Open access in humanities and social sciences: visions for the future of publishing

For this month's column, the editors are gearing up for the Library Publishing Forum, which will be held March 29?30, 2015, at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. We have interviewed the forum's keynote speakers, Martin Paul Eve and John Willinsky, who will share their vision of open access in the humanities and social sciences as well as their thoughts on future developments

Expanding scientific knowledge frontiers: open repositories in developing countries supported by NRENs

The current scenario of Internet operation has brought many challenges and opportunities to science as result of the evolution of technologies and network infrastructures, key enablers to information access at distinct levels. Regarding research and teaching, scientific Open Access (OA) repositories play a key role in the production, dissemination and sharing of knowledge. OA repositories improve the visibility, accessibility and availability of results from teaching and research activities, contributing to the knowledge society through the provision of scientific publications without restrictions.Taking worldwide OA initiatives and the Portuguese experience as case study, this paper analyzes technical challenges and strategies for building open repositories supported by National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in the African context. Considering Mozambique as the main target of this paper, the study of: (i) existing national and international initiatives; (ii) MoRENet -the Mozambique Research and Education Network; and (iii) SABER repository, will support the proposal of a set of directives and policies for the development and sustainability of a common OA platform for scientific and academic national production.We believe that this open repository will bring an undeniable added value for Mozambique knowledge growth, fostering the country development at both scientific and social levels.The authors would like to thank UM documentation services and RCAAP by sharing expertise in OA field. This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia in the scope of the project: PEst-OE/EEI/UI0319/2014.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The poverty of journal publishing

The article opens with a critical analysis of the dominant business model of for-profit, academic publishing, arguing that the extraordinarily high profits of the big publishers are dependent upon a double appropriation that exploits both academic labour and universities’ financial resources. Against this model, we outline four possible responses: the further development of open access repositories, a fair trade model of publishing regulation, a renaissance of the university presses, and, finally, a move away from private, for-profit publishing companies toward autonomous journal publishing by editorial boards and academic associations. </jats:p

New university presses in the UK: accessing a mission

In the space of just a year, five new university presses were launched in the UK. Although very different in size and stages of development, all but one were launched first and foremost as open access presses, based in or supported by their university’s library. Why should there have been such a significant flurry of activity in such a short space of time, and what can the stated objectives and activities of these presses tell us about the current UK scholarly publishing environment? To answer some of those questions, this article looks back to the original mission of the founding university presses, examines the policy and funding environments in which the new presses are operating, looks at overseas developments in recent years for comparison, and concludes with a review of the challenges these young presses face as well as the benefits all university presses, but particularly open access ones, can confer to their institutions

The Publishers' Pushback against NIH's Public Access and Scholarly Publishing Sustainability

Last September, US Congressman John Conyers introduced the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act. John Willinsky explains how the bill's Orwellian title obscures its true aim: to derail the new policy implemented by the National Institutes of Health to open access to publicly funded research, amid talk of sustainability that cuts both ways

JOAL Special issue on "Open Science and Data Protection" Part I Commentary: On Not Taking Open for Granted

Part I of this special double-issue on "Open Science and Data Protection" from the Journal of Open Access to Law (Vol 11, No 1) presents four papers that grapple with the larger picture of today’s digital-era move to open science

Open Access Publishing in Business Research: The Authors’ Perspective

Open access (OA) publishing is now accepted as an integral part of the emerging trends within scholarly communication. Business librarians, like their subject specialist colleagues in other disciplines, are increasingly called upon to interpret scholarly communication trends to their faculty. This study surveys 1,293 business faculty from American schools of business accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Issues explored include business faculty publishing practices within the discipline and how these affect academic advancement, obtaining articles for their own research, electronic publishing, self-archiving, and their perceptions about OA publishing generally.With support from the Emerald Publishing Research Award 2009

From the open road to the high seas? Piracy, damnation and resistance in academic consumption of publishing

Armin Beverungen conducts research on how universities retain their charitable status in a market environment, and on the teaching of ethics in business schools. Steffen Böhm has a particular interest in the economics and management of sustainability. He has also founded an open access journal and an open access press, MayFlyBooks. Christopher Land works on artists and the management of their creativity

What Those Responsible for Open Infrastructure in Scholarly Communication Can Do about Possibly Predatory Practices

This chapter presents a three-phase analysis of 521 journals that use the open source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS) while appearing on Beall’s list of predatory publishers and journals and/or inCabells Predatory Reports, both which purport to identify journals that charge authors article processing fees (APC) to publish in the pretense of a peer-reviewed journal. In 2020, 25,671 journals were actively using OJS, with 81.3 percent in the Global South, representing a great growth in global research activities. As members of the Public Knowledge Project, which develops this freely available publishing platform, the authors feel a responsibility to explore what platform developers can do to address both the real problem of duplicitous journals and the over-ascription of the “predatory” label to publishers and journals. represented by the authors of this chapter, Drawing on data from the beacon is a part of OJS, the chapter represents an assessment and intervention In the first phase, the researchers reached out to 50 publishers and 51 journals that use OJS and appear on Beall’s list offering to assist in improving their journal quality. The response from 14 publishers (28.0 percent) among publishers and two journals (3.9 percent) among standalone journals demonstrated a likely misanalysis as “predatory” along multiple dimensions from financial model to peer-review evidence. The second phase, devoted to assessing the degree to which journals using OJS are implicated in this issue, revealed that 2.0 percent of the journals using OJS are on one or both lists. The two phases point to how the identification issue is not that of Beall or Cabells International, but results from a journal tradition of asking readers to take on trust the adherence to scholarly standards. Amid the increase in research and open access to it, the third phase of this study introduces PKP’s new technical strategy for verifying and communicating standards adherence to the public. Work has begun on systems involving trade organizations, such ORCiD and Crossref, for authenticating journal practices (including editorial oversight, peer review, research funding, and data management), while communication strategies include adapting and testing with students and professionals the familiar Nutrition Facts label used with packaged foods. The goal is to provide a publicly accessible industry standard for more reliably assessing journal quality

The Publication Facts Label: Ascertaining a Publication’s Adherence to Scholarly Standards

This is a case study of a digital innovation aimed at increasing researchers’, professionals’, and the general public’s ability to approach research publications with a ready method of checking its compliance with the features that set scholarly publishing apart from other sources of information. More specifically, the innovation consists of generating a “publication facts label” (PFL) for articles and journals, which records their adherence to eight elements that reflect scholarly publishing standards. The label conveys data and links for publisher identity, scholarly editorial oversight, article acceptance rates, journal indexing, expert peer review, competing interests, data availability, and research funding (Fig. 1). The PFL is modeled on the United States nutrition facts label that, since 1996, has appeared on food products, proving itself an effective science communication strategy with adoptions around the world in different formats (Christof et al., 2018; Post et al., 2010). At this point, the PFL is being developed as an open source software project by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) at Simon Fraser University for use with its Open Journal Systems. In this case study, we present the rationale, design, and assessment strategies involved in PFL development and piloting. Although the PFL is still at an early stage, we consider the lessons already learned from this approach worth introducing into the industry’s current emphasis on ways to improve research integrity