Communicating knowledge: how and why researchers publish and disseminate their findings (Sept 2009) is a new free online report published by the UK’s Research Information Network (RIN).
Communicating knowledge – new report
07 Wednesday Oct 2009
Category Archives: Economics of Open Access
ELPUB 2009 papers now online
31 Friday Jul 2009
Full-text papers and Powerpoints from ELPUB 2009 : 13th International Conference on Electronic Publishing are now freely available online.
Lots of titles that sound interesting, including: ‘Overlay Publications: a functional overview of the concept’; ‘Targeted knowledge: interaction and rich user experience towards a scholarly communication that “lets”‘; ‘Incorporating Semantics and Metadata as Part of the Article Authoring Process’; and ‘Electronic publishing and bibliometrics’.
One short strand of the presentation ‘Electronic publishing and bibliometrics’ (.PPT) is summarised by Moitara’s blog which reposts a D-lib conference report, thus…
“discussed in Moed’s keynote speech was assessment in the area of the humanities where there is a lack of reference indexes such as Scopus or Web of Science, due to the different types of research, outcomes and habits between the humanities and science communities. Moed explored five different options for the creation of a comprehensive database for the humanities and social sciences, including combining a number of existing European special SSH bibliographies, creating a new database from publishers’ archives, stimulating further enhancement of Web of Science and Scopus, exploring the potentialities and limitations of Google Scholar and Google Book Search, and creating a citation index from institutional repositories. Much work must be done in these fields, but the availability of full-text seems to be a key issue.” (My emphasis)
The first part of this presentation also has an interesting graph, showing how the RAE in the UK severely skews the output of academic papers…
from: Moed (2009). “Electronic publishing and bibliometrics” (.PPT)
The long-term integrity of scholarly data
23 Thursday Jul 2009
A new U.S. National Academies report, Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age. The page for the report looks as though it’s behind a paywall, but scroll a little further down the page to find links to full-text page images. The report was commissioned in 2006, and the Chronicle of Higher Education has a short journalistic summary.
I’m thinking we need new long-term personal financial instruments that fund/ensure that the family/institution/archivists are sent the keys to a universal “digital vault” after someone’s death, the vault containing a structured and tagged backup archive of that person’s vital academic data, papers, blogs, book files, bibliographies, etc.
Does e-Journal Investment Lead To Greater Academic Productivity?
21 Tuesday Jul 2009
Posted in Economics of Open Access, Spotted in the news
“Does e-Journal Investment Lead To Greater Academic Productivity?” is a question asked in an article in the July-August 2009 edition of Library and Information Update (p.45)…
This U.K. magazine is not freely available online, but some of the points are usefully summarised over at the OUL Library blog, including, among others…
* Oct-Nov is the busiest season for downloads (a surprise)
* Access in increasingly via third parties (e.g. Google Scholar)
* Historians are the biggest users of Google as access route (?!)
Publishing a humanities article costs three times as much as a science article
20 Monday Jul 2009
This seems to be an important bit of research. The U.S. Chronicle of Higher Education reports on new NHA research which finds that…
“It costs more than three times as much to publish an article in a humanities or social-science journal as it does to publish one in a science, technical, or medical, or STM, journal [ reports ] an in-depth study of eight flagship journals in the humanities and social sciences.” […] “It cost an average of $9,994 in 2007 to publish an article in one of the eight journals analyzed” […] first-copy costs — “collecting, reviewing, editing, and developing content” — added up to about 47 per cent of the total outlay among the eight journals studied
The National Humanities Alliance report The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations (not yet online) was written during 2007-2009, and examined U.S. data from 2005 to 2007. The Chronicle journalist highlights three possible reasons for the difference…
* articles are significantly longer than in the sciences
* acceptance rates are far lower than in the sciences, at a pitiful 11%
* such journals include a wider variety of content than in the sciences…
“peer-reviewed research made up about 62 percent of what the eight journals published in 2007. The remaining 38 percent consisted of “other scholarly content,” including book reviews.” […] Such material does not come cheap, though; it must still be commissioned, edited, and put into production. It cost an [annual] average of $313,612 per journal in 2007, the study found.
On the “articles are longer” argument, I’m not sure that a simple word-count is a valid measure. Science articles are full of complex tables, formulae, diagrams, and it must take quite some time for a reviewer to mull these over. Similarly, I’m thinking that the acceptance rate may be so low because only the “top eight” most prestigious journals were surveyed — lesser journals may well have a far higher acceptance rate?
AJOL
13 Monday Jul 2009
A lengthy and referenced overview, based on a recent 2009 conference presentation, of the African Journal Online service — with some statistics. AJOL seems to be building quite an empire among African journals, and it has over 300 titles with about 28 of those in the arts and humanities.
The hidden economics of Open Access
03 Friday Jul 2009
Posted in Economics of Open Access
Joseph Gelfer criticises aspects of the paper “But what have you done for me lately? Commercial Publishing, Scholarly Communication, and Open-Access” (2009) by John P. Conley and Myrna Wooders, with special focus on the value that paid editors can bring in terms of polishing manuscripts.
In the second half of the post, Gelper also points out that…
“the volunteer labor on which many OA journals … are based hides the true cost of doing business. One would expect an economist to make more of this analysis, but the fact that $0 is spent on editing an OA journal does not result in zero cost. Costs come in many shapes and forms: that hour of volunteer copyediting from our editorially skilled and willing academic comes at the cost of their employer, or family, or an hour of leisure activity. … when such [OA] mandates rely on unpaid labor, they also have the potential to erase the skills of academics and publishing professionals who may otherwise reasonably demand an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work … the glossing over of economic realities does no service to OA’s moral high-ground”
The other hidden long-term cost factor here is training. Professionals may have invested years of their life in training courses and self-learning, whereas volunteer OA editors are seemingly expected to “just know how to do it”. Not only are volunteer editors not paid (even in terms of workload allowances), they’re not paid to train for their role either.
Self-archiving after publication
02 Thursday Jul 2009
Posted in Economics of Open Access
The Occasional Pamphlet (a law blog at Harvard) has a long and detailed posting on the issues around the public self-archiving of academic articles, after publication in an academic journal.
A tax on research
02 Thursday Jul 2009
Posted in Economics of Open Access
Amazing. Apparently the Treasury grabs 17.5% of the cost of all online academic journals, via charging VAT (a UK sales tax) on sales to university libraries.
Open Access: What are the economic benefits?
01 Wednesday Jul 2009
Posted in Economics of Open Access
Yet another new report for your holiday deckchair reading. Open Access: What are the economic benefits? A comparison of the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Denmark is by John Houghton of the Australian Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, and is published by the Danish Knowledge Exchange….
“Open access or ‘author-pays’ publishing for journal articles (i.e. ‘Gold OA’) might bring net system savings of around […] EUR 480 million in the UK (at 2007 prices and levels of publishing activity) […] a repositories and overlay-services model may well produce similar cost savings to open access publishing.”