Archive for Open Access

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Open Access: the Future is Diamond

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on May 24, 2023 by telescoper

As it was foretold the Council of Europe has now released a document (PDF) that calls for “transparent, equitable, and open access to scholarly publications”.  In its conclusions, the Council calls on the Commission and the member states to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers. In other words, it calls for Diamond Open Access. The covering press release includes:

If we really believe in open science, we need to make sure that researchers can make their findings available and re-usable and that high-quality scientific articles are openly accessible to anyone that needs to read them. This should be particularly the case for research that benefits from public funding: what has been paid by all should be accessible to all.

Mats Persson, Swedish Minister for Education, Ministry of Education and Research

This is clearly how Open Access should be, though I am still worried that the sizeable publishing lobby will still try to persuade research agencies and institutions to pay the existing fees on behalf of authors, which does not solve the problem but merely hides it.

I know I’m not alone in thinking that the current publishing ecosystem is doomed and will die a natural death soon enough. The replacement should be a worldwide network of institutional and/or subject-based repositories that share research literature freely for the common good. Universities and research centres should simply bypass the grotesque parasite that is the publishing industry. Indeed, I would be in favour of hastening the demise of the Academic Journal Racket by having institutions make it a disciplinary offence for any researcher to pay an APC to any journal.

We are lucky in physics and astronomy because arXiv has already done the hard work for us. With the existence of arXiv, old-style journals are no longer necessary. It is great that arXiv is being joined by similar ventures in other fields, such as BiorXiv and EarthArxiv. A list of existing repositories can be found here. I’m sure many more will follow. The future is Diamond.

What is needed is a global effort to link these repositories to each other and to peer review mechanisms. One way is through overlays as demonstrated by the Open Journal of Astrophysics, there being no reason why the idea can’t be extended beyond arXiv. Other routes are possible, of course, and I would love to see different models developed. I hope the European Council call will result in more support for Diamond Open Access. But whether this happens or not, I think the next few years are going to be very exciting.

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Progress on Open Access?

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , on April 27, 2023 by telescoper

The current state of play with regard to Open Access publishing is very disappointing. The academic publishing industry seems to have persuaded the powers that be to allow them to charge exorbitant article processing charges (APCs) to replace revenues lost from subscriptions when they publish a paper free to readers. This simply transfers the cost from reader to author, and excludes those authors who can’t afford to pay.

This current system of ‘Gold’ Open Access is a scam, and it’s a terrible shame we have ended up having it foisted upon us. Fortunately, being forced to pay APCs of many thousands of euros to publish their papers, researchers are at last starting to realize that they are being ripped off. Recently, the entire Editorial Board of Neuroimage and its sister journal Neuroimage: Reports resigned in protest at the `extreme’ APC levels imposed by the publisher, Elsevier. I’m sure other academics will follow this example, as it becomes more and more obvious that the current arrangements are unsustainable. Previously the profits of the big publishers were hidden in library budgets. Now they are hitting researchers and their grants directly, as authors now have to pay, and people who previously hadn’t thought much about the absurdity of it all are now realizing what a racket academic publishing really is.

The people at the top have been slow to grasp this reality, but there are signs that this is at last happening, In the USA there has been the Nelson Memorandum (see discussion here). Now there is movement in the European Union, with member states apparently set on agreeing a  text to be published next month (May 2023) that calls for immediate open access the default, with no author fees. This is clearly how Open Access should be, though I am still worried that the sizeable publishing lobby will try to persuade research agencies and institutions to pay the existing fees on behalf of authors, which does not solve the problem but merely hides it.

I know I’m not alone in thinking that the current publishing ecosystem is doomed and will die a natural death soon enough. The replacement should be a worldwide network of institutional and/or subject-based repositories that share research literature freely for the common good. Universities and research centres should simply bypass the grotesque parasite that is the publishing industry. Indeed, I would be in favour of hastening the demise of the Academic Journal Racket by having institutions make it a disciplinary offence for any researcher to pay an APC.

We are lucky in physics and astronomy because arXiv has already done the hard work for us. Indeed, it is now a fact universally acknowledged* that every new research paper worth reading in these disciplines can be found on arXiv. Old-style journals are no longer necessary. It is great that arXiv is being joined by similar ventures in other fields, such as BiorXiv and EarthArxiv. A list of existing repositories can be found here. I’m sure many more will follow. What is needed is a global effort to link these repositories to each other and to peer review mechanisms. One way is through overlays as demonstrated by the Open Journal of Astrophysics, there being no reason why the idea can’t be extended beyond arXiv. Other routes are possible, of course, and I would love to see different models developed. I think the next few years are going to be very exciting.

