Canadian think tanks and business research: an annotated Bibliography

Public research policies have been promoting open-access publication in recent years as an adequate model for the dissemination of scientific knowledge. However, depending on the disciplines, its use is very diverse. This study explores the determinants of open-access publication among academic researchers of economics and business, as well as their assessment of different economic measures focused on publication stimulus. To do so, a survey of Spanish business and economics researchers was conducted. They reported an average of 19% of their publications in open-access journals, hybrids or fully Gold Route open access. Almost 80% of the researchers foresee a future increase in the volume of open-access publications. When determining where to publish their research results, the main criterion for the selection of a scientific journal is the impact factor. Regarding open access, the most valued aspect is the visibility and dissemination it provides. Although the cost of publication is not the most relevant criterion in the choice of a journal, three out of four researchers consider that a reduction in fees and an increase in funding are measures that would boost the open-access model.

In previous Editor's Messages, I have discussed Neurosurgery Publications' role in representing the subspecialty at large and, through the rigors of peer review, publishing sound science that enlightens our understanding and advances our practice. In this Editor's Message, I would like to spend some time discussing the other end of the publication spectrum, specifically the various channels through which our published content is made accessible to the reader. Access to journals is traditionally through a sponsoring society membership or sold through the subscription model which, similar to common retail subscriptions one may have to the Wall Street Journal for example, involves paying a set price for a set term in a particular format (print, digital, or both). Many of those reading this piece now likely have access to Neurosurgery Publications journals through a digital institutional subscription. Institutions will typically purchase subscriptions to several titles within a discipline as a collection, granting access in turn to its students and staff. Our current publisher, Wolters Kluwer, offers institutional subscriptions in both print and digital formats the latter of which is fulfilled through Ovid, a medical research platform that includes over 6000 eBooks and 1400 journals in disciplines including medicine and nursing.1 Individual subscriptions are also available for those who wish to purchase access directly in either a print and digital bundle or digital-only format. Individual subscriptions are rather uncommon in medical publishing because of the prevalence of institutional access and cost. In addition to the subscription models mentioned above, of course, the other major avenue for accessing Neurosurgery Publications is through Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) membership. Depending on one's membership tier (Active, International, Resident, etc), access to Neurosurgery and Operative Neurosurgery is either complimentary and built into membership or available at a discounted price. Those accessing the journals through CNS membership are able to do so seamlessly through single sign on using their CNS member credentials. Beyond journal access, choosing CNS membership includes an array of benefits including member-only pricing on open access Article Processing Charges (APCs) in Neurosurgery Practice (née Neurosurgery Open).2 Currently, CNS members receive a 20% discount on the APCs and are able to claim this discount by entering their CNS Member ID during the submission process. Current APCs in Neurosurgery Practice are $2060 ($1648 for members) for full-length articles and $1030 ($824 for members) for all other articles. Although perhaps not a traditional form of “access” that may come immediately to mind, open access is a publication model that has seen significant growth largely driven by funder mandates and initiatives such as Plan S.3 The goal here is to make science as widely accessible as possible beyond the constraints of a subscription paywall. Neurosurgery Practice mentioned above is the official gold open access journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. Neurosurgery and Operative Neurosurgery offer hybrid open access options as well. Because these journals offer both traditional publication by copyright assignment and open access by creative commons licenses, they are referred to as hybrid journals. All 3 journals offer the CC BY and CC BY-NC-ND open access license.4 Helpful definitions of these license types can be found at https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/. The US government has mandated free open access (no cost and no embargo) for all articles related to federally sponsored research starting December 31, 2025. This mandate is in current discussion. Beyond the question of “access,” it is interesting to consider “use” and more specifically how we are able to measure this important metric. I have always believed that an article is to be both read and used. Perhaps the most simplistic form of “use” is when an article is cited in another research report. In the past decade, there have been articles published related to bibliometric science, with the goal of understanding trends in neurosurgery practice and research. Articles cited frequently (1 term is the “citation classic” with more than 500 citations) have focused on the science that may appear to be impactful on the work of others. One can track the citation of a work through a number of websites and services including Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Altmetrics. Other forms of use akin to article citation, although informal and less difficult to measure, are such instances as when another investigator might copy and paste elements of one's article into a slide presentation. At a very basic level, we can use the number of subscribers to gauge the number of readers; however, this does not provide as much insight as one may imagine. For instance, although we may send x number of print issues to x number of print subscribers, we have no way of knowing how many of those subscribers open the journal and, for those who do, which articles they choose to read. In the digital space, however, we are able to track article views (HTML page views) and PDF downloads. These metrics are a strong indicator of access, and we review these data from time to time to measure the engagement of a particular article or series of articles. Purchase of articles a la carte and article reprints can also be tracked and used as another indicator of access. In 2013, former Editor-in-Chief Dr Nelson Oyesiku put in place an initiative for attracting potentially high-impact research called the High Impact Manuscript Service (HIMS), and I am happy to say we recently relaunched this initiative in Neurosurgery. Manuscripts that are selected for this service receive several benefits including expedited review and waived open access fees. Those interested can learn more about this initiative here: https://journals.lww.com/neurosurgery/Pages/High-Impact-Manuscript-Service.aspx. As a suite of journals, Neurosurgery Publications is committed to and has a vested interest in ensuring our content is widely accessible. Through the benefits of CNS membership and subscriptions offered through our publisher, Wolters Kluwer, there are several options available. In addition, for those who wish to make their articles more widely accessible or are required to do so through funding mandates, our journals offer open access options. As Editor-in-Chief, I encourage you all to review these options and join us in the pages of Neurosurgery Publications. Douglas Kondziolka, MD, MSc Editor-in-Chief, Neurosurgery Publications New York, New York, USA

