015-0469-2
Short Description
The European Commission joined many other research funders in 2013 when it announced that one central requirement of future research grantees of Horizon 2020 would be that their research publications be made freely available to all. The Commission’s vision is open access for research outputs, as announced in its 2012 Communication. This states: “Information already paid for by the public purse should not be paid for again each time it is accessed or used, and […] should benefit European companies and citizens to the full.”
The Commission has no preferred model for how to achieve open access. It is searching for innovation wherever it may be found, from traditional commercial publishers, new organisations, distributed academic networks, and research libraries. The goal of achieving open access is a public one that sits above private interests. This sometimes means that businesses are obliged to evolve and adapt in light of the project to move towards open access.
The move to open access scholarly publishing has been accelerating for many years. It is driven by many factors, including: the emergence and expansion of the internet, which enables the fast and free dissemination of research outputs; the fact that many academic libraries are reporting the rising cost of subscription journals and the declining number of journals they can subscribe to; a moral case that publicly funded research should be freely available for all to see; and a case that more dissemination of knowledge will lead to more innovation and therefore economic growth.
Authors/Initiatives
Diane Harley, Sophia Krzys Acord, Sarah Earl-Novell, Shannon Lawrence, C. Judson King
Copyright: Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkley
Short Description
Since 2005, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), has been conducting research to understand the needs and practices of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. This report brings together the responses of 160 interviewees across 45, mostly elite, research institutions in seven selected academic fields: archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and political science. The overview document summarizes the main practices explored across all seven disciplines: tenure and promotion, dissemination, sharing, collaboration, resource creation and consumption, and public engagement. In this report, readers can search various topics within and across case studies. The report identifies five key topics, addressed in detail in the case studies, that require real attention:
Author/Initiative
European Commission - Directorate-General for Research & Innovation
Short Description
According to the ERC Scientific Council's Open Access Guidelines: “The mission of the European Research Council (ERC) is to support excellent research in all fields of science and scholarship. The main outputs of this research are new knowledge, ideas and understanding, which the ERC expects its researchers to publish in peer-reviewed articles and monographs. The ERC considers that providing free online access to these materials is the most effective way of ensuring that the fruits of the research it funds can be accessed, read, and used as the basis for further research. […] The ERC, therefore, supports the principle of open access to the published output of research as a fundamental part of its mission.” Under Horizon 2020, beneficiaries of ERC grants2 must ensure open access (free of charge, online access for any user) to all peer-reviewed scientific publications relating to its results. The detailed requirements on open access to publications are contained in the Horizon 2020 ERC Model Grant Agreement (Article 29.2).
Link
https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/file/ERC%20Open%20Access%20guidelines-Version%201.1._10.04.2017.pdf
Short Description
This initiative shares a vision of an independent, democratic academic evaluation model free from the conflicts of interest imposed by the agendas of journals and their commercial publishers. It aims to promote complementary strategies to comprise the ingredients needed to attain this goal and to encourage scholars and interested parties to experiment with new modes that can assist the transition to free, independent, open and transparent peer review. In addition, it considers that any platform developed to implement free and open peer review should be independent of intermediaries. To mitigate potential conflicts of interest such platforms should ideally be under the management of an open community, be open source and operate in a non-profit manner.
Short Description
This initiative shares a vision of an independent, democratic academic evaluation model free from the conflicts of interest imposed by the agendas of journals and their commercial publishers. It aims to promote complementary strategies to comprise the ingredients needed to attain this goal and to encourage scholars and interested parties to experiment with new modes that can assist the transition to free, independent, open and transparent peer review. In addition, it considers that any platform developed to implement free and open peer review should be independent of intermediaries. To mitigate potential conflicts of interest such platforms should ideally be under the management of an open community, be open source and operate in a non-profit manner.
Short description
The traditional forms of scientific publishing and peer review do not live up to all demands of efficient communication and quality assurance in today’s highly diverse and rapidly evolving world of science.
Author/Initiative
The list of the 38 potential contributors can found in the link provided.
Short Description
Research is getting a global makeover, in part thanks to the power of the internet and the tools it provides for us and in part due to a growing call for accountability (e.g. reproducibility and data provenance) in science. Global policies are popping up all over that include some aspect of ‘Open Research’ or ‘Open Science’, and inclusive of all research disciplines.
This MOOC is designed to equip students and researchers with the skills they need to excel in a modern research environment. It brings together the efforts and resources of hundreds of researchers who have all dedicated their time to making research just that little bit more awesome for us all.
Each module will comprise a complete range of resources including videos, research articles, dummy datasets and code, as well as ‘homework’ tasks to complete as individuals. Because you don’t learn how to do Open Research by reading; you learn by doing it.
Link
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KuTSECSYHXZmZX15GDjyD65pJ90eRMhHVEZ-1trsw30/edit#heading=h.17d4hvsvykmz
Short Description
A project report and associated recommendations, proceedings from a meeting and background papers.
Short Description
This is a report into peer review in scientific publications. Despite enormous pressure on public spending, the £4.6bn per annum funding for science and research programmes has been protected in cash terms and ring-fenced against future pressures during the Spending Review period.
Author/Initiative
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
Short Description
This is the last Module of the course on Open Access for researchers. So far you have studied about Open Access, its history, advantages, initiatives, copyrights and licensing, evaluation matrix for research – all in the context of scholarly communication. In this Module with just two units, we would like to help you share your work in Open Access through repositories and journals. At the end of this module, you are expected to be able to:
- Understand the publication process involved in dissemination of scholarly works;
- Choose appropriate Open Access journals and repositories for sharing research results;
- Use social media to promote personal research work and build reputation.
Link
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002322/232211E.pdf
Author/Initiative
James Wilsdon, Liz Allen, Eleonora Belfiore, Philip Campbell, Stephen Curry, Steven Hill, Richard Jones, Roger Kain, Simon Kerridge, Mike Thelwall, Jane Tinkler, Ian Viney, Paul Wouters, Jude Hill, Ben Johnson.
Short Description
The Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management was set up in April 2014 to investigate the current and potential future roles that quantitative indicators can play in the assessment and management of research. Its report, ‘The Metric Tide’, was published in July 2015 and is available below.
Link
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rereports/year/2015/metrictide/
Short Description
International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers publishing (STM) takes place within the broader system of scholarly communication, which includes both formal and informal elements. Scholarly communication plays different roles at different stages of the research cycle, and (like publishing) is undergoing technology-driven change. Categorising the modes of communication into one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many, and then into oral and written, provides a helpful framework for analysing the potential impacts of technology on scholarly communication. This STM report was published in 2009.
Short Description
This paper presents the findings from a survey study of UK academics and their publishing behaviour. The aim of this study is to investigate academics’ attitudes towards and practice of open access (OA) publishing. The results are based on a survey study of academics at 12 Russell Group universities, and reflect responses from over 1800 researchers.
Short Description
This paper presents the findings from a survey study of UK academics and their publishing behaviour. The aim of this study is to investigate academics’ attitudes towards and practice of open access (OA) publishing. The results are based on a survey study of academics at 12 Russell Group universities, and reflect responses from over 1800 researchers.
