Open Book Publishers celebrates 7th birthday

Today (24th September) is the seventh anniversary of the founding of Open Book Publishers.

CC-0. Portrait of an old man thought to be Comenius (c. 1661) by Rembrandt. Florence, Uffizi Gallery. Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_an_Old_Man,_Rembrandt.jpg. In The Scientific Revolution Revisited by Mikuláš Teich (2015)

Last time we blogged about OBP back in May they had published 55 titles, now the figure stands at 63! The University of St Andrews Library continues to contribute to the project by producing high quality MARC records for each book. MARC is a cataloguing standard for inputting metadata that makes sharing records between libraries easier. Libraries can download the MARC records we provide from the OBP website thus avoiding duplication of effort (see this page for more information).

George Washington Wilson, "Castle Urquhart.” 1867. Albumen print. Photographs of English and Scottish Scenery (Aberdeen: Printed by John Duffus, 1866-1868). British Library. http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/earlyphotos/c/largeimage53419.html. In Thomas Annan of Glasgow: Pioneer of the Documentary Photograph by
Lionel Gossman (2015)

"We can look back upon seven years of steady progress with satisfaction. 63 titles published. 700,000 book visits to our website. Readers from 207 countries. 400 readers per title every month. A library membership scheme with 70 members already enlisted. New partnerships bearing fruit. Our mission to change the nature of the traditional academic book and bring Open Access research to readers everywhere continues apace." Open Book Publishers Newsletter.

There are a further 19 forthcoming titles in the OBP catalogue, see the full list here. Forthcoming titles range from Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry: Reinventing the Canon to Advanced Problems in Mathematics: Preparing for University.

You can see each OBP title in our catalogue here: http://library.st-andrews.ac.uk/search/a?search=Open+Book+Publishers.

BMC Ecology image competition

CC BY Catherine Markham http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9

Each year BMC Ecology runs an image competition designed to allow ecologists to capture in a single frame their personal perspective on the 'beauty and mystery of our natural surroundings'. These images also provide a window into their specific research area:

'Ecologists can then educate as they draw attention to some of the outstanding science being done, while featuring their research efforts in a visual, and fun, way.' BMC Ecology

The overall winning image entitled “Palestinian sunbird female forages on Echinops sp.” was captured by Mohamed Sheb from the Suez Canal University Ismailia, Egypt.

CC BY Mohamed Shebl http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9.

There were 9 winning pictures, and an additional 23 that were highly commended. We highly recommend taking a look. All the pictures are published under a CC BY attribution licence so sharing them couldn't be easier too. All the pictures were published as part of an editorial here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9

Here's some more!

CC BY Kainaat William http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9.

CC BY Kenneth J. Chapin http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9.

New publishing initiatives: from authoring to archiving and beyond

Following on from our recent post on Outernet two recent announcements about new research publication platforms have attracted attention in the Open Access community:

Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal 
Pensoft's RIO extends publication into areas it hasn’t been associated with – project proposals for grant funding and project-related reports, methods and workflows that rarely see the light of day. It also builds on current OA trends by supporting publication of data, software, and research articles much of which is increasingly the subject of funder OA mandates. It claims “the most transparent, open and public peer-review process”; Public, Formal peer review is optional and is a paid-for service. Work will typically be accepted on the basis of a “sanity check” and public peer review:

• All outputs of the research cycle including grant proposals
• Everything from STEM to HSS
• Granularity – authors can pick and choose the services they need
• Impact - category labels help define interdisciplinary research
• It claims to be low cost
• Submissions open November 2015

It builds on the ARPHA XML authoring platform that eliminates the need for typesetting and allows reviewers to comment directly on the manuscript text as well as providing a full submission and editorial system.

Ross Mounce and Daniel Meitchen, Open Access advocates who have a deep understanding of research methods and research publication are founding editors. Peter Murray-Rust, the Cambridge-based chemist and leading light of Open Access and Open Data sits on its Advisory Board. Murray-Rust is known to be in favour of transparency in the ownership, governance and structure of OA platforms as well as in peer-review. There is some evidence that supporting researchers are responding to perceived publisher self-interest and poor service and a desire to take back control of their publishing.

As Science reported recently, there is scepticism around making grant proposals public due to the competitive nature of research funding. It will be interesting to see how researchers re-use published grant proposals and whether research is done that wouldn’t have been done otherwise.  James Wilsdon’s recent report The Metric Tide pointed out that no firm conclusion can be drawn whether funded researchers receive more citations*.

