Month: April 2018

The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review

Authors: Tennant, J.P., Waldner, F., Jacques, D.C., Masuzzo, P., Collister, L.B., and Hartgerink, C.H.J.

Comment:
Extensive review/overview of academic, social and economic impacts of OA and different stakeholders in terms of scholarly publishing north/south and briefly open data and open science.

Abstract:
Ongoing debates surrounding Open Access to the scholarly literature are multifaceted and complicated by disparate and often polarised viewpoints from engaged stakeholders. At the current stage, Open Access has become such a global issue that it is critical for all involved in scholarly publishing, including policymakers, publishers, research funders, governments, learned societies, librarians, and academic communities, to be well-informed on the history, benefits, and pitfalls of Open Access. In spite of this, there is a general lack of consensus regarding the potential pros and cons of Open Access at multiple levels. This review aims to be a resource for current knowledge on the impacts of Open Access by synthesizing important research in three major areas: academic, economic and societal. While there is clearly much scope for additional research, several key trends are identified, including a broad citation advantage for researchers who publish openly, as well as additional benefits to the non-academic dissemination of their work. The economic impact of Open Access is less well-understood, although it is clear that access to the research literature is key for innovative enterprises, and a range of governmental and non-governmental services. Furthermore, Open Access has the potential to save both publishers and research funders considerable amounts of financial resources, and can provide some economic benefits to traditionally subscription-based journals. The societal impact of Open Access is strong, in particular for advancing citizen science initiatives, and leveling the playing field for researchers in developing countries. Open Access supersedes all potential alternative modes of access to the scholarly literature through enabling unrestricted re-use, and long-term stability independent of financial constraints of traditional publishers that impede knowledge sharing. However, Open Access has the potential to become unsustainable for research communities if high-cost options are allowed to continue to prevail in a widely unregulated scholarly publishing market. Open Access remains only one of the multiple challenges that the scholarly publishing system is currently facing. Yet, it provides one foundation for increasing engagement with researchers regarding ethical standards of publishing and the broader implications of ‘Open Research’.

Tennant, J.P., Waldner, F., Jacques, D.C., Masuzzo, P., Collister, L.B., and Hartgerink, C.H.J. (2016). The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review. F1000Res 5.

Source: The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review

Publishing while Female. Are women held to higher standards? Evidence from peer review.

Author: Erin Hengel

Comment: Very strong article looking at the burden of publishing and peer review for women vs men in economics. Shows that not only do women do more work and improve their manuscripts more from the perspective of readability but that they also internalise this and produce more readable manuscripts in the first place.

Abstract: I use readability scores to test if referees and/or editors apply higher standards to women’s writing in academic peer review. I find: (i) female-authored papers are 1-6 percent better written than equivalent papers by men; (ii) the gap is two times higher in published articles than in earlier, draft versions of the same papers; (iii) women’s writing gradually improves but men’s does not-meaning the readability gap grows over authors’ careers. In a dynamic model of an author’s decision-making process, I show that tougher editorial standards and/or biased referee assignment are uniquely consistent with this pattern of choices. A conservative causal estimate derived from the model suggests senior female economists write at least 9 percent more clearly than they otherwise would. These findings indicate that higher standards burden women with an added time tax and probably contribute to academia’s “Publishing Paradox” Consistent with this hypothesis, I find female-authored papers spend six months longer in peer review. More generally, tougher standards impose a quantity/quality tradeoff that characterises many instances of female output. They could resolve persistently lower-otherwise unexplained-female productivity in many high-skill occupations.

Hengel, E. (2017). Publishing while Female. Are women held to higher standards? Evidence from peer review. (University of Cambridge). https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/270621

Source: Publishing while Female. Are women held to higher standards? Evidence from peer review.

Coherence of “open” initiatives in higher education and research: Framing a policy agenda – D-Scholarship@Pitt

Authors: Sheila Corrall and Stephen Pinfield

Comments: Discusses the range of definitions of “open” in policy contexts drawing on OER, OA and other aspects as well as controversies and the nature of disagreements.

Abstract: “Open” approaches have the potential to advance significantly the mission of higher education and research institutions worldwide, but the multiplicity of initiatives raises questions about their coherence and points to the need for a more coordinated approach to policy development. Drawing on the European e-InfraNet project, we adopt a broad definition of Open, including activity alongside content, and identify the different Open domains, their salient characteristics and relationships. We propose a high-level typology and model of Open to inform policy design and delivery, and employ Willinsky’s framework for open source and open access to discuss the theoretical underpinnings of openness, finding important commonalities among the domains, which suggests that the framework can extend to all the Open areas. We then examine potential shared benefits of Open approaches, which reinforce the argument for a unified policy agenda. We conclude with some observations on limits of openness, and implications for policy.

