IFLA Serials & Other Continuing Resources Section posted the recording of the webinar International Open Access Practices: beyond the APC model on their YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/mG2fhsJZbzs
You can also watch for future activities of the Serials & Continuing Resource Section of IFLA on this and other topics of interest.
On October 8th, COAR released a Community Framework for Best Practices in Repositories. The aim of this work was to bring together relevant criteria into a global, multidimensional framework for assessing best practices that can be adopted and used by different types of repositories (publication, institutional, data, etc.) and in different geographical and thematic contexts.
As one type of attempt to address the important issue of predatory publishing, numerous individuals, associations, and companies have begun curating journal watchlists or journal safelists. This study explores the inclusion/exclusion criteria stated by these lists to better understand their content, as well as the larger controversies that continue to surround the phenomenon of predatory publishing. Four watchlists and ten safelists were analyzed through an examination of their published mission statements and inclusion/exclusion criteria. Some researchers wish to go beyond these lists and are exploring the efficacy of information campaigns on raising awareness of predatory publishing.
The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) aims to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics in academic promotion. This study led by the Medical Faculty of University of Bern (Switzerland) demonstrates that the rank of the JIF is a bad proxy measure for the actual citation impact of individual articles. The University signed DORA and replaced the JIF rank with the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR), an article-level measure of citation impact developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Publishers agree to make journal summaries open and searchable in single repository. This new cross-publisher initiative, launched on 24 September by Stuart Taylor at OASPA Conference, calls for unrestricted availability of abstracts to boost the discovery of research. Publishers involved in I4OA, the Initiative for Open Abstracts, have agreed to submit their article summaries to Crossref, which will make the abstracts available in a common format. It also aims to emulate I4OC (Initiative for Open Citations), an initiative established three years ago to make metadata and bibliographical references openly available through Crossref. Since its launch, 2,000 publishers have signed up to I4OC.
The paper provides a critical review of predatory journals phenomenon affecting the field of scholarly communication. This article highlights the main issues and establishes them as research subjects. The article concludes with research avenues that contribute to the analysis of mutation in digital scholarly communication. [Abstract in English, Article in French]
Recently, interest in utilising open source software tools to create and disseminate scholarly content has grown. A June 2019 report, funded by the Mellon Foundation, supported by MIT Press, noted the clear lack of incentives for collaboration, due in part to tool creators chasing the same philanthropic funding. In response to this, the new non-profit Knowledge Futures Group offers institutions opportunities for collaboration with other open source initiatives, as well as with commercial entities wishing to explore a more open offering in community publishing.
Publishing open access dramatically increases the impact of research beyond academia. Springer Nature shares further evidence of this in a four-part blog series that highlights the key takeaways from a survey Springer Nature conducted of over 9,000 researchers in June 2019, to better understand their attitudes towards societal impact.
Scientific journals are run by researchers, experts in the discipline, who work, in this framework, for scientific publishing houses. Some researchers have also understood the value of offering these publishing giants new scholarly journals which they propose to “manage” in order to make their activity and their field of research flourish. Two cases of system drift are explained.
Who owns the content of scientific research papers, and who has the right to circulate them? This CREATe Working Paper by Aileen Fyfe uses the history of academic publishing to explore the origins of our modern concerns in terms of claim to ownership, circulation reprinting and reuse of material during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It ends by considering how things changed in the twentieth century, as commercial interests became increasingly influential in academic publishing and as new technologies brought new opportunities for circulating knowledge.
