Can scientists and their institutions become their own open access publishers?

This article offers a personal perspective on the current state of academic publishing, and posits that the scientific community is beset with journals that contribute little valuable knowledge, overload the community’s capacity for high-quality peer review, and waste resources. Open access publishing can offer solutions that benefit researchers and other information users, as well as institutions and funders, but commercial journal publishers have influenced open access policies and practices in ways that favor their economic interests over those of other stakeholders in knowledge creation and sharing. One way to free research from constraints on access is the diamond route of open access publishing, in which institutions and funders that produce new knowledge reclaim responsibility for publication via institutional journals or other open platforms. I argue that research journals (especially those published for profit) may no longer be fit for purpose, and hope that readers will consider whether the time has come to put responsibility for publishing back into the hands of researchers and their institutions. The potential advantages and challenges involved in a shift away from for-profit journals in favor of institutional open access publishing are explored. Este artículo ofrece una perspectiva personal a propósito del estado actual de la edición académica, y propone que la comunidad científica se encuentra lastrada por las muchas revistas que contribuyen pocos conocimientos de valor, sobrecargan la capacidad común de proporcionar una revisión experta de calidad, y desperdician los recursos. La edición en acceso abierto puede ofrecer soluciones que benefician a los investigadores y otros usuarios de la información, además de las instituciones y los patrocinadores, pero las editoriales comerciales de revistas científicas han influido en las políticas y prácticas del acceso abierto mediante vías que favorecen sus intereses económicos por encima de los intereses de otras partes interesadas en la creación y diseminación de conocimientos. Una manera de liberar a la investigación de las restricciones al acceso es la vía diamante de edición en acceso abierto, en la cual las instituciones y los patrocinadores que producen los nuevos conocimientos reclaman la responsabilidad de la edición a través de revistas institucionales u otras plataformas abiertas. Propongo que las revistas de investigación (sobre todo aquellas que son editadas como productos comerciales) ya no cumplen con su finalidad original, y espero que los lectores se planteen si es oportuno o no devolver a los investigadores y sus instituciones la responsabilidad de la edición y diseminación. Se exploran las ventajas potenciales así como los retos relacionados con el abandono progresivo de las revistas comerciales a favor de la edición institucional en acceso abierto

Can scientists and their institutions become their own open access publishers?

This article offers a personal perspective on the current state of academic publishing, and posits that the scientific community is beset with journals that contribute little valuable knowledge, overload the community’s capacity for high-quality peer review, and waste resources. Open access publishing can offer solutions that benefit researchers and other information users, as well as institutions and funders, but commercial journal publishers have influenced open access policies and practices in ways that favor their economic interests over those of other stakeholders in knowledge creation and sharing. One way to free research from constraints on access is the diamond route of open access publishing, in which institutions and funders that produce new knowledge reclaim responsibility for publication via institutional journals or other open platforms. I argue that research journals (especially those published for profit) may no longer be fit for purpose, and hope that readers will consider whether the time has come to put responsibility for publishing back into the hands of researchers and their institutions. The potential advantages and challenges involved in a shift away from for-profit journals in favor of institutional open access publishing are explored. Este artículo ofrece una perspectiva personal a propósito del estado actual de la edición académica, y propone que la comunidad científica se encuentra lastrada por las muchas revistas que contribuyen pocos conocimientos de valor, sobrecargan la capacidad común de proporcionar una revisión experta de calidad, y desperdician los recursos. La edición en acceso abierto puede ofrecer soluciones que benefician a los investigadores y otros usuarios de la información, además de las instituciones y los patrocinadores, pero las editoriales comerciales de revistas científicas han influido en las políticas y prácticas del acceso abierto mediante vías que favorecen sus intereses económicos por encima de los intereses de otras partes interesadas en la creación y diseminación de conocimientos. Una manera de liberar a la investigación de las restricciones al acceso es la vía diamante de edición en acceso abierto, en la cual las instituciones y los patrocinadores que producen los nuevos conocimientos reclaman la responsabilidad de la edición a través de revistas institucionales u otras plataformas abiertas. Propongo que las revistas de investigación (sobre todo aquellas que son editadas como productos comerciales) ya no cumplen con su finalidad original, y espero que los lectores se planteen si es oportuno o no devolver a los investigadores y sus instituciones la responsabilidad de la edición y diseminación. Se exploran las ventajas potenciales así como los retos relacionados con el abandono progresivo de las revistas comerciales a favor de la edición institucional en acceso abierto

