Category Archives: Open Access

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.

cOAlition S Issues a New Proposal Towards Responsible Publishing

While October 31st can bring lots of scary sights and frights, researchers and scholars hoping to continue to seek out and create more equitable publishing models were given some food for thought via a new proposal from cOAlition S – a leading initiative in creating more thorough open access models that ensure equity, timely publication, and comprehensive peer review than what is currently offered traditional subscription based models of publishing.

In their proposal, the international consortium puts forward four main ways that Scholarly Communication needs to change in the direction of more thorough open access:

Publishing models are still highly inequitable
Research assets’ publication is needlessly delayed
There is a potential for peer review that is not being fully utilized
Editorial gatekeeping is at odds with academic career incentives and it is damaging to the sciences.

Organizations across the world are fighting for more widely open access – as not all open access publications have the same level of accessibility. As more and more models push for Diamond publication and institutions fight for more transformative deals with more rights for students and faculty, keeping in mind some of the above considerations as well will help ensure that scholars are getting what they need from their institutions.

As more and more organizations and higher education institutions begin to question the inherent power dynamics present in our current publishing models, publishers are attempting to both meet user demand and also preserve their prestigious reputations in order to maintain subscription models and profitability. Additionally, as open access players like MDPI fight off attacks on their consistently high publication volume, it will be more important than ever for authors conduct research on not only the journal they are submitting to but also the publisher; understanding how their academic contributions will affect academic discourse in their field, and perhaps signal to other aspiring authors which journals are the safest, most accessible places to publish research.

Open Access Week Panel

This year for Open Access Week, the Boston College Libraries in conjunction with the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, will be hosting a panel of speakers. The panel includes Raquel Muñiz, Assistant Professor in the Lynch School; Kelly Gray, a third-year English PhD student; and Bryan Ranger, Assistant Professor in Engineering. Raquel and Bryan have also been recipients of Open Access Publishing Fund Awards – opting to ensure that their research is published fully accessible for all – rather than behind paywalls.

This year’s event will be on October 24 at 4:30pm in 245 Beacon, Room 215. Light refreshments and desserts will be served! RSVP is not required. Navigate to the Boston College Events page find out more about the event.

Open Access week is an internationally celebrated annual tradition where professionals in the publishing industry come together to reflect on the inequities of publishing for profit models, and explore models that fund scholarship more equitably, with a smaller burden for researchers who may be coming from smaller institutions with the ability to cover the costs of massive subscription fees.

Sign for Open Access Week Panel: Join us for a discussion about the future of equitable publishing and interdisciplinarity in academia. Pictures of panelists Raquel Muniz, Kelly Gray and Bryan Ranger. October 24th, 4:30 pm, 245 Beacon, Room 215.

Also for Open Access week, look for a display coming up on the third floor near the circulation desk and a new digital display.

Making the Most of Open Data

As part of Open Access Week, we want to recognize the critical role of open data on research and innovation. While the importance of sharing data is well-acknowledged, reusing open data and incorporating it into your research can be equally critical.

Why reuse data?

1. Efficiency and Time-Saving – Open data can accelerate the research process

2. Replicability and Validation – Reusing open data enables the replication of studies and validation research findings, which helps foster transparency and trust in scholarly work.

3. Ethics and Reducing Oversampling Burden – Certain populations, particularly marginalized and vulnerable populations, are sometimes overly sampled in research and reusing open data allows us to reduce the burden of oversampling.

4. Cross-Disciplinary Insights – Researchers can blend data from different disciplines, encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration.

How to approach data reuse?

1. Assess Quality & Compatibility – Check for completeness, biases, representation. Consider if the scope, variables, and collection methods align with your research objectives (e.g. if you were going to collect your own data, would you be doing it in the same way?)

2. Review Documentation – Part of quality assessment is reviewing metadata and understanding the collection methods and any cleaning processes that the data underwent. Need to examine licensing and ethical concerns around privacy and consent.

3. Data Integration – Open data might not always be the best fit, but it can be thought of as supplementary or contextual data that will make your primary research data more robust.

OASPA Conference

The Open Access Scholarly Publication Association recently held a conference inviting Scholarly Communications librarians from all over the world to come together virtually and discuss the current trends and new ideas in Open Access.

Articles Processing Charges (APCs)

While the movement for broader Open Access publishing, and knowledge and interest continues to increase among faculty and scholars in all disciplines, not all Open Access is equally free. Transformative journals may provide some of their content open access – but still require a subscription for all of it. Additionally, the increasing popularity of “Read and Publish” agreements – while generally beneficial for universities and libraries, providing a wide breadth of access for scholars at a given institution or set of institutions, do have some drawbacks for the scholarly ecosystem as a whole.

A good deal of the poster sessions therefore focused on models of Open Access publication that do not require Article Processing Charges at the point of submission – this is known, generally, as Diamond Open Access. In order to be considered Diamond Open Access, publication schedules cannot contain embargoes and the cost of submission and of accessing the content must be zero. These funding models are generally sponsored by universities, research institutions, and libraries themselves – as more and more institutions of higher education are recognizing that investing in consortial open access projects help budgets in the longer run, as they continue to support the free access and publication of research, which in turn lowers – or outright eliminates – subscription and APC fees.

Open Access Community Investment Program

“The LYRASIS Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP) provides a community-driven framework that enables multiple stakeholders – including academic and public libraries, academic departments, institutions, museums, and funding agencies – to evaluate and collectively fund Diamond Open Access (OA) journals.” – taken from the OACIP website

Lyrasis presented a relatively new program at OASPA; OACIP. Projects like these can provide the framework and model for Diamond OA so that institutions do not need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to figuring out their own equitable processes for publication. Additionally, having a large consortia of libraries participating and contributing to the discourse, credibility, and viability of Diamond OA projects make them all the more tenable in the eyes of researchers and faculty members trying to balance the pressures of publishing equitably.

Scottish University Open Access Press

Another example of a consortial approach to Diamond OA is the Scottish University Open Access Press. The goal of this project is to create a press managed and published by and for member university libraries. While the initial investments and staff times may demand higher education professionals working on projects that might not benefit their university in the short term in terms of semester to semester collections, growth of projects like these promises to significantly reduce the dependence on high-cost subscriptions – as an Open Access Press would ensure must more affordable access to materials that are already being generated by those same universities to begin with.