tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:/hub_feeds/3782/feed_itemsheather's..bookmarks2021-12-23T08:16:06-05:00TagTeam social RSS aggregratortag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/33950982021-12-22T13:04:50-05:002021-12-23T08:16:06-05:00Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: final report | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>This post concludes the 7-year Sustaining the Knowledge Commons (SKC) research program for which I gratefully acknowledge generous support from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) through an Insight Development Grant (2014 – 2016), and Insight Grant (2016 – 2021). I also gratefully acknowledge the hard work, team spirit and initiative of the many members of the SKC team over the years – their names are listed on the About the Team page; bios reflect statuses the last time they participated in the project. Following are my key recommendations for funders (including libraries & policy-makers), takeways for future APC researchers, select portions of my final report to SSHRC, and my final thoughts and next directions.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/31621992021-08-03T10:20:50-04:002021-08-03T10:20:50-04:00Irrational rationality: critique of metrics-based evaluation of researchers and universities | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>The unique contribution of this chapter is critique of the underlying belief behind both traditional and alternative metrics-based approaches to assessing research and researchers, that is, the assumption that impact is good and an indicator of quality research and therefore it makes sense to measure impact, with the only questions being whether particular technical measures of impact are accurate or not. For example, if impact is necessarily good, then the retracted study by Wakefield et al. that falsely correlated vaccination with autism is good research by any metric – many academic citations both before and after publication, citations in popular and social media and arguably a factor in the real-world impact of the anti-vaccination movement and the subsequent return of preventable illnesses like measles and a factor in the challenge of fighting COVID through vaccination. An alternative approach is suggested, using the traditional University of Ottawa’s collective agreement with APUO (union of full-time professors) as a means of evaluation that considers many different types of publications and considers quantity of publication in a way that gives evaluators the flexibility to take into account the kind of research and research output.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/30891532021-06-24T12:58:36-04:002021-06-25T13:04:28-04:00Open access article processing charges 2011 – 2021 | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>by: Heather Morrison, Luan Borges, Xuan Zhao, Tanoh Laurent Kakou & Amit Nataraj Shanbhoug</p>
<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p>
<p>This study examines trends in open access article processing charges (APCs) from 2011 – 2021, building on a 2011 study by Solomon & Björk (2012). Two methods are employed, a modified replica and a status update of the 2011 journals. Data is drawn from multiple sources and datasets are available as open data (Morrison et al, 2021). Most journals do not charge APCs; this has not changed. The global average <em>per-journal</em> APC increased slightly, from 906 USD to 958 USD, while the <em>per-article</em> average increased from 904 USD to 1,626 USD, indicating that authors choose to publish in more expensive journals. Publisher size, type, impact metrics and subject affect charging tendencies, average APC and pricing trends. About half the journals from the 2011 sample are no longer listed in DOAJ in 2021, due to ceased publication or publisher de-listing. Conclusions include a caution about the potential of the APC model to increase costs beyond inflation, and a suggestion that support for the university sector, responsible for the majority of journals, nearly half the articles, with a tendency not to charge and very low average APCs, may be the most promising approach to achieve economically sustainable no-fee OA journal publishing.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/28767412021-02-10T14:38:02-05:002021-02-10T14:38:02-05:00Some limitations of DOAJ metadata for research purposes | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>by Xuan Zhaon, Luan Borges & Heather Morrison</p>
