Open access: a medical association perspective

The benefits claimed for open access publishing in the medical area are subjected to evaluation and question. It is represented that these benefits are, in many cases, illusory or doubtful.     

Open access: what comes next?

This article examines the effects that present decisions about open access (OA) will have over the next ten years. It will be shown that the consequences are affected both by deliberate choices of policy by librarians and publishers, as well as by the adoption of various alternatives by scientific authors. The eventual result could be excellent, or quite otherwise.     

Open access: scientists as paradoxical consumers

The potential dangers of open access journals to the publishing activities of learned societies and thus to their financial stability and to the other activities they support are described. The interests of scientists in respect of access to research information may be opposed to their interests as members of learned societies.     

Open access developments in France: the HAL Open Archives System

This article presents an overview of open access publishing and open access archiving in France. In natural sciences, most articles are published in international journals; authors must therefore comply with the policies of their publishers, irrespective of their nationality. For humanities and social sciences, where publication tends to be distributed among many small journals, portals have been created to provide electronic publishing, with varied access policies. Open archives repositories have been in existence in France since 2001; from 2006, a proactive policy led the main research agencies and universities to coordinate their actions towards a common archiving platform, HAL (Hyper Articles on Line), operated by CNRS (Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique), with individual portals, either thematic or institutional. HAL stores now the majority of open access records – presently some 10–15% of French output – and is growing almost exponentially.     

Open access and predatory publishing: a survey of the publishing practices of academic pharmacists and nurses in the United States

Objective:Academics are under great pressure to publish their research, the rewards for which are well known (tenure, promotion, grant funding, professional prestige). As open access publishing gains acceptance as a publishing option, researchers may choose a “predatory publisher.” The purpose of this study is to investigate the motivations and rationale of pharmacy and nursing academics in the United States to publish in open access journals that may be considered “predatory.”Methods:A 26-item questionnaire was programmed in Qualtrics and distributed electronically to approximately 4,500 academic pharmacists and nurses, 347 of whom completed questionnaires (~8%). Pairwise correlations were performed followed by a logistic regression to evaluate statistical associations between participant characteristics and whether participants had ever paid an article processing fee (APF).Results:Participants who had published more articles, were more familiar with predatory publishing, and who were more concerned about research metrics and tenure were more likely to have published in open access journals. Moderate to high institutional research intensity has an impact on the likelihood of publishing open access. The majority of participants who acknowledged they had published in a predatory journal took no action after realizing the journal was predatory and reported no negative impact on their career for having done so.ConclusionThe results of this study provide data and insight into publication decisions made by pharmacy and nursing academics. Gaining a better understanding of who publishes in predatory journals and why can help address the problems associated with predatory publishing at the root.     

Open access policy implementation: first results compared

Open Access policy implementation is a tough job. Policy pioneers have faced considerable challenges in meeting their own aims and achieving recognized success. Professionals charged with implementing policy typically need several years to accomplish significant progress. This is a study of first results from a small but significant number of cases with an emphasis on variety and on defining a methodological standard. All cases have been reconstructed through documents and interviews. The most salient issues of policy implementation are investigated comparatively, namely (i) the matching infrastructure that a policy requires; (ii) the issue of capturing content and scholarly compliance; (iii) how to provide access to the content and foster usage; (iv) and the benefits offered to authors. As the author is pivotal to any open access solution, this provides a comparative perspective for delineating a policy research agenda.     

“开放存取”与高校图书馆的应对策略

文章简要分析了开放存取三个不同的含义,介绍了开放存取的研究和发展趋势,指出高校图书馆引入开放存取既是形势所迫,也是义不容辞,并从高校图书馆的定位、资源的引进和自主建设等方面提出了应对的策略.     

开放存取:学术信息交流的新模式

开放存取是一种全新的学术交流模式。文章分析了开放存取出版产生的历史背景、基本特征、实现模式等，并就开放存取过程中出现的相关问题和发展前景进行了初浅探讨。     

Open access publications in sciences and social sciences: A comparative analysis

In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis to examine the characteristics and evolutionary trends of open access (OA) publications in natural and social sciences. We use data recorded by Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Journal Citation Reports during 2001–2015 as the main source. We then comparatively analyse the characteristics of natural and social sciences in terms of historical evolution, main contributors, and distribution of OA journals and publications across different languages, disciplines, and impact factor quartiles. Our results suggest that both natural and social sciences experienced dramatic growth of OA journals since 2009, but the share of social science OA journals within journal impact factor quartile 1 is much lower than that of natural sciences. While natural and social sciences share some similarities in OA publishing activities, such as main countries of contribution, they differ greatly in dimensions such as OA ratio across specific disciplines, countries, and publishing languages. We acknowledge that OA publishing offers a level playing field for traditionally disadvantaged languages, countries, and scientific disciplines, but meanwhile, the advancement of high‐quality OA publishing needs more targeted and sophisticated approaches to tackle differences in natural and social sciences.     

Open access central funds in UK universities

This paper reports on the extent to which higher education institutions in the UK have set up central funds and similar institutionally co‐ordinated approaches to the payment of open access article‐processing charges. It presents data demonstrating that central funds have only been set up by a minority of institutions and that the number of institutions has not changed significantly between 2009 and 2011. It then explores the barriers to the establishment of such funds and discusses recent developments that might lower these barriers. Finally, it provides a case study of the development of the central fund at the University of Nottingham in the UK and considers the sustainability of such an approach.     

Open access foreign scientific resources and the SciGuide navigator

This paper outlines the reasons that open access resources are required and the developmental patterns of open access models, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of open access information flows; it introduces a navigator that has been created as a tool for the use of open access resources. It also contains an analysis of statistical data about the use of this tool, including the results of surveys and interviews with the experts from one of the top research institutes of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and presents the authors’ ideas about the role of libraries in the open access movement.