Corrall, S., and Pinfield, S. (2014). Coherence of “Open” Initiatives in Higher Education and Research: Framing a Policy Agenda. http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/21973/

Source: Coherence of “open” initiatives in higher education and research: Framing a policy agenda – D-Scholarship@Pitt

Openness as Tool for Acceleration and Measurement: Reflections on Problem Representations Underpinning Open Access and Open Science

Author: Jutta Heider

Abstract: Increasingly open access emerges as an issue that researchers, universities, and various infrastructure providers, such as libraries and academic publishers, have to relate to. Commonly policies requiring open access are framed as expanding access to information and hence as being part of a democratization of society and knowledge production processes. However, there are also other aspects that are part of the way in which open access is commonly imagined in the various policy documents, declarations, and institutional demands that often go unnoticed. This essay wants to foreground some of these issues by asking the overarching question: “What is the problem that open access is seen to solve represented to be?” The paper will discuss how demands to open up access to research align also with an administrative enclosure and managerial processes of control and evaluation. It will show that while demands for free and open access to research publications – created or compiled in research processes funded by public money – are seen as contributing to the knowledge base for advancing society for a common good and in that sense framed as part of a liberating discourse, these demands are also expression of a shift of control of the science community to invisible research infrastructures and to an apparatus of administration as well as subscribing to an ideal of entrepreneurialism as well as continuing a problematic and much criticized understanding of Western science as universal.

Haider, J. (2017). Openness as Tool for Acceleration and Measurement: Reflections on Problem Representations Underpinning Open Access and Open Science. In Open Divide: Critical Studies on Open Access / Edited by Ulrich Herb ; Joachim Schöpfel.(Litwin Books).

Source: Openness as Tool for Acceleration and Measurement: Reflections on Problem Representations Underpinning Open Access and Open Science

Barbarians at the gates: a half-century of unaffiliated users in academic libraries – ScienceDirect

Author: Nancy Courtney

Comment:

Abstract: Discusses effects of academic unaffiliated access, in the US. In particular how technology has impacted and limited access  from 1980s  to 2000 through licensing restrictions and replacement of print serials with ejournals delivering greater control to vendors over access to non-local users.

Courtney, N. (2001). Barbarians at the gates: a half-century of unaffiliated users in academic libraries. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 27, 473–480.

Source: Barbarians at the gates: a half-century of unaffiliated users in academic libraries – ScienceDirect

Alumni access policies in public university libraries

Authors: Natalie Burclaff and Johannes Britz

Summary: Reviews library open access policies in one US university system from the perspective of alumni. Includes good historical account of policy changes since 1970s.

Abstract: This paper explores the current library access policies for alumni at a public university system using document analysis, observations and interviews. We found that alumni are specifically addressed in only two library access policies, and borrowing privileges through cards, on-site access and restricted access to electronic resources are common elements in the policies for community users. There are opportunities to expand and standardize services, and we recommend addressing alumni in policies as a separate user group.

 

Burclaff, Natalie, and Johannes Britz. “Alumni Access Policies in Public University Libraries.” Inkanyiso, Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 3, no. 1 (2011): 1–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ijhss.v3i1.69496.

Source: Alumni access policies in public university libraries

Added 2018-04-27

A genealogy of open access: negotiations between openness and access to research

Author: Samuel Moore

Comment: A discussion of the history of different conceptions of Open Access, their origins and how they play out in the policy and political arena today.

Abstract: Open access (OA) is a contested term with a complicated history and a variety of understandings. This rich history is routinely ignored by institutional, funder and governmental policies that instead enclose the concept and promote narrow approaches to OA. This article presents a genealogy of the term open access, focusing on the separate histories that emphasise openness and reusability on the one hand, as borrowed from the open-source software and free culture movements, and accessibility on the other hand, as represented by proponents of institutional and subject repositories. This genealogy is further complicated by the publishing cultures that have evolved within individual communities of practice: publishing means different things to different communities and individual approaches to OA are representative of this fact. From analysing its historical underpinnings and subsequent development, I argue that OA is best conceived as a boundary object, a term coined by Star and Griesemer (1989) to describe concepts with a shared, flexible definition between communities of practice but a more community-specific definition within them. Boundary objects permit working relationships between communities while allowing local use and development of the concept. This means that OA is less suitable as a policy object, because boundary objects lose their use-value when ‘enclosed’ at a general level, but should instead be treated as a community-led, grassroots endeavour.

Moore, S. (2017). A genealogy of open access: negotiations between openness and access to research / Une généalogie de l’open access : négociations entre l’ouverture et l’accès à la recherche. Revue Française Des Sciences de l’information et de La Communication 11.

Source: A genealogy of open access: negotiations between openness and access to research

“Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence | Palgrave Communications

Authors: Samuel Moore, Cameron Neylon, Martin Paul Eve, Daniel Paul O’Donnell & Damian Pattinson

Comment:  A discussion of how the word “excellence” means very little in the context of research evaluation, and can actually be quite damaging. Reviews a range of literature on issues in research evaluation with a focus on rankings and quantitative assessments.

Abstract: The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organizations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning in academia. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. To investigate whether this linguistic function is useful we examine how the rhetoric of excellence combines with narratives of scarcity and competition to show that the hyper-competition that arises from the performance of “excellence” is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. In the final analysis, it turns out that that “excellence” is not excellent. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship. This article is published as part of a collection on the future of research assessment.

Moore, S., Neylon, C., Paul Eve, M., Paul O’Donnell, D., and Pattinson, D. (2017). “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence. Palgrave Communications 3, 16105.

Source: “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence | Palgrave Communications