Let's Make Those Book Chapters Open Too!

Seven Years; It's Time for a Change

The Launch of PRS GO

Since our first issue in 1977, with founding editor Michael Harloe, IJURR has been at the forefront of critical urban debates. The year 2015 marks an important moment for the journal since we stand at a crossroads between an increasingly corporate publishing environment, in which many journals are becoming online only, their academic content trapped behind expensive electronic pay walls, and an alternative pathway towards a defence of the modern journal as a printed publication, affordable and accessible to a wide range of readers. Many libraries, for example, especially from the global South, continue to rely on print-only subscriptions. At our most recent editorial board meeting held in Mexico City we had a wide-ranging discussion about the future of academic publishing and reaffirmed our commitment to IJURR as a high-quality academic journal available in both print and online formats. The cornerstone of our defence of IJURR in an increasingly challenging publishing environment is our comprehensive redesign. This has been developed over the last two years in collaboration with the Austrian designer Paulus M. Dreibholz, who has extensive experience with cutting-edge architectural and cultural publications, across a variety of different formats. As part of the IJURR redesign each article will work effectively either as an individual electronic document or as a printed version contained within a specific journal issue. The dual approach extends to precise details of the font, layout and pagination. Given the intense pressures on space we have had to find a solution that does not significantly affect our annual page range for the journal. A key element of the redesign has involved changing the existing typefaces. We have replaced the Times New Roman typeface, which is amongst the least distinctive available, with the clearer and more contemporary Mercury (1997), developed by the New York based typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler. For the headings, captions and block quotes, which had been set in Interstate (used for American road signage), we have switched to Avenir Next (2007), a typeface developed by Adrian Frutiger and Akira Kobayashi, which adds greater versatility between print and digital formats than Frutiger's original Avenir (1988) but retains key elements of geometric sans-serif typefaces such as Erbar (1922) and Futura (1927). With our new look we are aiming to make IJURR more distinctive, more readable, and also more closely engaged with cutting-edge developments in design and publishing, including the necessity to connect with wider audiences such as practitioners and urbanists outside the academy. Our redesign also marks a more serious engagement with the use of visual materials ranging from architectural sketches, film stills and photographs to various explanatory figures and tables. We are not only interested in the quality and legibility of these materials, both for print and online readers, but also their precise role in the context of key urban debates. Additionally, each issue of the journal will feature three images on the cover, connected to the articles, but also providing an opportunity to reflect on broader themes in urban culture. We also intend to use this ‘gallery space' to signal the distinctiveness of key debates or symposia. In parallel with changes to the journal we have also worked with the German web designer Corinna Reetz to revamp our website: gone is the clutter and garish maroon banner. In its place we hope that readers will find the site clearer and more navigable. We will be making greater use of our website in future to enable complementary commentaries and shorter interventions to accompany themes developed within the journal itself but also to allow faster interaction with contemporary debates of potential interest to our readers. As part of our commitment to improving IJURR we have also upgraded the paper quality for the printed journal––contrary to recent publishing trends––to ensure that the journal is attractive, readable, and earns its place on our bookshelves. We are keen that the journal should be available for sale in individual bookshops, alongside other critical journals, and we have negotiated a special single-issue price to facilitate this way of reaching wider readerships. We are also introducing a choice of referencing systems between the Chicago (footnote) and Harvard (in-text citation) models to reflect our commitment towards widening the range of disciplines we wish to feature in these pages: we hope that scholars from anthropology, history, science and technology studies (STS) and other disciplines will consider IJURR as a suitable outlet for innovative work that has hitherto been largely published elsewhere. This flexibility is important because it enables us to handle a wider range of data sources, methodological approaches and styles of writing: we are interested in countering the creeping uniformity of academic scholarship and the tendency towards highly formulaic modes of exposition. Another important area of change in academic publishing that affects IJURR directly is the introduction of ‘open access publishing'. This change is being driven mainly by demands that publications derived from publicly funded research activity should be freely available in digital format. At present, there are two ‘open access' options available: ‘green' and ‘gold'. Under ‘green open access', authors can make the peer-reviewed version of their article (i.e. the accepted version before copy editing and formatting) openly available in institutional and not-for-profit repositories after a set embargo period. Under ‘gold open access', authors who have institutional funds available to pay the so-called ‘Article Publication Charge' can make the published version of their article openly available immediately upon publication. IJURR fully embraces the move to green open access. However, our editorial board has raised significant concerns that the payment of exorbitant fees for gold open access is an integral part of the neoliberal drift in higher education and academic publishing. It is also discriminatory, since it will disproportionately benefit scholars from wealthier institutions in the global North