<p>Some of the limitations of DOAJ metadata that researchers need to be aware of are explained in this post. In brief, DOAJ metadata must be opened in Unicode to retain non-English characters. The metadata will sometimes appear in the wrong column; clean-up is needed to avoid errors in data analysis. Metadata may be inconsistent; anomalies in listing of publisher names is presented as an example. An open dataset has been released of the DOAJ metadata as of Jan. 5, 2021, with the non-English characters retained, information in the correct columns, and an additional column with standardized publisher names added; the link can be found in the post. DOAJ updating limitations are explained. As of Jan. 5, 2021, only 30% of records had been updated in the past year, and there is no way for researchers to know if the last update reflects a full review, i.e. the particular metadata of interest might not have been updated. </p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/28680562021-01-29T12:38:17-05:002021-01-30T08:50:49-05:00Preservation of Digital Blog-Posts | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>The goal of this literature review was to gain an understanding of the current status of research on the topic of digital blog preservation. After conducting a series of searching within the database LISTA (Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts), one can determine that there are little to no recent developments in technology or research specifically for the access/preservation of digital blog posts. Unsurprisingly, much of the scholarly conversation about blog/microblog preservation took place between 2002 and 2010. </p>
<p>by Katie Pelland</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/27827972020-10-01T15:49:44-04:002020-10-01T15:49:44-04:00The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2020<p>While many aspects of our lives and activities have slowed down during the COVID pandemic, this has not been the case with open access! The OA initiatives tracked through this series continue to show strong growth on an annual and quarterly basis. Important milestones are being reached, and others will be coming soon. Highlights The Directory of Open Access Journals now lists over 15,000 fully open access, peer reviewed journals, having added 379 journals (> 4 per day) in the past quarter, and now provides searching for over 5 million articles at the article level. A PubMed search for "cancer" limited to literature from the past 5 years now links to full-text for over 50% of the articles. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine now cross-searches over 8,000 repositories and will soon surpass the milestone of a quarter billion documents. Anyone worried about running out of cultural materials during the pandemic will be relieved to note that the Internet Archive has exceeded a milestone of 6 million movies in addition to over 27 million texts (plus audio, concerts, TV, collections, webpages, and software).</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/27669142020-09-09T15:26:17-04:002020-09-09T15:26:17-04:00Bienvenue à C.A.S.A.D.: Centre d’Accès aux Savoirs d’Afrique et de sa Diaspora | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>Notre Tanoh Laurent Kakou a créé un blog pour son propre projet de recherche en libre accès, C.A.S.A.D.: Centre d’Accès aux Savoirs d’Afrique et de sa Diaspora. Quelques articles seront familiers aux lecteurs de Soutenir les savoirs communs, le travail de l’équipe; d’autres sont nouveau recherche fait par Tanoh. La vidéo Qu’est-ce que la revue Afroscopie?, un entretien avec Benoit Awazi, est éclairante pour quiconque s’intéresse à la recherche en Afrique francophone. Merci et félicitations à notre Tanoh Laurent Kakou, candidat au doctorat en communication (et diplômé d’ÉSIS), qui a réussi son examen de synthèse cet été! Meilleurs voeux à Tanoh et sa recherche.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/27669132020-09-09T15:24:57-04:002020-09-09T15:25:02-04:00Welcome to C.A.S.A.D.: Centre d’Accès aux Savoirs d’Afrique et de sa Diaspora | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>Our Tanoh Laurent Kakou has created a blog for his own research project in open access, C.A.S.A.D.: Centre d’Accès aux Savoirs d’Afrique et de sa Diaspora. Some articles will be familiar to readers of Sustaining the knowledge commons, as the work of the team; others are new research projects by Tanoh. The video Qu’est-ce que la revue Afroscopie?, an interview with Benoit Awazi, is enlightening for anyone who is interested in research in francophone Africa. Thank you and congratulations to our Tanoh Laurent Kakou, a doctoral candidate in communication (and graduate of ÉSIS) on passing his comprehensive exam this summer! Best wishes to Tanoh and his research.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/27003412020-06-03T17:59:39-04:002020-06-04T09:26:48-04:00Frontiers 2020: a third of journals increase prices by 45 times the inflation rate | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>A third of the journals published by Frontiers in 2019 and 2020 (20 / 61 journals) have increased in price by 18% or more (up to 55%). This is quite a contrast with the .4% Swiss inflation rate for 2019 according to Worlddata.info ; 18% is 45 times the inflation rate. This is an even more marked contrast with the current and anticipated economic impact of COVID; according to Le News, “A team of economic experts working for the Swiss government forecasts a 6.7% fall in GDP”. (Frontiers’ headquarters is in Switzerland).</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/26669612020-04-23T12:48:40-04:002020-12-01T12:11:32-05:00China and open access: Sciencepaper Online | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>During the lockdown of the entire country, China is bravely fighting against COVID-19. Many database vendors, publishers, and Internet companies announced to offer free access to academic resources to help students and researchers get the resources they need from home. Most of the publishers offered free access to everyone for a limited time and to decide whether to extend the period or not depend on the COVID-19 situation while some publishers announced open access from the announcement date indefinitely.