The future of academic publishing: what is open access?

Open Access Publications with Article Processing Charge (APC) Payment: a Brazilian Scenario Analysis

The expansion of open access publications has been correlated with specific government policies in many countries. The evolution in these cases is understandable within the framework of funding regulations. However, this is not the case for Brazil, where no regulation is currently in place. The unusually high percentage of open access publications in the Brazilian scientific community is analyzed here toward understanding which factors influence this growth and how similar effects may also impact other countries, particularly developing nations. We found that from 2012 to 2019 the Brazilian scientific community drifted to international open access journals. This transition is discussed in the framework of mega journals.

Drivers of article processing charges in open access

Large publishing companies have been dominating scientific publishing for long, which leads to high subscription fees and inhibited access to scientific knowledge. At digital era, the opportunity of an unrestricted access appears feasible, because the cost of publishing should be low. It is no longer the readers and libraries to pay subscription fees, but scientific organizations and authors themselves who pay for the cost of having their article published. As the data shows, there is a tremendous variance of article processing charges (APC) across journals, which obviously cannot be explained by the costs. One of the explanatory variables could be reputation, but it only contributes less than 5% to the variance in average APC. This study is meant to shed light on the various determinants of APC. Based on the data from the OpenAPC Initiative, the Directory of Open Access Journals and three different datasets of Web of Science, we employ ANOVAs and multivariate regressions. The results show that market power plays an important role to explain APC, inter alia, through market concentration, market position of individual publishers (publisher size), and the choice of hybrid publishing model.

Open Access Journal Policies: A Systematic Analysis of Radiology Journals

OBJECTIVE

The open access movement has pushed for greater access to scientific knowledge by expanding access to scientific journal articles. There is limited information about the extent to which open access policies have been adopted by radiology journals. We performed a systematic analysis to ascertain the proportion of radiology journals with open access options.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A search was performed with the assistance of a clinical informationist. Full and mixed English-language diagnostic and interventional radiology Web of Science journals (impact factors > 1.0) were included. Nuclear medicine, radiation oncology, physics, and solicitation-only journals were excluded. Primary outcome was open access option (yes or no) with additional outcomes including presence or absence of embargo, complete or partial copyright transfer, publication fees, and self-archiving policies. Secondary outcomes included journal citations, journal impact factors, immediacy, Eigenfactor, and article influence scores. Independent double readings were performed with differences resolved by consensus, supplemented by contacting editorial staff at each journal.

RESULTS

In all, 125 journals were identified; review yielded 49 journals (39%, mean impact factor of 2.61). Thirty-six of the journals had open access options (73.4%), and four journals were exclusively open access (8.2%). Twelve-month embargoes were most commonly cited (90.6%) with 28.6% of journals stating that they did not require a complete transfer of copyright. Prices for open access options ranged from $750 to $4,000 (median $3,000). No statistically significant differences were found in journal impact measures comparing journals with open access options to journals without open access options.

CONCLUSIONS

Diagnostic and interventional radiology journals have widely adopted open access options with a few radiology journals being exclusively open access.

We should be just a number and we should embrace it

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to support the use of unique identifiers for the authors of scientific publications. This, the authors believe, aligns with the views of many others, as it would solve the problem of author disambiguation. If every researcher had a unique identifier, there would be significant opportunities to provide even more services. These extensions are proposed in this paper.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors discuss the bibliographic services that are currently available. This leads to a discussion of how these services could be developed and extended.

Findings

The authors suggest a number of ways that a unique identifier for scientific authors could support many other areas of importance to the scientific community. This will provide a much more robust system that provides a much richer and more easily maintained, scientific environment.

Originality/value

The scientific community lags behind most other communities with regard to the way it identifies individuals. Even if the current vision for a unique identifier for authors was to become more widespread, there would still be many areas where the community could improve its operations. This viewpoint paper suggests some of these, along with a financial model that could underpin the functionality.

New facilities provided by the medicine and internet

A világháló jelentőségét felfedezése, kialakítása után rögtön felismerték az orvosok, akkoriban elsősorban a kapcsolattartás eszközeként használták. 2004 óta egy új kifejezés, a web 2.0 látott napvilágot, amely a közösségi webet takarja. Olyan szolgáltatásokról van szó, amelyek többsége ingyenes, és használatuk nem igényel informatikai tudást, valamint a felhasználó számára lehetővé teszi a visszajelzést a szolgáltatóhoz. A szerzők cikkükben rövid összefoglalást adnak a web 2.0 orvosi felhasználásáról. Az orvosi információ demokratizálódása ebben a nagyrészt empirikus tudományban és a hozzá tartozó hierarchikus struktúrában, mint a legtöbb fejlődés, a már látható előnyök mellett számos, még kiszámíthatatlan, de megelőzhető veszéllyel is jár. Ezért a szerzők javasolják, hogy az orvosok, egészségügyi dolgozók ne csak passzív befogadói, hanem aktív előállítói legyenek az internetes információnak.