Predatory publishing: what authors need to know.

INTRODUCTION Authors of academic works do not take full advantage of the self-archiving rights that they retain in their publications, though research shows that many academic authors are well-aligned (at least in principle) with open access (OA) principles. This article explains how institutionally-assisted self-archiving in open access repositories can effectively take advantage of retained rights and highlights at least one method of facilitating this process through automated means. METHODS To understand the scope of author-retained rights (including the right to purchase hybrid or other open access options) at some sample universities, author-rights data through the SHERPA/RoMEO API was combined with individual article citations (from Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science) for works published over a one-year period (2011) and authored by individuals affiliated with five major U.S. research universities. RESULTS Authors retain significant rights in the articles that they create. Of the 29,322 unique articles authored over the one year period at the five universities, 28.83 percent could be archived in final PDF form and 87.95 percent could be archived as the post-print version. Nearly 43.47 percent also provided authors the choice of purchasing a hybrid paid open access option. DISCUSSION A significant percentage of current published output could be archived with little or no author intervention. With prior approval through an open access policy or otherwise, article manuscripts or final PDFs can be obtained and archived by library staff, and hybrid paid-OA options could be negotiated and exploited by library administrators. CONCLUSION Although mandates, legislation, and other policy tools may be useful to promote open access, many institutions already have the ability to increase the percentage of accessible works by taking advantage of retained author rights and hybrid OA options.

SummaryScientific publications have become the backbone of scientific communication since their foundation in 1665. The three main models for publishing are Traditional (or subscription-based), Open Access (OA), and Hybrid. As of July 1, 2025, the NIH requires that Author Accepted Manuscripts resulting from NIH-funded research be immediately publicly available. To comply with this new requirement, authors may be forced to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) to publish Open Access, ranging from ~$2000 to ~$13,000 per article. With this change to the scientific publishing landscape, publishing costs shift from subscribers to authors causing authors to re-evaluate how they choose which journal to publish in. Here we analyze 75 popular biomedical journals to evaluate the publishing costs compared to the scientific impact (i.e. Impact Factor, CiteScore, SNIP) illustrated by three different Cost-Impact Effectiveness (CIE) metrics (APC/IF, APC/CS and APC/SNIP). To complement the new open access policy, our goal is to provide a resource to help the scientific community evaluate the impact-based cost effectiveness of different Open Access options during their journal selection process.

I t has now been more than a decade since the Budapest Open Access Initiative coined the term open access (OA) and united a movement to free scholarly literature from access barriers.Incredible progress has been made in this time with the launching of thousands of OA journals, open repositories, and mandates from institutions, funders, and various levels of government in countries around the world.The momentum only seems to be increasing in recent years.OA is now considered to be inevitable, with one prediction estimating that it will be the dominant model for scholarly literature in the next decade. 1 This guide is intended to be a practical tool to help busy researchers, and the librarians who support them, make the transition to OA.The focus herein is on freely available online resources that will assist in making research publications OA; the closely associated, and rapidly growing, area of research data is beyond the scope of this column.

