Research and Scholarly Communications - Blog

The theme of Open Access week this year is “Community over commercialization”.  

Across the next seven days, the Research and Scholarly Communications Team in the University Library Services will share with you some initiatives that aim to transform scholarly publishing and move away from the for-profit publishing that has largely dominated academic publishing.

Theme 7. Open Access and research assessment

The move toward Open Access of scholarly communications is clearly driven by funders mandates and research assessments practices. Since the 2012 Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), there has been a recognition that research assessments need to be reformed to provide a true assessment of what makes good research. The aim of these reforms is to recognise the varied research outputs that emerge from research and eschew the use problematic metrics (such as Journal Impact factor) used as proxy for measuring quality.

 In the context of the UK, the first decisions of the forthcoming REF 2028 insists on the importance of developing a positive research culture. In particular, there is a stated aim to reconsider what should be recognised and rewarded as part of the research assessment and to consider how research culture is supported. In many ways, opening access to research is an important element of creating a positive research culture at institutional, national and international level. Sharing research results as openly as possible is one of the building blocks to move away from the competitive culture instilled by the use of questionable metrics to assess research. It creates an environment in which sharing is important and recognised as more valuable than restricting access.  

It is also important to note that DORA, of which the University of Sunderland is a signatory, recognises the need to assess research on its own merits, not based on where it is published. This can hopefully enable researchers to be more confident to choose reputable Open Access venues to publish over the traditional, locked behind paywall, high impact factor journal that might not contribute to creating a positive research culture.

The theme of Open Access week this year is “Community over commercialization”.  

Across the next seven days, the Research and Scholarly Communications Team in the University Library Services will share with you some initiatives that aim to transform scholarly publishing and move away from the for-profit publishing that has largely dominated academic publishing.

Theme 6. Library-led open access publishing

Moving toward Open Access is an opportunity to experiment and create new publishing models. Libraries, who are a key player in the ecosystem of scholarly publications, have experimented with changing their role from access provider to publishers. These initiatives align with the ideal of sharing knowledge and enabling societal impact of research over the for-profit model that dominates traditional publishing.  The example of the Scottish University Press is a case in point. The Scottish University Press aims to enable researchers to make their work freely available to a wide audience. The press was set up through the collaboration of 18 academic libraries with an ambition to establish a fully open access, non-profit press. One of the drivers was the publication of the new UKRI open access policy requiring monographs to be OA from 2024. However, it was also driven by the desire to explore cost-effective solutions for Open Access. The press was set up using a subscription model. All 18 participating libraries pay an annual fee to pay for the cost of running the press. In addition, authors, or their institutions are charged a fee per book for production cost. However, the press and its participating libraries recognise the challenges this can create for authors and has aimed to make its cost transparent and as low as possible. They highlight the challenge for libraries with limited budgets to keep paying for traditional subscription costs while exploring new avenues to develop the Open Access landscape. In view of this challenge, they are exploring new funding models. This initiative demonstrates the appetite to support new initiatives and models for the publications of research from academic libraries.   https://www.sup.ac.uk/news/sup-collective-funding

Theme Five: Octopus, a new way to circulate your research ideas and results, claim precedence and accelerate research.   

The theme of Open Access week this year is “Community over commercialization”.  

Across the next seven days, the Research and Scholarly Communications Team in the University Library Services will share with you some initiatives that aim to transform scholarly publishing and move away from the for-profit publishing that has largely dominated academic publishing. 

Octopus is a platform, funded by UKRI, where researchers can publish primary research – things like hypotheses, full data, analyses, code, and reviews.    

Octopus has been created to address many of the challenges faced by the research community.  For instance: barriers to sharing research; incentivizing all research outputs, not just journal articles; addressing biases, whether they’re to do with the prioritizing of ‘positive’ findings, institutional bias, or those faced by non-English speakers; and improving the global research community by facilitating a more collaborative research culture.  

Octopus aims to remove what they call the ‘hierarchical problems’ and ‘human gatekeepers’ that can inhibit new researchers and instead advocate for a more sustainable peer review system where authors are incentivised to publish fewer but better publications, and where reviewers are credited and rewarded for performing this important task. 

A really positive aspect of this platform is how it aims to address the current research culture where individuals are often competitive rather than collaborative.  By allowing researchers to publish their work at early stages, the emphasis shifts from ‘proving a hypothesis’ to sharing a good hypothesis with the community.   

