Open Access Category

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Pluses and Minuses of Open Access Publishing

Along with the positive aspects of open access publishing, there are some negatives too: work, time and, of course, money. Rose Eveleth, in her article “Free Access to Science Research Doesn’t Benefit Everyone” (The Atlantic, 22 December 2014) notes that it’s often graduate students and early career professionals who deal with the problems.  Read the article here.

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Nature announces exaggerated “free to view” program

On Tuesday Nature published a news item with the following headline, “Nature Makes All Articles Free to View”, which from the headline alone sounded pretty good. Upon further inspection it looked like Nature had created a new form of access, that has been coined “Beggar Access”  (see Bonnie Swoger’s blog post). Two days later the Nature news article was corrected, and the title now reads “Nature promotes read-only sharing by subscribers” (see the corrected Nature news post here), which is a more realistic depiction of the new program. Comments from others, skeptical of the program, have now been included in the article. See excerpts from the corrected Nature news post below.

Annette Thomas, chief executive of Macmillan Science and Education, says that under the policy, subscribers can share any paper they have access to through a link to a read-only version of the paper’s PDF that can be viewed through a web browser. For institutional subscribers, that means every paper dating back to the journal’s foundation in 1869, while personal subscribers get access from 1997 on.

Initial reactions to the policy have been mixed. Some note that it is far from allowing full open access to papers. “To me, this smacks of public relations, not open access,” says John Wilbanks, a strong advocate of open-access publishing in science and a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri

Peter Suber, director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that the programme is a step forward by providing immediate free online access, in contrast to Nature‘s self-archiving open access policy, which still requires a six-month embargo. But, he notes, if authors prefer to share links rather than actually deposit their manuscripts in an online repository, the programme could be a step backward, because repositories host copies independently from the publisher, and those copies can be printed or saved and are generally more reusable than a screen-only file.

 

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Creating a New Model for the Scholarly Monograph

The mission of Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is to explore and change the current system for publishing scholarly books. By working together, libraries can create a sustainable route to open access for the scholarly monograph and secure long-term cost savings.  Scholars, students, higher education institutions, and the public benefit. And authors benefit because their books are available to anyone in the world who has access to the internet (and access=citations=impact).

The University of Iowa Libraries is a charter member of KU, whereby we supported the publication of a pilot collection of 28 scholarly titles, published by a variety of established publishers. Since March (in merely 8 months), the books in the collection have been downloaded nearly 13,000 times, and readers in at least 139 countries have been accessing the titles via HathiTrust or OAPEN, trusted digital repositories that archive content in perpetuity.

Some additional, and amazing, statistics on the usage of these 28 titles:

  • Total number of downloads: 12,763
  • Mean average number of downloads per week: 1,064
  • Mean average number of downloads per book/week: 40
  • Mean average number of downloads=473 per book

 

 

 

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Open Access Week video available online

You can now watch the UI’s Open Access Week 2014 panel discussion “Open Access and the Public Good” via Iowa Research Online.  Professor Russell Ganim (Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures) moderates a conversation between the Honorable James Leach (Law), Professor Christina Bohannan (Law), and Professor Bernd Fritzsch (Biology). Among the topics are how research in the Humanities and Sciences is financed and conducted and who has the right to access its results.

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Paperity Aggregates All Open Access Articles. Finally!

Paperity, just launched this week, is the first multi-disciplinary aggregator of all peer-reviewed published open access articles and papers. Yes, that’s right, it aggregates not just the abstracts, but the full-text of the articles. Right now Paperity includes over 160,000 articles from 2,000 scholarly journals, and growing. The goal of the team is to cover 100% of Open Access literature in 3 years from now.

Paperity:

  • gives readers easy and unconstrained access to thousands of journals from hundreds of disciplines, in one central location;
  • helps authors reach their target audience and disseminate discoveries more efficiently;
  • raises exposure of journals, helps editors and publishers boost readership and encourage new submissions.

Check it out!

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The importance of open access medical literature, by James Amos, MD

James Amos, MD, Department of Psychiatry at The University of Iowa, continues our celebration of Open Access Week with a guest post on the importance of free access to medical articles for patients and their families.

