Wiley and Elsevier attacked over failures to deposit papers as research funder warns it could withdraw funding for hybrid journals

Looking for reasons to visit a library for students in the age of technology? Here are a couple of solid ones.

A Review of: Baich, T. (2015). Open access: Help or hindrance to resource sharing? Interlending & Document Supply, 43(2), 68-75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ILDS-01-2015-0003   Abstract    Objective – To examine interlibrary loan (ILL) request rates for open access (OA) materials and determine how OA may affect resource sharing. This research updates the author’s previous study.   Design – Quantitative analysis.  Setting – A large, urban, public research university library system in the United States of America.  Subjects – 1,557 open access ILL material requests among 23,531 total ILL requests submitted during the 2012 and 2013 fiscal years (July 2011-June 2013).  Methods – The library has tracked and recorded OA requests that appear among ILL material requests since 2009. Using OCLC’s ILLiad software to manage ILL requests, they have implemented two custom routines. One routine is for open access searching on standard items, and uses software plugins to search across various open resources. All materials published prior to 1923 are treated as being in the public domain, so requests for these materials are automatically routed to this queue. The second custom routine is used for searching for OA electronic theses and dissertations, and is employed when the requested resource is not found in the library’s subscription resources. Other article requests are routed to the RapidILL service for open access availability.   Main Results – The research presented reveals that ILL requests for OA materials exhibited a steady increase year over year, while overall ILL requests decreased slightly. This finding is true both for the fiscal years reported in this study and also the years since the author’s original study in 2011 (Baich, 2012). Of the 1,557 OA requests examined, 72% (n=1,135) were for journal articles, 8% (n=125) were for books or book chapters, 9% (n=140) were for theses or dissertations, 3% (n=54) were for conference papers, and 7% (n=105) were for reports.  Library staff typically fill these article requests using gold OA or green OA sources. The researcher notes the difficulty in refining by source, though confirmed that 15% of articles requested (n=170) were filled using a gold OA source, and that another 30 article requests (~2.6%) were filled with materials available in the public domain. This leads to the conclusion that the majority of article requests are filled using green OA sources. As the library also includes OA collections within its electronic resources, staff filled 13% of ILL article requests (n=152) using journals and repositories from these sources. Another 16% of article requests were filled using a combination of various online open repositories, including subject repositories (n=83), institutional repositories (n=84), or national or consortial repositories (n=16).  The author includes a similar breakdown of fulfillment rates and sources for the other main categories explored – books and book chapters, theses and dissertations, conference papers, and reports – representing a combined 27% of all OA ILL requests. Regarding this content, it is noteworthy that overall open access requests for these material categories has dropped across each category when compared to the author’s previous study, with the exception of report requests, which more than doubled compared to that previous study.  The study includes a brief overview of the user status for users making the various open access requests, with undergraduate students (n=283) and graduate students (n=807) combined making 70% of all requests. Subject areas are also briefly examined, with ILL requests coming from 63 different schools or departments across the library system. The top 15 are reported, with Psychology being the top requester (n=198), followed closely by Engineering & Technology (n=182). The author notes that 7 of the top 15 are STEM or health science disciplines.   Conclusion – The rate of ILL requests for OA materials shows that library users continue to struggle with information retrieval. The researcher concludes that in many cases, making an ILL request is easier for the user than completing a thorough search. Since staff resources are being redirected to fill user requests for materials that are readily available through open access, this use of staff time may have impacts on resource sharing and the library’s ability to fill ILL requests. The author identifies benefits of using OA resources, including an increased ability of staff to fulfill ILL requests, especially when providing grey literature, theses and dissertations, and conference papers and reports. Another identified benefit was the decreased turnaround time for securing materials, with immediate availability via OA saving 1.15 days to deliver materials to the user. Finally, the library estimates cost savings of over $27,000 (USD), based on estimated traditional per unit ILL costs.

The Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication spearheads campus-wide initiatives to open, share, and preserve scholarship.

