Scholarly communications links from July 2016

>>>>>Open Access articles worth reading!

• How open science helps researchers succeed, by Erin C McKiernan et al. eLife 2016;10.7554/eLife.16800 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.1680. Slides from the article are available for use also; they are licensed CC-BY.
• The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review [version 2; referees: 3 approved, 2 approved with reservations]., by Tennant JP, Waldner F, Jacques DC et al. F1000Research 2016, 5:632 (doi: 10.12688/f1000research.8460.2) – still in preprint stage last time I checked

>>>Open education resources (OERs) Opening the Textbook: Open Education Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2015-16 was released this month based on a survey of 3,000 faculty. It’s a fun report to browse with lots of quotes from comments to the survey.
Two posts about the report:

• More Professors Know About Free Textbook Options, but Adoption Remains Low By Goldie Blumenstyk, July 26, 2016 in Chronicle of Higher Education
• Where Open Textbooks Are Used While most faculty members are still unaware of open educational resources, use in introductory courses nearly rivals that of traditional textbooks, study finds, by Carl Straumsheim in Inside Higher Education

Selected findings from the Executive Summary of the report. (The report is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.)

• Faculty awareness of OER has increased in the last year, but remains low. Only 6.6% of faculty reported that they were “Very aware” of open educational resources, with around three times that many (19%) saying that they were “Aware”.
• 5.3% of courses are using an openly licensed (Creative Commons or public domain) required textbook.
• The barriers to adopting OER most often cited by faculty are that “there are not enough resources for my subject” (49%), it is “too hard to find what I need” (48%) and “there is no comprehensive catalog of resources” (45%).

>>>>engrXiv announced An eprint server for engineering built on a model that sounds similar to SocArXiv was just announced July 27. The announcement

>>>>Wellcome Open Research forthcoming, a journal and eprint/preprint/data platform paid for by a research funder – certainly a new model for open access. Wellcome Trust has been on the forefront of open access to funded research, being the first to request and pay for open access books and book chapters (in addition to articles) and to regularly share data about how much they spent to make articles and books open access. Here are a few of many posts so far:

• Why we’re launching a new publishing platform
• A new e-journal could be a ‘game-changer.’ But will scientists come?
• Science funder becomes publisher; publishing, reading articles both free “Researchers will undoubtedly choose more prestigious traditional journals when their results warrant it, but the Wellcome Open Research doesn’t seem to be competing with those journals anyway—instead, it seems to be focused on expanding the scope of what can be published.”
• Open Access Infrastructure: Help on the Way?, By Shan Sutton, July 25 commenting on Wellcome Open Research and other July events

>>>>How should open access publishing costs be paid? A few recent additions to the discussion.

• I posted a bit about how preprint services are funded at the bottom of this month’s post, Sharing for social scientists – developments in July 2016: SocArXiv and SSRN changes
• This letter promotes the “Platinum OA” idea that external subsidies, instead of authors, cover publication fees: Subsidizing truly open access, Science, 17 Jun 2016: Vol. 352, Issue 6292, pp. 1405 DOI: 10.1126/science.aag0946. In a similar vein, this Association of Research Libraries statement was distributed July 20th: Substituting Article Processing Charges for Subscriptions: The Cure Is Worse than the Disease, by by David Shulenburger.
• The just-released UC Pay-It-Forward Project final report examines the long-term financial sustainability of the article processing charge (author*-pays) business model. It gets complicated quickly but you may want to review the findings on page 7. Data and other information is also available. [*”Author” in author-pays models may sometimes be the author’s institution or funder.]
• This is a peripheral issue but the cost of organizing peer review is often a major item justifying high article publishing charges so I thought this little post was interesting: Peer-review is not free – it’s a subsidy for publishers, by Björn Brembs, July 26.

I do not know how such costs should be paid or what part of Washington University’s budget (or all academic budgets) should go toward support, but I think these are good questions for all of us to consider!

>>>>Metrics, impact factors, new measures, a selection of interesting recent items

• Measuring Up: Impact Factors Do Not Reflect Article Citation Rates, by by Veronique Kiermer on PLOS blogs
• Valuable essay! Metrics and The Social Contract: Using Numbers, Preserving Humanity, by Mike Taylor on Digital Science blog. “Increasingly, we’re not limited by what we can measure but are challenged with the question of what we should measure and how we should analyse it.”
• Digital Science to Adopt Relative Citation Ratio Developed at NIH; Becker Library posted about Relative Citation Ratio last month.