“Open access” (Open Access) is a new vocabulary only emerged in recent years, to solve the contradiction between the price rise of academic journals and the relatively tight of school library funding, a internet freedom communication campaign arose in international academic community, information media and the publishing industry. As a new mode of academic information exchange, the “open access” has drawn wide attention. This paper uses the form of online surveys, investigates the open access resource use in the university libraries and sports college libraries, introduces the main access in detail to open access resources of physical education, and on this basis, concludes three strategies of integration use of open access resource in sports college libraries: strengthen publicity of open access resources, collect and collate open access resources of physical education, establish navigation system of open access resources of physical education.

There has been an increasing call for peer-reviewed journals that publish scholarly evidence to become ‘Open Access’ whereby their contents can be freely retrieved with cost incurred to individuals accessing them. Two subtypes of Open Access journals are ‘hybrid open access’ (some articles are open access and others not), and ‘delayed open access’ (some articles are open access and other articles have delayed access) (Ohno-Machado, 2011). Traditionally, journals have been published in two ways. In the first instance, professional associations, government organisations, universities or learned societies published journals that were only available to members as a benefit or subscribers to that journal. The second option included journals that were published by private companies (e.g. Sage and Wiley-Blackwell) and subscriptions were sold to those who wanted access to the journals. In both these contexts, access to journal articles was restricted to individuals who had a paid subscription or access fee. There are several reasons why journals' becoming Open Access has become a timely topic. An emphasis on evidence-based practice; knowledge translation; journal quality metrics (such as impact factor); increased international visibility; higher citation rates for authors; plus many agencies who fund research requiring grant recipients to publish their findings in journals that are classified as Open Access (Willinsky, 2006) all put pressure on journals to provide this. Journals can be ‘Open Access’ in several ways. Firstly, a journal can be completely ‘Open Access’ using a fee-based approach or a no-fee option. The costs associated with fee-based open access journals is borne either by the journal's sponsoring organisation, the journal's publisher, the authors who submit the articles to the journal, the author's employer, a research grant an author has received, or a combination thereof. The Australian Physiotherapy Association's Journal of Physiotherapy is a recent example of a journal that is now no-fee, open access. Alternatively, a journal can have specific articles that are classified as accessible even though there may be other articles that are not. Editors can decide to make an article freely available or authors pay a fee to the journal publisher to enable free access. This is the current arrangement for the Australian Occupational Therapy Journal (AOTJ) with Wiley-Blackwell. One result of passing on the cost of making an article ‘Open Access’ is the rise of ‘vanity publishers’ and ‘predatory publishers’ who produce material that is presented as ‘open access’, but then charge authors large fees to accept and publish their manuscripts as a means of generating profits. ‘Many of these publishers are corrupt and exist only to make money off the author processing charges that are billed to authors upon acceptance of their scientific manuscripts’ (Beall, 2013, n.p.). These sources of information are considered not credible and are best avoided. A list of these journals and their publishers is available from Beall's List of Predatory Publishers 2013 (http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/12/06/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2013/). AOTJ currently complies with all relevant research funding requirements by offering a variety of Open Access options. The AOTJ utilises a ‘hybrid open access’ approach where an author who has an article accepted for publication is able to pay a fee directly to the publishers to make it Open Access. The first issue of the current year and special issues of the AOTJ are also freely accessible for a period of time when they are first published. If the AOTJ wanted to become completely Open Access, then the cost linked to this would need to be carried either by the individual authors publishing in the AOTJ or by Occupational Therapy Australia Limited (OT AUSTRALIA) who contracts Wiley-Blackwell to publish the AOTJ and provides AOTJ as a member benefit. Both options would have additional cost implications for the parties involved. One primary advantage of making the AOTJ Open Access would be that it would likely increase the journal's Impact Factor by making its articles easier to retrieve and cite (Björk & Solomon, 2012). The question to be considered and debated is the cost-benefit of such a move for the Australian occupational therapy community, OT AUSTRALIA as an organisation, and OT AUSTRALIA's membership, Wiley-Blackwell as the publisher of the AOTJ and the users and consumers of occupational therapy evidence.

