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This week (22-28 October) is the yearly Open Access Week, instigated by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). For this reason, this issue of the newsletter will almost entirely be devoted to open access.
Open access, i.e. free online distribution and usage of research outputs, has gained increasing attention in academia during the last fifteen years. While the term itself was coined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002, the idea behind open access is significantly older. Already in the 1970's researchers in computer science self-archived work on ftp-servers, and in 1991 physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory started what later became ArXiv, an e-print archive to date containing some 1,5 million manuscripts.
University libraries have also been an important driver for open access. A large portion of library budgets are spent on journal subscriptions, and the costs for these have sky-rocketed. While publishers do not have to pay for most of the work that sustain them, universities pay for the research itself, for the peer review, for editors, and for the journal subscriptions.
Today, stakeholders of academic publishing work to change old publishing models. Open access policies have been adopted by research funders, governments, and universities. Publishers have started gold open access journals, and researchers share their work on social media and other digital outlets.
But while many hoped that open access would mean greater access to research and lower costs, in reality publishing houses earn more money than before, while researchers often find themselves squeezed between funders open access policies and journals' high article processing charges (APC's). For this reason, Karlstad University runs an APC fund since 2017. So far, more than 60 KaU-scholars have been aided by the fund to publish their work open access.
However, while APC-funds can help individual researchers to some degree, such measures do little or nothing to change the flaws of the publishing system itself. To increase pressure on publishers to make more research freely available to everyone, on September 4, 2018, 13 national research funders from 12 countries, supported by the European Commission and the European Research Council, formed cOAlition S. It has launched the so-called Plan S (where S stands for Science, Speed, Solution, and Shock) with a clear aim to increase the speed in this inevitable change of the academic publishing system. One of the components of Plan S, and also the most debated one, is that from Jan 1, 2020, all research funded by the signatories must be published either as gold OA, or published on separate OA platforms. This means that publishing in hybrid journals, such as Science, Nature, and many other prestigious journals, will no longer be allowed if you want to fulfill the requirements of these 13 funders.
The largest funder of research in Sweden, the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) says it supports the aims of Plan S but think the time line is too short. It has therefore decided to not join the coalition as of now. However, both Forte and Formas joined the coalition.
The theme of this year's open access week is "Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge", a theme that seems fitting in the light of cOAlition S's ambition to "level the playing field". Whether 2019 will see a development towards equity or not remains to be seen.
Jakob Harnesk,
University library director
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- ... that the library now subscribes to BrowZine - a tool for browsing and reading the library´s electronic journals? BrowZine also allows you to set alerts for new journal issues and export articles to reference management tools such as EndNote and Zotero. BrowZine is a web-based service and app for Apple and Android devices. [Read more]
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Open access publishing can be expensive for authors. That is why Karlstad University and the library offer financial open access support. We do this by different means. Open access deals have been negotiated with publishers. For you as researcher, this means that you can publish open access articles at no or reduced cost. Currently, we have such deals with Frontiers, Institute of Physics, Royal Society of Chemistry, Springer, and Taylor & Francis. New deals are under way.
The library also administers the Karlstad University open access fund. If the application from a KaU-researcher meets the funds' criteria we reimburse 100% of the author fee of a gold open access journal, and 50% of the fee of a hybrid journal (hybrid journals combine subscription and author fees, while gold journals only apply author fees).
Here are a few quick statistics on how the KaU open access fund has been used since its inception in 2017:
- 65 applications from KaU-researchers have been approved.
- In 2017 there were 20 applications from the HS-faculty and 19 from HNT.
- In 2018 so far 26 applications have been approved, 9 from HS and 17 from HNT.
- Of all 65 applications, 26 have been submitted by women, and 39 by men.
- Within HS the Department for Social and Psychological Studies has submitted most applications (11). Within HNT the Department for Engineering and Chemical Sciences submitted most applications (also 11).
- Of all 65 applications 29 concerned gold journals and 36 hybrid journals.
- Until 30 September 2018 a total of 432.704 SEK had been transferred from the fund to the departments. In addition, applications worth roughly 230.000 SEK have been approved but are waiting to be invoiced.
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Get It Now is a new service which makes it possible for you to retrieve articles from Elsevier journals which are not accessible via KaU library (articles published before 1995 and after 30 June 2018).
