From conference to newsletter to journal: a challenge to the emphasis on peer review

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The reason for posting the following excerpt from one of the resource requirements interviews is intended to raise the question: is the current focus on the technical aspects of peer review out of touch with the communication / community aspects of scholarly communication of which formal publishing is arguably just one part?

This journal is one among the many thousands of small, scholar-led fully open access journals that would clearly meet all of the requirements for inclusion in DOAJ, including the peer review process. However, the peer-reviewed journal is just one portion of the rich history of the communication of this scholarly community, which flows from the conference(s) and early newsletter. Does it really make sense to separate the peer-reviewed bits from the larger history of communication among this scholarly community? I argue that it does not, that to fully understand the peer-reviewed literature it is important to know the historical context.

What about today’s emerging scholarly communities? I think I am seeing a narrow emphasis on the technical aspects of peer review, understandable in the context of open access debates but probably not optimal for scholarly communication and communities. This would be a good topic for further research, one that might appeal to historical researchers. There is probably a good deal of material within scholarly journals (there are often editorials about recent developments) and on the websites of scholarly societies. Current scholarly societies could be interesting to explore for researchers in anthropology or other social sciences.

In the words of the anonymized interviewee:

“we had a conference on this in [years several decades ago], at [our university], on the topic of we called it [our topic] and it was sort of a new field in [our discipline] and by the way we’re all [members of our discipline] it’s a multidisciplinary field now and I guess it always has been, but anyway we had this conference and people discovered that they’re breaking away from previously standard arguments / approaches [in our discipline] independently and in much the same direction and so it’s quite exciting to find that among the [less than 100] people that came to this conference that there was this commonality, and somebody said that we should keep in touch, and so we offered to set up this newsletter, and so we had a newsletter from [period of 5 years] but people began to send us manuscripts and people who didn’t need to publish in a refereed journal to get tenure sent us manuscripts and we began to get more and more articles and by [the end of the 5-year period] we said clearly there is a demand for the journal so we turned ourselves into a journal by getting ourselves an editorial board and establishing some procedures”.

This was a rich interview and content will be included in other posts. The purpose of this narrow excerpt is to focus on this challenge to the narrow focus on peer review.

This post is part of the resource requirements for small scholar-led open access publishing project.

Morrison, H. (2015). From conference to newsletter to journal: A challenge to the emphasis on peer review. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/12/from-conference-to-newsletter-to-journal-a-challenge-to-the-emphasis-on-peer-review/

Wanting to be open does not mean we want to be open about everything

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In planning interviews with editors of small scholar-led journals that either are, or would like to be, open access journals, I started off with the assumption that interviewees might want their interviews to be open, too, either as audio online or as transcripts. This would have been a deviation from the custom of confidential or anonymous interviews. Therefore, my approach was to offer the customary confidentiality / anonymity with the invitation to share the interview openly if desired by participants. None of the 8 interviewees to date has taken me up on the offer to make their interviews open. This makes sense. A journal might want to be open access, but some of the behind-the-scenes discussions around this decision might need to be kept private. There may be justifiable concerns about a revenue stream or supporting resource for the journal in the context of universities in tight financial situations looking for areas to cut. I’ll keep the invitation open, but for now will consider this a learning experience. In retrospect, this just makes sense. We can be advocates for both strong open access and strong privacy rights at the same time (I am very much for both); consider the intertwining of freedom of information and privacy.

This post is part of the Resource Requirements for Small Scholar-Led Open Access Publishing project.

If you are doing or thinking about doing research in this area, please let us know in the comments section.

Cite as:

Morrison, H. (2015). Wanting to be open does not mean we want to be open about everything. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/12/wanting-to-be-open-does-not-mean-we-want-to-be-open-about-everything/

Forthcoming research and an invitation to cooperate

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Here is what we are up to, why, and plans for the near future, shared in the spirit of open research and by way of invitation to others working on overlapping research to share your own plans through comments on this post, so that we can combine efforts and all get to the goal of figuring out how to sustain open access as quickly as possible.

Resource requirements for small scholar-led open access journals

  • Interviews and focus groups with small scholar-led journals that either are, or want to become, open access, on the resources required. This is a qualitative-to-quantitative, idea-gathering and partial action research project. To date, 8 interviews conducted with journals from 4 countries, 1 focus group. Initial writing / blogspots will begin to appear this summer. More invitations to participate forthcoming soon. The primary reason for this project is a hypothesis that this sector is both the most cost-effective and the best option from the perspective of scholarship and the public interest. According to my analysis, the average revenue for OJS journals of $188 per article according to a survey by Edgars and Willinsky is about 4% of current global average spend per peer-reviewed journal article by academic libraries. This may not be enough to sustain these journals, but there is a lot of leeway between an average of $188 per article and the over $4,000 per article current spend. The purpose of this project is to figure out what these journals need to survive into the future; for example, what is the work, who does it (academics and/or support staff), journal hosting and sources of support.

