How much does it cost to publish an open access article? This post reports a study published in F1000Research, in which the authors collected detailed data on each stage of scientific publishing, from acquisition, preparation, up to dissemination of content, considering six scenarios with different editorial service providers. The average cost varies between US$460 and US$520, depending on the number of articles published per year. … Read More →
How will the Rights Retention Strategy affect scholarly publishing? [Originally published in the LSE Impact blog in September/2021]
The extent that authors retain control over their published research is dependent on what rights they sign over to their publisher prior to publication. As part of efforts to promote the immediate open publication of research a number of research funders have endorsed the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), by which authors can declare their author-accepted manuscript to be open access. In this post Stephen Eglen, explores the rights retention strategy and discusses the potential impact it might have on scholarly communication more broadly. … Read More →
How effective are funding mandate for open access?
Plan S, launched in Europe late 2018 to accelerate the transition to open access starting in January 2020, imposes open access mandates to all publicly funded research. But would such mandates really be effective in promoting open access? A study showed that the results vary greatly among disciplines and funders. However, between the gold route and the green route, two-thirds of the articles are, in fact, available for reading. … Read More →
Transparency: What Can One Learn from a Trove of Invoices? [Originally published in the Scholarly Kitchen blog in November/2019]
A new dataset from the Gates Foundation offers insights into author choices and APC pricing. … Read More →
The gold rush: Why open access will boost publisher profits [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in June/2019]
An important justification for transitioning from a subscription based journal publishing system to an open access journal publishing system, has been that whereas printing and distributing physical copies of journals is an expensive process, the cost of digital publication and dissemination are marginal. In this post Shaun Khoo argues that whilst a shift to gold (pay to publish) open access would deliver wider access to research, the lack of price sensitivity amongst academics presents a risk that they will be locked into a new escalating pay to publish system that could potentially be more costly to researchers than the previous subscription model. … Read More →
Plan S — and Article Processing Charges (APCs)
Recently, in Europe, a plan has been launched to accelerate the transition to open access. It is called Plan S. Its key principle is stated as follows: “After 1 January 2020 scientific publications on the results from research funded by public grants provided by national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.” Some issues are highlighted, especially the issue of the cost of APCs, and some suggestions for possible improvement of Plan S are given. … Read More →
Towards universal open access? Why we need bibliodiversity rather than a “silver bullet”
The current debate on open access is often based on undue generalizations advocating for “silver bullet” models to flip the scholarly communication system globally. This approach is flawed because it doesn’t take into account the diversity of communication practices across the different disciplines and countries. … Read More →
Radiography of open access academic publishing and its bibliometric indicators
How does open access publishing evolves over time? Is it true that open access papers get more citations? Is open access increasing due to institutional or government mandates or at the initiative of authors themselves? To answer these and other questions, the US National Science Foundation commissioned Science-Metrix a detailed study on open access academic publishing, considering the gold route and the green route, the influence of the areas and the behavior of the research leading countries over the last decade. Here are the results. … Read More →
How to find articles in open access – tips from my favorite nerd
Scholarly communication available online, whether in journals or repositories, adds up to millions, and this figure grows every year. What browser efficient tools are available to researchers, librarians, students, and the like to find the open-access versions of the articles that interest them? … Read More →
Study assesses financing sources of open-access article processing charge
Is there a correlation between article processing charge (APC) and the journals’ Impact Factor? What are the funding sources for payment and how do they influence the choice of journals for publication? These and other questions were investigated by authors from Nanjing University, China and the results explain the peculiarity of open access in different countries. … Read More →
Open Access article processing charges: a new serial publication crisis?
The financial and ethical implications that emerge from open access publishing through article processing fees in India are analyzed in a study that proposes the creation of a national open access journal platform such as SciELO in order to reduce costs, increase efficiency and facilitate the sharing of metadata among repositories. … Read More →
How Open Access can boost researchers’ careers
Full adoption of open access has not been achieved mainly because researchers are not yet totally convinced that this type of publication will do for their careers the same as the subscription journals. A detailed review article published in eLife shows that open research brings many benefits to researchers and it is associated with increased citations, media attention, potential collaboration and funding and jobs opportunities. … Read More →
Open Access reviewed: stricter criteria preserve credibility
The most comprehensive index of open access journals, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), reviewed its inclusion criteria, in view of allegations of the presence of predatory journals. This restructuring will lead to more than 3,000 journals to be removed from the database. DOAJ, besides advocating Open Access, established, in collaboration with COPE, OASPA and WAME, a code of principles and good practices in scientific publishing. … Read More →
Results of the workshop AlterOA: recommendations for the future of open access
The future of open access, as the preferred alternative for publication of research results, was widely discussed at the Workshop on Alternative Open Access Publishing Models, held in October 2015 in Belgium. Learn about the participants’ innovative ideas and the recommendations of the European Commission to strengthen and facilitate this business model. The workshop report considers SciELO the most established among the models analyzed. … Read More →
Open access as a sustainable alternative to scholarly communication
The abusive price of scientific journals subscriptions, that triggered the open access movement in the 2000s, remains until today. The enormous financial pressure on academic libraries, research institutions and governments find alternative in open access business models. Innovative alternatives on open access publishing systems were created in several countries and a workshop organized by the European Commission brought together experts to discuss them. Get to know some alternatives. … Read More →
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