Estimating the potential impacts of open access to research findings

Advances in information and communication technologies are disrupting traditional models of scholarly publishing, radically changing our capacity to reproduce, distribute, control, and publish information. The key question is whether there are new opportunities and new models for scholarly publishing that would better serve researchers and better communicate and disseminate research findings. Identifying access and efficiency limitations under the subscription publishing model, this paper explores the potential impacts of enhanced access to research outputs using a modified Solow-Swan model, which introduces ‘accessibility’ and ‘efficiency’ parameters into calculating returns to R&D. Indicative impact ranges are presented for Government, Higher Education and Australian Research Council R&D expenditures. We conclude that there may be substantial benefits to be gained from more open access to research findings

Looking in from the outside: The case of the excluded self-publisher

A significant portion of books on Amazon are self-published using Kindle Direct Publishing. Self-publishers are given an opportunity to share their work with the world with a few clicks of their mouse. However, traditional publishing infrastructures are not as welcoming to the self-publisher. This paper undertakes to perform a policy analysis of government funding frameworks available to workers of the Canadian publishing industry. Through performing a discourse analysis, the study finds that the self-publisher is ineligible to apply for funds and grants from the government both on the provincial and the federal levels. The self-publishing business model is not recognized as a legitimate one and is often equated with vanity publishing, which comes with a stigma. Furthermore, traditional publishing industry workers act as gatekeepers who also exclude the self-publisher from the conversation around the changing landscape of the Canadian publishing industry. Even though the self-publisher should be recognized as a legitimate worker of the cultural industries, they are not acknowledged as such both by government officials who distribute grants and traditional publishers. This study adds to the limited scope of research conducted on self-publishing in order to break the boundaries that self-publishers encounter. The study concludes with recommendations to assess the process of the distribution of government funds and grants in order to incorporate the changing practices of the cultural industries and incorporate new business models such as self-publishing

Response from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to the consultation on the European Commission study on scientific publishing

CERN welcomes the EC study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication markets in Europe. In general the report accurately reflects the overall situation in scientific publishing. Most of the findings in the study accord with data collected and analyzed by our scientific information officers. The report has the potential to serve as a reference document for scientific information policy makers in the ongoing reform of the publishing model. The recommendations presented by the authoring consortium of the study deserve the European Commission's full attention. We support the recommendations made and we take the opportunity to encourage the Commission to take all appropriate steps to contribute to adapt the framework for scientific publishing to a fast changing world with new paradigms

Coping with journal-price inflation: leading policy proposals and the quality-spectrum

This paper presents a simple model in which research universities stock their libraries with academic journals by picking a threshold level of quality below which no subscriptions are ordered. This framework is used to analyze two sets of initiatives aimed at dealing with journal-price inflation: (1) promoting low-cost modes of production and distribution, e.g., e-journals, and (2) changing tenure and promotion requirements in order to reduce the incentive for scholars to prioritize quantity over quality. Although these initiatives are, in the author's view, laudable in many respects, the model makes the point that the range of quality among journals that libraries subscribe to may shrink as a result. If there are gaps between contemporary standards of ``quality'''' in academic publishing, and what turns out to be useful to society in the long-run, then a ``scholarly communication'''' policy that is sensitive to pluralism with respect to journal-quality is recommended.

Reason, Risk, and Reward: Models for Libraries and Other Stakeholders in an Evolving Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem

Scholarly publishing, and scholarly communication more generally, are based on patterns established over many decades and even centuries. Some of these patterns are clearly valuable and intimately related to core values of the academy, but others were based on the exigencies of the past, and new opportunities have brought into question whether it makes sense to persist in supporting old models. New technologies and new publishing models raise the question of how we should fund and operate scholarly publishing and scholarly communication in the future, moving away from a scarcity model based on the exchange of physical goods that restricts access to scholarly literature unless a market-based exchange takes place. This essay describes emerging models that attempt to shift scholarly communication to a more open-access and mission based approach and that try to retain control of scholarship by academics and the institutions and scholarly societies that support them. It explores changing practices for funding scholarly journals and changing services provided by academic libraries, changes instituted with the end goal of providing more access to more readers, stimulating new scholarship, and removing inefficiencies from a system ready for change

Pubfair: A Framework for Sustainable, Distributed, Open Science Publishing Services

Over the last thirty years, digitally-networked technologies have disrupted traditional media, turning business models on their head and changing the conditions for the creation, packaging and distribution of content. Yet, scholarly communication still looks remarkably as it did in the pre-digital age. The primary unit of dissemination remains the research article (or book in some disciplines), and today’s articles still bear a remarkable resemblance to those that populated the pages of Oldenburg’s Philosophical Transactions 350 years ago. In an age of such disruptive innovation, it is striking how little digital technologies have impacted scholarly publishing; and this is also somewhat ironic, since the Web was developed by scientists for research purposes. Pubfair is a conceptual model for a modular open source publishing framework which builds upon a distributed network of repositories to enable the dissemination and quality-control of a range of research outputs including publications, data, and more. Pubfair aims to introduce significant innovation into scholarly publishing. It enables different stakeholders (funders, institutions, scholarly societies, individuals scientists) to access a suite of functionalities to create their own dissemination channels, with built in open review and transparent processes. The model minimizes publishing costs while maintaining academic standards by connecting communities with iterative publishing services linked to their preferred repository. Such a publishing environment has the capacity to transform the scholarly communication system, making it more research-centric, dissemination-oriented and open to and supportive of innovation, while also collectively managed by the scholarly community

Media and social solidarity: Vienna Part I

I flew to Vienna just as the UK Govt was publishing its spending data for the first time. And as I waited in fog-bound Heathrow I started reading Alan Rusbridger’s landmark essay on how the business model change in journalism is changing its democratic role. I was on my way to the heart of old middle Europe for a transatlantic debate on Social Solidarity, Democracy and the Media at the Institut Fur Die Wissenschaften vom Menschen