Tag Archives: scholarly publishing

Project to Watch: SocArXiv

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socarxiv

In a recent post, we argued that preprints are having a moment. Here’s further proof: this week, the Center for Open Science and the University of Maryland launched a new repository for social science research, called SocArXiv (the name comes in part from the well-known preprint repository arXiv). Currently, there is a temporary home for the repository here, with a more robust platform coming in the near future. In addition to preprints, SocArXiv also accepts conference papers, working papers, datasets and code. The project is being led by Philip N. Cohen, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. The steering committee includes scholars, librarians, and open access advocates.

Interested in submitting? Just e-mail socarxiv-Preprint@osf.io from your primary e-mail address. Put the title of your work in the subject line, and the abstract in the body of your e-mail. Then attach the work as a PDF or Word file. Finally, hit send. Your scholarship should appear on the site shortly and you should be automatically registered for an Open Science Framework account. Use this account to go into the page for your work on the site and add any relevant tags. Just make sure that you have the rights to anything you post. If you’re not sure, check your publication agreement or search SHERPA/RoMEO, a database of publisher copyright and self-archiving policies. And remember: this method of submission is only temporary. Once the permanent SocArXiv platform is up and running we will update this post.

Some researchers may wonder why they should post their work to SocArXiv, when there are so many other options, including another open access repository, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). SSRN was founded in 1994 by Wayne Marr, a professor of finance, and Michael Jensen, and professor of business administration. It includes scholarship from a range of disciplines, from accounting to economics to political science. The business model of SSRN has always been different than most other open access repositories. Unlike arXiV, which is based at Cornell University and funded by grants and library support, SSRN is a privately-held corporation. While all deposited papers are free for users to read, SSRN also offers paid content to users through its partnerships with other publishers (such as Wiley-Blackwell). In May of this year, a major change came to SSRN when the platform was bought by Elsevier, a large Dutch company that publishes some of the world’s top journals. Elsevier also owns the reference manager Mendeley. SSRN’s management claims that all the scholarship on the site will remain free. They also argue that Elsevier’s ownership will only make SSRN better, providing them with the resources they need to make much needed improvements in the design and functionality of the site. Many scholars, librarians, and other experts, however, are worried. They wonder what Elsevier will do with all the scholarly data it now owns, and how the company will try to monetize that data. Similar concerns have been raised about other popular scholarly sharing platforms, including Academia.edu and ResearchGate. Kevin Smith, the Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas, has called this trend “the commodification of the professoriate.”  SocArXiv, then, offers a non-commercial alternative that puts scholars’ interests first.

New Digital Publishing Platforms Scholars Need to Know About

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Digitalbook

UPDATE: The Manifold platform has now launched.

Are you in the process of writing a book or journal article? Have you been thinking about how you might present some or all of your research digitally? Over the past ten years, university presses, libraries, and others in higher education have started building the infrastructure necessary to support the creation of high-quality, peer-reviewed digital work. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has provided the start-up funds for many of these projects. One of the first digital publishing platforms that the Mellon Foundation funded was Scalar, which was developed at the University of Southern California on behalf of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Scalar is currently being used by a number of different publishers, including the University of California Press and Duke University Press, to publish both born-digital scholarship and digital companions to print monographs. Scholars can also use Scalar to self-publish their work. Recently, the Mellon Foundation has funded other exciting efforts in this area. All share a common belief that scholars and publishers need to think beyond the traditional print monograph. Here are four new projects, all currently in development, worth watching:

Vega is a digital publishing platform being developed under the direction of West Virginia University for books, journals, projects, data sets, and other scholarly output. The Vega team is particularly interested in streamlining the production and editorial process for publishers. Unlike some existing platforms (such as Open Journal Systems), Vega will be completely customizable. Look for it to launch in 2018.

Editoria is a digital-first book production platform being developed by the California Digital Library, the University of California Press and the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation. Like Vega, it is designed to simplify the publishing workflow process in order to help lower production costs. A beta version of Editoria is planned for release in late 2016/early 2017.