This is how it works:
1. Look up the article in One Search.
2. Click KAU link in the article record,
3. After clicking KAU link you receive information that you can "Obtain articles from Get It Now".
4. When you click the link you are redirected to Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), the company owning the service. Type your KaU e-mail address, accept the terms and conditions and the article pdf from the Elsevier journal will be sent to you, free of charge, within 8 hours or less.
Please note that this service will only be available to Karlstad University staff, not to students.
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Sharing research results can help your career, your subject discipline, and knowledge production in general. But today there are so many publications to choose from. How can you be sure you can trust a particular journal?
To reduce the risk of research being submitted to predatory journals several publishing organisations and publishing houses have joined forces and put together a service to help researchers, Think-Check-Submit.
The service gives you tips and tricks on how to make sure a journal is of good quality. Here are some examples of important checkpoints: Does the publisher belong to COPE - The Committee for Publication Ethics, an organisation working to promote research integrity? If the journal is open access, is it listed in DOAJ - Directory of Open Access journals, and does the publisher belong to OASPA - Open Access Scholarly Publishing (both organisations that work to ensure the quality of open access journals)?
The checklists provided by Think-Check-Submit give you a good idea of what to keep in mind before submitting your work. And don't forget that you can always contact us at the library, if you are hesitating over which outlet is the best for you.
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At the beginning of 2017 the National Library received an appropriation directive from the Swedish Government to act as a national coordinating body in the work towards a transition to open access to scholarly publications.
Five national working groups have been formed on the topics listed below, with stakeholder representation from Swedish funding agencies, HEIs, researchers and the National Library of Sweden. The topics are:
- The current merit and resource allocation system versus incentives for open access
- Funding for a transition from a subscription-based to an open access publishing system
- Open access to scholarly monographs
- Financial and technical support for converting peer-reviewed and scholarly journals from toll access to open access
- Monitoring of compliance with open access policies and mandates
The working groups have now published their preliminary reports, and the National Library encourages input on them via their web forum. If you want to give your opinion on the reports, and suggest improvements, you are able to do so until October 31.
Follow this link to read and comment on the reports (only in Swedish)
The finalised reports will be presented to the Swedish government in the beginning of 2019.
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On 2 October publishers Elsevier and American Chemical Society (ACS) filed a law suit against academic social network ResearchGate (RG). The publishers claim that RG commits copyright infringement as published articles owned by the publishers are disseminated through RG.
It was only a year ago that Elsevier and ACS last brought suit against RG. This court battle is still ongoing in Germany. The new suit is filed in Maryland, US. As a result of the pressure put on RG, they have removed over a million published articles from their servers, but the publishers argue that the infringing activity is still ongoing.
The publishers claim 150.000 USD for each unlawfully disseminated article. As reported by Inside Higher Ed the court documents include an "illustrative but not exhaustive" list of 3,143 articles shared by RG, which means a possible total claim for at least 470 million USD.
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Have you recently found yourself sighing and swearing in despair over our “post-truth” society? A society in which the anti-science brigade spreads dangerous lies and the public won´t listen to science facts and evidence. You are definitely not alone. Most likely there is no magic bullet to solve this tricky situation but this does not mean that we should give up and stick our heads in the sand. Why? Because researchers have something, that many other professions lack or have little of: people´s trust.
It has been shown in recent surveys that scientists are among the professions that are regarded as most trustworthy1, whereas journalists receive relatively low rankings. To me, this means that we as researchers have a responsibility to back up journalists and make our voice heard in order to become a balance against fake news. Obviously not all of us have the time or energy to work with public outreach but there might be another option: open access. It can easily be included in the regular publishing process and makes a difference for those who would like to verify information by checking the original research. The latter is not possible in many cases today. If someone outside academia wants to validate whether science news may be fake, they might not have access to it. The hurdle they generally face are 30 $ per article, which is most likely too high to make it worth for most people.
So, let´s assume that people do not buy lies over the truth, that there is an interest to got to the bottom with things, and that we can easily increase the number of trustworthy information sources by choosing open access over paywall publications. The opposite option, namely keeping our research closed because we anticipate it is of no interest to others than scientists, would be worse, and we would all be the poorer for it.
Source: 1https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2017-11/trust-in-professions-veracity-index-2017-slides.pdf
Nadja Neumann, Ph. D.
Publishing editor
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