{"id":72,"date":"2014-07-22T15:43:09","date_gmt":"2014-07-22T14:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/?p=72"},"modified":"2014-07-22T15:46:41","modified_gmt":"2014-07-22T14:46:41","slug":"open-access-sector-news-june-july-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/2014\/07\/22\/open-access-sector-news-june-july-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Access Sector News, June-July 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is time for another round-up of news relating to open access and scholarly communication \u2013 here is a summary of interesting things that caught my eye during the past few weeks. I would like to highlight one of the miscellaneous items: analysing its publications, Chalmers University found that the open access articles deposited in the institutional repository have a 22% higher field normalized citation rate than the non-OA articles. So if you would like your citation rates to have a similar increase, why not deposit in Spiral<\/a>, Imperial\u2019s repository?<\/p>\n

Policy<\/h3>\n

David Willetts<\/strong> has been replaced by Greg Clarke as minister for universities and science. Whether this will have an impact on the government\u2019s OA policies remains to be seen, but Willetts has been an active supporter of open access<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Harvard was one of the earliest universities adopting an open access policy<\/a> where academics grant the university a non-exclusive licence to distribute publications \u2013 this allows deposit in the institutional repository regardless of publishers\u2019 OA policies. Other American universities have implemented similar policies – CalTech recently made such an announcement \u2013 and we now also see universities outside of the US following Harvard as KAUST has now adopted a similar OA policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Research Fortnight published a summary of FOI requests on RCUK open access compliance<\/a>. \u201cThe average rate across the 27 universities that responded was 49 per cent, just above RCUK\u2019s target. However, at least 11 universities have not hit the target\u2014and the real number may well be higher, given that 57 universities did not respond.\u201d Regarding publishers actually delivering OA, Research Fortnight conclude that \u201con average, 8 per cent of articles that should have been made open access had not been, and that 12 per cent carried no clear indication of their open-access or publishing-licence status.\u201d As RCUK have now made the details of their review<\/a> public, we are in the process of bringing together the relevant data at Imperial College; a challenge is to identify which of the roughly 10K articles annually published by our academics fall under the RCUK policy, and also the articles where the authors have paid for open access from their own budgets or gone down the green route in an external repository without alerting the College.<\/p>\n

Wiley Exchanges published an interview with Mark Thorley<\/a>, who coordinates OA and RDM for RCUK<\/strong>. He is overall positive about progress and defends gold OA, but he is also concerned about fluctuating embargos and some universities \u201cacting in an \u2018anti-Gold\u2019 OA manner\u201d. He commends UCL on launching a new OA university press. It is interesting to compare his comments with those of the Wellcome Trust\u2019s Robert Kiley who at a recent Jisc-CNI event was very critical of hybrid journals and publishers progress in switching to OA publishing.<\/p>\n

Subscriptions, Gold OA and cost of scholarly publishing<\/h3>\n

A study on Evaluating big deal journal bundles<\/a> finds that journal pricing is not necessarily related to size or research outputs of the subscribing universities. It also concludes that academia is receiving significantly less value from commercial publishers than from non-profits<\/strong>: \u201cAmong the commercial publishers in our study, Elsevier\u2019s prices per citation are nearly 3 times those charged by the nonprofits, whereas Emerald, Sage, and Taylor & Francis have prices per citation that are roughly 10 times those of the nonprofits.\u201d The study has been picked up by media, including the Guardian<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Notes of the RCUK International Meeting on Open Access<\/a> (20th<\/sup> March 2014) have been made public. They contain some interesting information. For example, the Wellcome Trust has imposed sanctions in respect to its OA policy 62 times in the last twelve months (none at Imperial College), and the overall compliance rate is now 66%. Cameron Neylon estimates that gold OA is now 20-25% of the global market. The paper has a useful summary of global OA activities, by country.<\/p>\n

Stuart Lawson suggests<\/a> that the Finch Report may have missed evidence when it estimated the average price of APCs. According to his article, a comprehensive study that had not been acknowledged in the report set the average APC at about 1\/3 of the price eventually published by Finch. As the current APCs from hybrid journals fall into the much higher bracket given by Finch, Lawson speculates that the Finch estimate may have become a \u201cself-fulfilling prophecy\u201d.<\/p>\n

A lecturer in New Zealand has taken inspiration from Tim Gowers<\/a> and has sent FOI requests about subscription payments to NZ universities.<\/p>\n

UC Davis have set out a plan for a Mellon-funded project to investigate the institutional costs of gold open access<\/a>, partnering with North American universities including Harvard. We are doing something similar, but on a smaller scale, as part of the OA project.<\/p>\n

Other open access related news<\/h3>\n

A Swedish study shows<\/a> that OA articles deposited in the repository of the Chalmers University of Technology have a 22% higher field normalized citation<\/strong> rate<\/strong> than the non-OA articles.<\/p>\n

Taylor & Francis apologised<\/a> for interfering with and delaying the publication of an article that criticised the profits of major academic publishers. The apology followed from the editorial board considering resignation<\/a> over what could be perceived as censorship.<\/p>\n

An analysis of data from the Directory of Open Access Journals<\/a> (DOAJ) shows that the US has the highest number of OA journals, followed by Brazil and the UK. The UK is the country with the second highest percentage of OA journals that charge a fee \u2013 about 64%, compared to Germany\u2019s 30% and Egypt\u2019s 87%. Egypt ranking highly is probably due to the OA publisher Hindawi being based in Cairo, whereas the high percentage of OA journals that charge authors a fee in the UK may be due to funders\u2019 focus on paid-for OA.<\/p>\n

The Research Council of Norway<\/a> is making available money to cover 50% of open access publishing costs in a new, five year funding scheme.<\/p>\n

\u201cA Subversive Proposal\u201d, a message sent by Stevan Harnad encouraging academics to make their publications freely available online, has just had its 20th<\/sup> anniversary<\/a>. It is generally seen as one of the founding documents of the OA movement. Being asked what he would change if he were to write it today, Harnad responded: \u201cKnowing now, in 2014, that researchers won\u2019t do it of their own accord, I would have addressed the proposal instead to their institutions and funders.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is time for another round-up of news relating to open access and scholarly communication \u2013 here is a summary of interesting things that caught my eye during the past few weeks. I would like to highlight one of the miscellaneous items: analysing its publications, Chalmers University found that the open access articles deposited in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":711,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20705],"tags":[20707,20716,16945,7401,744],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oa-news","tag-apc","tag-citations","tag-harvard","tag-rcuk","tag-wellcome-trust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/711"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/78"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}