Search results

The purpose of this paper is to determine the relationship between the access mode of research articles [Open Access (OA) and Toll-Access (TA)] and their subsequent citation counts in Biological and Physical Sciences in three Impact factor zones (High, Medium and Low).

Three subjects each from Biological Sciences (Biochemistry, Cell Biology and Genetics) and Physical Sciences (Astronomy, Oceanography and Optics) were selected for the study. A comprehensive list of journals (TA and OA) in select subjects of Biological and Physical Sciences was prepared by consulting Journal Citation Report’s Master Journal List (for the compilation of both Open Access and Toll Access journal list) and Directory of Open Access Journals (for the compilation of Open Access journal list). For each journal, essential details like content language, format, year of publication, access mode (Open Access or Toll Access), etc. were obtained from Ulrich’s Periodical Directory. Web of Science (WoS) was used as citations indexing tool in this study. The data set was run on the WoS to collect the citation data.

The results of the study indicate that open mode of access is not a prerequisite for higher citation boost as in the majority of the cases in this study, TA articles have garnered a greater number of citations as compared to open access articles in different Impact factor zones in Biological and Physical Sciences.

A novel approach has been adopted to understand and compare the research impact of open access (OA) and toll access (TA) journal articles in the field of Biological and Physical Sciences at three Impact factor zone levels to reveal the citation metrics encompassing three parameters, i.e. citedness, average citation count and year wise distribution of citations in select subjects of Biological and Physical Sciences.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/[DOI]/10.1108/OIR-01-2021-0029

This paper aims to analyze open access (OA) scholarly publishing patterns as well as OA policies and mandates across European countries.

The study is based on a descriptive research approach using data from Web resources, directories and bibliographic and citation databases, namely, DOAJ, OpenDOAR, SCImago journal and Country Ranking portal, ROARMAP and Web of Science.

The findings indicate that the initiatives and measures in Europe that promote OA are adequate. OA journals and digital repositories have progressively increased over the past two decades. Of the total journals (n = 25,231) published worldwide and indexed in Scopus, 53% are published in European countries, with 23.7% being OA journals. In total, 34% of the OA repositories (n = 5,714) are in European countries. The proportion of OA journal papers has grown significantly in all European countries, with a 14.3% annual growth rate. The average proportion of OA publications in European countries is significantly higher (39.07%) than the world average (30.16%), with a clear inclination for making research literature openly accessible via the green OA route (79.41%) compared to the gold OA route (52.30%). Most European research funders and institutions have required researchers to make OA available for their research findings, either by publishing them in OA journals or depositing accepted manuscripts in repositories.

The study analyzed OA trends in Europe; other continents and countries were not included in the analysis. The study only described OA policies and mandates; the extent to which the OA policies and mandates were implemented was not studied. However, the results of the study may be helpful to policymakers, funders, research institutions and universities in other countries in adopting and implementing OA policies and mandates.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is the first that used multiple data sources for investigating different facets of OA publishing in European countries, including OA journals, digital repositories, research output, mandates and policies for publicly funded research. The findings will be helpful for researchers and policymakers interested in promoting OA adoption among researchers worldwide.

Open-access repositories (OARs) are essential for openly disseminating intellectual knowledge on the internet and providing free access to it. The current study aims to evaluate the growth and development of OARs in the field of technology by investigating several characteristics such as coverage, OA policies, software type, content type, yearly growth, repository type and geographic contribution.

The directory of OARs acts as the source for data harvesting, which provides a quality-assured list of OARs across the globe.

The study found that 125 nations contributed a total of 4,045 repositories in the field of research, with the USA leading the list with the most repositories. Maximum repositories were operated by institutions having multidisciplinary approaches. The DSpace and Eprints were the preferred software types for repositories. The preferred upload content by contributors was “research articles” and “electronic thesis and dissertations”.

The study is limited to the subject area technology as listed in OpenDOAR; therefore, the results may differ in other subject areas.

The work can benefit researchers across disciplines and, interested researchers can take this study as a base for evaluating online repositories. Moreover, policymakers and repository managers could also get benefitted from this study.

The study is the first of its kind, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to investigate the repositories of subject technology in the open-access platform.

The paper seeks to introduce the “critical open access literacy” construct as a holistic approach to confront the challenges in open access (OA) as a dimension of scholarly communication.