with access to sources of research funding and institutions that can support (and indeed demand) the payment of gold open access fees. Nevertheless, we had to weigh our deep concern about gold open access against the need to find a solution that will not deter publicly funded research from being published in IJURR. Within this complicated publishing terrain we decided to offer green open access to all our authors, and gold open access to those authors who have to comply with gold open access requirements posed by their institutions or research funding bodies. At the same time, we actively explore ways in which gold open access fees can be redistributed to benefit authors from different institutional and geographical settings, in consultation with the charitable wing of our activities, the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies. In recognition that academic publishing, along with its wider institutional and public policy context, is in a state of flux at present we shall regularly review these developments to try and mitigate some of the more iniquitous effects. We are conscious that IJURR is embedded in an asymmetrical environment but do not wish to exacerbate these inequalities further. One additional question linked to the open access debate, is the way in which open access content can be handled in the print version of the journal. As noted earlier, we remain committed to retaining a high quality well-designed print journal, in an era in which commercial and technical advances push for the full ‘digitalization' of academic publications. But what does ‘being open access' mean to subscribers of the print only version of the journal, or to readers who do not have access to digital formats? Although it hinges upon addressing complex legal and institutional issues, we are committed to continue exploring ways for offering equal opportunities for open access to authors and readers alike independently of their geographic location or institutional setting. The significant increase in the quantity of submissions, combined with the increase in quality of papers we receive is a welcome development. Although in 2013 and 2014 we published almost twice our normal content in order to accommodate the increasing number of excellent papers we received, we are now also very close to accepting just 10% of articles submitted. This means we publish only articles that are judged to be truly exceptional in terms of empirical, methodological or conceptual originality and critical insight. What is also important to note, however, is that the journal's high quality is the result of the collective effort and labour put into it not only by authors, editors, and the editorial board and office, but also by our referees, who offer critical comments to improve papers. IJURR is one of the few journals that engage referees at every stage of the reviewing process by communicating all comments and editorial decisions to referees as well as authors. This is made possible thanks to the outstanding support offered by Mel Goodsell and Angela Yeap, under the guidance of Terry McBride, our managing editor. By sharing the anonymized version of the decision letter we send to authors with our international body of referees, we hope to foster the growth of an international community of critical scholars who are sometimes trained in different reviewing traditions. As they can see the comments written by their peers, our reviewers can engage in an international dialogue. Problems of urban and regional development are of growing visibility on a world scale, in rich and poor, socialist and capitalist countries alike. Often … they directly derive from processes which operate on an international level. This journal will compare and contrast such problems as they occur in widely differing situations and social systems. International dialogue has been our mission since the very beginning, a dialogue between scholars from various disciplines and origins, and a dialogue between scholars and activists (and they are oftentimes the same people). In 1998, the editors published a statement reflecting on how IJURR developed with regards to its original objectives. They wrote: ‘Despite the recurrent taste for simple universal models (which can be seen as an indirect form of intellectual domination), we have respected the diversity of urban experience and the usefulness of comparative analysis to enable understanding of the more familiar by contrast to the less familiar'. In 2009, the editors highlighted that international dialogue was more and more reflected in the composition of the editorial board, as well as in the range of articles published in the journal. Moreover, they note that technological changes now allow the journal to be accessible around the world. But, as they note, ‘internationalization is surely above all about acknowledging that theories derived from the experiences of North-West Europe and North America may not be universally applicable, and that those regions may be exceptional from a global perspective. Internationalization is thus a process of reconsidering and challenging theory on a range of levels'. Over the years, the very meaning of IJURR's international mission has changed because the world has profoundly changed. If the language we use to speak of the world has evolved, we remain stuck in dichotomies, despite many calls to break them down. Our efforts in the last decade have been placed on fostering scholarship that attempts to do away with these capitalist/socialist, first world/third world, developed/under-developed, core/periphery, north/south dichotomies in innovative ways. This has meant opening our pages to new epistemological traditions produced outside Europe and North America and in the new transdisciplinary frontiers of social knowledge production. The challenges are great because of language barriers and the continued dominance of English-speaking ways of writing papers and conducting research, which transpires in the reviews we receive. But the journal pursues its work towards internationalization by, for instance, relying on more and more reviewers from outside of Europe and North America. We have recently begun to organize IJURR lectures in other languages than English. The first of such, held in Mexico City in October 2014, will be available online shortly.

