Open Access, academic libraries and the future of scholarly publishing

●Background on research project ●Open Access: a long desire for transition ●Open Access targets in Europe ●OA2020 – setting a new horizon? ●Counter-narratives and inner resistances ●What about libraries? ●Discussion & concluding remark

Open Access – the better access? Academic publishing and its politics

Open Access to scholarly literature seems to dominate current discussions in the academic publishing, research funding and science policy arenas. Several international initiatives have been recently started calling for a large-scale transformation of the majority of scholarly journals from subscription model to Open Access. Such a massive transition would indeed affect not only business models and related cash flows but might be also expected to generate new inequalities in distributing resources among different regions or research fields. Thus, the paper at hand aims to serve as an input statement for the upcoming discussion and to provide some background information on Open Access debates

Open Access – the better access? Academic publishing and its politics

Open Access to scholarly literature seems to dominate current discussions in the academic publishing, research funding and science policy arenas. Several international initiatives have been recently started calling for a large-scale transformation of the majority of scholarly journals from subscription model to Open Access. Such a massive transition would indeed affect not only business models and related cash flows but might be also expected to generate new inequalities in distributing resources among different regions or research fields. Thus, the paper at hand aims to serve as an input statement for the upcoming discussion and to provide some background information on Open Access debates

Plan S, Open Access and the potential roles for STS research

The year 2020 plays a highly symbolic role in the world of academic publishing. As the beginning of a new decade, it featured prominently in various research programmes such as “Horizon 2020”, the framework programme for research and innovation of the European Commission, as well as in numerous roadmaps and development goals in various institutions across the globe. Yet, in the recent past, it has also become a target year in many strategic plans for shifting the business of academic publishing from the prevailing journal subscription model towards full and immediate Open Access

Vier Dilemmata offener Wissenschaft

Welchen Nutzen hat die Gesellschaft wirklich von öffentlich zugänglichen wissenschaftlichen Publikationen? Können Forschende als Open Scientist eine wissenschaftliche Karriere aufbauen? Wo sind Grenzen der offenen Wissenschaft? Der Beitrag beleuchtet vier Spannungsfelder, die es zu überwinden gilt, damit die neue offene Wissenschaftskultur Wirklichkeit wird

Of hopes, villains, and Trojan horses : Open Access academic publishing and its battlefields

Open Access to scholarly literature has become a popular concept that rapidly catapulted onto the (European) science policy-making stage. In particular, since its inception some 20 years ago by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), there has been an idea that the conventional subscription-based system of scientific journal publishing should be gradually replaced with free online access worldwide. Because research results reported in such publications are often paid for through public funding, suggests a common argument, broader societal groups, practitioners, and other scholars should have immediate and unrestricted access to them. However, translating this vision into practice reveals a number of varying and at times conflicting interests and goals of involved actors. The controversies around Open Access range from the two main implementation models (the so-called Green and Golden roads to Open Access) that were initially proposed as complementary by the BOAI but have increasingly grown to be seen as competitive by their respective proponents, to more recent national and international science-policy interventions that aim to achieve 100% Open Access by a certain target year. By taking the example of negotiations between Dutch research universities and the scientific publishing company Elsevier, in this thesis I investigate how different expectations are attached to the proposed transition to full Open Access, how it has started to affect actual publication practices, and how it could ultimately re-order the whole academic publishing system according to a novel economic logic of author-side publishing fees. For this purpose, I have conducted a case study which includes interviews with negotiation team members and researchers in the Netherlands as well as Open Access monitoring statistics and other empirical materials. Building on Grounded Theory and Situational Analysis approaches as well as infrastructure studies and re-infrastructuring as my overall theoretical framework, I show how controversies around Open Access can be illuminated through these lenses. In doing so, the thesis contributes to current debates by adding more nuanced perspectives and original insights. Offener Zugang zu wissenschaftlicher Literatur ist schnell zu einem populären Konzept avanciert, das derzeit große Aufmerksamkeit in der (europäischen) Wissenschaftspolitik genießt. Seit der Erklärung der Budapester Open Access Initiative (BOAI) vor 20 Jahren gibt es Bestrebungen, das herkömmliche Publikationssystem auf Basis kostenpflichtiger Abonnements durch freien elektronischen Zugang zu wissenschaftlichen Zeitschriften zu ersetzen. Weil viele Forschungsergebnisse, die dort veröffentlicht werden, aus öffentlicher Hand finanziert werden, so das gängige Argument, sollen andere Forschende, Fachleute aus der Praxis sowie die breitere Öffentlichkeit einen unverzüglichen und uneingeschränkten Zugang zu diesen Publikationen bekommen. Doch die Versuche, diese Vision umzusetzen, offenbaren eine Vielzahl von unterschiedlichen und teilweise widersprüchlichen Interessen und Zielen von beteiligten Parteien. Dies fängt bereits mit den zwei Implementierungsmodellen (sog. Grüner und Goldener Weg zu Open Access) an, die von BOAI ursprünglich als komplementär vorgeschlagen wurden, jedoch zunehmend in Konkurrenz zu stehen scheinen. Aber auch neuere (inter-)nationale Interventionen seitens der Wissenschaftspolitik, die die Erreichung von 100% Open Access bis zu einem bestimmten Jahr anstreben, lösen kontroverse Reaktionen aus. Aufbauend auf einem Fallbeispiel mit Verhandlungen zwischen den niederländischen Universitäten und dem Wissenschaftsverlag Elsevier gehe ich in dieser Dissertation den Fragen nach, wie an die angestrebte Open-Access-Transformation unterschiedliche Erwartungen geknüpft werden, wie sie die eigentlichen Publikationspraktiken zu beeinflussen beginnt und wie das wissenschaftliche Publikationssystem insgesamt durch neuartige Publikationsgebühren umgeordnet werden könnte. Zu diesem Zweck habe ich eine Fallstudie durchgeführt, welche Interviews mit Mitgliedern von Verhandlungsteams und Forschenden in den Niederlanden, Monitoring-Statistiken zu Open Access sowie weitere empirische Materialien inkludiert. In Anlehnung an Grounded Theory und Situationsanalyse sowie an Infrastrukturforschung und Re-Infrastrukturierung als theoretischen Rahmen zeige ich auf, wie Kontroversen um Open Access aus diesem Blickwinkel beleuchtet werden können. Dadurch trägt diese Dissertation differenziertere Perspektiven und neue Erkenntnisse zu laufenden Debatten bei