Source: Priem, J. and Hemminger, B. M. 2012. Decoupling the scholarly journal. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. Image licensed under CC BY-NC.

Rua
Ubiquity Press is developing an open source book workflow management platform in response to demands from authors and editors. The source can be found on GitHub. Its main aim is to assist with monograph publishing. This would make it a direct competitor to PKP’s well-established Open Monograph Press platform. PKP also provide the Open Journal System used at St Andrews to host the Journal of Terrorism Research and other Open Access titles.

Both platforms are the result of conversations between researchers and publishers criticising closed, traditional publishing on the one hand and supporting open, adaptable models on the other.  The effect is driving rapid change in the industry, as reported by Nature.

*Supplementary Report I: Literature Review

Outernet: the first library in space

Outernet is a company that is organising a so-called ‘library in space’ designed to untether information from the restrictions imposed by the Internet. The Internet as a medium for transmitting information is of course a miraculous one, but access to it is highly dependent on communications infrastructure, which of course many developing countries lack.

Copyright Outernet 2015, https://outernet.is/

There have been projects in the past, and many on-going, to try and bring the Internet to the world on a universal level. One on-going project, which has been met with concerns over neutrality and data security, is the Internet.org project run by Facebook. Google’s Project Loon is another service that hopes to reach digitally isolated regions of the Earth. Project Loon uses balloons that travel around 20km above the surface of the Earth. The balloons utilise the wind currents at different altitudes to maintain their position relative to the Earth’s surface. The balloon can stay in the stratosphere for around 100 days, and can provide connectivity to a ground area of about 40km in diameter.

Outernet is a different sort of project to Loon and Internet.org. Where other projects aim to provide access to the Internet wholesale (although whether internet.org really does this is up for debate), Outernet is a project that seeks to distribute information uploaded to a library, and then distribute that information via satellite.

The lottery of where you are born, and therefore what information you have the rights to access, will eventually be cancelled out by Outernet.

-Outernet Chief Operating Officer Thane Richard International Business Times

Outernet began its operations in June 2014: “Since then we have moved quickly. Outernet is now multicasting on seven satellites covering 99% of humans with 1 GB/day and a test beam of 100 GB/day over Africa and Europe.” (https://outernet.is/about)

Outernet sell receivers called Lighthouses for $99, but they also offer instructions on how you can build your own. The receivers operate in a read only fashion allowing users to pick information (via a Wi-Fi enabled device) to view and download. Filling the shelves of 'Humanity's Public Library' posed significant challenges due to the limited bandwidth available via satellite. This is why the team behind Outernet decided early on to create a systematic set of guidelines for choosing what information should be shared (Outernet guidelines document). Essentially, the information is structured into four tiers.

Copyright Outernet 2015, https://librarian.outernet.is/en/

1. The Core Archive - this is relatively static and features content considered to be of high universal utility and importance. Such things include scientific studies, and classical works of fiction.
2. Globally Curated Content - Similar to the Core Archive but with a the additional emphasis on currency and regularly updated content.
3. Nationally Curated Content - this is information that is of local/national importance - effectively most of this information will be from newspapers.
4. Disaster information - information about natural disasters, wars, etc. is broadcast separately and given highest priority.

One of the early partners of the project was Harvard University, who agreed to upload content from their institutional repository DASH. Peter Suber, Director Scholarly Communications at Harvard said:

“Harvard supports open access to peer-reviewed faculty scholarship, and the participation of our open-access repository in Outernet is entirely consonant with our mission to enhance the distribution, visibility, and usage of Harvard research.” Outernet 2015

Syed Karim, CEO of Outernet, said:

“Broadcasting the academic content of one of the leading universities in the world is an enormous win for information equality.” Outernet 2015

Outernet also has partnerships with Wikipedia, the open access monographs publisher Project Gutenberg (http://blog.outernet.is/project-gutenberg-announces-partnership-with-outernet/), and Open Education Consortium; who offer free resources and tools for education.

Refreshed look for St Andrews journal hosting service

Over the summer, the University Library's journal hosting service has been given a bright new look to its welcome page.

As well as a fresh, more organised look to our range of journals, the main site provides users with the ability to search across all content.

An upgrade to the software means we can introduce additional features for readers such as citation tools, improved display of Creative Commons licences, and DOIs (coming soon).

Journal managers will be able to create their own reports on downloads, using the publishing industry standard 'COUNTER' statistics.

