1st Basel Sustainable Publishing Forum
Theme: Dialog with Learned Societies: Sustainable Solutions for Successful Transition to Open Access
The conference will be held at the ZLF, University Hospital of Basel, Switzerland, on September 9, 2019.
“This dialog day aims to bring together representatives of learned societies to hear from them and understand the challenges that they are facing to transition/flip their journals to Open Access.” Keynote speakers include a representative of cOAlition S (the details of Plan S), Alicia Wise (Transition to Plan S), Jan Erik Frantsvåg (the current open access landscape), and Saskia de Vries (fair open access in the context of Plan S).
DEADLINE FOR REGISTRATION: August 26, 2019
Full program and more information: https://sciforum.net/conference/SustainableSolutionsToOpenAccess
Open Access Academic Books are More Downloaded and Cited
A research conducted by Springer Nature reveals that publishing academic books on open access platforms have many benefits. This report, according to Springer Nature, is the first of its kind to make a comparative analysis of open access and non-open access academic books. The study highlights the benefits open access books has provided to authors, publishers, funders and to a society at large.
The research used three metrics to measure the impact of open access academic books: downloads, citations and online mentions. In addition to these quantitative measures, Springer Nature also investigated the motivations and experiences with open access of researchers in a qualitative manner, by interviewing researchers and funders.
Results of the quantitative research
Most importantly, this study finds that:
- open access books are downloaded seven times more
- over the past four years the number of citations that open access books received is 50% higher
- open access books are mentioned online 10 times more
Results of the qualitative research
The interviews with funders show that the open access requirements put in place by funders are ethically motivated. Funders find it primarily important that the results from the research they funded disseminates to a large audience and is without access barriers.
The interviews with the researchers, on the other hand, shows that open access publishing was not solely ethically motivated. Researchers care most about visibility of their research output. They desire that their work gets disseminated to the widest possible audience and that this work gets cited more.
However, the researchers that were interviewed are not convinced about the benefits of open access to achieve wider dissemination and more citations. Although the interviewed acknowledged the quantitative results of the study, they pointed out that the causality is not proven. Other reason for the increased downloads and citations of open access scholarly work were suggested, such as authors reputation and the topic of the books that are open access.
Isn’t this skeptical attitude of these researchers slightly ironic? Indeed, this study doesn’t prove causality. But knowing that 1) open access removes an access barrier, 2) open access books are downloaded and used more, can we really not infer (1+1=2) that open access is increasing visibility? Are we not ‘scientific’ enough if we believe this inference? Or are researchers perhaps too skeptical stressing the lack of evidence for causality?
Study shows that Open Access On the Rise
Open-access papers are more popular in the scholarly literature than they’ve ever been, and this trend shows no signs of abating, according to a study of hundreds of thousands of papers published in journals spanning disciplines from physics and astronomy to chemistry and social science. The sprawling study, published this week (August 2) in PeerJ, found that 28 percent of the total scholarly literature is open access, and in 2015 (the most recent year with data complete enough to analyze), 45 percent of papers were open access.
By analyzing the recently unveiled web extension Unpaywall, which points users in the direction of open-access [OA] versions of papers, the authors found that nearly half of a sample of 100,000 papers users searched for in June were open-access. Information scientist and coauthor Jason Priem, cofounder of Impactstory, the nonprofit that spun out the open-source data platform OADOI, which powers Unpaywall, spoke with The Scientist about the study and its implications. Read full article on the Scientist
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Gates Open Access, an open access publishing platform, the Nature report shows. With this platform, the Gates Foundation hopes to accelerate publication of articles and data.
The Foundation does not play editorial oversight and it contracted management of publishing services to F1000Research, an organization that is known for quickly publishing open access articles. The foundation provides article-processing charges (APCs), which ranges from $150 to $2500. All articles are subjected to post-publication peer review processes.
The Gates Foundation particularly wants to provide help to authors in developing countries. It also believes that this platform will help to protect authors against predatory publishers out.
The UK-based Wellcome Trust, a research funding agency, has been using similar approach. The European Commission (EC) is also considering to implement a similar strategy.
This new initiative demonstrates the Gates Foundation’s commitment to research and research output dissemination.
Nature | If research funders demand open-access publishing, will subscription journals acquiesce? An announcement today by the publisher of Science suggests they will — as long as that funder is as influential as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The global health charity, based in Seattle, Washington, has partnered with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in a year-long agreement to “expand access to high-quality scientific publishing”. This means that Gates-funded research can be published on open-access (OA) terms in Science and four other AAAS journals.
“This is the first time AAAS is offering open-access publishing for Science and the subscription-based sister journals,” says Meagan Phelan, a spokesperson for AAAS in Washington DC.
Read full article on the Nature