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

Societal Impact StatementPrimary occurrence data (‘what, where, when’) enable study of species distribution and diversity, facilitating reactions to societal challenges from food security to climate change mitigation. Scientific names integrate information and are made concrete through reference to a type specimen. Research and conservation planning requires timely open access to this data. Around 2000 vascular plant species are described each year, and many are narrowly endemic and face conservation threats. Twenty‐four percent of those published between 2012 and 2021 is available openly, and only 12% of taxa is represented by digitised type material served from within their native range. We make several recommendations to increase open access to this vital information to support prompt conservation action and future research.Summary We review access to literature and type specimens, key resources for taxonomic research. Takeup of open access (OA) publishing in plant naming is analysed using the International Plant Names Index (IPNI) data (2012–2021), and online availability of specimens analysed using the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Integration of the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) taxonomy and distributional data is used to examine regional variation. We found that 23% of vascular plant names are published OA, and 41% are digitally undiscoverable: contained in bibliographic works without a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) or with an unresolvable DOI. The most common OA publishing model used is ‘gold’. We also found that 30% of taxa are represented by a digitised type specimen mobilised from within the continent of their natural range and only 12% from the (more precise) country. We recommend clear article processing charge (APC) waivers for authors from low and middle income countries to better enable ‘gold’ OA and promotion of deposition repositories to better enable ‘green’ OA. Nomenclators should clearly indicate the OA status of literature and mobilise type citation data as material citations to aggregators like GBIF. Names registration systems should promote the capture of code‐recommended elements such as catalogue numbers for type specimens. Digital mobilisation of specimen metadata and images from collections based in low‐ and middle‐income countries must be accelerated to help increase in country taxonomic capacity to document and conserve plant diversity.

Bridging the Segment-Prosody Divide in Speech Production and Perception

Information for Contributors

The growth of open access (OA) has created a unique opportunity for publishers and institutions to collaborate and deliver real change to the way science is disseminated and built upon. OA allows institutions to share and evaluate the research performed by their researchers as never before. Through OA, research can now reach readers from all walks of life, from all countries of the world. Combined with article-level metrics, authors and institutions are able to see the full reach of their research, beyond the traditional channels of citations and journal impact factors (IFs). However, the drive by policymakers to implement OA presents significant challenges to institutions and publishers. These challenges mean that the future of OA is by no means certain, and it is now up to funders, institutions and authors to work together to ensure the potential of OA is fully realized.

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 ...

OpenAIRE is the European Union initiative for an Open Access Infrastructure for Research in support of open scholarly communication and access to the research output of European funded projects and open access content from a network of institutional and disciplinary repositories. This article outlines the curation activities conducted in the OpenAIRE infrastructure, which employs a multi-level, multi-targeted approach: the publication and implementation of interoperability guidelines to assist in the local data curation processes, the data curation due to the integration of heterogeneous sources supporting different types of data, the inference of links to accomplish the publication research contextualization and data enrichment, and the end-user metadata curation that allows users to edit the attributes and provide links among the entities.