The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles

Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles. We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigateOAin three populations: (1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, (2) recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and (3) articles viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that lets users find OA articles using oaDOI. We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made freeto- read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license. We also examine the citation impact of OA articles, corroborating the so-called open-access citation advantage: accounting for age and discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA.Weencourage further research using the free oaDOI service, as a way to inform OA policy and practice

Is It Such a Big Deal? On the Cost of Journal Use in the Digital Era

Commercial scholarly publishers promote and sell bundles of journals—known as big deals—that provide access to entire collections rather than individual journals. Following this new model, size of serial collections in academic libraries increased almost fivefold from 1986 to 2011. Using data on library subscriptions and references made for a sample of North American universities, this study provides evidence that, while big deal bundles do decrease the mean price per subscribed journal, academic libraries receive less value for their investment. We find that university researchers cite only a fraction of journals purchased by their libraries, that this fraction is decreasing, and that the cost per cited journal has increased. These findings reveal how academic publishers use product differentiation and price strategies to increase sales and profits in the digital era, often at the expense of university and scientific stakeholders

Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature

The website Sci-Hub enables users to download PDF versions of scholarly articles, including many articles that are paywalled at their journal\u27s site. Sci-Hub has grown rapidly since its creation in 2011, but the extent of its coverage was unclear. Here we report that, as of March 2017, Sci-Hub\u27s database contains 68.9% of the 81.6 million scholarly articles registered with Crossref and 85.1% of articles published in toll access journals. We find that coverage varies by discipline and publisher, and that Sci-Hub preferentially covers popular, paywalled content. For toll access articles, we find that Sci-Hub provides greater coverage than the University of Pennsylvania, a major research university in the United States. Green open access to toll access articles via licit services, on the other hand, remains quite limited. Our interactive browser at https://greenelab.github.io/scihub allows users to explore these findings in more detail. For the first time, nearly all scholarly literature is available gratis to anyone with an Internet connection, suggesting the toll access business model may become unsustainable

Next-Generation Data Management Plans: Global, Machine-Actionable, FAIR

At IDCC 2016 the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library (CDL) announced plans to merge our respective data management planning tools, DMPonline and DMPTool, into a single platform. By formalizing our partnership and co-developing a core infrastructure for data management plans (DMPs), we aim to meet the skyrocketing demand for our services in our national, and increasingly international, contexts. The larger goal is to engage with what is now a global DMP agenda and help make DMPs a more useful exercise for all stakeholders in the research enterprise. This year we offer a progress report that encompasses our co-development roadmap and future enhancements focused on implementing use cases for machine-actionable DMPs

The State of OA: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Prevalence and Impact of Open Access Articles

Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles. We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigate OA in three populations: (1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, (2) recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and (3) articles viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that lets users find OA articles using oaDOI. We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made freeto-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license. We also examine the citation impact of OA articles, corroborating the so-called open-access citation advantage: accounting for age and discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA. We encourage further research using the free oaDOI service, as a way to inform OA policy and practice

Study on open science: The general state of the play in Open Science principles and practices at European life sciences institutes

Nowadays, open science is a hot topic on all levels and also is one of the priorities of the European Research Area. Components that are commonly associated with open science are open access, open data, open methodology, open source, open peer review, open science policies and citizen science. Open science may a great potential to connect and influence the practices of researchers, funding institutions and the public. In this paper, we evaluate the level of openness based on public surveys at four European life sciences institute