Data reuse in the social sciences and humanities : project report of the SWITCH Innovation Lab “Repositories & Data Quality”

The underlying data and additional materials in connection with this publication are available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4609834 The code used for data analysis is available at: https://github.com/ZHAW-Services-Research-Data/SWITCH-Innovation-Lab-Repositories-Data-QualityThis report is the result of the SWITCH Innovation Lab “Repositories & Data Quality”, a project that ran from October 2020 until February 2021 as a collaboration between SWITCH and ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences. Its aim was to complement previous studies on research data management issues (conducted in part as earlier SWITCH Innovation Labs) and to identify relevant data sources for researchers in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in Switzerland. More particularly, the project focused on the reuse of existing data sets by SSH researchers and the criteria they applied when choosing a suitable data source for their work and research. Some of the steps in this task consisted of finding the locations where valuable data is shared, published and accessed as well as conducting a more specific investigation into data availability, modes of accessibility and aspects related to assessing data quality. For this purpose, the project team designed and carried out an online survey targeted specifically at active SSH researchers in Switzerland. To disseminate the survey questionnaire towards this target audience, mailing lists of several research organizations in these fields were utilized. The survey ran for about 8 weeks until early February 2021 and received responses from 260 participants. Some of the main findings include a generally high number of researchers making use of existing data for their own work. Central data providers such as FORSbase, FSO and the GESIS data archive are the most frequently named sources. Trust in these data sources and sufficient additional materials like documentation and methodologies are key criteria for selecting data for reuse. Some data sources could provide desired data sets but are hardly accessible and reusable for researchers (if at all). This mainly includes administrative data and records of (Swiss) public authorities and offices, as well as historic assets from archives, libraries and museums. Furthermore, qualitative research data like interviews, surveys, questionnaires and observations were often highlighted among valuable yet usually inaccessible data sources. At the same time, the case of qualitative data such as interview recordings and ethnographic fieldnotes illustrate well a certain reusability dilemma. To enable “reusability” of such materials from a legal perspective (i.e. to protect personal identities of research participants), much of sensitive context-related details need to be removed. Yet, it is exactly those details that are necessary to contextualize and reuse these data in a proper way from a qualitative researcher’s point of view. Finally, the list of relevant data sources in the SSH contains a large number of individual studies, data sets and resources. This fact supports the idea to connect and link this data, as repeatedly voiced by survey respondents. This demand presents a particular opportunity for future efforts in this area that directly align with the broad objectives at SWITCH. More specifically, the vision of the SWITCH Research Data Connectome is to interconnect research data from different sources, which contributes to the current development of a knowledge graph. Building on this knowledge base that documents and links metadata to enable a more effective search for and reuse of data, new specialized services could be employed in the future. The results of the SWITCH Innovation Lab “Repositories & Data Quality” project shall help lay the groundwork for such future client-oriented services, by providing more detailed information about the handling and reuse of data in Switzerland

Wie das GOAL-Projekt nachhaltige Kollaborationen zwischen Menschen, Maschinen und Strukturen fördert

Das von swissuniversities geförderte Projekt GOAL fungiert als Drehscheibe in einem Netzwerk, das unterschiedliche Akteure (Autor:innen, Bibliotheken, Herausgeber:innen) zusammen- und verschiedene Kollaborationen voranbringt: Die Kooperation zwischen Menschen und zwischen Maschinen wird gefördert und es sollen kollaborative Strukturen entstehen. Ziel des Projekts ist es, Verlage zu kontaktieren und diese bei der Erstellung und Implementierung einer Green Policy zu unterstützen. Der Blick wird auf die Publikationslandschaft von FH’s und PH’s gerichtet. Häufiger als an Universitäten wird hier in Fachmedien und landessprachlichen Zeitschriften publiziert. Die jeweiligen Geschäftsmodelle sind jedoch schlecht mit einer Umstellung auf Gold Open Access vereinbar. Mit dem gezielten Fokus auf den Green-Open-Acess-Weg wird eine nachhaltige Lösung für alle involvierten Akteure gesucht, die helfen soll, das Ziel der nationalen Open Access Strategie der Schweiz zu erreichen; d. h. bis Ende 2024 100% der öffentlich geförderten, wissenschaftlichen Publikationen im Open Access (OA) verfügbar zu machen