Open Access and Legal Publishing: An Annotated Bibliography

A news article published online in Nature this morning discusses the announcement of new open access options in the Nature family of journals. The details are in the article, but the basic story (written by Holly Else) is that authors wanting to make their work OA can pay an APC of €9,500 or choose a ‘guided’ route, which is about 50% cheaper but splits the price between reviewing and publishing.

Is it wrong for an author to pay a journal to publish a research paper? This has become one of the most common questions audiences ask when I speak at universities and meetings in my role as the editor-in-chief of a medical journal. The proliferation of open-access journals — defined broadly as journals whose content is available freely without barriers apart from those involved from the ability to use the Internet itself [2] — is causing important changes in the world of scholarly publishing. Open access also confuses readers, which should cause journals and the press to promote education and dialogue. Unfortunately, headlines like "Some Online Journals Will Publish Fake Science, For A Fee" [7] and "The Exploitative Economics Of Academic Publishing" [6] make that dialogue harder to sustain. Let's try to keep it cool for another 900 words or so, and examine the various ways information can be disseminated, as well as the incentives that each approach might create. Before diving in, it is worth remembering what journals actually do, and what "scholarly publishing" means. For a few dollars a year, one can create a website or blog, and post research results on it instantly; most academic departments have websites that likewise allow near-immediate dissemination of new knowledge at no cost to the scientist. Instead, most researchers opt to endure peer review's indignities and delays, and some even pay for the privilege. Reasons for this vary, but the perceived values of scholarly publication include the validation of one's findings by colleagues, the ability to participate in the debate that advances a specialty's knowledge (an essential part of the scientific method), the wider dissemination of one's work afforded by the reach of a good journal or publisher, and the primacy that university promotions committees place on peer-reviewed publications. Most things that have value also have costs. Journals' expenses generally are not offset by advertising revenue [4]. Speaking generally but accurately, some of the remaining costs can be covered in two ways: Charging users or users' institutions to access content in a journal (a subscription-based model), or charging authors to publish in a journal (one common open-access model, though other open-access approaches certainly exist). In broad terms, the subscription model involves dividing costs by the number of readers or users, while a common alternative involves dividing costs by the number of articles published. Subscriptions are premised (and critically dependent) upon the idea that the contents of the journal are worth paying for. This tends to incent particular behaviors on the part of journals, including a focus on quality of the finished product, and a stringency of process that confers an air of selectivity; high-rejection-rate journals in medicine often are considered more prestigious. While no doubt there are some excellent open-access journals, and it is clear that not all subscription-model journals achieve those two aspirational standards, the incentives created by the subscription approach (along with the relative novelty of the open access movement) remain sufficient to allow easy substantiation of the following claim: The best journals in medicine and science still sell subscriptions. Even so, there are some important philosophical and practical reasons why open access is gaining traction, and for why the answer to the opening question of this editorial is unequivocally "no" — or at least "not in all cases". First, governments fund a great deal of research, and taxpayers fund governments. Because of this, there is an ethical case to be made that publicly funded work should be publicly available. Moving the paywall back from the subscriber to the author, as in an open-access model, accommodates this principle. Because of this, major public funders of research in the United States and Europe — including the National Institutes of Health in the United States and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom — have open-access mandates. Some university librarians assert that rising subscription costs represent a crisis that impairs their ability to support the academic mission [8]; many libraries support open access for this reason among others [10, 11]. Finally, most [9] open-access models allow authors to retain copyright, allowing them to disseminate their work on university websites, and distribute it elsewhere without further charge. There is evidence that that open-access articles are more influential in terms of usage than are articles placed behind subscription-model paywalls [3, 5], although truly fair comparisons on this question will be difficult to conduct. But open access has a dark side. There is a perception that if journals collect fees from authors rather than subscribers, those journals will accept work of lower quality in order to collect more fees. This perception is what lies behind the opening question of this essay, and was the motivation behind a recent "sting" carried out by the journal Science [1]. The journal found a very high proportion of open-access journals that purport to do peer review appear to be little more than pay-to-play scams [1]. I hasten to add that many others are entirely reputable, some open-access journals have impact factors several times higher than any orthopaedic surgery journal, and as we all know, the quality of subscription-model journals also varies widely. I suspect many subscription-model journals would have been "stung" had Science opted to include them in its recent operation; one need not be a cynic to imagine why a subscription-model journal like Science might not choose to do so. Finally, open access is impractical for many researchers in a specialty like orthopaedic surgery, where most research is not funded extramurally. Open access fees can cost several thousand dollars, and most authors simply cannot or will not pay them. By way of disclosure, Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research® is a hybrid. We remain principally a subscription-model journal, but our publisher, Springer®, offers authors an open access option in which — for USD 3000 — authors can retain copyright on their paper, and the work will be accessible to all users without charge to those users. Few authors choose this option. Importantly (we believe), in a variation on the open-access theme: 1 year after publication, all of the content in CORR® becomes freely available to everyone on PubMedCentral at no cost to authors. The fact that major public funding agencies, large university libraries, and multinational publishers are behind open access suggests it is here to stay. We do not completely know how this emerging trend will change scholarly publishing in general, and orthopaedic publication practices in particular, but I have a strong sense that it will. Stay tuned.

