Open access for all

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

Offline: Scientific publishing—trust and tribulations

FTC Sues OMICS: Claims Open Access Academic Publisher Scams Academics

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

Open access, or no fee access, to journal articles has been gaining wider adoption in the scientific and scholarly communities. The medical physics community is no exception, with many of the journals dedicated to medical physics topics now having specific policies enabling open access. The advantages of open access to scholars, researchers, and other “users” of articles are many, but the topic is not without controversy or complexity.As open access becomes more prevalent, it is important for our community to understand the concepts of open access and the context in which it has come about. Changing regulations by funding agencies, shifts in the attitudes of authors, budgetary considerations, and the interests of journals and societies all play important roles.The speakers in this session will provide background information on open access as well their perspectives on how open access fits into the medical physics landscape and the larger world of scholarly publishing.Learning Objectives:1. Understand the basic concepts and definitions in open access publishing.2. Understand the current state of open access in medical physics.3. Understand the perspective of different stakeholders in open access publishing.

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.

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.

The article focuses on maintaining the relevance of science librarians with new developments such as new communication initiatives and Open Access publishing. Current issues demonstrating the impact of such initiatives include the digital divide existing between the public and the research community, transformation of the physical space in the library and increasing reliance on electronic journals. Standards on interoperability in sharing library data and collections include the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and the Dublin Core (DC).

Reviewed by: The Future of Scholarly Communication, edited by Deborah Shorley and Michael Jubb Jeffrey Beall The Future of Scholarly Communication, ed. Deborah Shorley and Michael Jubb. London: Facet Publishing, 2013. 188 pages. $80.00 (ISBN 978-1-85604-817-0) The thirteen essays in The Future of Scholarly Communication are divided into two parts called Changing Researcher Behavior and Other Players: Roles and Responsibilities. They cover most of the hot topics in scholarly communication, including open access, institutional repositories, data mining, and the future roles of libraries in the scholarly communication ecosystem. A better title might have been The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Scholarly Communication, as few of the authors really make any definite predictions; they seem to have the same uncertainty that most of us share regarding scholarly communication’s future and instead primarily identify and describe past and present trends. While the work purports to be about the future, many of the authors spend a large number of words expressing their disdain with the present. An example is David C. Prosser’s chapter titled “Researchers and Scholarly Communications: An Evolving Interdependency.” Much of this chapter actually focuses on the past, and the author bemoans the fact that the Internet has had little impact on the essentials of journal publishing. He seems more interested in forcing change than in analyzing it or letting it occur organically. Similarly, Mark L. Brown’s chapter, “The Role of the Research Library,” is probably the most relevant one for the readers of this journal, but the chapter again focuses disproportionately on the past and present instead of the future. Brown concludes that research libraries are leaders of innovation in scholarly communication, that they serve as centers of experimentation and advocacy, that they work to provide access to all the different types of scholarly communication, and that they generally work in collaboration and as consortia to achieve economies of scale. On the other hand, the book’s final chapter, “The Library User’s View,” presents a perspective that essentially devalues libraries as simple acquisitions departments. Author Roger Schonfeld describes how he believes science faculty experience the library: “The scientist, for whom the experience is indeed frequently seamless, has little recognition that he is using the campus library, other than in its role as a purchasing agent.” (p. 172) Fortunately, the book’s other authors do not share Schonfeld’s [End Page 121] cynical view of academic libraries, instead affirming research libraries’ role as centers of innovation in science communication. Of course, this work’s elephant in the room is the fact that it purports to describe the future of scholarly communication using a technology developed in the fifteenth century—the printed book. Is the future not yet here? Some of the contributors are advocates of open access, yet they allowed their work to be published as a hardcopy monograph. Moreover, most of the discussion revolves around the scholarly article; monographs are largely ignored, so it is ironic that the authors choose to disseminate their work not only in an old technology but also in a form they neglect to even describe as being a part of scholarly communication’s future. Finally, the book is excessively centered on the United Kingdom and insufficiently treats how research libraries are organized and how research is funded in North America. Published in April 2013, this work is already becoming dated. Much of it deals with scholarly open-access publishing, a topic best covered in open-access works themselves—works published in the many new and open scholarly communication venues the book itself describes. Jeffrey Beall University of Colorado Denver jeffrey.beall@ucdenver.edu Copyright © 2013 Johns Hopkins University Press