The importance of open access medical literature

James Amos, MD

As a consulting psychiatrist, I teach medical students and residents, I really appreciate open access medical literature. We have a weekly case conference called Clinical Problems in Consultation Psychiatry, a practical way to teach the Practice-Based Learning & Improvement Core Competency.

This helps develop the habit of reflecting on and analyzing one’s practice performance; locating and applying scientific evidence to  the care of patients; critically appraising the medical literature; using the computer to support learning and patient care, and facilitating the education of other health care professionals.

Recurring topics are delirium and dementia. Our recommendations for patients, families, and colleagues depend on free, easy access to studies and reviews.

A poignant reminder was a recent CNN article about a man struggling to cope with early state Alzheimer’s disease. He said, “All we really are is our thoughts…” Ironically, mindfulness research tells us the opposite might be true. A paper in the Directory of Open Access Journals reviews the growing research literature on the role of mindfulness in moderating the suffering of those with dementia [1].

  1. Marciniak, R., et al. (2014). “Effect of meditation on cognitive functions in context of aging and neurodegenerative diseases.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 8.
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The changing landscape of publishing: are we witnessing a revolution in information flow through open access? by Bernd Fritzsch

Open Access Week 2014 begins today, and we’ll be running posts by guest bloggers on open access and contemporary scholarship. Today’s post comes from Bernd Fritzsch, Chair and Professor in the Department of Biology, and panelist in last month’s Open Access and the Public Good discussion.

The changing landscape of publishing: are we witnessing a revolution in information flow through open access?

Bernd Fritzsch

I am old enough to remember the ‘good old days’ when we went through the ‘Current Contents’ every week to find out what had been published journal by journal. Once you had identified a paper of interest, you needed to request a reprint, which you received maybe several weeks to several months later. You had to keep track of what reprints you requested, what you received and archive all of that in an ever increasing collection of reprints.

This started to change with the introduction of online journals—a new concept following the introduction of the world-wide web. Now, once you had identified a paper of interest you could possibly download a PDF of the entire article or at least see its abstract for a better assessment of fit for your interest.   That was around 2000. In the last 14 years this concept of online, open access journals is increasingly pitched against the traditional journals. These novel ideas for access can potentially solve the biggest problem of the past—the unequal flow of scientific information—by providing easy access for everyone.

One major difference between open access and ‘traditional’ journals is the basic business model. Traditional journals rely, at least to some extent, on subscriptions to make a profit. How much a given journal profits from subscriptions is variable and the data is hard to come by. Given the high cost of subscriptions, budget-strapped libraries are faced with deciding which journal subscriptions are the most useful for their audience. The citation impact factor was developed by ISI initially to give libraries an idea of which journals are highly cited and read, helping them determine which journals they need to hold. Of course, once the idea of ‘impact factor’ was established for journals, the same system was used to rank authors. In essence, publishing in a prestigious journal with a high impact factor that is found in every library and many individual labs, was one way of making sure that a given scientific insight was widely disseminated. Journals, in turn, were interested in acquiring the highest impact factor to be widely subscribed. The problem with this business model is that the tax payer pays at least twice: first to finance the research that drives the lab of the author and subsequently to finance the library subscriptions. NIH has argued that this is an undue support and these arguments have changed the business model: now, papers, whose research was funded by NIH, have to be made available free to the public within one year. The authors, however, pay nothing in most cases, but have to sign over the copyright of data generated in most cases by public funding to a for profit organization. The problem with this model is that not every journal is easily accessible. In many cases one can only access abstracts unless a given University has a subscription that allows online access. Given that most researchers have their ‘reprint collections’ on their hard drive or the ‘cloud’ as PDF files, the possibility of accessing a given PDF instantly is becoming the rate limiting factor for information dissemination.