Open access article processing charges

For me, the primary reason for this research stream is that in an online environment, cost-per-article is a rational measure of efficiency. The APC study is important in the macro-analysis of the potential for full transition to open access publishing, and worthy in its own right as a model used by a minority of journals and in an minority of disciplines. Studying APCs does not imply endorsement of the model. I have never paid an APC. Now that I am a researcher even the idea of diverting funding from research to pay APCs when so much money is still going into subscriptions is a concern. Institutional funding for APCs sounds like a great idea, but when universities are strapped for cash this kind of support could be reduced or dropped. The focus of this research is trends over time, particularly looking for the potential for the same dysfunctional market that has plagued scholarly publishing for decades will appear in APCs too.

For published work see the Publications and Presentations page.

In progress

  • Correlating subjects and APCs, based on May 2014 data (tendency to charge and how much) (Progress: see which subjects are charging the most? and this post with links to data and documentation.
  • Correlating content in DOAJ and APCs, based on May 2014 data (hypothesis: at least some types of journals, particularly commercial journals, are charging low or no fees initially with plans to initiate or raise fees once they become established). Example: Hindawi provides free publishing for a number of their journals on a rotating basis, even though it is clear that this is an APC model. Progress: a significant positive correlation has been found in the DOAJ data (i.e. journals with more content in DOAJ, if they use APCs, tend to have higher charges), however a check against the actual publications of the journals suggests that the DOAJ publication size only roughly corresponds with actual journal publication size. A check of DOAJ in May 2015 suggests that recent tech changes at DOAJ mean that this data is different today and perhaps even less reliable. A tech tips post for journal publishers contributing content to DOAJ has been released. The large size of the sample and the at least roughly comparable journal sizes is still worth reporting on. Currently I am pondering whether a follow-up study based on publisher website counts is necessary or worthwhile. If anyone has this data in a dataset that identifies journals (by title or ISSN) for cross-referencing purposes please let me know.
  • Varying impact of APC based on regional differences and currency fluctuations. Early work contrasts the Egpyt-based commercial OA APC success story Hindawi with the difficult financial situation for researchers at Egypt’s public universities.

Theoretical work

  • Exploring theoretical frameworks such as the commons and the gift economy for potential for ideas on how to sustain a global open access knowledge commons.


Forthcoming

  • May 2015: update of 2014 APC survey and longitudinal comparisons with data from 2014, 2013 and Bjork and Solomon’s 2010 study
  • Impact factor / APC correlation. Hypothesis: some types of journals, particularly commercial journals, will tend to increase charges disproportionately when they obtain an impact factor or increase in rankings.


A bit farther into the future

  • Case studies: library journal hosting services costs
  • Publisher survey(s): follow-up from interviews and focus groups
  • Revist macro analysis for potential for global transition to OA based on academic library budgets

Related projects

  • Creative Commons and Open Access Critique: a call to abandon the idea of CC-BY as default for open access and open the conversation about how best to address issues such as copyright, licensing, attribution and re-use
  • Updating 2010 survey of  Canadian libraries journals and university presses’ support for open access (with team leader Brent Roe, Don Taylor, Kumiko Vézina and Andrew Waller (in progress)

Some details about the open research approach and the reason for this invitation

One of the primary reasons for the existence of this blog is to support the project’s open research approach. Scholarly traditions tend to favor competition which gives researchers an incentive to keep what they are doing, and their data, secret until they are ready for formal publication, ideally before the competition so we can prove we are the best researchers.

Research in an area like open access article processing charges provides a good illustration of the potential advantages of collaborating rather than competing. Last May we downloaded the DOAJ metadata file and gathered in-depth quantitative and qualitative information about article processing charges for a large sample of the minority of journals using this approach. Our main dataset is available through the dataverse. We have other information gathered (e.g. full publisher APC lists including journals not in DOAJ and various DOAJ screen scrapes including content by year, publisher and provider). The reasons for not sharing all data openly have more to do with the learning curve of working with this much data (e.g. if we added all the data to one dataverse would that make it too difficult for people to find?) and the complexities of documentation. At last count we had well over 300 files of various types (mostly large spreadsheets) that we share among team members.