Some Research Wants to Be Free, Some Follows the Money: Bogus Journals Complicate the Open Access Movement

Purpose – The study seeks to investigate factors that affect the adoption and use of open access in Tanzanian health sciences universities. Design/methodology/approach – Based on a cross-sectional questionnaire survey, 415 faculty members were selected through a stratified random sampling from a population of 679 in all eight health sciences universities in Tanzania. The response rate was 71.1 per cent. Findings – Based on the social exchange theory (SET), and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), the study developed a model suitable for assessing open access adoption and usage in academic institutions. The study found that facilitating conditions, extrinsic benefits (professional recognition), behavioural intention and individual characteristics (professional rank, technical skills and number of publications) predicted actual usage of open access. Other factors related to contextual factors (attitude, and open access culture), and extrinsic benefits (academic reward, accessibility and preservation) determined behavioural intention to use open access. Fear to violate publisher's copyright policies and effort expectancy however de-motivated faculty to adopt open access, while copyright concerns inhibited faculty's actual usage of open access. Originality/value – This is the first comprehensive study focusing on the health sciences faculty's open access adoption and usage behaviour in Africa, and Tanzania in particular, and reveals findings that are useful for planning and implementing open access initiatives in other institutions with similar conditions.

It is my pleasure to introduce the inaugural issue of the first peer-reviewed, fully open access journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The scientific community has been abuzz with enthusiasm about open access, but with some legitimate concerns about the credibility of some of those journals from less reputable publishers and the level of peer review—or lack thereof—for open access articles. We are taking a unique approach with BioResearch Open Access to address these concerns and guarantee expert review. The strength of our editorial team lies in the unique input from our highly experienced Section Editors, each of whom is the Editor of a leading journal in his or her own field and who recommend articles for publication. The Journal also welcomes unsolicited articles. BioResearch Open Access is a fully peer-reviewed journal, ensuring that the quality and integrity of articles is maintained. I am delighted to acknowledge the support and participation from the following Section Editors: Stephen C. Ekker, PhD Mayo Addiction Research Center, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota Domenico Grasso, PhD, PE, DEE The University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey, PhD SENS Foundation, Cambridge, United Kingdom Stephen Higgs, PhD, FRES Biosecurity Research Institute, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas Thomas Hope, PhD Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois Peter C. Johnson, MD Scintellix, LLC, Raleigh, North Carolina Eugene Kolker, PhD Chief Data Officer, Seattle Children's Hospital, Seattle, Washington Antonios G. Mikos, PhD Rice University, Houston, Texas Graham C. Parker, PhD Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, Michigan Carol Shoshkes Reiss, PhD New York University, New York, New York Alan J. Russell, PhD Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Ganes C. Sen, PhD Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cleveland, Ohio Bruce A. Sullenger, PhD Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina John B. West, MD, PhD University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California David L. Woodland, PhD Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology, Silverthorne, Colorado Professor Sir Ian Wilmut, OBE, FRS, FRSE MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine, Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom James M. Wilson, MD, PhD University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania The Journal provides a new rapid-publication forum for a broad range of scientific topics, including, but not limited to, molecular and cellular biology, tissue engineering and biomaterials, regenerative medicine, bioengineering, stem cells, gene therapy, systems biology, genetics, biochemistry, virology, microbiology, and neuroscience. The purpose of this publication is to create a forum to bring together research from all aspects of biomedical research through open access. This first issue (Volume 1, Issue 1) has accomplished this goal by providing six research articles from internationally acclaimed research groups: Reovirus-Mediated Cytotoxicity and Enhancement of Innate Immune Responses Against Acute Myeloid Leukemia (University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom) Differentiation of Human Neural Progenitor Cells in Functionalized Hydrogel Matrices (University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany) Permeability of 3D Fibrin Constructs Corresponds to Fibrinogen and Thrombin Concentrations (University of California, Los Angeles, California) Human Skin Cells That Express Stage-Specific Embryonic Antigen 3 Associate with Dermal Tissue Regeneration (University of California, Los Angeles, California) Phylogenetic Analysis of the Earliest nef Gene from Hemophiliacs and Local Controls in Korea (University of Ulsan, Ulsan, Korea) The Effect of Biological and Synthetic Matrices on Hepatic Stem Cell Gene Expression (University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom) We would like to thank the authors who submitted their work to this new journal and hope that this collection of articles makes them pleased to be a part of the first issue. BioResearch Open Access welcomes basic science and translational research in the form of original research articles, comprehensive review articles, minireviews, rapid communications, brief reports, technology reports, hypothesis articles, perspectives, and letters to the editor. All research articles in BioResearch Open Access will be published online within 4 weeks of acceptance. Articles will be fully open access and posted on PubMedCentral, and the Journal is fully NIH-, HHMI-, and Wellcome Trust–compliant. Instructions for Authors and further information are available at www.liebertpub.com/biores We hope that this new venture will provide a stimulating forum for biomedical research and discussion, and we welcome your active participation and article submissions.