We are excited to continue providing this service which gives opportunities for our own staff and students to publish open access scholarly journals. We have also been working with an external hosting provider to trial an even better look and feel for one of our journals, still based on the underlying OJS software. Look out for more announcements soon!

RCUK Executive Response to the Burgess Review

As expected the Research Councils UK Executive has responded to the independent Burgess Review of its Open Access policy that we blogged in April.  

The Executive accepts and will act on all the recommendations.

Its most immediate response is to explore incorporating Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCiD) in its systems and to strongly encourage institutions and publishers to do the same.

It will also establish a joint practitioners working group made of of staff working on Open Access policy within institutions that will include representatives from learned societies and publishers. It will work on policy expression, communication and data collection and is due to meet for the first time in Autumn 2015.

Detail from cover: Review of the implementation of the RCUK Policy on Open Access
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence

Key responses

• Explore sources to track compliance data in consultation with the practitioner group.
• Work to reduce the burden of data collection on the administration of the block grant.
• Improve communication around the policy.
• Promote the mixed model of Open Access and researcher choice.
• Clarify the policy on embargo periods, the CC-BY licence requirement and promote understanding of different licence types.
• Share best practice in policy implementation across the sector.
• Consider the issues around block grant allocation within HEI departments and disciplines.

Echoing the Burgess Review, the next independent review will be postponed for one year to allow extra time to gather enough data for an evidence base.

If you are a St Andrews researcher and need help to comply with RCUK's Open Access policy or to access the block grant to pay an article processing charge, please email open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Nature survey finds attitudes towards open access are changing

(NPG), Nature Publishing Group (2015): Author Insights 2015 survey. figshare.http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1425362

Each year Nature Publishing Group and Palgrave Macmillan conduct an Author Insights Survey, the aim of which is to track changes in behaviours and attitudes towards publishing. The survey, which was published under a CC BY licence on Figshare, is available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1425362.

Overall the survey found that attitudes towards open access are softening, but there is still a lot of misunderstanding about funder open access policies.

(NPG), Nature Publishing Group (2015): Author Insights 2015 survey. figshare.http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1425362

Question 9: Reasons for not publishing OA?
The survey asked authors who had chosen not to publish OA in the past 3 years to provide their reasons for not doing so. The most common reason for deciding against OA (totalling 27% of the answers) was fear about the perceived quality of open access papers. Although this is perhaps alarming, it is actually a reduction from the previous year’s survey which saw 40% of respondents give this reason. In humanities and social sciences the drop in respondents choosing this option was from 54% in 2014 to 41% in this year’s survey. So overall this represents good news as it demonstrates that perceptions of quality are becoming less of an issue. It is also interesting to note that around the same number of respondents choose the option “I am not willing to pay an APC”. This answer too has seen a reduction year on year, from around 30% to 25% for STEM and 52% to around 42% for HSS.

(NPG), Nature Publishing Group (2015): Author Insights 2015 survey. figshare.http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1425362

Question 8: Understanding funder requirements.

25% of respondents said they didn’t know their funder’s open access requirements (20% in STEM disciplines, and 30% in Humanities and Social Sciences). Interestingly, around 23% of respondents thought their funder demanded authors publish the final published version either with an embargo or immediately via open access. In our experience funders require at the very least the accepted version, and none stipulate the final published version only. A further 6% thought their funder demanded the pre-peer review version. Again, this seems unlikely. So, what this indicates is that in all probability more than half of the respondents did not know their funder’s requirements for open access. Also interesting to note is that around 40% of those who reported that their funder required immediate OA also admitted they had not published open access.

Nature/Palgrave admit themselves that the survey is not an "academically rigorous study" nor is it particularly comprehensive. What it does highlight are general attitudes and trends. We have picked out two questions that produced particularly pertinent results. What the results of these two questions show is that overall attitudes towards open access are improving, but there are still misunderstandings about how funding bodies fit in, and what, if any, mandates for open access exist.

In a Nature Publishing Group press release Dan Penny, Head of Insights at NPG and Palgrave Macmillan said:

"Perceptions are likely to change over time as more open access publications establish strong reputations, funders mandate open access, and authors publish their best research in OA journals. Last year in particular saw a significant improvement in attitudes." (Nature Publishing Group, 2015, http://www.nature.com/press_releases/perceptions-open-access.html)

If any authors would like more information about funder open access policies, or would like any other advice about open access publishing, as ever the Open Access and Repository Publications Support team is here to help - email us at open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk. We also have a webpage detailing relevant funding bodies with open access policies.

The survey was published with a CC BY creative commons licence on Figshare here: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1425362