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/26507932020-03-31T14:00:03-04:002020-03-31T14:00:03-04:00Coronavirus: an idea to identify articles that aren’t OA yet, but could be | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>This is a suggestion for how to identify articles on coronavirus that are not yet open access. The majority of these articles will be in journals that allow author self-archiving, and some may be published by authors covered by open access policies. Communication with authors and/or journals may be helpful to improve the percentage of open access. A PubMed search for “coronavirus” limited to the past 10 years then limited again to free full-text yields results of 55% free full-text. With no date limit, it’s 46%. This search will get at research on COVID and the next most relevant research, all the other coronaviruses (mers, sars, common cold), and will be helpful for researchers and medical practitioners anywhere.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/26498782020-03-30T13:34:31-04:002020-03-30T13:34:31-04:00COVID-19 open access and open research: good progress and what is missing | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>Major publishers are making research and data directly related to COVID-19 freely available. This is good news, and may reflect progress towards open access over the past two decades, because the arguments for free sharing of information in the context of pandemic are so compelling, as I touched on in this post. A few examples, current best practices and gaps, will follow, but first, a few notes to explain why we need to move beyond open sharing of directly related resources to include all resources.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/26003152020-01-20T14:33:19-05:002020-01-20T14:33:19-05:00Open peer review discussion | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>Thank you to Heather Staines from MIT’s Knowledge Futures Group for initiating this discussion in response to an invitation to participate in an open peer review process of the OA Main 2019 dataset and its documentation on the SCHOLCOMM list (the invitation was also sent to GOAL and the Radical Open Access List) and for permission to post her e-mails on Sustaining the Knowledge Commons.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/25889482020-01-03T16:51:27-05:002020-01-04T12:51:55-05:00Dramatic Growth of Open Access 2019 | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>2019 was another great year for open access! Of the 57 macro-level global OA indicators included in The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, 50 (88%) have growth rates that are higher than the long-term trend of background growth of scholarly journals an d articles of 3 – 3.5% (Price, 1963; Mabe & Amin, 2001). More than half had growth rates of 10% or more, approximately triple the background growth rate, and 13 (nearly a quarter) had growth rates of over 20%.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/25647032019-11-27T13:34:47-05:002019-11-27T13:34:47-05:00Sabinet – Comprendre le fonctionnement de l’industrie de l’information en Afrique | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>De nos jours, les sites web constituent des supports importants pour la diffusion d’information. Les entreprises s’attèlent à donner une visibilité à leurs produits. Les plateformes sont les lieux où les compagnies proposent une variété de produits. L’industrie de l’information en Afrique dans leur conversion au numérique utilise des plateformes pour proposer des services. C’est l’exemple de Sabinet qui est une plateforme hybride qui publie des revues africaines en ligne depuis 2001 (Sabinet, 2019). Elle commercialise trois Produits:</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/25645442019-11-27T08:39:40-05:002019-11-27T10:40:08-05:00Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs | Open Access Scholarship / Littérature savante en libre accès<p>Abstract – Open access journals have been developing in India for several decades for promoting the visibility of research done in various streams. OA to science has been encouraged by government sponsored repositories of student and doctoral proposals, and numerous Indian journals are distributed with OA. There is a need to build mindfulness among Indian scholastics with respect to publication practices, including OA, and its potential advantages, and use this methodology of distribution at whatever point doable, as in openly supported research. This research also showed that a well doing publisher in India gets acquired by European publisher Wolters Kluwer and becomes commercialised. The number of journals with “title not found” or “risky URL”, for example leading to a scam website, is surprising as one might assume that the motivation for this publisher’s society, university and commercial partners is that such partnership would result in high quality services. Most Medknow journals do not charge publication fees. The journals with publication fees are increasing the cost up to 50%. For documentation and a link to the underlying dataset, see Morrison et al. (2019).