Another year of Developments.

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.

A Review of:
 Dawson, D. (2018). Effective practices and strategies for open access outreach: A qualitative study. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 6(1), eP2216. https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2216
 Abstract
 Objective – To discover effective outreach methods used by academic libraries to promote open access (OA) publishing to researchers.
 Design – Semi-structured interviews
 Setting – 7 large research universities in the United Kingdom (UK)
 Subjects – 14 individuals responsible for OA outreach at their institution, including librarians and other OA practitioners
 Methods – Purposive sampling was used to select universities based on their membership in the UK’s Russell Group, designation in the top 20 of the Research Council UK’s OA grant-size ranking, and suggestions from other professionals. The author contacted individuals responsible for OA at these institutions by email to inform them of the study and solicit their participation. The subsequent semi-structured interviews occurred in person. Areas of focus in the interview included: job responsibilities and overview of offered scholarly communications services; sources of OA services at the institution; evolution and effectiveness of OA outreach activities; support and scholarly communication knowledge needed by researchers; and advice for fellow practitioners conducting OA outreach. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded using the qualitative software NVivo. Inductive analysis was conducted to identify key themes.
 Main Results – The author identifies four primary themes in the coded interviews: “The Message”; “Key Contacts and Relationships”; “Qualities of the OA Practitioner”; and “Advocacy versus Compliance” (p. 1). Participants advocated for straightforward, frequent messaging tailored to the audience. The author identifies relationships as important to outreach – especially support from influential administrators and buy-in from key researchers – highlighting that face-to-face interaction is helpful when cultivating these types of relationships. Participants emphasized important qualities for OA practitioners to possess, including expertise, diplomacy, and perseverance. Establishing credibility as an expert was identified as important to generating buy-in from researchers. Finally, the author discusses the library’s role in OA advocacy vs. compliance. Some participants suggested an overemphasis on compliance to meet funder requirements may overshadow promotion of the inherent value of OA in academic publishing.
 Conclusions – The author suggests that because UK open access efforts are robust and have been in progress for many years, OA practitioners from the UK may possess useful insights for North American librarians with growing initiatives. The study highlights implications for practice including the identification of effective outreach strategies, evidence of the need for balanced messaging, and observations on why faculty may be resistant to outreach from librarians. The author recommends further research to determine what type of messaging is most valuable and when, suggesting less complex policies in North America may allow for more focus on the public good of OA. Successful outreach is predicated upon having enough time to gain the necessary depth of knowledge, and the study acknowledges that librarians with diverse job responsibilities may have less time to invest in this way. The author also suggests more research is needed to evaluate the impact of the dynamics between librarians and classroom faculty. The article posits that librarians who participate in research and tenure processes may find communication easier and have opportunities to promote OA through participation in university governance. Finally, the author observes that librarians are poised to have a positive impact on the scholarly publishing system through outreach to researchers who can drive systemic change.