*It is also a fact universally acknowledged that anyone who doesn’t understand the reference to “a fact university acknowledged” has not read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen…

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Response to the Nelson Memorandum from arXiv

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on April 11, 2023 by telescoper

I just noticed on the arXiv blog that arXiv, along with bioRxiv and medRxiv, has released its response in the form of an open letter to the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) “Nelson Memorandum” which recommends that US government agencies update their public access policies to make publications and data from research funded by US taxpayers publicly accessible immediately without embargo or cost. I thought I’d take the liberty of reproducing the letter in full here because what it says should apply beyond the United States. I agree particularly strongly with the last paragraph. I haven’t edited the letter except to replace footnotes with links.

—o—

April 11, 2023

The recent Office of Science and Technology Policy “Nelson Memorandum” on “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research” is a welcome affirmation of the public right to access government funded research results, including publication of articles describing the research, and the data behind the research. The policy is likely to increase access to new and ongoing research, enable equitable access to the outcome of publicly funded research efforts, and enable and accelerate more research. Improved immediate access to research results may provide significant general social and economic benefits to the public.

Funding Agencies can expedite public access to research results through the distribution of electronic preprints of results in open repositories, in particular existing preprint distribution servers such as arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv. Distribution of preprints of research results enables rapid and free accessibility of the findings worldwide, circumventing publication delays of months, or, in some cases, years. Rapid circulation of research results expedites scientific discourse, shortens the cycle of discovery and accelerates the pace of discovery.

Distribution of research findings by preprints, combined with curation of the archive of submissions, provides universal access for both authors and readers in perpetuity. Authors can provide updated versions of the research, including “as accepted,” with the repositories openly tracking the progress of the revision of results through the scientific process. Public access to the corpus of machine readable research manuscripts provides innovative channels for discovery and additional knowledge generation, including links to the data behind the research, open software tools, and supplemental information provided by authors.

Preprint repositories support a growing and innovative ecosystem for discovery and evaluation of research results, including tools for improved accessibility and research summaries. Experiments in open review and crowdsourced commenting can be layered over preprint repositories, providing constructive feedback and alternative models to the increasingly archaic process of anonymous peer review.

Distribution of research results by preprints provides a well tested path for immediate, free, and equitable access to research results. Preprint archives can support and sustain an open and innovative ecosystem of tools for research discovery and verification, providing a long term and sustainable approach for open access to publicly funded research.

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on February 3, 2023 by telescoper

The articles are coming in thick and fast at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. and why trying to get them refereed and published as quickly as we can. It’s time to announce yet another paper. This one was published officially yesterday (2nd February 2023) but I just found time to post about it here today before I go to my 9am tutorial.

The latest paper is the 4th paper in Volume 6 (2023) as well as the 69th in all. This one is in the Astrophysics of Galaxies folder.

The latest publication is entitled “Wide Binaries from GAIA EDR3: preference for GR over MOND?”.  The authors of this paper,  Charalambos Pittordis and Will Sutherland, are both based at Queen Mary, University of London. We published a related paper last month.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the  abstract:

 

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on November 4, 2022 by telescoper

It’s time once again for me to announce new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. The new paper, published last week, is the 15th paper in Volume 5 (2022) and the 63rd in all. The latest publication is entitled “Two-photon amplitude interferometry for precision astrometry” and the authors are Paul Stankus, Andrei Nomerotski and Anže Slosar of Brookhaven National Laboratory (USA) and Stephen Vintskevich (Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology, Russia).

The paper presents a new method for doing interferometry with quantum-mechanically entangled photons and is thus is in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. I don’t know much about this area – and there are many whose baseline opinion is that interferometry is a bit of a fringe topic that is rather complex perhaps needs more visibility in the current phase of its development  (geddit?) – but the physics looks fascinating to me. Amplitude interferometry should be contrasted with the intensity interferometry method of Hanbury Brown and Twiss which I remember learning about as an undergraduate.

Anyway, here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the  abstract:

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. The full image used in the overlay is this:

 

You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

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Open Access Week and the arXiv

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on October 17, 2022 by telescoper

Just time for a quick post to advertise the fact that next week (commencing October 24th 2022) is International Open Access Week.