Fulcrum is a digital publishing platform being developed by the University of Michigan Library and Press. Fulcrum will make it easier for authors who want to link their source material to their scholarship. The resulting digital piece can be published as a supplement to a print book, or can even take the place of a print book. One of Fulcrum’s early adopters will be Lever Press, a new press run by a group of leading liberal arts colleges that plans to publish open access, digitally native scholarly monographs.

Manifold Scholarship is a digital book production platform being developed by the University of Minnesota Press and the GC Digital Scholarship Lab at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Similar to Scalar, Manifold aims to help authors create media-rich scholarship that is nonlinear and allows for reader feedback. Although the Manifold platform is not yet live, the University of Minnesota Press has begun considering potential book projects.

 

The Past, Present, and Future of Preprints

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arXiv

Preprints seem to be having a moment. Last week, the registration agency CrossRef announced that they will soon allow members to assign DOIs (digital object identifiers) to preprints, just as they do for published articles. In making this change, CrossRef is acknowledging that preprints are an important part of the scholarly publishing ecosystem. In addition, back in March, a group of biologists made it into the New York Times for advocating for the use of preprints in their own discipline. At the same time, many academics still don’t know much about preprints or why they matter.

In general, a preprint is a piece of scholarship that has not yet been peer reviewed (and thus, hasn’t been published in a scholarly journal). It is related to a postprint, which has been peer reviewed, but has not been properly formatted by the publisher. Confusingly, the term preprint is sometimes also used to describe a postprint. Preprints have a long history, but people have been trying to collect and distribute them in a more formal way since the 1940s. The first online archive for preprints, arXiv, was launched in 1991 by Paul A. Ginsparg, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Ginsparg is now a professor at Cornell University). Ginsparg hoped that arXiv (originally called xxx.lanl.gov) would help “level the research playing field,” by granting anyone with an internet connection access to the latest scholarship in high-energy physics, for free. He also knew it would help researchers get their work out into the world faster than ever before. Almost twenty-five years later, arXiv hosts over 1 million preprints from disciplines including mathematics, computer science and statistics. As New York University Professor of Physics David Hogg noted in a recent Wired article, “When I give seminars, I give the arXiv numbers for my papers. Why? Because I know that my arXiv papers are available to any audience member, no matter what their institutional affiliation or library support.” Thanks in part to the success of arXiv, scholars in other disciplines are now considering making drafts of their work public, including those in the humanities. In CORE, the Modern Language Association’s new digital repository, 25% of the articles are preprints or postprints.

So, why should academics, particularly those outside of the sciences, care about preprints? These days, more and more scholars are sharing copies of their work online (see our recent post on Academia.edu). Since most scholars do not own the copyright to their work, however, they may not have permission from the publisher to do so. One way to get around this is by sharing a preprint. While the vast majority of publishers will not allow a scholar to make the final version of their article (also known as the publisher’s version/PDF) freely available, they often allow the sharing of a preprint and/or postprint through an institutional repository or a personal website. According to SHERPA/RoMEO, a database of journal policies, 79% of publishers formerly allow for some kind of self-archiving.

It’s important to point out that not everyone in the academy agrees that the posting of preprints is a good idea. Some scholars worry that if they share their ideas too early, they might get stolen. Others correctly note that a preprint is not a substitute for a peer-reviewed journal article (which remains the gold standard for getting tenure). Finally, there are more general concerns about sharing work before it has been thoroughly vetted or revised. However, one recent study compared over 9,000 preprints from arXiv to their final published versions. The authors ultimately found that there were very few differences between the two versions.

Have you shared a preprint of your work online before? Why or why not?

 

All About ORCID

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Orcid

One of the problems many researchers face is that they have the same name as another scholar working in a similar field. In addition, a researcher’s name might change over the course of their career, or they may use different variations of their name (such as a nickname or middle initial) depending on where they publish. So, given these challenges, how can you make sure that you are being properly recognized for all of your scholarship?

Launched in 2012, ORCID (“Open Researcher and Contributor ID”) is a global non-profit organization the provides researchers with free unique persistent identifiers (basically, 16-digit numbers). These identifiers are stored in a central registry, so that others can find you and your work. While there are a number of different types of author identifiers out there, including ResearchID (from Web of Science) and SCOPUS Author ID, ORCID is quickly becoming the standard, in large part because it is not tied to a particular publisher or platform. Instead, ORCID is an open, community-driven organization. To date, over two million researchers have registered for ORCID identifiers.

