scholarly journals Motivational Factors in Open Access Publishing. Developing a Methodology for Evaluating Users’ Perspective of the OA Journal JeDEM

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noella Edelmann ◽  
Judith Schoßböck

Watch the VIDEO of the presentation.JeDEM, the Journal of E-democracy and Open Government (jedem.org), was first published in 2009 as an initiative of the Centre for E-Governance. It is an open access e-journal (that follows the green open access road) with a focus on topics such as e-democracy, e-participation, open government and open access. The journal follows the green open access road, and it is indexed with EBSCO[1], DOAJ[2], Google Scholar and the Public Knowledge Project metadata harvester[3]. With a wide range of subjects and research fields, articles cover diverse topics so publishing in JeDEM attracts a wide range of authors and readers from different disciplines.While the effects and impact of open access publishing have been studied, there is less research on the motivational factors of publishing in open access e-journals (such as JeDEM) that focus on a user perspective (see e.g. Nicholas et al 2015; Jamali, Nicholas, and Herman 2016). A review of JeDEM by Quality Open Access Market (QOAM)[4] in 2016 provides an external evaluation of JeDEM, but in this contribution, we wish to present and to discuss a research design to assess the users’ perspectives and motivational factors for publishing open access whilst also considering different user types and disciplines. A workshop held at CEDEM16 (Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government 2016[5], see Lampoltshammer, Edelmann, und Schossboeck, 2016)), shed some light on the most important topics for researchers in open access publishing. The results of this workshop revealed some motivations for publishing open access. Another workshop will be held at CeDEM Asia 2016 (Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government Asia 2016)[6], with the aim of uncovering further motivational factors and understanding them from a comparative perspective. Comparing the results of both workshops and a literature review regarding motivational factors for open access publishing will form the basis for developing and choosing the questions for a quantitative study (online survey) to be sent out to all users of JeDEM by summer 2017. Conferences in the area of open access will be used to discuss the methodology and set-up of this questionnaire. Registered and potential users will be encouraged to answer the survey, also to find out about their use of the features of the journal (e.g. commenting articles) and how such features contribute to the concept of open science and scholarly communication.By assessing the user perspective of our open access journal, we seek to answer questions such as:Can we distinguish differences in motivation for publishing in open access across user types and disciplines? What differences can be determined?How can users be classified according to their motivations and does it make sense to consider user types and motivations for management activities of an open access journal? What type of users are JeDEM users?What are users’ opinion on different aspects of open access publishing and its further development, e.g. open peer review etc. and how do user opinions differ across the disciplines or countries?How can results help other e-publishers or editors in the area of open access and contribute to the field of scholarly communication?As an ongoing research project, we will be looking forward for feedback and recommendations about how to develop the user survey and our activities for the journal.[1] EBSCO Information Services www.ebsco.com[2] DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals https://doaj.org/[3] https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/[4] https://www.qoam.eu/[5] www.donau-uni.ac.at/cedem16[6] www.donau-uni.ac.at/cedemasia2016

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Friedman

>> See video of presentation (25 min.)BioMed Central is the open access publisher who pioneered this publishing model and has been part of Springer since 2008. We launched our first journal in the year 2000, and have since seen several positive global developments which have helped establish open access as an important trend in the evolvement of scholarly communication.  We have consequently observed a steady increase in awareness of open access and specifically, of our wide range of specialist as well as broad interest titles which is reflected in our growing submission numbers.BioMed Central as one of the main open access publishers has helped to establish open access as a new way of making academic research available to researchers and the public, and to introduce a change of the subscription business model in academic publishing and libraries. While BioMed Central also offers a solution for the Green Route of open access (“Open Repository”) the main part of our publishing activity is centred around our fully or “gold” open access journals. BioMed Central and SpringerOpen practise the “author pays” model, whereby the author is asked to pay a fee to cover the publisher’s cost of publishing and distributing the article. While the awareness of open access is growing among the academics, there is still uncertainty among many of how open access works and why they are asked to pay a fee. To cover that fee can still be a major obstacle for a researcher attempting to publish an article in an open access journal, as the SOAP report stated in 2011.I will present an analysis of the most recent open access developments and studies globally; as well as the effect that this has had on a number of factors that play a role in scholarly publishing, such as Impact Factors, citations and awareness of open access among academics. I will give an update on BioMed Central and Springer’s own development in the arena of open access and visibility of research, including  experimenting with alternative methods of evaluating research such as Altmetric and the SCImago Journal & Country Rank.  I will conclude with an overview of how we are working with research organisations and universities to offer financial support to their researchers in order to cover the fee for publishing in BioMed Central and SpringerOpen journals in the context of our institutional membership program.