Issue brief?

#Bibliogifts in LibGen? Text sharing powered by biblioleaks + crowdsourcing http://t.co/GZXdYaQM7g in @JASIST or here http://t.co/bhffXBAUcc — Guillaume... #English #hybridopenaccess #openaccess

A fair, free and open future

How to give academics incentives to do systematic research on current events

Here is the text from my talk at the CUNY Graduate Center on Feb. 5, 2016 as part of a panel discussion entitled “Ideas in Circulation: Open Scholarship for Social Justice.” You can fol…

Background Recent controversies highlighting substandard peer review in Open Access (OA) and traditional (subscription) journals have increased the need for authors, funders, publishers, and institutions to assure quality of peer-review in academic journals. I propose that transparency of the peer-review process may be seen as an indicator of the quality of peer-review, and develop and validate a tool enabling different stakeholders to assess transparency of the peer-review process.   Methods and Findings Based on editorial guidelines and best practices, I developed a 14-item tool to rate transparency of the peer-review process on the basis of journals’ websites. In Study 1, a random sample of 231 authors of papers in 92 subscription journals in different fields rated transparency of the journals that published their work. Authors’ ratings of the transparency were positively associated with quality of the peer-review process but unrelated to journal’s impact factors. In Study 2, 20 experts on OA publishing assessed the transparency of established (non-OA) journals, OA journals categorized as being published by potential predatory publishers, and journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Results show high reliability across items (α = .91) and sufficient reliability across raters. Ratings differentiated the three types of journals well. In Study 3, academic librarians rated a random sample of 140 DOAJ journals and another 54 journals that had received a hoax paper written by Bohannon to test peer-review quality. Journals with higher transparency ratings were less likely to accept the flawed paper and showed higher impact as measured by the h5 index from Google Scholar.   Conclusions The tool to assess transparency of the peer-review process at academic journals shows promising reliability and validity. The transparency of the peer-review process can be seen as an indicator of peer-review quality allowing the tool to be used to predict academic quality in new journals.

KEYNOTE: Erin McKiernan, My pledge to be open (Yeah, how’s that going?) As given at OpenCon 2015 Brussels. Marking the official launch of http://whyopenresearc…

Publishing an open-access paper in a journal can be prohibitively expensive. Some researchers are drumming up support for a movement to change that.

This paper is the first to study the effects of several dissemination channels in an open access environment by analysing the download data of the OAPEN Library. The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible monographs. The goal of open access publishing is maximum dissemination, and this implies finding the largest possible number of readers within and outside academia. This may be supported by understanding the effects of dissemination channels. The download data stems from three channels: Website only, Website and direct access and direct access only.  From the logs of the OAPEN Library, download data were obtained containing the number of downloads and the name of the Internet provider. Based on public information, each Internet provider was categorised. The subject and language of each book were determined using metadata from the OAPEN Library.   The download data of 979 books in the OAPEN Library were analysed. The monographs were downloaded 152,662 times in the first six months of 2012. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out on the data. The quantitative analysis was done using the spread sheet software Excel. The qualitative analysis was carried out using the statistical package SPSS.   Quantitative analysis shows that use is dominated by direct access. Almost three quarters of all downloads come from users who do not use the Website www.oapen.org, but find the books by other means. The qualitative analysis could not find evidence that channel use was influenced by user groups nor the state of users' Internet infrastructure. The same holds true for the characteristics of the books themselves: no effect on channel use was found for both the language and subjects of the monographs.  The goal of multichannel analysis is to determine the optimal use of resources: what configuration leads to the best results? The definition of best results in an open access environment is different from a commercial environment. the objective not financial gain, but maximum dissemination. results show that most readers are using direct download channel. direct downloads occur if use other systems than oapen library website, spite of fact it offers functions available through channels. this implies making metadata user's infrastructure used on daily basis ensures results.

As a new open access press with a liberal arts focus launches, I asked four veterans of the project to look back at the journey.