Since 2000 a different business of publishing is gaining ground: open access journals such as BMC journals, PloS journals and, more recently, eLife. These journals have no printed copies and thus no subscriptions by individuals or libraries to finance their costs. Upon acceptance of a paper, the author pays a fee to allow online access for all potential readers. The importance of this new business model is that data are immediately available for all to see and download as PDF to build up your own computer based library. Unfortunately, payments have to be made by the author, but the author typically retains the rights for his/her data. Of course, once the power of the internet become apparent to traditional publishers, most have added online access to their journals, in addition to the traditional paper journal (although this is sometimes at additional expenses to the author).  Of course, impact factors of the new exclusive online journals are next to irrelevant for libraries (they do not need to subscribe to them) and are now only used to gauge the ability of a given set of authors to move a paper into a higher impact journal, allegedly being seen by more people, a questionable argument at a time of all access search engines.

Indeed, the very perception of a high impact journal carrying more weight because it is more being widely read is becoming debatable. At a time when several online journals provide statistics for each paper such as views per months, number of downloads of PDFs, number of citations including links to citations etc., other metrics that are easily accessible to evaluate ‘impact’ are moving into the forefront. Instead of ‘guessing’ the possible impact of a given article based on the ‘impact factor’ of a journal, one can now see the impact unfolding in real time for every article in these journals or for every author across journals. This allows every author to compare the impact development of their papers published in a low as compared to a high impact journal. In fact, only time can tell how a publication will fare: some papers will be cited frequently early and phase out, others will start with few citations and last. In addition, several online indices exist (Scopus, Google Scholar) that measure the real time impacts of any given paper from any journal. I recently looked at this data for papers I had published in the same year in high impact journals (Nature, for example) and low impact journals. I discovered that it did not matter where I had published my research: over a 25 year period the quality of the paper seems to equalize, at least for my sample, the impact factor difference of the journals; both papers were nearly equally cited. In my area of expertise, one of the most cited papers by T Dobzhansky (1708 times) is in a journal with an impact factor of around 0.4, highlighting my point namely that highly cited papers can appear in ‘low impact’ journals. Moreover, since the h-index was invented nearly 10 years ago, it is now possible to calculate for every author the total citation impact of her/his publication record as a measure of the life time impact. This measure is becoming more widely accepted. In many countries tenure and promotion decisions are partly based on not only the numbers of papers published and the impact factor of the journal, but increasingly the cumulative impact of a given faculty through the h-index.

Having a clearer understanding of what the changes in publication landscapes imply, one can begin to ask questions about the future success of the traditional versus the open access models, in particular in the context of faculty promotion. In my opinion, h-index is here to stay as a measure of overall citation frequency of papers of a given author. Modifications to correct for academic age, such as the m-index, combined with overall citation frequencies (provided by Google Scholar or Scopus) can provide a reasonable measure of how many people found the work of a given author useful for their own work and thus cite it. Variations of these measures can look into position of a given a faculty in the list of authors (middle name in a 20 people assembly of authors or first name in small set of authors). However, this will not change the basic usefulness of existing quantifications of a given author’s impact, they will only fine tune the results.

How will all of this affect frequency of reading of a given publication? Because it is now possible to search across all publications in seconds followed by the direct access not only of an abstract but the entire article information flow will speed up and help to develop a given idea. My expectation is that the traditional publication approach will disappear over time and most papers will go on line proportional to the phasing out of senior scientist used to the traditional model. My guess is that the revolution in disseminating information that started with typesetting by Gutenberg in 1450 (in China already around 1000) will soon be replaced by all electronic media. In addition, I expect that journal articles will transform into online fora of open discussions of the content of journals, not just consumption. ELife has already developed some of these novel publishing ideas such as the publication of the peer-review along with the article and the author’s rebuttal letter–things that are kept top secret by traditional journals. In addition, anybody can comment on the paper and such comments will become a permanent record. Combined, open access and open communication will help stamp out scientific fraud. The quality of the review process along with the publication of the name of the reviewer will ensure that anybody who cannot repeat the work can immediately interact with the authors via the online fora. This will change publication as we know it from a static process forming a one-way street of information flow (author to journal to library) into a dynamic process that will turn the scientific community into an intellectual village of worldwide openly communicating individuals. Clearly, ranking of universities such as QS University relies for 20% of the total ranking on citations per faculty, requiring that faculty should make sure that all their citations are properly credited to them. Easy ways to do this is through Google Scholar profile (or Scopus or Web of Science profiles).