More and more journals, publishers, and funding agencies are collecting ORCID identifiers from researchers. In fact, in a recent letter, several major journals and publishers, including The Royal Society, PLOS, and Science, explained that they will now require all researchers who publish with them to have an ORCID identifier.

Creating an ORCID identifier is easy: simply use your e-mail address to register, then add as much or as little information as you want. Adding your scholarship is a good first step. You can add work manually, import your citations from a BibTeX (.bib) file, or search ORCID’s many data sources to find and link your work. One of the great things about ORCID is that it supports 37 different kinds of scholarly output, including books and articles, but also inventions, conference posters, data sets, and even artistic performances. You don’t have to be a scientist to use and benefit from ORCID. Your profile can also include information about your education, funding, and employment history. Although profiles are public, you control who can see what in your profile. You have three choices: make your information publicly available, share it with trusted sources (such as your library), or keep it private. It’s up to you. Once you have an ORCID identifier, you can use it when submitting journal articles and grant applications. You can also display your identifier on your personal or departmental website. You can even buy custom ORCID mugs and stickers!

It is important to note that ORCID does not try to verify the information researchers provide. Basically, they depend on researchers to be honest about their scholarship.

Have you signed up for an ORCID identifier? How do you use it?

Paying for Peer Review?

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peerreview

“Peer Review” by AJCann is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

A recent article in Times Higher Education reports that a new British publisher, Veruscript, plans to pay authors for their peer review work. Although paying for peer review is not a new idea, it is only recently that scholarly journals have begun to experiment with the practice.

Perhaps the most prominent mega-journal that pays for peer review is Collabra, which is published open access by the University of California Press. Launched in 2015, Collabra publishes scholarship on life and biomedical sciences, ecology and environmental sciences, and social and behavioral sciences. To cover the costs of making articles freely available, Collabra charges authors an article processing charge (or APC) of $875. Collabra then takes a portion of that money ($250) and places it in a fund to pay editors and reviewers. Reviewers are offered money no matter whether they accept or reject a manuscript. Reviewers can choose to take the money outright, donate it to the Collabra APC waiver fund, or donate it to their own intitution’s open access publishing fund. The amount is low enough that scholars are not motivated to review just because of the money, yet it’s a small way to reward the academic labor that goes into reviewing articles.

Still, the practice of paying for peer review remains controversial within the academy. Many academics feel that peer review is a community service that should not be monetized. Serving as a peer reviewer, they argue, is simply part of one’s job as a scholar. Others point out that there are ways to reward peer reviewers without actually paying them. The Molecular Ecologist, for example, publishes a yearly list of its best reviewers. The open access mega-journal PeerJ offers another kind of incentive for peer reviewers. Under their economic model, individuals pay a flat fee for membership. Membership allows authors to submit papers and preprints. However, in order for authors to keep their membership from lapsing, they must submit one “review” a year. This can be an informal review, such as a comment on an article, or a formally requested peer review (which is by invitation only). Finally, the for-profit company Publons showcases the work of peer reviewers by making it possible for scholars to create Publons-verified profiles in which they list all the journals they have reviewed for. Publons claims that their model will help scholars get credit for what is usually invisible work, as well as give them another way to demonstrate their subject expertise.

What do you think? Should reviewers be compensated for their work?

How Much Does it Cost to Produce a Scholarly Monograph?

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universitypress

“Cambridge University Press” by Lezan is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

University presses have long played a crucial role in disseminating scholarship. Over time, however, sales of scholarly monographs have declined, while the cost of producing them has not. This has led to what many people refer to as a “crisis” in scholarly publishing.

