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Discipline-specific open access publishing practices and barriers to change: an evidence-based review.

ABSTRACT: Background: Many of the discussions surrounding Open Access (OA) revolve around how it affects publishing practices across different academic disciplines. It was a long-held view that it would be only a matter of time before all disciplines fully and relatively homogeneously implemented OA. Recent large-scale bibliometric studies show, however, that the uptake of OA differs substantially across disciplines. We aimed to answer two questions: First, how do different disciplines adopt and shape OA publishing practices? Second, what discipline-specific barriers to and potentials for OA can be identified? Methods: In a first step, we identified and synthesized relevant bibliometric studies that assessed OA prevalence and publishing patterns across disciplines. In a second step, and adopting a social shaping of technology perspective, we studied evidence on the socio-technical forces that shape OA publishing practices. We examined a variety of data sources, including, but not limited to, publisher policies and guidelines, OA mandates and policies and author surveys. Results: Over the last three decades, scholarly publishing has experienced a shift from "closed" access to OA as the proportion of scholarly literature that is openly accessible has increased continuously. Estimated OA levels for publication years after 2010 varied between 29.4% and 66%. The shift towards OA is uneven across disciplines in two respects: first, the growth of OA has been uneven across disciplines, which manifests itself in varying OA prevalence levels. Second, disciplines use different OA publishing channels to make research outputs OA. Conclusions: We conclude that historically rooted publishing practices differ in terms of their compatibility with OA, which is the reason why OA can be assumed to be a natural continuation of publishing cultures in some disciplines, whereas in other disciplines, the implementation of OA faces major barriers and would require a change of research culture.

SUBMITTER: Severin A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7194335 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Discipline-specific open access publishing practices and barriers to change: an evidence-based review.

Severin Anna A Egger Matthias M Eve Martin Paul MP Hürlimann Daniel D

F1000Research 20181211

<b>Background:</b> Many of the discussions surrounding Open Access (OA) revolve around how it affects publishing practices across different academic disciplines. It was a long-held view that it would be only a matter of time before all disciplines fully and relatively homogeneously implemented OA. Recent large-scale bibliometric studies show, however, that the uptake of OA differs substantially across disciplines. We aimed to answer two questions: First, how do different disciplines adopt and sh ...[more]

PMID: 32399178

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Project description:IntroductionThe majority of the open access publishing allows the researchers to publish their articles for a fee and at the same time enables the readers to access the research without paying the expensive journal subscription charges. Under the garb of open access publishing, predatory journals run a scam to dupe the researchers of money. This study was conducted to highlight the characteristics of pseudojournals and increase the awareness about their modus operandi.MethodsThe email inboxes of 3 academic urologists (APS, AS, and KP) were searched for emails soliciting articles for open access journals. A list of all such journals was compiled. These journals were checked for metrics from the Journal Citation Reports and the Scimago Journal Rankings. All these journals were then cross-checked with the available whitelists and blacklists. Features pointing toward a pseudo journal were identified as red flag signs for these journals and were noted. A literature search was performed on open access publishing and predatory journals, and the salient points were noted. A checklist of red flag signs was compiled.ResultsA total of 71 emails soliciting article submissions from 68 journals were received by the three urologists (APS, AS, KP). Of these, 54 were highly suggestive of being a pseudojournal, 5 journals were operating in the gray zone between genuine open access journals and outright predatory journals, and 9 were genuine open access journals. A total of 33 articles on predatory journals were reviewed after the literature search as per the PRISMA guidelines. The red flag signs identified along with the literature review were used to create the SAFEiMAP checklist, which can be used to identify predatory journals.ConclusionPredatory journals have infiltrated the whitelists, and the indexing databases like PubMed and no blacklist is all-inclusive. Understanding the concept and the types of open access publishing gives the researchers a better idea on how to differentiate fake journals from the genuine ones. Using a checklist will help to identify the red flag signs of such journals and identify those journals that operate in the gray zone.

Dataset Information

Discipline-specific open access publishing practices and barriers to change: an evidence-based review.

Publications

Discipline-specific open access publishing practices and barriers to change: an evidence-based review.

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