</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/25645512019-11-27T08:46:21-05:002019-11-27T09:27:34-05:00OA APC longitudinal survey 2019 | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>This post presents results of the 2019 OA APC longitudinal survey and extends an invitation to participate in an open peer review process of the underlying data and its documentation. One thing that is not changing is that most OA journals in DOAJ do not charge APCs: 10,210 (73%) of the 14,007 journals in DOAJ as of Nov. 26, 2019 do not have APCs. The global average APC in 2019 is 908 USD. This figure has changed little since 2010, however this consistency masks considerably underlying variation. For example, the average APC in 2019 for the 2010 sample has increased by 50%, a rate three times the inflation rate for this time frame. The tendency to charge or not to charge, how much is charged and whether prices are increasing or decreasing varies considerably by journal, publisher, country of publication, language and currency. One surprise this year was the top 10 countries by number of OA journals in DOAJ. As usual, Europe, the US and Latin America are well represented, but Indonesia is now the second largest country in DOAJ and Poland, Iran, and Turkey are among the top 10, perhaps reflecting the work of the DOAJ ambassadors. Pricing per journal shows mixed trends; most journals did not change price between 2018 and 2019, but there were price decreases as well as increases. The UK’s Ubiquity Press as having a relatively low APC (a fraction of Oxford’s, another UK-based publisher) and no price increases.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/25645502019-11-27T08:45:21-05:002019-11-27T08:45:21-05:002010 – 2019 APC update | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>This is an update of the 2010 study of Solomon & Björk (2012) of a sample of 1,046 journals charging APCs listed in DOAJ at that time. 74% of these journals are still active and actively charging publication fees. The average APC reported by Solomon & Björk was 906 USD; the average in 2019 for the 739 journals for which we have APC data for both years is 1,363 USD. This represents a 50% price increase during this time frame, an increase that is 3 times the inflation rate. Not all journals increased in price; some decreased or remained the same price. Nearly a quarter of the journals (23%) are ceased or not found. Most of this attrition rate can be attributed to new OA APC-based commercial publishers with a start-up strategy involving roll-out of a broad range of journals, with unsuccessful journals being retired.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/25645492019-11-27T08:44:43-05:002019-11-27T08:44:43-05:00APC price changes 2019 – 2018 by journal and by publisher | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>Pricing trends for 2018 – 2019 were compared on a per-journal and per-publisher basis. In contrast to the relatively unchanging global average APC, per-journal and per-publisher shows a mixture of trends. Most journals did not change in price from 2018 to 2019; 13% increased in price, 25% decreased. Journals included in DOAJ showed a greater tendency to increase in price (37%). Average price changes per publisher ranged from 0 (no change) to a 34% average increase in price. In some cases, price increases and decreases cancel each other out resulting in an average of 0 (no change) masking considerable change at the per-journal level. Only 2 publishers have APPCs; these have similar average prices. Average APC price by publisher ranges from 246 to 2,851 USD. UK-based not-for-profit publisher Ubiquity Press stands out as having the second-lowest average APC of 536 USD with no price increases.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/25645472019-11-27T08:43:01-05:002019-11-27T08:43:01-05:00DOAJ 2019: Language analysis | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>The analysis of Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) shows that open access journals were published in 85 different languages in 2019. English is the language used by more than 9,500 journals, while Spanish language comes second with more than 2,400 journals, followed by Portuguese (1,731), Indonesia (1,135) and French (897). We analyzed the tendency to charge and average APC by first language listed. The only language with a majority of journals charging APCs was Chinese (54%), followed by Persian (33%) and English (31%). Average APC ranged from 43 USD (Indonesian) to 1,096 USD (English). The second highest APC was Catalan at 331 USD, illustrating a correlation between language and APC, with English language journals at the high end of the range.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/25645482019-11-27T08:43:53-05:002019-11-27T08:43:53-05:00Open Access in 2019: Which countries are the biggest publishers of OA journals? | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>Fifty percent of the open access (OA) journals listed in DOAJ in 2019 are published in Europe, and the United Kingdom is the biggest publisher of OA journals in DOAJ. It is important to note that we do not know the extent to which OA journals are fully represented in DOAJ; we understand that there is a parallel service called Chinese Open Access Journals. There are a few surprises in the 10 largest countries in DOAJ. Latin America and the U.S. are well represented as usual, while Indonesia is now the second largest country in DOAJ, and Poland, Iran, and Turkey, are among the top 10. This may reflect the work of the DOAJ ambassadors program.