The Council of the European Union adopted on May 2023 conclusions on the ‘high quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing’, calling for immediate and unrestricted Open Access in publishing research involving public funds (Council conclusion).

OPERAS welcomes this official positioning of the council on diversity and equity in publishing academic results and the emphasis on “that immediate and unrestricted open access should be the norm in publishing research involving public funds, with transparent pricing commensurate with the publication services and where costs are not covered by individual authors or readers”. Read Council conclusion p. 5.

In June, APA (American Psychological Association) added 76 new terms to its Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms® to provide more effective searching on current topics. This Thesaurus update also includes 55 new cross-referenced terms and 76 revised scope notes. 

New terms from this summer update will initially be applied to current content only; following the fall release, the majority of new postable terms for 2023 will be back-mapped to older records. You can see the full list of Thesaurus changes on APA website.

PsycINFO® is among the ROAD data sources.

OPERAS Innovation Lab’s website has been launched! The Observatory will feature case studies, discussions, resources and guidelines about innovation in scholarly communication.

The Innovation Lab is part of OPERAS, Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area. It is coordinated by the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN).

STM Solutions, the operational arm of STM, has launched a paper mill detection tool as part of its Integrity Hub. The MVP (minimal viable product) is a web application that can be used to upload submitted journal manuscripts and scan them for pre-identified indications of potential fraud. If any potential issues are noted, the system generates a message alerting the research integrity managers and editors, allowing them to investigate and take action if needed.

By analyzing 25,671 journals largely absent from common journal counts, as well as Web of Science and Scopus, this study demonstrates that scholarly communication is more of a global endeavor than is commonly credited. These journals, employing the open-source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS), have published 5.8 million items; they are in 136 countries, with 79.9% in the Global South and 84.2% following the OA diamond model (charging neither reader nor author). A substantial proportion of journals operate in more than one language (48.3%), with research published in 60 languages (led by English, Indonesian, Spanish, and Portuguese). The journals are distributed across the social sciences (45.9%), STEM (40.3%), and the humanities (13.8%). For all their geographic, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity, 1.2% are indexed in the Web of Science and 5.7% in Scopus. On the other hand, 1.0% are found in Cabell’s Predatory Reports, and 1.4% show up in Beall’s (2021) questionable list.

This report is the main outcome of a study commissioned by Knowledge Exchange (KE). The study was aimed at investigating “Risks and trust in pursuit of a well functioning Persistent Identifier infrastructure for research”. The investigation set out to analyse the current state of the Persistent Identifier (PID) landscape in the six Knowledge Exchange partner countries and beyond, taking emerging PIDs particularly into account and examining the roles of relevant stakeholders as PID service providers, higher education institutions, researchers, publishers and national libraries. The report examines the PID landscape and provides a detailed look at what can go wrong with an unreliable PID service. In addition, a series of recommendations aimed at each stakeholder group are presented.

The Nobel Foundation and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences are organising the second Nobel Prize Summit: Truth, Trust and Hope. They will convene Nobel Prize laureates and other experts, information technology and business leaders, policymakers, journalists, educators, and youth from around the world to engage in constructive dialogue on actively combating the spread of mis- and disinformation, share evidence-based knowledge and global experiences, and help restore trust and confidence in science, institutions and systems of society.

This post is a recap of the recent SSP webinar, Ask the Experts: AI in Publishing, held on 6 October 2022.

There are numerous conferences, workshops, and keynotes about how or whether techniques developed under the moniker ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) can support (or ruin!) scholarly publishing (not to mention two recent Scholarly Kitchen posts on ChatGPT and the issues it presents). But what is actually meant by AI, according to people who do this for a living? How, precisely, can this mysterious set of technologies help or harm scholarly publishing, and what are some current trends? What are the risks of AI, and what should we look out for?

A journal article dataset has been developed with metadata of articles by France-based authors in the period 2013-2020. The purpose of this dataset was to form a basis for the retrospective and prospective analyses of the total costs of APCs paid by French institutions. This article presents the main results of the retrospective analysis of the dataset regarding the numbers of APC-paid articles with a France-based corresponding author.