Scholarly Publishing News

The editorial board for the Journal of Library Administration (JLA) has resigned due to the restrictive licensing policy dictated by its publisher, Taylor & Francis.

JLA board member Chris Bourg stated in a blog post:

The best Taylor & Francis could come up with was a less restrictive license that would cost authors nearly $3000 per article. The Board agreed that this alternative was simply not tenable, so we collectively resigned.

Brian Mathews, who was set to guest an issue of JLA, has written a post for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the situation. He quotes from the resignation notice, which highlights the need for potential authors to have more control over their work:

A large and growing number of current and potential authors to JLA have pushed back on the licensing terms included in the Taylor & Francis author agreement. Several authors have refused to publish with the journal under the current licensing terms.

Authors find the author agreement unclear and too restrictive and have repeatedly requested some form of Creative Commons license in its place.

Peter Suber notes that similar mass resignations have often been followed by the creation of an Open Access journal by the board members:

It looks like the editorial board has not yet taken a further step, such as building on its experience and credibility to launch a new, OA or less-restrictive journal to cover the same research niche. I realize that would be a big step. But the board should know that 20 previous boards at other journals resigned en masse to protest restrictive publisher policies, and then took the next step of launching new journals with less restrictive policies. Here’s the inspiring list of those 20 cases from the Open Access Directory.
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Journal_declarations_of_independence

Suber also wrote that this may be the first editorial board to resign “to protest restrictive policies at a hybrid OA journal, as opposed to restrictive policies at a full-TA journal”.

Danny Kingsley, Executive Officer of the Australian Open Access Support Group, has written about the mass resignation, highlighting the power that journal editors hold – and outlining ways that subscription journals can be moved to an OA platform.

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) recently expressed its support for the U.S. President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)’s policy memorandum released on Feb. 22nd to increase public access to research that is funded federally.

None of the AAA’s publications are open access, but this is set to change next year.

Brad Weiss, President, Society for Cultural Anthropology, has posted on the journal Cultural Anthropology’s website:

Starting with the first issue of 2014, CA [Cultural Anthropology] will provide world-wide, instant, free (to the user), and permanent access to all of our content (as well as ten years of our back catalog). [...]

Cultural Anthropology will be the first major, established, high-impact journal in anthropology to offer open access to all of its research, and we hope that our experience with open access will provide the AAA as a whole, as well as other journals in the social and human sciences, valuable guidance as we explore alternative publishing models together.

Since its launch in 2003, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has steadily increased the number of journals and articles that it covers. We’re happy to report that it now includes more than one million articles. Incidentally, the DOAJ has also recently launched on a new platform “with integrated functionality for sharing, exporting and enhanced search/browse functionality.” You can read more about the DOAJ’s added functionality on its homepage.

Since it was introduced in Congress on February 14, there has been a lot of talk about the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) which would make journal articles based on federally-funded U.S. Government agencies which spend at least $100 million a year on extramural research freely available within six months of publication. (Happy Valentine’s Day, indeed!)

Two good resources for getting up-to-speed on this bill are Peter Suber’s Notes on the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act and SPARC’s FAQ for the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR).

SFU Library is pleased to announce that Donald Taylor has agreed to serve as SFU’s first Copyright Officer.

In addition, the Library has launched a Copyright at SFU website that provides providing authoritative and current copyright information for members of the SFU community.

In a policy memo released today, the Obama Administration signaled its commitment to the accessibility of results of  federally funded scientific research.

The Obama Administration is committed to the proposition that citizens deserve easy access to the results of scientific research their tax dollars have paid for. That’s why, in a policy memorandum released today, OSTP Director John Holdren has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research. OSTP has been looking into this issue for some time, soliciting broad public input on multiple occasions and convening an interagency working group to develop a policy. The final policy reflects substantial inputs from scientists and scientific organizations, publishers, members of Congress, and other members of the public—over 65 thousand of whom recently signed a We the People petition asking for expanded public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research.

Focused on the biological, medical, and health sciences, PeerJ is a new Open Access peer reviewed scholarly journal.  The funding model used by PeerJ is unique, requiring authors pay a one time fee for publishing articles:  $99 for 1 publication/yr, $199 for 2 publications/yr, and $299 for unlimited publications/yr.  All articles published in PeerJ are peer-reviewed using an open peer-review process.

PeerJ is a formally peer-reviewed journal. All publications in the journal undergo a single-blind peer review process where reviewers know the identity of the authors but authors do not, by default, know the identity of the reviewers.

However, PeerJ encourages full transparency in the peer review process via a process sometimes known as ‘open peer review’. This takes two forms:

1  Peer reviewers are encouraged (but not required) to provide their names to the authors when submitting their peer review. If they agree to provide their name, then their personal profile page will reflect a public acknowledgement that they performed a review (even if the article is rejected). If the article is accepted, then reviewers who provided their name will be associated with the article itself.

2  Authors are given the option to reproduce the complete peer review history of their article alongside the final publication of the article. If they choose this option then all submitted manuscript files, peer review comments, author rebuttals and revised materials are provided as a downloadable package. This is an all-or-nothing option; no text is edited or removed. Therefore, if the reviewers agreed to provide their name to the authors then their name will become part of this published record as well.

Mark McCabe (University of Michigan), Christopher Snyder (Dartmouth College) and Anna Fagin (Dartmouth College) have authored a new paper, using a simple “platform market” model to try to determine under which conditions a publisher might prefer article processing fee open access instead of a regular subscription model. The paper makes some assumptions, as Heather Morrison points out in her analysis of the article – “This paper repeats the error of equating open access with open access publishing, equates open access publishing with the article processing fee model, and equates that the article processing fee is an “author-pays model”". Over all though, the article is very informative and provides a helpful model for understanding the economics of scholarly journal publishing and the economics of open access publishing in particular.

Read the full article  Open Access Versus Traditional Journal Pricing: Using a Simple ‘Platform Market’ Model to Understand Which Will Win (and Which Should)

The good folks at Eigen Factor and journalprices.com have created a graph that plots the “prestige” of a journal (it’s “article influence / impact” score based on citations to its articles) versus the article processing fee (publication fee) of the journal. The highest impact journals with the lowest article processing fees are in the upper left hand corner of the graph. Living Reviews in Relativity, published by the Max Planck Society, has the highest score, as it has the highest article influence and an article processing fee of $0.

See the whole chart at the Eigen Factor website

A joint statement by the editors of 21 UK History journals shows the concerns of publishers regarding the bold Finch Report.  The statement reads: “‘We fully support initiatives to make scholarship as widely and freely available as possible, above all online. However, we have serious concerns about several aspects of the proposed implementation of the policy, which we believe will have a serious effect on the reputation of UK scholarship internationally, on peer review, and on the rights of authors.”

The journals will still allow both gold and green OA.  However, the embargo period will be 36 months and the journals will use the CCBY NC ND (creative commons non-commercial non-derivative) license only, instead of the more permissive license and shorter embargo recommended in Finch.

For a full list of the titles affected and for more information, check out Researchinformation.com and the Institute of Historical Research.