Editorial News

<h3>Objective</h3> Open access (OA) publishing allows research to be freely available to readers, whilst costs are usually transferred to authors, funders, or institutions. This study explores OA indexing and publication costs among occupational health journals. <h3>Material and Methods</h3> We queried the Ulrichsweb database (a comprehensive catalog for academic and non-academic publications) for publications under the subject ‘occupational health and safety’. Filters were applied to restrict the search to active peer-reviewed journals with either print or online formats. After deduplication, journals were searched for indexing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Data on OA status, article processing charges (APC), and author copyright retention were retrieved from DOAJ. The DIAMAS criteria (persistent identification, scholarly journal, OA with licenses, no fees, open to all authors, and community-owned) were used to define diamond OA journals when all criteria were met. Publishers were labelled as commercial or non-commercial by reviewing publishers’ websites and stock exchange listings. APC were compared by type of publisher (commercial/non-commercial) with the Mann-Whitney U-test. A p &lt; 0.05 was considered statistically significant. <h3>Results</h3> Out of the 107 journals analyzed, 33 (30.8%) were fully OA and 15 (14%) were diamond OA journals. In the subset of fully OA journals, 6 (18.2%) were owned by commercial publishers and 27 (81.8%), non-commercial. Journals owned by commercial publishers charged higher APC (median: 1532.5 EUR, IQR: 671.25 – 1745) than non-commercial (median: 0 EUR, IQR: 0 – 421, p = 0.02). Fifteen (14%) OA journals allowed authors to retain copyright of their works. <h3>Conclusion</h3> Nearly one third of occupational health journals in Ulrichsweb are fully OA and less than 2 in 10, diamond OA. Those owned by commercial publishers charge higher APC. Existing occupational health journals could evaluate transitioning to non-commercial or diamond OA models, while new diamond OA journal initiatives could be encouraged.

FTC Sues OMICS: Claims Open Access Academic Publisher Scams Academics

Obama Signs Act to Make More Federally Funded Research Open Access: NIH Requirement Extended to Other Agencies

Choosing the Target Journal: Do Authors Need a Comprehensive Approach?

A Review of: Scott, R. E., Murphy, J. A., Thayer-Styes, C., Buckley, C. E., &amp; Shelley, A. (2023). Exploring faculty perspectives on open access at a medium-sized, American doctoral university. Insights the UKSG Journal, 36(1), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.620 Objective – To examine faculty members’ preferences, experiences, and current practices for publishing and using Open Access (OA) content. Design – Qualitative interviews and inductive coding of participants’ responses. Setting – Illinois State University (ISU), a public R2 university. Subjects – Twenty-five faculty members, representing all of ISU’s colleges. Methods – Authors recruited participants via a faculty electronic mailing list, selecting 25 faculty members representing all of ISU’s colleges, as well as differing academic ranks and length of time since earning their terminal degrees. Interviews were conducted, recorded, and transcribed over Zoom. Authors used inductive coding to identify themes, while also seeking input from participants and external professionals to guarantee accurate and detailed representation of participants’ responses to the interview questions. Main Results – All participants placed themselves somewhere on the spectrum between being completely opposed to, and enthusiastically participating in, OA publishing, with many noting tension between a principled belief in OA scholarship and difficulties with carrying out those beliefs due to journal quality or article processing fees. Some scholars were able to make use of grants, transformative agreements, or departmental funds to cover the costs associated with OA publishing. Disciplinary norms governed the sharing or use of unpublished, publicly accessible scholarship, with scholars in the sciences being more likely to place works in disciplinary repositories, such as arXiv. Participants expressed hesitation to post preprints to repositories due to lack of peer-review, legal considerations, and having one’s research ideas “scooped.” Lack of peer-review also contributed to hesitancy to cite preprints, although arXiv emerged as a highly regarded repository in terms of article quality for relevant scientific disciplines. Conclusion – The authors conclude that perceptions of OA publishing are heavily determined by disciplinary norms, leading to a broad range of practices even within an R2 university. This necessitates multiple approaches by libraries to make OA publishing more possible and palatable for scholars including facilitating access to funds that alleviate or cover article processing fees, hosting OA journals, and providing quality education and support for publishing in reputable OA journals in one’s field. The authors see sustained shifts toward publishing in OA models as also likely to lead to scholars' increasing their use of others’ OA materials.

