A new comment article in Nature, headed up by lead-author Agnes Grudniewicz, unveils a new consensus-formed definition of predatory publishing, and provides some suggestions of steps to take in the future to tackle the problems developing from the phenomena.
Download rates of academic journals have joined citation counts as commonly used indicators of the value of journal subscriptions. While citations reflect worldwide influence, the value of a journal subscription to a single library is more reliably measured by the rate at which it is downloaded by local users. If reported download rates accurately measure local usage, there is a strong case for using them to compare the cost-effectiveness of journal subscriptions. The authors of this study examined data for nearly 8,000 journals downloaded in the University of California system during a period of six years. They came to the conclusion that the currently available download statistics, which are supplied by publishers, are not sufficiently reliable to allow libraries to make subscription decisions based on price and reported downloads, at least without making an adjustment for publisher effects in download reports.
STM and its members continue to stand ready to work with cOAlition S and individual funders to make a vision of a high-quality, sustainable, and more open scholarly communication environment a reality.
The University Press Library is the result of a five-year pilot project initiated by De Gruyter, the three prestigious presses of Harvard, Columbia and Princeton with collaboration from LYRASIS and ten participating academic libraries. The pilot project sought to address the challenges of acquiring complete DRM-free frontlist eBook collections of university press content for both the press and the academic library. The data gathered from this successful pilot inspired the University Press Library, a sustainable model that meets the financial and academic needs of both university press partners and the library in a digital environment.
Online search engines and academic indexes require machine-readable metadata to ingest and interpret information about journal articles. Without rich machine-readable metadata, the potential reach and impacts of journal articles are sure to be stunted because search engines and indexes will struggle to parse the articles and return them in relevant search results. Scholastica automatically produces machine-readable metadata for all of the articles published using their open access publishing platform, and they make it easy to apply metadata collected during peer review to published articles saving journals time. ISSN is among the core metadata required by publishing standards organizations and open access initiatives like Plan S.
COPE’s first survey aims to identify publication ethics issues specifically for Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS) journals. The report takes you through the study methodology, its findings on issues identified by the 650 editors who responded, and their awareness of COPE and its resources. The study also compares the responses of the AHSS respondents to those of STM journals in a study by Wager et al in 2009.
The report can be downloaded here.
Jasmin Lange, Chief Publishing Officer and a member of Brill’s Executive Committee, presents Brill’s endeavors in open access (OA) and about Plan S. Brill is a 336-year old publishing house, and the author explains how the last 12 months have changed her perspective on academic publishing, first presented at the STM conference in Washington in April 2019 (slides available here).
With more than 20 years of experience in research, advice and training to publishers, Latindex promotes this online course Publishing and visibility of scientific journals. This project involves researchers specialized in librarianship and information science and partners of Latindex. The objectives are multiple: to provide Central American publishers with the basic knowledge for publishing and managing printed and electronic academic journals; to promote an improvement in the editorial quality of scientific publications; to promote journals acquiring a better visibility at a global level, and finally to promote Open Access.
Springer Nature sets out a new approach to research publishing with the goal of increasing the demand from authors to immediately publish their research open access (OA). The other goal is to increase the supply of journals able to publish OA, potentially enabling even highly selective journals such as Nature to transition to OA. The new approach would see publishers become active drivers of the transition to OA, with this demonstration of commitment increasing institutions and funding bodies’ confidence and support. This blog post describes a potential significant way to progress.
Since 2017, Springer Nature has provided an optional Research Data Support service to help researchers deposit and curate data that support their peer-reviewed publications. This service builds on a Research Data Helpdesk, which since 2016 has provided support to authors and editors who need advice on the options available for sharing their research data. This paper describes a short project which aimed to facilitate an objective assessment of metadata quality, undertaken during the development of a third-party curation service for researchers (Research Data Support). The curation services which have been developed and introduced are also described.