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/25645462019-11-27T08:42:01-05:002019-11-27T08:42:01-05:00Open Access in 2019: Original currencies for article processing charge | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>The original currency to charge article processing charge (APC) for more than 50 percent of world open access (OA) journals in 2019 recorded in our study is USD (for documentation of our procedures see Morrison et al (2019), while GBP and EUR are in the second and third place. 5 currencies (USD, GBP, EUR, CHF – Swiss Franc, INR – Indian Rupee) account for over 90% of the journals.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/25645452019-11-27T08:40:58-05:002019-11-27T08:40:58-05:00APCs comparisons among different publishers in 2019 | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>This post features 4 comparisons between publishers and sub-publishers of fully open access journals that are included in our longitudinal APC study. Traditional publisher Wolters Kluwer owns two sub-publishers (or imprints). Wolters Kluwer Medknow journals tend not to charge APCs, and have low prices when they do charge. Wolters Kluwer Lippincott journals tend to charge, and prices are high. Indonesian-based Universitas Negeri Semerang is now one of the world’s largest OA journal publishers by the number of journals and appears to be new to online publishing using open-source software. Very few of their journals have APCs. The traditional Oxford University Press tends to have APCs, and their APCs are more than twice as high as a new UK-based not-for-profit OA journal publisher, Ubiquity Press. MDPI and Hindawi are very similar, both are fairly new, APC based commercial OA journal publishers; but Hindawi’s average APC is 44% higher than MDPIs. To understand the economics of OA journal publishing, it is necessary to take into account the strategies of particular publishers and even sub-publishers.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/25645432019-11-27T08:38:04-05:002019-11-27T08:38:04-05:00OA journals non-charging and charging central trends 2010 – 2019 | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>For the year 2019, we analyzed around 16000 journals that were fully open access in DOAJ (or whose publishers were listed in DOAJ) at some point from 2010 – 2019. More than half of these journals (58%) published had no publication charge.30% of the journals have publications fees. The most frequent model is APC (28% of total) followed by APPC (page charges), under 1%. In a few cases the cost was not specified or an unusual model such as charge per word was used. Of all the journals analyzed, the title of 4% of journals were not found and 3% of journals belonged to ceased publication. It was noted that 53 journals (less than 1%) also had hybrid charges (partially open access) in 2019. The global average APC was 908 USD. From 2010 the global average APC has ranged from 906 – 974 USD. The lack of change in the global average contrasts with variation in mode, reflecting change in the market, particularly ongoing entry of large numbers of new journals, gradually increasing maximum amounts for both APC and APPC, and substantial changes we sometimes observe when recording data for particular publishers. We conclude that continuing to calculate the global average is a less fruitful method of studying the transition to open access and plan to continue this longitudinal study by using the historical data gathered to focus on case studies.</p>
tag:tagteam.harvard.edu,2005:FeedItem/25503772019-11-05T15:51:41-05:002019-11-05T15:51:41-05:00Hindawi APC comparison 2018-2019 | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs<p>Posted by anqishi</p>
<p>ABSTRACT: 481 Hindawi journals were analyzed. 226 (47%) journals published at some point from 2010 – 2019 have ceased publication, 7 cannot be found on the Hindawi website anymore and 1 has been transferred to another publisher. In 2019, there are 247 journals actively publishing on the Hindawi website. All the journals are charging APCs. The average price is 1186.44 USD, an increase of 14% over the 2018 APC (1040.30 USD). Compared to the US inflation rate for 2018 of 2.44%(“U.S. Inflation Rate 1960-2019” n.d.), the publication fee rises more than 5 times. Among active journals, 17% of the 217 journals did not change in price; 30% journals decreased their price while more than half (53%) of the journals increased price. The amount of price increase starts from 25 USD up to 1350 USD. 14 journals appear to have switched from “no fee” to “fee”, with different APCS from 750 USD to 1350 USD.</p>
<p>Most journals that not found on the website in 2018 now been illustrated ceased on the web page with the specific ceased year and where to find previous publication articles which could be good practice for authors who are trying to find the latest information about specific journals. it also benefits other publishers to follow the lead.</p>