The first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 11 open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) is presented, focusing on four key modes of analysis: journal outputs ; OAMJ author characteristics; subject areas; and citation profiles. Actually, there is no “typical” mega-journal, and additional research should be carried out to better understand the current and future role of OAMJs in scholarly communication.
OpenAIRE works to find a community-endorsed definition of “open peer review” (OPR). OpenAIRE collected 122 definitions of “open review” or “open peer review” from the scientific literature. Iterative analysis of these definitions resulted in the identification of seven distinct OPR traits at work in various combinations amongst these definitions. In this post will be described each of these OPR traits and their proposed advantages and disadvantages, with reference to evidence of their efficacy where available.
INRA, French National Institute for Agricultural Research, has spent the last years promoting the accessibility of its scientific resources in many ways. The institution formalized its open-access policy in 2016 which involves seven main principles with a two-fold goal. INRA’s commitment to open science goes beyond just providing access to its publications. Its broad policy, which now targets manuscripts and datasets, has two main goals.
The 2016 Jisc and CNI one-day conference brought together leaders from the UK and the US academic and research communities concerned with scholarly communications. A briefing paper and report on the proceedings of the event is available separately but this report is designed to bring together into seven themes the key points from the conference. Further discussions are also reflected in this report about 2 themes: sustaining and using the scholarly record; improving the ability to re-use the scholarly record.
In October, SPARC Europe convened a meeting with high-level stakeholders from the international funding, research and library communities to discuss how to sustain some of the world’s important OA services. New funding mechanisms are being explored. After extensive essential preparatory work led by Knowledge Exchange, best concluded in the Putting Down Roots report, SPARC Europe now wants to explore the feasibility of the proposal and how to put this into action with leading decision-makers and Open Science advocators worldwide.
From 8th September, DOAJ will accept a short open access statement, but only in combination with a Creative Commons licensing statement on the same page. Likewise, from August 2016, DOAJ no longer accepts journals that require users to register to view the full text.
The Jisc-funded Open Access Good Practice (OAGP) initiative is a community-led support programme which aims to develop and share best practices when implementing open access (OA) workflows, systems and procedures across UK higher education institutions (HEIs). As part of this programme, nine Pathfinder projects were established in 2014. This paper highlights a selection of thoughts and reflections from project members about their experience of participating in the programme.
De Gruyter Open Author Survey has recently shown that authors from less wealthy countries are indeed more likely to publish their works in gold open access model. There is a strong negative correlation between the share of academic papers published in open access journals and a country’s GDP per capita.
The University of California (UC) Libraries have recently released the final version of the Pay It Forward report, examining the impact on large, research-intensive institutions in the US and Canada of a wholesale shift to gold open access (OA) for journals. The conclusions point a way toward a possible funding model that could introduce the right incentives to both manage costs and improve the system over time, while achieving the benefit of fully open access to research.
The result of the study revealed that 56 % of respondents prefer to seek information through Open Access Digital Repositories , 34 % of the respondents believe that the use of Open Access Digital Repositories while seeking information has increased their academic activities.
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