I’ll be participating in one of the events – a panel discussion – organized by arXiv as part of Open Access Week. This event is entitled Trends in Peer Review of Open Access Preprints and the description is:

Speed of research is a major feature of open access preprint platforms like arXiv – formal peer review can follow later after rapid distribution of results. However, as submissions to arXiv and other preprint servers have grown, many researchers are seeking new avenues for community feedback and peer review. At this panel discussion, leaders in preprints and peer review will discuss current trends in virtual overlay journals, open peer reviews, and more. (Video recording will be available to registrants after the event)

Panelists:

  • Peter Coles, PhD, Theoretical Cosmologist at Maynooth University in Ireland and Managing Editor of The Open Journal of Astrophysics
  • Jessica Polka, PhD, Executive Director of ASAPbio
  • Antti Mikael Rousi, PhD, Senior Advisor, Research Services at Aalto University, Finland
  • Steinn Sigurdsson, PhD, Professor of Astronomy at Penn State University and arXiv Scientific Director

The event is at on Wednesday, October 26, 2022 at 15:00 UTC /11:00 EDT; that’s 16:00 Irish Time. It’s on Zoom (unless you are at Cornell and can attend in person). You need to register here.

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Open Access USA

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on August 26, 2022 by telescoper

There was an important announcement yesterday about Open Access from the Office of Science & Technology Policy at the White House which I picked up from Twitter. Here is a summary:

More detailed documents can be found here and here.

The principle that research that is funded by the public should be available to the public is one of the foundations of Open Access publishing and it is laudable to see this enforced more strictly. Previously journals were able to keep articles behind a paywall for an embargo period, just withholding access for up to a year. The deadline for ending this practice is December 31st 2025. I would have made it sooner, but at least it has not been kicked into the very long grass.

The problem that I can see with the policy is that it will probably involve researchers having to pay thousands of dollars in article processing fees associated with the “Gold” Open Access of the form offered by commercial publishers. When the summary says “without cost” it means “without cost to the reader”. The way it will work is that these costs are transferred to the authors. The publishers will still gather their profits.

It will take stronger policies than this to break the stranglehold of the academic publishing cartels. It is more likely in my view that radical change will emerge from the grass roots, as researchers find novel ways of publishing their work without handing huge dollops of cash to profiteers.

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The Wrong Sort of Open Access

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , on August 14, 2022 by telescoper

I came across two articles this week on the subject of Open Access and thought I’d share them here with a few comments of my own.

The first article was published in the LSE blog on 11th August with the title Article Processing Charges (APCs) and the new enclosure of research. For those of you not in the know, an Article Process Charge (APC) is a fee that authors are required to pay a publisher to allow Open Access to the paper on publication, i.e. without readers having to pay. The fees for some journals can many thousands of dollars. The lede for the LSE blog post reads:

Drawing on a recent analysis of APC pricing and movements within the commercial publishing sector, Gunnar Sivertsen and Lin Zhang argue that APCs have now firmly established themselves as the predominant business model for academic publishing. Highlighting the inequalities inherent to this model, they posit now is the time to consider alternatives.

In the text the authors reveal that in 2020 alone APCs contributed over $2Bn in revenue to academic journal publishers. I agree with the authors’ conclusion that the APC model is unfair and unsustainable. Indeed I would go further: it’s a complete con. The actual cost of processing an article for publication is a tiny fraction of the APC – the rest is just profit. The academic community is being fleeced. The right “time to consider alternatives” was many years ago, however, when we could have prevented this ridiculous model from being established in the first place. I still believe that the model will collapse under the weight of it’s own contradictions, however, so it’s not too late to change.

The second paper (which was published in January 2022) is entitled Open Science – For Whom? and is published in the Data Science Journal. It was drawn to my attention by the first author, Martin Dominik. Here is an excerpt:

So-called “Open-Access journals” lift the economic barrier to reading scholarly articles, but flipping the paywall from the reader to the author is not a viable solution and inhibits global participation in the scientific process. While article processing charges as well as read-and-publish deals currently on offer appear to be unaffordable to many institutions or individuals (not only in low- and middle-income countries), already the requirement of somebody else having to sign off for getting research published collides with the principles of academic freedom.

and later:

Flipping the paywall is not a solution for scholarly communication in a global Open Science ecosystem. Author-pays-charge models for disseminating research results are not viable in practice and simply absurd.

Simply absurd is right; see the above comments. How on Earth did we let the APC model take hold? I think the answer to that is inertia and lack of imagination within the academic community. It seems many researchers are willing to complain publicly about the absurdity of APCs but far fewer are willing to do something about the situation.

I pointed out the unfairness of APCs in a blog post ten years ago. I ended that post with this paragraph:

I for one have no intention of ever paying an Article Processing Charge. If the journals I publish in insist on levying one, I’ll just forget about the journals altogether and put my papers on the arXiv. I urge my colleagues to do the same.

I’m glad to say that I’ve kept that pledge and have never paid an APC. I recently completed a survey about Open Access which included a question about what level of APC I thought was reasonable; I put zero.