2019 ◽  
pp. 016555151986548
Author(s):  
Wilhelm Peekhaus

This article presents results from a survey of faculty in North American Library and Information Studies (LIS) schools about their attitudes towards and experience with open-access publishing. As a follow-up to a similar survey conducted in 2013, the article also outlines the differences in beliefs about and engagement with open access that have occurred between 2013 and 2018. Although faculty in LIS schools are proponents of free access to research, journal publication choices remain informed by traditional considerations such as prestige and impact factor. Engagement with open access has increased significantly, while perceptions of open access have remained relatively stable between 2013 and 2018. Nonetheless, those faculty who have published in an open-access journal or are more knowledgeable about open access tend to be more convinced about the quality of open-access publications and less apprehensive about open-access publishing than those who have no publishing experience with open-access journals or who are less knowledgeable about various open-access modalities. Willingness to comply with gold open-access mandates has increased significantly since 2013.


PeerJ ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. e2323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Najko Jahn ◽  
Marco Tullney

Publication fees as a revenue source for open access publishing hold a prominent place on the agendas of researchers, policy makers, and academic publishers. This study contributes to the evolving empirical basis for funding these charges and examines how much German universities and research organisations spent on open access publication fees. Using self-reported cost data from the Open APC initiative, the analysis focused on the amount that was being spent on publication fees, and compared these expenditure with data from related Austrian (FWF) and UK (Wellcome Trust, Jisc) initiatives, in terms of both size and the proportion of articles being published in fully and hybrid open access journals. We also investigated how thoroughly self-reported articles were indexed in Crossref, a DOI minting agency for scholarly literature, and analysed how the institutional spending was distributed across publishers and journal titles. According to self-reported data from 30 German universities and research organisations between 2005 and 2015, expenditures on open access publication fees increased over the years in Germany and amounted to € 9,627,537 for 7,417 open access journal articles. The average payment was € 1,298, and the median was € 1,231. A total of 94% of the total article volume included in the study was supported in accordance with the price cap of € 2,000, a limit imposed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of its funding activities for open access funding at German universities. Expenditures varied considerably at the institutional level. There were also differences in how much the institutions spent per journal and publisher. These differences reflect, at least in part, the varying pricing schemes in place including discounted publication fees. With an indexing coverage of 99%, Crossref thoroughly indexed the open access journals articles included in the study. A comparison with the related openly available cost data from Austria and the UK revealed that German universities and research organisations primarily funded articles in fully open access journals. By contrast, articles in hybrid journal accounted for the largest share of spending according to the Austrian and UK data. Fees paid for hybrid journals were on average more expensive than those paid for fully open access journals.


2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Pimm

SummaryRadical changes are taking place in scientific publishing, driven by mandates from major research funders both in the UK and elsewhere. The publishing landscape is changing, and open access is increasingly being seen as a viable alternative to subscription-based business models. Although many issues are yet unresolved, even the large commercial publishers are developing stables of open access journals. To reach a wider audience, and to increase appeal to potential contributors deciding where to publish, the Bulletin has now become an open access journal with effect from this issue.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Proudman

The open access publishing offering has grown significantly over the last two decades with DOAJ alone currently indexing over 15,000 open access journals. Apart from APC-based OA, a fertile and diverse landscape of open access journals and platforms exists in the form of Diamond OA. Diamond OA is the publishing model where research is both free for authors to publish and free for readers to access. This presentation will describe the results of an ongoing research study: The Diamond Open Access Study commissioned by cOAlition S. This research study aims to acquire a deeper understanding of the landscape of OA Diamond journals and platforms. Its goal is also to gain insights that will help cOAlition S and other stakeholders develop effective policies and funding mechanisms that more strategically support Diamond Open Access. For the Munin Conference, we aim to present the preliminary results of the survey part of the study. As at end August, more than 1,700 Diamond OA journals have responded to the survey which was launched in early July 2020. The survey focuses on journals in DOAJ and on those not yet included. The session will address the following: What are the motivations for OA Diamond? How mature are OA Diamond journals, where are they based, what languages and what disciplines do they serve? What journal services are provided? How do journals manage copyright and licensing? What editorial quality assurance practices exist? And how do these characteristics differ between journals from different regions, languages and disciplines?Who owns them? How are they funded by whom and using which type of mechanism? What revenue streams exist? How might funders support the financial sustainability of the journal or platform?