Everything published on Octopus is time-stamped and registered to the authors, which should alleviate any worries about author’s having their ideas stolen. 

It’ll be great to see how this service develops, and whether it can move beyond its current science-centric bias.  Anything that begins to address the demonstrable shortcomings of the current, unsustainable, publishing model has to be a step in the right direction.  

The theme of Open Access week this year is “Community over commercialization”.  

Across the next seven days, the Research and Scholarly Communications Team in the University Library Services will share with you some initiatives that aim to transform scholarly publishing and move away from the for-profit publishing that has largely dominated academic publishing. 

Theme 4. Subscribe to Open

Subscribe to Open (S2O) is a community of practice developed by the non-profit scholarly publisher Annual Reviews.  The initiative is a response to the need for open access, and to the difficulties associated with implementing that movement. 

S2O describes itself as a ‘pragmatic approach’ for converting traditional subscription journals to ones that offer open access to their archives.  This works by allowing subscribers to essentially fund OA through their current subscriptions: if every subscriber agrees, the publisher makes the content of that title OA. 

This alleviates the need for APCs – a model which is extremely problematic, and in many disciplines, such as the humanities, to say nothing of researchers working in the global south, almost unworkable given the limited funding available.     

So far, over 300 journals are employing the subscribe-to-open model, including some titles published by some of the most influential academic publishers such as Sage, De Gruyter, and the University of Edinburgh Press.  

This is a radical initiative that aims to ‘flip’ gated research to OA without incurring the questionable practices of ‘double-dipping’ (where institutions were often paying their authors’ APCs, whilst also having to subscribe to the titles in which those papers appeared).  It’s dependent upon close collaboration between all the stakeholders involved in academic publishing: the researchers who create the content, the publishers who distribute it, and the libraries who facilitate the eventual dissemination of that research.  It will be interesting to see how it develops.  

You can read more about Subscribe to Open here: Subscribe to Open: A practical approach for converting subscription journals to open access - Crow - 2020 - Learned Publishing - Wiley Online Library 

A brief summary of the case for S2O presented by John Willinsky to the National Academy of Sciences Journal Summit, March 22, 2021

The theme of Open Access week this year is “Community over commercialization”.

Across the next seven days, the Research and Scholarly Communications Team in the University Library Services will share with you some initiatives that aim to transform scholarly publishing and move away from the for-profit publishing that has largely dominated academic publishing.

Theme 3 - Path to Open – JSTOR and publishing monographs

As Open Access (OA) is becoming more prevalent, new models of funding publishing are starting to emerge.

Path to Open is a pilot programme to find a new sustainable way to fund Open Access monograph publishing. Indeed, one of the barriers to OA is to rethink the business model whereby presses and publishers make money out of the sale of journals or books to one in which they can still flourish without these. It also aims to address the challenges faced by libraries that find that their book and serials budgets are not sufficient to buy the content needed for either students or researchers.

This initiative aims to support small and medium university presses and to provide libraries with affordable access to high quality frontlists OA books. Presses such as Liverpool University Press, Manchester University Press and Bristol University press are part of the programme and more are signing up.

Participating libraries contribute by paying a subscription fee to the pilot programme. In the UK this subscription fee has been negotiated through JISC. In return JSTOR supports the participating university presses to produce high-quality open access monographs. The pilot is set to last three years over which they plan to publish 300 titles every year. The first 100 titles have been released to participating libraries. For the duration of the pilot, only participating libraries will have access to the books. After the first three years, these titles will be fully open access on the JSTOR platform.

In this model, the role of libraries evolved from being guardians and providers of information to participate in the production of the scholarly record.

As authors, have a look at the list of university presses already part of the programme and think about whether they might be a good fit for your next book.

Across the next seven days, the Research and Scholarly Communications Team in the University Library Services will share with you some initiatives that aim to transform scholarly publishing and move away from the for-profit publishing that has largely dominated academic publishing.

Theme 2: Rights Retention Policy

As the movement towards Open Access (OA) gathered momentum, it became clear that one of the issues locking scholarly publications behind paywalls was the direct transfer of copyright from authors to publishers as soon as the publication was accepted. This meant that authors could not share their work as they wished. This created issues for the green route to Open Access. The green route to Open Access, also called self-archiving route, is when an author places their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in an institutional repository.