Sir, I read with interest the editorial by Satyanarayana where he mentions that open access (OA) of journals is one of the changing aspects of journal publishing in modern day1. This system is a blessing for scientific communities because it is easily available in digital form and allows user to read, download, copy, distribute, and print2,3 without any barrier, thus increases impact of the published material. The progress of scientific knowledge in any field depends on retrieval and accessibility of relevant literature2 and in this regard archiving4 and access5 of OA literature plays a major role. In self archiving, the author can upload preprint or postprint versions in OA digital platform2,5,6 and use personal website, institutional archive, departmental archive, inter- and intra-disciplinary archive for this purpose2,6. Self-archiving can be Green OA2,6 which allows uploading postprint version and Pale Green2 OA which allows uploading preprint version of scholar work. Open access journals are another source of OA literature and provide postprint or copy edited version2 of a published article. When publishers allow immediate OA to all published material, it is known as Gold OA2,5,7. Sometimes publishers make scholarly article available after an embargo period, identified as delayed open access7. When subscription based journals allow OA to a limited number of scholarly articles, it is known as hybrid open access7. Open access in digital platform allows free access and reduced expenses for printing and distribution5 unlike traditional printing and subscription based journals. But to host a digital platform by using modern technology and archive in cyber space increase expenditure of journal publishing5 and put additional economic burden to OA publication3,5. Economically sustainability is one of the main supports for long lasting of any journal3 and it comes from either authors pay model or from external supports like public funding, membership fees, users consortia, advertising, institutional subscriptions and service sales3. In OA publication except public funding and advertising there are less chances to generate revenue from any author external sources to fulfill publication cost. Advertising generates small revenue3 and public funding sources like universities, research laboratories pay for their organization member publication3,5. In this scenario, the only feasible option left for OA journal is to generate revenue through authors pay model. According to Subar2, most of the OA journals do not charge authors but most of conventional and non OA journals do and usually authors’ fee for publication is paid by author sponsors or waived off2. Now-a- days fraud publishers use this authors pay model to generate money in dishonest way as termed as “Cash Cow” model in the editorial1. This is one of the biggest threats in the era of OA journals for scientific communities. Due to pressure for publication scholars fall in their traps. They should be careful about these fake journals because now-a-days quality of publication is more acceptable than quantity of publication8. Though there are no foolproof methods to find out fake journals in open access platform, but scholars can take certain measures to avoid these kind of counterfeit journals. First, they should check scope of the journal as most of these fake journals publish articles from different fields of science9 within a short period of time9,10, which is usually not possible for a normal regular journal. Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association(OASPA) clearly mentions in their code of conduct that an OA journal should have editorial boards or other governing bodies consisting of recognized specialists from the field(s) that constitute the scope of the journal8. OASPA also suggested that there should be some form of peer review and it should be clearly mentioned on the journal or publisher's website8. The authors should also check the details of the editorial board members or reviewers available in journal home page like phone number with ISD codes which help to identify countries they belong to, institutes they work in and their details like websites from where scholars can obtain information. Regarding publication fee OASPA has clearly stated in the code of conduct that the publication fee or charges in the OA journal should be clearly mentioned on the home page and should be easily located by potential authors8. Finally, scholar should check contact details of the publisher provided in the journal or publisher's home page as most of the time it is an internet based invoice1,10 and does not have any postal code and phone number and bank account details available, which can help to identify the publishing place and thus are strong indicators of “Predatory Publishers”. All OA publishers are not predatory publisher9 but this situation can create many problems for authors and readers. This problem may be solved when open access becomes free for authors like its users6. This is an ideal OA and termed as Diamond or Platinum OA6 and will give a new direction of OA publication.