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Гульдар Фанисовна Ибрагимова ◽  
Ольга Алексеевна Ковалевич ◽  
Раиса Николаевна Афонина ◽  
Елена Алексеевна Лесных ◽  
Яна Игоревна Ряполова ◽  
...  

Conference paper Covered by Leading Indexing DatabasesOpen European Academy of Public Sciences aims to have all of its journals covered by the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Scopus and Web of Science indexing systems. Several journals have already been covered by SCIE for several years and have received official Impact Factors. Some life sciencerelated journals are also covered by PubMed/MEDLINE and archived through PubMed Central (PMC). All of our journals are archived with the Spanish and Germany National Library.All Content is Open Access and Free for Readers Journals published by Open European Academy of Public Sciences are fully open access: research articles, reviews or any other content on this platform is available to everyone free of charge. To be able to provide open access journals, we finance publication through article processing charges (APC); these are usually covered by the authors’ institutes or research funding bodies. We offer access to science and the latest research to readers for free. All of our content is published in open access and distributed under a Creative Commons License, which means published articles can be freely shared and the content reused, upon proper attribution.Open European Academy of Public Sciences Publication Ethics StatementOpen European Academy of Public Sciences is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Open European Academy of Public Sciences takes the responsibility to enforce a rigorous peerreview together with strict ethical policies and standards to ensure to add high quality scientific works to the field of scholarly publication. Unfortunately, cases of plagiarism, data falsification, inappropriate authorship credit, and the like, do arise. Open European Academy of Public Sciences takes such publishing ethics issues very seriously and our editors are trained to proceed in such cases with a zero tolerance policy. To verify the originality of content submitted to our journals, we use iThenticate to check submissions against previous publications.Mission and ValuesAs a pioneer of academic open access publishing, we serve the scientific community since 2009. Our aim is to foster scientific exchange in all forms, across all disciplines. In addition to being at the root of Open European Academy of Public Sciences and a key theme in our journals, we support sustainability by ensuring the longterm preservation of published papers, and the future of science through partnerships, sponsorships and awards.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elke Maurer ◽  
Nike Walter ◽  
Tina Histing ◽  
Lydia Anastasopoulou ◽  
Thaqif El Khassawna ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Along with emerging open access journals (OAJ) predatory journals increasingly appear. As they harm accurate and good scientific research, we aimed to examine the awareness of predatory journals and open access publishing among orthopaedic and trauma surgeons. Methods In an online survey between August and December 2019 the knowledge on predatory journals and OAJ was tested with a hyperlink made available to the participants via the German Society for Orthopaedics and Trauma Surgery (DGOU) email distributor. Results Three hundred fifty orthopaedic and trauma surgeons participated, of which 291 complete responses (231 males (79.4%), 54 females (18.6%) and 5 N/A (2.0%)) were obtained. 39.9% were aware of predatory journals. However, 21.0% knew about the “Directory of Open Access Journals” (DOAJ) as a register for non-predatory open access journals. The level of profession (e.g. clinic director, consultant) (p = 0.018) influenced the awareness of predatory journals. Interestingly, participants aware of predatory journals had more often been listed as corresponding authors (p < 0.001) and were well published as first or last author (p < 0.001). Awareness of OAJ was masked when journal selection options did not to provide any information on the editorial board, the peer review process or the publication costs. Conclusion The impending hazard of predatory journals is unknown to many orthopaedic and trauma surgeons. Early stage clinical researchers must be trained to differentiate between predatory and scientifically accurate journals.


BMJ Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. e047107
Author(s):  
Mallory K. Ellingson ◽  
Xiaoting Shi ◽  
Joshua J. Skydel ◽  
Kate Nyhan ◽  
Richard Lehman ◽  
...  