While this “crisis” has been around for decades, only now, thanks in large part to the digital revolution, are we seeing university presses start to experiment with new business models. The University of California Press, for example, recently launched an imprint called Luminos where authors, rather than readers, help the press cover their costs. For authors who publish with Luminos, the UC Press charges a baseline fee of $15,000. UC Press and its library partners absorb some of that cost, but the author is expected to pay between $5,000 and $7,500. The thought is that the author will not necessarily pay this money out of pocket, but that they will be able to find financial support from their department, provost, or library. Indeed, over 50 university libraries in the United States now have some kind of Open Access Publishing Fund, which is designed to support authors publishing open access articles or books. A Luminos book goes through the same editorial process (including peer review), that all other UC Press books go through. Unlike a traditional monograph, however, once published, the Luminos book is made available open access, so that anyone can read or download a copy for free. A print version is also available for sale (which helps UC Press recoup more of its costs).

It is important to point out that although UC Press has set $15,000 as their fee, this does not mean that $15,000 is the full cost of publishing a book. The actual cost could be higher or lower. One difficulty presses are facing when it comes to changing their business models is that it’s hard to say just how much it costs to produce a scholarly monograph.

Recently, the research group Ithaka S+R tried to find out. They interviewed 20 university presses from across the United States. These presses ranged in size from small (annual revenue under $1.5 million, with only about 10 employees) to large (annual revenue over $6 million, with almost 80 employees). All together, they analyzed 382 titles (all published in 2014). Ithaka S+R estimated costs at every stage of a book’s production, from acquisition to editorial to copyediting to design to marketing. What they found was that the cost of publishing scholarly monographs ranged widely, from $15,140 to $129,909. The overall average full cost of a book was $39,892. Staff time was, unsurprisingly, the biggest cost associated with producing a book. In addition, acquisitions work was the most expensive activity. Ithaka S+R also sought to understand what makes certain books more expensive to produce. They found that longer books, as well as books with illustrations do cost more. An author’s first book, however, was not more expensive than later books.

Despite Ithaka S+R’s well-researched report, more work still needs to be done on this important issue, particularly into why the costs vary so widely. In addition, presses are just beginning to publish digital projects, and the costs of producing this type of scholarship are largely unknown.

Towards an Open Future for Books

Temple University Press, ,

unlatched

“Unlocked” by samstockton is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Knowledge Unlatched is a not-for-profit organization that makes scholarly books in the social sciences and the humanities free for anyone to read. By doing so, it helps excellent peer-reviewed scholarship reach new audiences. It works like this: publishers submit several titles to Knowledge Unlatched. Then, the organization’s Library Selection Task Force chooses the best books submitted. Once the titles are chosen, Knowledge Unlatched coordinates with publishers to come up with the basic cost of publishing the book. Libraries around the world pledge a certain amount of money to help reach that amount. The more libraries that contribute, the lower the cost for each library. When the total amount is reached, a Creative Commons licensed PDF of the book is made available open access through OAPEN and HathiTrust. This version does not carry any DRM restrictions, like many ebooks. Although the digital version is free, a print version can still be sold by the publisher.

Knowledge Unlatched launched in 2014 with twenty-eight books. Temple University Press was one of thirteen publishers who participated in the first round of the project, with the book, Constructing Muslims in France by Jennifer Fredett (2014). You can read the book here. This week, Knowledge Unlatched announced that they had received enough pledges from libraries to make seventy-eight new scholarly monographs open access. The list includes three titles from Temple University Press:

Peter O’Brian, The Muslim Question in Europe (2016)

Jennifer Riggan, The Struggling State: Nationalism, Militarism, and the Education of Eritrea (2016)

David Spener, We Shall Not Be Moved/No nos moverán (2016)

Although the benefits of Knowledge Unlatched to readers are clear, you may wonder why publishers are willing to participate in such a project. According to the Director of Temple University Press, Mary Rose Muccie, “The program is a win for us and for our authors.” She continues, “The Knowledge Unlatched model takes into account the current realities of our business and allows us to recoup many costs as well as to continue to sell print and electronic editions. Being chosen for inclusion in the program reflects the quality of the title, and because of broad access and use, we have the opportunity to get our name in front of a large group of people interested in what we publish. It’s been a great experience for the Press and we’re looking forward to continuing to partner with Knowledge Unlatched and to expanding our participation as the program grows.”