Author Archives: Elliott Hibbler

Open Access Publishing Fund opens soon!

Applications for grants from Boston College’s Open Access Publishing Fund will open on June 3rd! Faculty, students and staff are encouraged to apply. Open access can be expensive, so the fund assists authors in making their new work available via open access when they do not have other grant funding. Applications can be submitted before an article is accepted, but the intended journal needs to be listed on the application.

Last fiscal year, the fund awarded more than $30,000 of grants for twenty-one publications, including an open access monograph. While open access may be most prevalent in the natural sciences, many different disciplines have taken advantage of the fund. Please contact Elliott Hibbler if you have any questions.

A pie chart showing a fairly even distribution of awards between Biology, Communication, Computer Science, Engineering, Envi Studies, Fine Arts, LSEHD, MCAS Core, Psych and Neuro, and School of Social Work. Biology, LSEHD, Fine Arts, and the School of Social Work have the most.

OSTP Federal Research Funding update

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has received funding from Congress to continue its implementation of the Nelson Memo. This memo requires any federal agency that awards research grants to implement a policy requiring immediate public access to publications resulting from that research, as well as access to data and the use of persistent digital identifiers in article metadata.

During the lengthy Federal appropriations process, the House Appropriations Committee released a bill that specifically defunded any attempt to implement the memo. No individual or lobbying group ever came forward to take any credit for trying to kill the OSTP memo in the budget, nor was there much explanation of why it might have been included.

The final appropriation bill (technically the explanatory statement accompanying the bill) only included a requirement that OSTP produce a financial analysis of the impact of the memo, “including the policy’s anticipated impact on Federal research investments, research integrity, and the peer review process,” within 100 days of the bill passing. In other positive news, this was the only requirement. There is no trigger stopping development of policy depending on what the report says. This likely means that after the report, there would be a round of Congressional hearings before more action is taken. Being an election year, there may not be enough time for a truly adverse legislative action. Overall, this means plans will progress, and there should be some good reading on the state of scholarly publishing sometime in mid-June!

OA Policy Changes at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has recently announced a “refreshed” Open Access Policy, to start in 2025. There is a lot to unpack.

The headline change for publishers is that the Foundation will no longer pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) for its funded researchers to publish Open Access. However, they have not stepped back from their support of Open Access. Rather than paying for post-publication OA, they are requiring posting all manuscripts on a preprint server. Not just any preprint server – one approved by the Foundation, with “a sufficient level of scrutiny to submissions.” The works must be licensed as CC-BY 4.0, or something similar. Interestingly, authors also must assign the license to an Author Accepted Manuscript of the article if it is published later. Any data that is used in the manuscript must also be made immediately available.

The Foundation is working with F1000, a subsidiary of Taylor & Francis, to create a preprint platform named VeriXiv. The platform will do a series of “ethics and integrity checks,” looking for things like plagiarism and image manipulation, as well as author-related conflicts. One thing that it is not doing is peer review. An author can still publish the article in a journal as well, as long as that journal respected the OA requirements of the Foundation, and the author would have to pay any APC themselves.

The question is how will this affect the publishing ecosystem? The Foundation awards more than five billion dollars in grants per year, which is enough to create real change. On the one hand, authors could decide that traditional publishing is not worth the time and cost, which the Foundation’s policy strongly suggests, and just move to preprints. On the other hand, authors may still have other institutional incentives tied to publishing output and prestige. Will this just shift the cost of traditional publishing to authors, and indirectly to libraries and universities that support them? It might work out that this is a lever to reduce prestige-based incentives at institutions, or it might work out that authors with fewer resources fall a little further behind.

This may also just be a business fight between funders and publishers, with researchers caught in the middle. Publishing is a bundle of services, including ethics and plagiarism checks, peer review, distribution and preservation. Commercial publishers charge a lot for that bundle. Starting with posting a preprint and then layering on other services could be cheaper, especially if one thinks different research outputs need differing levels of service. This opens the door to new business models, like stand-alone peer review services, as contemplated by the Publish-Review-Curate model of publishing. We will see who steps in to fill those needs.

ORCID at BC

One of the underreported requirements of the 2022 Nelson Memo requiring federally-funded research to be published open access is the requirement that federally-funded researchers have a digital persistent identifier. Federal guidance says that such an identifier should be from an open platform, disambiguate authors, and allow a researcher to have a profile with their works included, all provided at no cost to the researcher.

One might think that type of service sounds almost too good to be true. But, that is one part of the Nelson memo where the infrastructure exists today. ORCID, through its ORCID iD, already meets the recommended standards. The ORCID service provides users with a unique 16-character identifier, along with a profile with a permanent URL where they can add information about employment, education, works published, and even grants received!

Note: ORCID stands for “Open Researcher and Contributor ID.” They prefer “iD” for the actual identifier authors get. There were no federal guidelines on proper capitalization.

How do I get one of these ORCID iDs?

There are two ways to get an ORCID iD. You could just go to ORCID.org and register for a new account. However, you can also do it directly through the Boston College’s Agora Portal link, ORCID at BC. This lets you tie your ORCID iD to your Boston College login and Eagle ID. This will let you log in using your BC credentials.

Then what?

There are a few things to do once you have an ORCID iD.

Make sure it is public!

Sometimes people sign up for an ORCID iD, knowing they need it to fill out a form or application, but do not actually make it public.

Link it to a couple of sources for publications

ORCID lets you populate your profile with information from other databases, including Scopus and MLA International Bibliography! It also lets you link to information from CrossRef, if your publication has a DOI.

Put the ORCID iD in a few different places

Putting your ORCID iD on a personal webpage, in a CV (especially one you do not update frequently), and even in an email signature is a great quick way to let others find your work.

Right now, Boston College’s ORCID adoption rate for faculty is over 35%. That is not bad, but it means there is a long way to go. For more information on ORCID, and for help on specific integrations, check out our ORCID guide.

The State of Scholarly Publishing

For folks interested in the current state of scholarly publishing, especially regarding Open Access, there are two recent reports that do a great job of summarizing publishing’s move toward OA.

In November, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released its “Report to the U.S. Congress on Financing Mechanisms for Open Access Publishing of Federally Funded Research.” This report, required by a 2023 appropriations Act, describes the different business models currently being used to comply with the requirement of public access within a year of publication (remembering that the U.S. government uses the term “public access” to denote free-to-read access, and not any of the other rights OA implies). It also provides top-level statistics about the rapid growth in OA publishing over the last ten years.

The most interesting takeaway is how difficult it is to estimate how much federally funded researchers paid to publish in the last few years. Even the U.S. government has very limited data. The best guess from OSTP was slightly more than $378 million in 2021, a 39% increase from 2016. The other highlight of the report is the Appendix, which describes the economic concepts related to publishing that can be used to analyze the system.

Also in November, a group of faculty and staff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released the report “Access to Science and Scholarship: Key Questions about the Future of Research Publishing.” Much like the OSTP report, it spends most of its time discussing the recent history of publishing, highlighting growth in both scholarly outputs and in spending. There is more detail here on specific publishers and their business models, especially the growth of massive fully-OA publishers.

The benefit of this report is that it takes a slightly larger view of the entire scholarly communications ecosystem. The Nelson memo applied to both publications and data, and this report poses some interesting research questions about open data, like how it should be shared, and what is it going to cost? It also presents questions about preprint servers and peer review, two issues not covered by OSTP.