Currently, there is no consistency in the policies of publishers on whether authors can upload their AMMs, and whether or not they can do so without an embargo period. An embargo period locks the AMM in the repository for a certain period of time (generally 12 to 24 months depending on the discipline) making it inaccessible.

Of course, this is in direct conflict with the new Open Access requirements of UKRI for journal articles. It is also in opposition with the principles outlined by PlanS that demand immediate OA.

A strategy being developed by a number of institutions is to put in place Institutional Rights Retention Policies. These initiatives are supported by Plan S and JISC who will act as an advisory body to institutions who want to implement these policies.  Many funders, including UKRI (April 2022), the Wellcome Trust (January 2021), the NIHR (June 2022), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (January 2021) have Plan S aligned policies, which include a rights retention requirement.

The principle is that authors retain the rights to their AMMs. Currently, 30 UK universities have put in place Institutional Rights Retention Policies. The University of Sunderland also has a Rights Retention Policy which currently supports researchers in receipt of funding from UKRI and other funding bodies requiring immediate OA.  

 Live map available here. Map https://sje30.github.io/rrs/rrs.html

As an Open Access initiative, Rights Retention policies have become a way to ensure authors would retain their copyright. Issues of copyright are integral to Open Access which advocates for creative commons licences to allow sharing and reusing research published as long as it is attributed fairly.

One publisher has already pushed back against these efforts to introduce Rights Retention polices. Indeed, ACS recently announced a new type of charge for AMMs that are submitted with Rights Retention . A response from Coalition S is already available.

It is important to think about whether the traditional model of giving over your copyright to the publisher serves you, the rest of the research community or the communities you are trying to help through your research. While using Rights Retention statements on your submissions might feel like a risk, it is about taking a stance about the value and importance of Open Research.

The theme of Open Access week this year is “Community over commercialization”.

Across the next seven days, the Research and Scholarly Communications Team in the University Library Services will share with you some initiatives that aim to transform scholarly publishing and move away from the for-profit publishing that has largely dominated academic publishing.

1. Preprints and Open Review.

A preprint article is the version of your work before it has been submitted to a journal or been peer-reviewed. Using a pre-print server is an opportunity to share research at an early stage. In some disciplines, the use of preprint repositories or servers has been embedded for some time and is integral to the communication of research and results. Results of research projects are disseminated more quickly and feedback from the research community can help refine your work.  One of the first preprints repository, started in 1991, was ArXiv with a focus on physics.

Over the years, further preprint servers were created with different disciplinary focus. The Directory of Open Access Preprint Repositories is a useful tool to identify these.

As we move towards more open access, preprints repositories can be used to transform traditional academic publishing. Indeed, these servers could become central in the publishing process without the intervention of traditional journal structures. By embracing the notion of open peer-review,  some projects see preprint repositories as an alternative route to publication which embraces the ideals of open research. 

Open peer-review eschews the traditional double-blind peer-review process. The reviewers are identified, and the reviews are public. This aims to encourage both more rigor in the review process and to discourage the dreaded reviewer two comments that can be disparaging as they are discouraging, especially to early career researchers.

There are a range of different models emerging, all of them non-profit with a desire create a more equitable and fairer system of scholarly communications. These initiatives aim to speed-up the research process :

Review Commons: a preprint platform that offers a review service. It is affiliated with a number of journals to which these refereed preprints can be submitted. Their aim is a speedier process of publication.

Peer Community in (PCI) PCI evaluates articles submitted to its platform and helps the author to make them citable, Once recommended for publication they can be published for free in Peer Community Journal or be submitted to a PCI friendly journal.

Rapid Reviews – (Focus on infectious disease) An initiative that emerged from MIT during the Covid-19 pandemic, Rapid reviews seeks to accelerate the peer-review process. Its team looks through preprint servers, identifying work on infectious diseases and reviews them. These reviews are then published and linked to the preprint.

PreReview – With a focus on providing a voice to ‘systematically disadvantaged scientists’. It provides training on peer-review practices and challenges the "behind closed door" model of traditional peer-review. It aims to make the evaluation of research more equitable and provide reviews of preprints already on preprint servers.

Science CoLab – Inspired by what they call a ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ model which disrupts current practices, Science CoLab emphasises the community work behind publications. Authors decide when to publish their work, it is then assessed through open peer-reviews, improved and once the author deems the work finished, it can be placed in a curated collection.

These models all give the academic community more control over the publication process and aim to make research more open.