The paper first introduces the concepts of information literacy (IL) and OA in the context of transformations in the scholarly information environment. Via a theoretical-analytical exercise on the basis of a literature review of the intersections between the two concepts and of the criticisms of OA, the paper discusses the role of critical IL in addressing the challenges in OA and lays the theoretical-conceptual groundwork for the critical OA literacy construct.

The structural nature of the challenges and transformations in the scholarly information environment require new foci and pedagogical practices in library and information studies. A more holistic, critical and integrative approach to OA is warranted, which could effectively be achieved through the re-conceptualization of IL.

The paper specifies the avenues for putting the theoretical conceptualizations of critical OA literacy into practice by identifying possible foci for IL instruction alongside a transformed role for librarians.

The paper extends deliberations on the role of critical IL for scholarly communication and attempts to advance the research fields of the two domains by proposing a new construct situated at the junction of OA and IL.

Open access (OA) is often considered as particularly beneficial to researchers in the global south. However, research into awareness of and attitudes to OA has been largely dominated by voices from the global north. A survey was conducted of 507 researchers from the developing world and connected to INASP's AuthorAID project to ascertain experiences and attitudes to OA publishing. The survey revealed problems for the researchers in gaining access to research literature in the first place. There was a very positive attitude to OA research and OA journals, but when selecting a journal in which to publish, OA was seen as a much less important criterion than factors relating to international reputation. Overall, a majority of respondents had published in an OA journal and most of these had paid an article processing charge. Knowledge and use of self-archiving via repositories varied, and only around 20% had deposited their research in an institutional repository. The study also examined attitudes to copyright, revealing most respondents had heard of Creative Commons licences and were positive about the sharing of research for educational use and dissemination, but there was unease about research being used for commercial purposes. Respondents revealed a surprisingly positive stance towards openly sharing research data, although many revealed that they would need further guidance on how to do so. The survey also revealed that the majority had received emails from so called “predatory” publishers and that a small minority had published in them.

The number of open access repositories (OARs) has been growing globally, but faculty members have been reluctant to embrace OAR and submit their work. While there are studies that looked at sociotechnical factors that affect faculty participation in OARs, this study aims to explore how the individual characteristics of faculty might impact faculty willingness to deposit their work in an OAR.

The survey was distributed to all faculty at a large public university in the USA who were identified as having their primary job responsibilities in teaching and research. This study used a correlational analysis between faculty individual characteristics (i.e. age, rank, status and academic discipline) and their willingness to deposit their work.

The findings show that there is a difference in faculty familiarity with open access (OA) principles and faculty awareness of OA policy based on individual characteristics. Furthermore, these individual characteristics have a significant impact on faculty willingness to participate in OARs. While this study reveals a significant correlation between the faculty intent to deposit and the respondent’s academic discipline, rank and status, there are other factors that affect faculty intent to participate in OAR, such as familiarity with OA principles and awareness of institution’s OA Policy.

There were no significant responses from the Colleges of Science or Health and Public Service and, therefore, did not yield any statistically significant results. Measuring the university’s promotion system was outside the scope of this research.

Results of this research can provide insight on how individual characteristics of faculty might impact their willingness to embrace OA publishing in general and OARs in particular.

The findings from this research will be a valuable source of information for librarians and OA staff in developing more effective outreach programs to increase faculty participation in OA and OARs.

This study reveals that individual faculty traits do have an impact on faculty willingness to participate in OARs. The academic discipline was found to make the most significant difference in faculty intent to deposit their work in an OAR. However, due to the ever-changing landscape of OA publishing and the ongoing outreach efforts by librarians, the faculty members’ perception and participation in OARs is likely to evolve.

This study aims to analyze Open Access (OA) publishing trends and policy perspectives in India. Different aspects, such as the growth of OA journals digital repositories, the proportion of OA availability to research literature and the status of OA mandates and policies are studied.

Data for analyzing OA trends were gathered from multiple data sources, including Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), OpenDOAR, SCImago and Web of Science (WoS) databases. DOAJ and OpenDOAR were used for extracting OA journals and digital repository data. SCImago Journal and Country ranking portal and WoS database were used to obtain Indian publication data for assessing the proportion of OA to research literature. ROARMAP was used to study OA mandates and policies adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders in India. OA mandates and policies of major regulatory bodies and funding agencies were also reviewed using secondary sources of information and related websites.