I believe that the essential stumbling block for these new models of truly free communications, data, and idea exchange will be how to finance these forward looking endeavors that are transforming our publication landscape. Nearly 500 years after printing helped the public to gain access to scriptures, restricted before to the knowledgeable few, online open access publications could become the next step forward in free information flow, provided the financial models can be resolved. Other online features such as Facebook or Twitter will help to drive the free communication enterprise even further into accessibility by everyone.

Further reading:

http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676

https://twitter.com/elife

http://theconversation.com/schekmans-luxury-journal-boycott-doesnt-go-far-enough-21145

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Visualizing Impact with IRO’s Readership Activity Map

readership-map

Readership Map: Real-time Visualization of Full-text Downloads

The homepage of Iowa Research Online has a whole new look with a Readership Activity Map. This new tool allows visitors to see full-text downloads from all over the world as they happen. When someone visits the site and downloads a Master’s Thesis or research article or any other scholarly work in the Iowa Research Online collection, a dot will appear on the map showing the user’s location and the box on the left will show what document is being downloaded. With every passing minute, readers everywhere can access and benefit from the research coming from the University of Iowa. Visit the site and see for yourself!

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Appropriations Bill Expands Open Access to Federally Funded Research

President Obama signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014 last Friday (1/17/2014) to fund the activities of the federal government for the 2014 fiscal year. The $1.1 trillion dollar budget includes the requirement that federal agencies providing $100 million or more in annual research funding to make the resulting peer-reviewed research papers publicly available within 12 months of publication. This provision is an expansion of the Open Access policy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to cover agencies within the purview of the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. Here is an excerpt of the bill that details this provision:

Sec. 527. Each Federal agency, or in the case of an agency with multiple bureaus, each bureau (or operating division) funded under this Act that has research and development expenditures in excess of $100,000,000 per year shall develop a Federal research public access policy that provides for—

(1) the submission to the agency, agency bureau, or designated entity acting on behalf of the agency, a machine-readable version of the author’s final peer-reviewed manuscripts that have been accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals describing research supported, in whole or in part, from funding by the Federal Government;

(2) free online public access to such final peer-reviewed manuscripts or published versions not later than 12 months after the official date of publication; and

(3) compliance with all relevant copyright laws.

Like the NIH Public Access Policy, this will require recipients of federal research funding to deposit their final research papers to an Open Access repository like PubMed Central or Iowa Research Online. Details of specific public access policies have yet to be released.

[Washington Post | SPARC]

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Nobel Laureate Participates in a Reddit Ask Me Anything

Randy Schekman, a co-recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, participated in an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session on Reddit this weekend. Schekman, a Cell Biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, was jointly awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in understanding the transport mechanisms involved in the export of proteins from cells. Last week, he authored an editorial in the Guardian that accused the practices of journals like Cell, Nature, and Science of distorting science and has been the subject of both criticism and praise in the scholarly publishing world.

In his editorial, Schekman specifically calls out Cell, Nature, and Science (C/N/S) who are among the most prestigious journals in the biological and medical sciences.

“These journals aggressively curate their brands, in ways more conducive to selling subscriptions than to stimulating the most important research. Like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits, they know scarcity stokes demand, so they artificially restrict the number of papers they accept.” [Source]

From the Reddit AMA, the focus of Schekman’s criticism of C/N/S is the artificial restriction of publishing only the papers that fit in the print run of these journals. “Why should we have such a limitation in the 21st century?” he asks. Schekman marks this practice as a distinguishing characteristic of a “luxury” journal as well as the use of a professional editorial staff rather than working scientists in the field. This combination of management priorities, Schekman argues, distorts scientific discourse by emphasizing fashionable topics at the expense of good science.

Schekman is a supporter of the open access movement and is the Editor-in-Chief of eLife, an open access journal of life sciences papers. His boycott of C/N/S has drawn criticism for his eLife affiliation and his previous 46 publications in these journals.  [Read the AMA here]