Simon Linacre Open Access

Open Access Week 2019: “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge”

It is #OpenAccessWeek, and a number of players in the scholarly communications industry have used the occasion to produce their latest thinking and surveys, with some inevitable contradictions and confusion. Simon Linacre unpicks the spin to identify the key takeaways from the week.

It’s that time again, Open Access Week -or #openaccessweek, or #OAWeek19 or any number of hashtag-infected labels. The aim of this week for those in scholarly communications is to showcase what new products, surveys or insight they have to a market more focused than usual on all things Open Access.

There is a huge amount of content out there to wade through, as any Twitter search or scroll through press releases will confirm. A number have caught the eye, so here is your indispensable guide to what’s hot and what’s not in OA:

  • There are a number of new OA journal and monograph launches with new business models, in particular with IET Quantum Communication and MIT Press, which uses a subscription model to offset the cost of OA
  • There have been a number of publisher surveys over the years which show that authors are still to engage fully with OA, and this year is no exception. Taylor & Francis have conducted a large survey which shows that fewer than half of researchers believe everyone who needs access to their research has it, but just 18% have deposited a version of their article in a repository. Fewer than half would pay an APC to make their article OA, but two-thirds did not recognize any of the initiatives that support OA. Just 5% had even heard of Plan S
  • And yet, a report published by Delta Think shows that OA publications continue to increase, with articles published in Hybrid OA journals alongside paywall articles declining compared to pure OA articles. In other words, more and more OA articles continue to be published, but the hybrid element is on the decrease, hence the reports’ assertion that the scholarly communications market had already reached ‘peak hybrid’

At the end of the Delta Think report was perhaps the most intriguing question among all the other noise around OA. If the share of Hybrid OA is in decline, but there is an increase in so-called read-and-publish or transformative agreements between consortia and publishers, could Plan S actually revive Hybrid OA? The thinking is that as transformative agreements usually include waivers for OA articles in Hybrid journals, the increase in these deals could increase Hybrid OA articles, the very articles that Plan S mandates against.

And this puts large consortia in the spotlight, as in some cases a major funding agency signed up to Plan S may conflict with read-and-publish agreements increasing Hybrid OA outputs. It will be interesting to see how all this develops in the next OA Week in October 2020. The countdown starts here.

Mike Bisaccio Research, Scholarly Communication

Cabells renews partnership with CLOCKSS to further shared goals of supporting scholarly research

Cabells is excited to announce the renewal of its partnership with CLOCKSS, the decentralized preservation archive that ensures the long-term survival of scholarly content in digital format. Cabells is pleased to provide complimentary access to the Journal Whitelist and Journal Blacklist databases for an additional two years to CLOCKSS, to further the organizations’ shared goals of supporting and preserving scholarly publications for the benefit of the global research community.

The goal of Cabells is to provide academics with the intelligent data needed for comprehensive journal evaluations to safeguard scholarly communication and advance the dissemination of high-value research.  Assisting CLOCKSS in its mission to provide secure and sustainable archives for the preservation of academic publications in their original format is a logical and rewarding collaboration.

“We are proud to renew our partnership with CLOCKSS. Our mission to protect the integrity of scholarly communication goes hand in hand with their work to ensure the secure and lasting preservation of scholarly research,” said Kathleen Berryman, Director of Business Relations with Cabells.

In helping to protect and preserve academic research, Cabells and CLOCKSS are fortunate to play vital roles in the continued prosperity of the scholarly community.

 

About: Cabells – Since its founding over 40 years ago, Cabells services have grown to include both the Journal Whitelist and the Journal Blacklist, manuscript preparation tools, and a suite of powerful metrics designed to help users find the right journals, no matter the stage of their career. The searchable Journal Whitelist database includes 18 academic disciplines from more than 11,000 international scholarly publications. The Journal Blacklist is the only searchable database of predatory journals, complete with detailed violation reports. Through continued partnerships with major academic publishers, journal editors, scholarly societies, accreditation agencies, and other independent databases, Cabells provides accurate, up-to-date information about academic journals to more than 750 universities worldwide. To learn more, visit www.cabells.com.

About: CLOCKSS is a not-for-profit joint venture between the world’s leading academic publishers and research libraries whose mission is to build a sustainable, international, and geographically distributed dark archive with which to ensure the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research community.

Simon Linacre Academic Publishing

Bringing clarity to academic publishing

How do you know if a journal is a good or a bad one? It is a simple enough question, but there is a lack of clear information out there for researchers, and often scams that lay traps for the unaware. In his latest post, Simon Linacre presents some new videos from Cabells that explain what it does to ensure authors can keep fully informed.

On a chilly Spring day in Edinburgh, myself and one of my colleagues were asked to do what nobody really wants to do if they can help it, and that is to ‘act natural’. It is one of life’s great ironies that it is so difficult to act naturally when told to do so. However, it was for a good cause, as we had been asked to explain to people through a short film what it was that Cabells did and why we thought it was important.

Video as a medium has been relatively ignored by scholarly publishers until quite recently. Video has of course been around for decades, and it has been possible to embed video on websites next to articles for a number of years. However, embedding video into pdfs has been tricky, and as every publisher will tell you when they ask you about user needs – academics ‘just want the pdf’. As a result, there has been little in the way of innovation when it comes to scholarly communication, despite some brave attempts such as video journals, video abstracts and other accompaniments to the humble article.