See video of the presentation.In 2013 The University of Bergen established a publication fund to cover the costs for publishing Open Access. The fund covers Article Processing Charges (APC) in both Open Access journals and hybrid Open Access in subscription journals. The publication fund at The University of Bergen is one of few in Norway that includes support for hybrid Open Access. The hybrid model is controversial because the publisher receives income twice for the same article, first through APC and then through subscriptions.The arguments for including hybrid were: (1) there are more journals to choose from, hence giving more researchers the opportunity and initiative to publish Open Access. (2) the quality issue of Open Access journals. The University believed that by including hybrid more articles would be published Open Access in renowned journals. This because a larger percentage of hybrid journals are registered on level 2 in the Norwegian System for defining quality of publication channels.The fund has been a success in so far that it has led to an increase in Open Access articles in high quality journals, also within research fields that traditionally do not publish Open Access. The fund has granted applications for almost 9 million NOK. Of a total of 437 granted applications, 278 (64 %) are articles in hybrid journals. 103 articles (24 %) have been published on level 2; 11 in Open Access-journals and 92 hybrid.When it comes to research field, the results show that about 90 % of granted applications come from researchers within medicine, psychology and the natural sciences, including many fields that already have a tradition for publishing their research Open Access. The fund has only led to a slight increase in Open Access publishing with APC within the humanities, social sciences and law.Researchers are happy with hybrid publishing because they are able to continue publishing in the same journals as before. It is also the case that support of hybrid publishing results in more Open Access articles in high quality journals according to the Norwegian system. Yet, support for hybrid publishing has so far not altered which research fields that publish Open Access, although there has been an increase of Open Access publications within all faculties.Our presentation will form a basis for discussing a number of questions pertaining to the hybrid model: What have the academic and economic consequences of the hybrid model been? Do all researchers at the University have the same opportunity to publish their research Open Access? Has support of hybrid lead to more Open Access in renowned publication channels?The University has appointed a group to evaluate the publication fund and recommend if and how it shall continue. Will the fund continue to support hybrid after the trial period ends in 2015?

Predatory publishing: what authors need to know.

Measuring the Impact of Gold and Green Open Access

It appears that open access (OA) academic publishing is better for science because it provides frictionless access to make significant advancements in knowledge. OA also benefits individual researchers by providing the widest possible audience and concomitant increased citation rates. OA publishing rates are growing fast as increasing numbers of funders demand it and is currently dominated by gold OA (authors pay article processing charges (APCs)). Academics with limited financial resources perceive they must choose between publishing behind pay walls or using research funds for OA publishing. Worse, many new OA journals with low APCs did not have impact factors, which reduces OA selection for tenure track professors. Such unpleasant choices may be dissolving. This article provides analysis with a free and open source python script to collate all journals with impact factors with the now more than 12,000 OA journals that are truly platinum OA (neither the author nor the readers pay for the peer-reviewed work). The results found platinum OA is growing faster than both academic publishing and OA publishing. There are now over 350 platinum OA journals with impact factors over a wide variety of academic disciplines, giving most academics options for OA with no APCs.