This study analyzes research articles about open access (OA) indexed by the Scopus database, published from 2001 to 2015, in order to: (a) propose a categorization scheme about OA; (b) categorize the scientific production about OA; and (c) identify research trends on OA through disciplines at international level over time. The authors used descriptive statistical methods and deductive content analysis using an unconstrained matrix in 347 selected research articles. The most explored themes were found to be “overview, current state, and growth of OA” counting for 98 articles (28.2%), and “awareness, perceptions, and attitudes toward OA” for 75 articles (21.6%). As a conclusion, this study reveals a continuous and growing research interest by the OA community in studies focused on case studies regarding the development or evolution of OA in relation to certain groups, institutions, regions, periods, and how different actors perceive and address the OA movement.

This chapter presents a new paradigm for sustainable data-driven language learning systems design in higher education that draws on qualitative reflections spanning a decade (2012–2022) with stakeholders from an ongoing global research study with the FLAX (Flexible Language Acquisition) and F-Lingo projects at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand (Fitzgerald (2019) A new paradigm for open data-driven language learning systems design in higher education; König et al. (2022) Smart CALL). Design considerations are presented for remixing domain-specific open access content into Open Educational Resources (OER) for academic English language provision across formal and non-formal higher education contexts. Primary stakeholders in the research collaboration include the following three groups: (1) Knowledge organisations that provide open access to academic content—libraries and archives, including the British Library and the Oxford Text Archive, universities in collaboration with MOOC providers and the CORE (COnnecting REpositories) open access aggregation service at the UK Open University; (2) Researchers who mine and remix academic content into corpora and open data-driven language learning systems—converging from the fields of open education, computer science and applied corpus linguistics; (3) Knowledge users who re-use and remix academic content into OER—English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioners from university language centres. Automated content analysis was carried out on a corpus of interview and focus discussion data with the three stakeholder groups in this research. We discuss themes arising from the research data that reflect the different stakeholders’ experiences of remixing open access research content that has been produced within the academy for re-use as open educational content for teaching and learning features of academic language within open data-driven language learning systems. These open learning systems have been specifically designed to scale with OER expansion and traction in mind for their sustainable uptake both within and beyond the brick and mortar of the traditional university. The new paradigm presented in this chapter challenges, as the OER movement must, established business models and deeply embedded cultural or institutional norms that present obstacles to OER expansion and traction and the sustainability of the movement. One persistent challenge concerns the lack of open education policy across the higher education sector for full open access (for use, modification, adaptation) via Creative Commons licensing to content produced within the academy. Thus, while this research has theoretical and practical implications in applied linguistics, computer science, language teaching and learning and open education, more generally, it also has significant cultural, business model and policy implications for higher education.KeywordsData-driven learningDesign-based researchEnglish for academic purposes (EAP)Higher educationMassive open online courses (MOOCs)Open accessOpen educational practicesOpen educational resources (OER)Systems design

Bibliography: Larrea, Miren: Editorial, IJAR – International Journal of Action Research, Vol. 18, Issue 3-2022, pp. 201-203. https://doi.org/10.3224/ijar.v18i3.01 ----- Open Access License: This contribution is available in Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0 (Attribution 4.0 International) as of January 24, 2023. More information about the license and the terms of use can be found here .

Bibliography: Larrea, Miren: Editorial: Stirring the fire under the ashes of action research, IJAR – International Journal of Action Research, Vol. 19, Issue 2-2023, pp. 105-106. https://doi.org/10.3224/ijar.v19i2.01 ----- Open Access License: This contribution is available in Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0 (Attribution 4.0 International) as of August 14, 2023. More information about the license and the terms of use can be found here .

A Review of: Scott, R. E., Murphy, J. A., Thayer-Styes, C., Buckley, C. E., & 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.