The way forward, I believe, is Diamond Open Access (i.e. free for both authors and readers), such as that offered by the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This is not the only model, of course, but we have at least demonstrated that it is viable (and indeed rather successful). And at least in setting up the Open Journal of Astrophysics I’ve done a bit more than whinge.

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Overlay journals: a study of the current landscape

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on April 11, 2022 by telescoper

There’s a recent paper on the arXiv by Rousi & Laakso (both based in Finland) with the above title and the following abstract:

Overlay journals are characterised by their articles being archived on public open access repositories, often already starting in their initial preprint form as a prerequisite for submission to the journal prior to initiating the peer-review process. In this study we aimed to identify currently active overlay journals and examine their characteristics. We utilised an explorative web search and contacted key service providers for additional information. The final sample consisted of 35 active overlay journals. While the results show an increase in the number of overlay journals in recent years, the current presence of overlay journals is diminutive compared to the overall number of open access journals. The majority of overlay journals publish articles in the natural sciences, mathematics or computer sciences. Overlay journals are commonly published by groups of scientists rather than formal organisations and overlay journals may also rank highly within the traditional journal citation metrics. Nearly none of the investigated journals charge fees from authors, which is likely related to the cost-effectiveness of the overlay publishing model. Both the growth in adoption of open access preprint repositories, and researchers willingness to publish in overlay journals will determine the models wider impact on scholarly publishing.

You can find a discussion of overlay journals in general here, where I learnt that the term “overlay journal” was coined back in 1996 but it obviously took quite a long time to implement the idea in functioning platforms. The paper is well worth reading. It contains some analysis of journal citation metrics but because most of the journals are young this information is very sparse. The Open Journal of Astrophysics of course gets a mention. It doesn’t yet have a Journal Impact Factor. Some of the journals in the Rousi-Laakso paper have a JIF but this dates from a time before the journal flipped to overlay state. For your information, the JIF for year n is based on citations received in that year for papers published in years n-1 and n-2. The Open Journal of Astrophysics should qualify for a JIF for 2021 based on papers published in 2019 and 2020 but Clarivate (who control such things) doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to issue one.

I think Journal Impact Factors are a waste of time. Why use journal level metrics when there is plenty of information at the article level? On the other hand the bean-counters in charge of science funding in several countries (including Italy) insist that papers resulting from this funding should be published in papers with a high JIF so I’m aware that not having a JIF is a limiting factor for some.

Of course many fields do not use the arXiv, but there is no reason why the principle of the overlay journal could not be applied to other forms of repository. There has been a culture in physics and astronomy of circulating preprints for a very long time now, and it may take a while for this to permeate into other disciplines.

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UNESCO and Open Science

Posted in Open Access, Politics with tags , , , , , on January 12, 2022 by telescoper

Time to pass on news of an interesting development from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) concerning Open Science. Here’s a little video to explain what it’s about:

A press release announcing the new recommendations begins thus:

The first international framework on open science was adopted by 193 countries attending UNESCO’s General Conference. By making science more transparent and more accessible, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science will make science more equitable and inclusive. 

Through open science, scientists and engineers use open licenses to share their publications and data, software and even hardware more widely. Open science should, thus, enhance international scientific cooperation. 

Some 70% of scientific publications are locked behind paywalls. Over the past two years, however, this proportion has dropped to about 30% for publications on COVID-19 specifically. This shows that science can be more open. 

The framework document itself is here (21 pages). It’s a very general document, the strongest aspect of which is that it takes a broad view of open science. When I’ve talked and written about open access publishing I’ve always stressed that represents only one aspect of open science: there is a need to share data and analysis software too.

You can find an upbeat commentary on the new agreement by James Wilsdon here. Here’s a snippet:

At a time when ideologies opposed to universalism, multilateralism, and collaboration are gaining ground in many parts of the world—exacerbated by greed, corruption, and exploitation of common assets and resources—the scientific system is as vulnerable as it has always been to reflecting both the best and the worst of society’s wider tendencies.

Moves towards open research have gained significant ground over the past twenty years, but this progress remains fragile, under-resourced, and at times willfully or unintentionally blind to the fresh inequalities and pressures it can create—particularly for researchers and institutions in the global south.

For me, the greatest strengths of the UNESCO statement are its breadth and holism—unlike some declarations in this field, it speaks with an authentically international chorus of voices. It reasserts the need for cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary pluralism, and reminds us that openness is ultimately a means to more fundamental ends. The recommendation returns repeatedly to the importance of infrastructures and incentives, which need to be financed, sustained, and better aligned.

I couldn’t agree more!

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