India ranks number 15 and 17 globally for OA journals and OA repositories, with 317 journals and 98 repositories. Although India’s proportion to OA publications is 23% (7% below the world average of 30%), the annual growth rate of OA publications is around 18%. Although the governing bodies and institutions have made efforts to mandate researchers to adopt OA publishing and self-archiving, its implementation is quite low among Indian researchers, as only three institutions (out of 18 listed in the ROARMAP) are defined the embargo period. Funding agencies in India do not provide financial assistance to authors for the payment of Article Processing Charges despite mandates that research is deposited in OA repositories. India lacks a national OA policy but plans to implement a “one nation one subscription” formula to provide OA to scientific literature to all its citizens.

The study has certain limitations. Because much of India’s research output is published in local journals that are not indexed in WoS, the study recommends conducting further analyses of publications using Scopus and other databases to understand the country’s OA publishing proportion better. A further study based on feedback from different stakeholders through a survey may be conducted for formulating a national OA policy.

The study is the first that used multiple data sources for investigating different facets of OA publishing in India, including OA journals, digital repositories, OA research output and OA mandates and policies for publicly funded research. The findings will be helpful for researchers and policymakers interested in promoting OA adoption among researchers worldwide.

Science policy and practice for open access (OA) books is a rapidly evolving area in the scholarly domain. However, there is much that remains unknown, including how many OA books there are and to what degree they are included in preservation coverage. The purpose of this study is to contribute towards filling this knowledge gap in order to advance both research and practice in the domain of OA books.

This study utilized open bibliometric data sources to aggregate a harmonized dataset of metadata records for OA books (data sources: the Directory of Open Access Books, OpenAIRE, OpenAlex, Scielo Books, The Lens, and WorldCat). This dataset was then cross-matched based on unique identifiers and book titles to openly available content listings of trusted preservation services (data sources: Cariniana Network, CLOCKSS, Global LOCKSS Network, and Portico). The web domains of the OA books were determined by querying the web addresses or digital object identifiers provided in the metadata of the bibliometric database entries.

In total, 396,995 unique records were identified from the OA book bibliometric sources, of which 19% were found to be included in at least one of the preservation services. The results suggest reason for concern for the long tail of OA books distributed at thousands of different web domains as these include volatile cloud storage or sometimes no longer contained the files at all.

Data quality issues, varying definitions of OA across services and inconsistent implementation of unique identifiers were discovered as key challenges. The study includes recommendations for publishers, libraries, data providers and preservation services for improving monitoring and practices for OA book preservation.

This study provides methodological and empirical findings for advancing the practices of OA book publishing, preservation and research.

Open access (OA) has emerged as a modern academic publishing paradigm that strives to provide all members of society with free access to scholarly knowledge. This study aims to assess the behavior of faculty members to publish in OA journals from the perspective of the decomposed theory of planned behavior (DTPB).

A quantitative survey research design based on a cross-sectional survey approach was applied to investigate the phenomenon. The data were collected through a structured questionnaire from 338 faculty members of two large universities in Pakistan.

The findings of the study indicate that behavioral intentions (β = 0.664, p < 0.01), subjective norms (β = 0.159, p < 0.01) and perceived behavioral control (β = 0.238, p < 0.01) positively while attitude toward behavior negatively affected the actual behavior of the university faculty members to publish in OA journals.

The study offers theoretical implications for researchers and practical implications for educational authorities, policymakers and funding agencies.

The study fills the literature gap and offers insight into the OA publishing behavior of academicians from the perspective of DTPB.

The overall goal of science is to build a valid and reliable body of knowledge about the functioning of the world and how applying that knowledge can change it. As personnel and human resources management researchers, we aim to contribute to the respective bodies of knowledge to provide both employers and employees with a workable foundation to help with those problems they are confronted with. However, what research on research has consistently demonstrated is that the scientific endeavor possesses existential issues including a substantial lack of (a) solid theory, (b) replicability, (c) reproducibility, (d) proper and generalizable samples, (e) sufficient quality control (i.e., peer review), (f) robust and trustworthy statistical results, (g) availability of research, and (h) sufficient practical implications. In this chapter, we first sing a song of sorrow regarding the current state of the social sciences in general and personnel and human resources management specifically. Then, we investigate potential grievances that might have led to it (i.e., questionable research practices, misplaced incentives), only to end with a verse of hope by outlining an avenue for betterment (i.e., open science and policy changes at multiple levels).