Video has been growing as a means of search, particularly for younger academics, and it can be much more powerful when it comes to engagement and social media. Stepping aside from the debate about what constitutes impact and whether Altmetrics and hits via social media really mean anything, video can be ‘sticky’ in the sense that people spend longer watching it than skipping over words on a web page. As such, the feeling is that video is a medium whose time may have yet to come when it comes to scholarly communications.

So, in that spirit, Cabells has shot a short video with some key excerpts that take people through the Journal Whitelist and Journal Blacklist. It is hoped that it answers some questions that people may have, and spurs others to get in touch with us. The idea of the film is the first step towards Cabells’ development of a number of resources in lots of different platforms that will help researchers drink in knowledge of journals to optimize their decision-making. In a future of Open Access, new publishing platforms, and multiple publishing choices, the power to publish will increasingly be in the hands of the author, with the scholarly publishing industry increasingly seeking ways to satisfy their needs. Knowledge about publishing is the key to unlocking that power.

Mike Bisaccio Academic Publishing, Getting published, Research

Updated CCI and DA metrics hit the Journal Whitelist

Hot off the press, newly updated Cabell’s Classification Index© (CCI©) and Difficulty of Acceptance© (DA©) scores for all Journal Whitelist publication summaries are now available. These insightful metrics are part of our powerful mix of intelligent data leading to informed and confident journal evaluations.

Research has become increasingly cross-disciplinary and, accordingly, an individual journal might publish articles relevant to several fields.  This means that researchers in different fields often use and value the same journal differently. Our CCI© calculation is a normalized citation metric that measures how a journal ranks compared to others in each discipline and topic in which it publishes and answers the question, “How and to whom is this journal important?” For example, a top journal in computer science might sometimes publish articles about educational technology, but researchers in educational technology might not really “care” about this journal the same way that computer scientists do. Conversely, top educational technology journals likely publish some articles about computer science, but these journals are not necessarily as highly regarded by the computer science community. In short, we think that journal evaluations must be more than just a number.

CCI screenshot 2019 updates

The CCI© gauges how well a paper might perform in specific disciplines and topics and compares the influence of journals publishing content from different disciplines. Further, within each discipline, the CCI© classifies a journal’s influence for each topic that it covers. This gives users a way to evaluate not just how influential a journal is, but also the degree to which a journal influences different disciplines.

For research to have real impact it must first be seen, making maximizing visibility a priority for many scholars. Our Difficulty of Acceptance© (DA©) metric is a better way for researchers to gauge a journal’s exclusivity to balance the need for visibility with the very real challenge of getting accepted for publication.

DA screenshot 2019 updates

The DA© rating quantifies a journal’s history of publishing articles from top-performing research institutions. These institutions tend to dedicate more faculty, time, and resources towards publishing often and in “popular” journals. A journal that accepts more articles from these institutions will tend to expect the kind of quality or novelty that the availability of resources better facilitates. So, researchers use the DA© to find the journals with the best blend of potential visibility and manageable exclusivity.

For more information on our metrics, methods, and products, please visit www.cabells.com.

Simon Linacre Predatory publishing

The Journal Blacklist surpasses the 12,000 journals listed mark

Just how big a problem is predatory publishing? Simon Linacre reflects on the news this week that Cabells announced it has reached 12,000 journals on its Journal Blacklist and shares some insights into publishing’s dark side.

Predatory publishing has seen a great deal of coverage in 2019, with a variety of sting operations, opinion pieces and studies published on various aspects of the problem. It seems that while on the one side, there is no doubt that it is a problem for academia globally, on the other side there is huge debate as to the size, shape and relative seriousness of that problem.

On the first of those points, the size looks to be pretty big – Cabells announced this week that its Journal Blacklist has hit the 12,000 mark. This is less than a year since it hit 10,000, and it is now triple the size it was when it was launched in 2017. Much of this is to do with the incredibly hard work of its evaluations team, but also because there are a LOT of predatory journals out there, with the numbers increasing daily.

On the last of those points, the aftershocks of the Federal Trade Commission’s ruling against OMICS earlier this year are still being felt. While there is no sign of any contrition on the part of OMICS – or of the $50m fine being paid – the finding has garnered huge publicity and acted as a warning for some academics not to entrust their research with similar publishers. In addition, it has been reported that CrossRef has now cut OMICS membership.

However, the shape of the problem is still hard for many to grasp, and perhaps it would help to share some of the tools of the trade of deceptive publishers. Take one journal on the Cabells Journal Blacklist – the British Journal of Marketing Studies.

Cabells Blacklist Screenshot

Sounds relatively normal, right? But a number of factors relating to this journal highlight many of the problems presented by deceptive journals:

  • The title includes the word ‘British’ as a proxy for quality, however, over 600 journals include this descriptor in the Blacklist compared to just over 200 in Scopus’ entire index of over 30,000 journals
  • The journal is published by European-American Journals alongside 81 other journals – a remarkable feat considering the publisher lists a small terraced house in Gillingham as its main headquarters
  • When Cabells reviewed it for inclusion in the Blacklist, it noted among other things that:
    • It falsely claimed to be indexed in well-known databases – we know this because among these was Cabells itself
    • It uses misleading metrics, including an “APS Impact Factor” of 6.80 – no such derivation of the Web of Science metric exists, apart from on other predatory journal sites
    • There is no detailed peer review policy stated
    • There is no affiliation for the Editor, one Professor Paul Simon, and searches cannot uncover any marketing professors with such a name (or a Prof. Garfunkel, for that matter)

This IS a problem for academia because, no matter what the size and seriousness of predatory publishing may be unless researchers learn to spot the signs of what it looks like, they will continue to get drawn in and waste their research, funding dollars, and even career, on deceptive publishing practices.