Reclaiming the midnight hours: up-to-date evidence in just one click.

Research is one of the key pillars in the teaching and learning situation in any university in the world. However, the approach to research varies from one university to the other. The purpose of this study was to find out how the level of awareness and satisfaction, the challenges and extent of use of open access resources impact research productivity of faculty in *Dartum University. A quantitative survey research method was adopted. A sample size of 62 full-time lecturers and 134 part-time lecturers was selected for the study using a stratified simple random sampling technique. The findings revealed that research productivity is low despite the high level of awareness and satisfaction with open access use. Again, the findings showed that faculty members use open access to a considerable extent and point out some challenges associated with open access use. It was concluded that there is a very weak but significant influence of open access use on research productivity in Dartum University. It is recommended that African universities, and in particular Dartum University, establish or patronise institutional repositories which support open access.

Scholars have argued that open access has neither future nor meaning unless research assessment processes and practices evolve. Moreover, science’s societal impact is the foundation of open access existence, and therefore, research impact assessment needs to embrace openness principles. Scholarly communication, open access, and open science have been significantly transformed over the years by technological developments; however, contrary to these transformations, research impact assessment in Africa has remained largely focused on academic impact and metrics. Although metrics have dominated performance evaluation because of their ease of use, inter alia, they are not without epistemic challenges and biases, notably for African researchers. Hence, the purpose of this study, which draws from a doctoral study on research impact assessment, is to explore how higher education institutions can advance open access and open science through equitable performance evaluation. The paper adopts a largely quantitative approach (questionnaire and document analysis) to ascertain challenges with metrics used for research impact assessment and best practices in research impact assessment to advance open access and open science. Data collection was via an online structured questionnaire with University of Cape Town (South Africa) researchers and academic staff, and document analysis of relevant documents. The study revealed that higher education institutions need to recenter what they value to transform research assessment. Equally, any fundamental change necessitates a shift in policies, processes, structures, norms, and values to allow for the new changes to be adopted and institutionalized. The study provides insight into how higher education institutions can advance open access and open science by extension through aligning values, policy, research assessment processes, and practices as well as changing how researchers are evaluated.

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a powerful method originating in the fields of political science and sociology, where it is becoming a mainstream method. This article analyzes the state of QCA applications in business and management (B&M) research by conducting a structured literature review, which results in the identification of 96 studies between 1995 and 2015. Additionally, the knowledge basis of those articles is analyzed by means of a citations analysis. The 5,141 unique citations serve to also structure the research front using a bibliometric coupling analysis. The results point towards a somewhat deferred development of QCA in the discipline, which has recently undergone a quantum leap with regard to the number of publications as well as the advance of the method application. The current development is strongly determined by the originator of the method, Charles Ragin, and by the first studies applying QCA in business and management. Yet, the research front is only loosely connected, underlining that QCA remains at an early stage of adoption in business and management. The chapter gives three recommendations for future QCA studies and predicts a progressing profile formation of QCA in business and management research that can contribute to the adoption of configurational thinking within the discipline.