ObjectiveTo estimate the financial costs paid by individual medical researchers from meeting the article processing charges (APCs) levied by open access journals in 2019.DesignCross-sectional analysis.Data sourcesScopus was used to generate two random samples of researchers, the first with a senior author article indexed in the ‘Medicine’ subject area (general researchers) and the second with an article published in the ten highest-impact factor general clinical medicine journals (high-impact researchers) in 2019. For each researcher, Scopus was used to identify all first and senior author original research or review articles published in 2019. Data were obtained from Scopus, institutional profiles, Journal Citation Reports, publisher databases, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and individual journal websites.Main outcome measuresMedian APCs paid by general and high-impact researchers for all first and senior author research and review articles published in 2019.ResultsThere were 241 general and 246 high-impact researchers identified as eligible for our study. In 2019, the general and high-impact researchers published a total of 914 (median 2, IQR 1–5) and 1471 (4, 2–8) first or senior author research or review articles, respectively. 42% (384/914) of the articles from the general researchers and 29% (428/1471) of the articles from the high-impact medical researchers were published in fully open access journals. The median total APCs paid by general researchers in 2019 was US$191 (US$0–US$2500) and the median total paid by high-impact researchers was US$2900 (US$0–US$5465); the maximum paid by a single researcher in total APCs was US$30115 and US$34676, respectively.ConclusionsMedical researchers in 2019 were found to have paid between US$0 and US$34676 in total APCs. As journals with APCs become more common, it is important to continue to evaluate the potential cost to researchers, especially on individuals who may not have the funding or institutional resources to cover these costs.


Publications ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Carmen López-Vergara ◽  
Pilar Flores Asenjo ◽  
Alfonso Rosa-García

Technological development has transformed academic publication over the past two decades and new publication models, especially Open Access, have captured an important part of the publishing market, traditionally dominated by the Subscription publication model. Although Health Sciences have been one of the leading fields promoting Open Access, the perspectives of Health Science researchers on the benefits and possibilities of Open Access remain an open question. The present study sought to unveil the perspective of researchers on scientific publication decisions, in terms of the Subscription and Open Access publication model, Gold Road. With this aim, we surveyed Spanish researchers in Health Sciences. Our findings show that the value of publishing in Open Access journals increases as the experience of the researcher increases and the less she/he values the impact factor. Moreover, visibility and dissemination of the results are the main determinants of publication when choosing an Open Access journal as the first option. According to the response of the researchers, the reduction of fees and the increase in financing are important economic incentive measures to promote the Open Access publication model. It is widely accepted that the volume of Open Access publications will increase in the future.


2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (06) ◽  
pp. 481-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Kuballa ◽  
Mareike Schulze ◽  
Claudia Böhm ◽  
Olaf Gefeller ◽  
Jan Haaf ◽  
...  

SummaryBackground: Based on today‘s information and communication technologies the open access paradigm has become an important approach for adequately communicating new scientific knowledge.Objectives: Summarizing the present situa -tion for journal transformation. Presenting criteria for adequate transformation as well as a specific approach for it. Describing our exemplary implementation of such a journal transformation.Methods: Studying the respective literature as well as discussing this topic in various discussion groups and meetings (primarily of editors and publishers, but also of authors and readers), with long term experience as editors and /or publishers of scientific publications as prerequisite.Results: There is a clear will, particularly of political and funding organizations, towards open access publishing. In spite of this, there is still a large amount of scientific knowl edge, being communicated through subscription-based journals. For successfully transforming such journals into open access, sixteen criteria for a goal-oriented, stepwise, sustainable, and fair transformation are suggested. The Tandem Model as transformation approach is introduced. Our exemplary implementation is done in the Trans-O-MIM project. It is exploring strategies, models and evaluation metrics for journal transforma tion. As instance the journal Methods of Information in Medicine will apply the Tandem Model from 2017 onwards.Conclusions: Within Trans-O-MIM we will reach at least nine of the sixteen criteria for adequate transformation. It was positive to implement Trans-O-MIM as international research project. After first steps for transforming Methods have successfully been made, challenges will remain, among others, in identifying appropriate incentives for open access publishing in order to support its transformation.


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