Background. Open access (OA) publishing via article processing charges (APCs) is growing as an alternative to subscription publishing. The Pay It Forward (PIF) Project is exploring the feasibility of transitioning from paying subscriptions to funding APCs for faculty at research intensive universities. Estimating of the cost of APCs for the journals authors at research intensive universities tend to publish is essential for the PIF project and similar initiatives. This paper presents our research into this question.Methods. We identified APC prices for publications by authors at the 4 research intensive United States (US) and Canadian universities involved in the study. We also obtained APC payment records from several Western European universities and funding agencies. Both data sets were merged with Web of Science (WoS) metadata. We calculated the average APCs for articles and proceedings in 13 discipline categories published by researchers at research intensive universities. We also identified 41 journals published by traditionally subscription publishers which have recently converted to APC funded OA and recorded the APCs they charge.Results. We identified 7,629 payment records from the 4 European APC payment databases and 14,356 OA articles authored by PIF partner university faculty for which we had listed APC prices. APCs for full OA journals published by PIF authors averaged 1,775 USD; full OA journal APCs paid by Western European funders averaged 1,865 USD; hybrid APCs paid by Western European funders averaged 2,887 USD. The APC for converted journals published by major subscription publishers averaged 1,825 USD. APC funded OA is concentrated in the life and basic sciences. APCs funded articles in the social sciences and humanities are often multidisciplinary and published in journals such as PLOS ONE that largely publish in the life sciences.Conclusions. Full OA journal APCs average a little under 2,000 USD while hybrid articles average about 3,000 USD for publications by researchers at research intensive universities. There is a lack of information on discipline differences in APCs due to the concentration of APC funded publications in a few fields and the multidisciplinary nature of research.

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.

Through the study, we explore the development path of open access (OA) in Chinese Science journals based on DOAJ. This article examines the development of Open Access (OA) in Chinese Science journals on DOAJ, using a web-based survey of 86 journals. Data from the DOAJ platform and journal websites were collected and analyzed statistically with EXCEL. Findings indicate that the growth of Chinese Science journals is uneven, with a significant number of journals published in English. Most journals require authors to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs), and only 40.7% offer APC waiver policies. The predominant OA license is CC BY-NC-ND. About 69.77% of journals have a publishing cycle of under 20 weeks, and anonymous peer review is the most common method. Print remains the primary publication format, with few journals having long-term digital preservation or dedicated institutions in China for such preservation. Additionally, there is an imbalance in research themes. Recommendations include increasing the number of OA journals in Chinese Science disciplines and encouraging more Chinese journals to join the DOAJ, waving or reasonably charging APCs, adopting flexible Creative Common Licenses, implementing more rigorous peer review processes, reducing publishing cycles, internationalizing journal formats, and conducting further research on long-term digital preservation and expanding research themes.

Open access (OA) journals are a growing phenomenon largely of the past decade wherein readers can access the content of scientific journals without paying for a subscription. The costs are borne by authors (or their institutions) who pay a fee to be published, thus allowing readers to access, search, print, and cite the journals without cost. Although the OA model, in and of itself, need not diminish scientific rigor, selectivity, or peer review, the "author pays" model creates an inherent conflict of interest: it operates with the incentive on the part of the journal to publish more and reject less. This is coupled with cost containment measures that affect the journals' ability to engage experienced editors and professional staff to scrutinize data, data analyses, and author conflicts of interest. While some OA journals appear to be comparable to their print competitors, others are "predatory" and have no legitimacy at all. Two recent "scams"--one recently published in Science--highlight the urgency of addressing the issues raised by OA publication so that OA does not lose its credibility just as it begins to gather substantial momentum. High-quality journals develop their reputations over time, and OA outlets will be no exception. For this to occur, however, the OA audience will need to be satisfied that OA can deliver high-quality publications utilizing rigorous peer review, editing, and conflict of interest scrutiny. Academic tenure and promotion committees that review scholarly credentials are understandably skeptical of publications in unrecognized journals, and the large number of new OA outlets contributes to this urgency from their perspective as well.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report results of a study which investigated the growth of open access (OA) journals across the world with reference to the Asian region. Details of 117 OA journals were collected from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to determine the geographic distribution, language of publication and growth of periodical year-wise. The study makes detail analysis of four OA periodical published from India, Iran, Pakistan and Taiwan. Pattern of authorship and contribution according to nature of professional work were analyzed. The study reveals that most contributions were made by teaching professionals in comparison to working library and information officers. Single-authored contributions dominated (44 per cent) in all periodicals of the Asian region, indicating low amount of teamwork/collaborative contributions to library and information science (LIS) research by the authors of this region. To know the subject distribution of articles, the study was limited to 27 ...