Cite as:

Morrison, H. (2015). Forthcoming research and an invitation to cooperate. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/07/forthcoming-research-and-an-invitation-to-cooperate/

Tech tip for DOAJ journals contributing article-level metadata

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If your journal is contributing article-level metadata to DOAJ, you should probably check to see if the year of publication is being noted correctly. Based on data gathered last year, it appears that article counts by publication year by journal significantly under-represent the actual journal content, and based on a more recent cursory search of DOAJ and e-mail with DOAJ’s community manager Dom, it appears that a fairly recent change in metadata harvesting at DOAJ has increased the disparity.

Here is how to check for your journal:

From a DOAJ Advanced Search Screen

    Under journals vs. articles (left hand side of the screen) select Articles
    In the main search area across the top of the screen, use the drop-down menu that starts with Search all, select Article: Journal Title and enter the title of your journal as the search term
    On the left-hand side of the screen, expand Year of Publication

If the publication numbers by year in DOAJ do not match your journal’s publication numbers, check the DOAJ For Publishers page for information on what to do next. If you have any questions, please send them to DOAJ feedback. If you have tips for other publishers to resolve this issue, feel free to add a comment to this post. Feel free to add questions too, just note that I won’t be able to help.

To illustrate the scope of the problem

A DOAJ Advanced Search for “articles” with no search terms or limits with the Year of Publication expanded yields the following results for the past 4 years:

2015 (11)
2014 (37388)
2013 (183470)
2012 (211728)

It is far more likely that the nearly ten-fold decrease in publication numbers from 2012 to 2014 reflects the difference in ingestion of metadata than an actual decrease in publication numbers in DOAJ journals.

How did I notice this? I’ve been doing some analysis of content in DOAJ. As of last May, the number of articles identified via publication year appears to have been considerably understated for many journals. For example, a search of the World Journal of Gastroenterology for 2004 – 2013 yielded a total of 23,000 articles while the DOAJ results for this journal for these years was only 5,901. 1,047 articles were identified as published in 2013. A DOAJ search for World Journal of Gastroenterology today, almost exactly a year later, still yields exactly 5,901 articles total for this journal. The Year of Publication option on the left-hand side of the screen lists 2012 as the most recent year, while the results show articles published in 2013.

Cite as:

Morrison, H. (2015). Tech tip for DOAJ journals contributing article-level metadata. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/06/tech-tip-for-doaj-journals-contributing-article-level-metadata/

Heather at the Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing Seminar

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Heather Morrison presented as an invited speaker on the topic of open access and creative commons licensing at the Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing in Washington, D.C. on April 16, 2015. Links to view a video of her presentation or download her slides can be found in the institutional repository (links to conference website previously posted are no longer available).

Morrison, H. (2015). Open access & copyright: Let’s start the conversation. Invited speaker. Presented at the Emerging trends in publishing seminar, Washington, D.C., sponsored by Allen Press. Retrieved from http://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/39972

Subject classification of DOAJ journals – data and documentation

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Data for the subject classification of DOAJ journals is now available in the OA APC dataverse:

Morrison, Heather; Villamizar, César; Mondésir, Guinsly; Calvé-Genest, Alexis, 2019, “OA APC – Subject Analysis – Statistic Frequency & Coding”, https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/4WKTZF, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V1

Documentation of the dataset:

Documentation – Subject Classification – OA APC – V1.3

Presentation of results:

Morrison, H., Villamizar, C., Salhab, J., & Calvé-Genest, A. (2015). Open access APC subject, content and impact factor correlational study. Presented at the Canadian Association of Information Studies annual conference, Ottawa, ON, Canada. Retrieved from https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/32440

Cite as:

Villamizar, C., Mondésir, G., Calvé-Genest, A., & Morrison, Heather. (2015). Edit Post ‹ Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://wordpress.com/post/sustainingknowledgecommons.org/334

 

Which subjects are most likely to charge article processing charges?

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Since the SKC team is studying article processing charges, it’s important to emphasize that the majority of fully open access journals do not use APCs; our studies of this method are not intended as an endorsement of this business model. The following data is from a follow-up analysis based on the May 2014 survey of a sample of the 2,567 journals listed in DOAJ at that time that had article processing charges, 26% of the 9,709 titles in DOAJ at that time. For details on the sample, see our article in MDPI’s Publications. César’s dataset and documentation explaining the preparatory analysis of subjects in DOAJ will be posted shortly. The following table illustrates the difference in the tendencies of journals from different subjects to charge APCs. Medicine is the discipline most likely to charge APCs; 47% of the journals in our APC sample were from medicine compared to 23% of journals listed in DOAJ at that time. The “subject tendency to charge APCs” is calculated by subtracting the percentage of journals in DOAJ from the % of journals from sample with APC. A positive result means a greater tendency to appear in DOAJ than to charge APCs, while a negative result means a greater presence in DOAJ as a whole than in the APC sample. For example, humanities includes 14% of the journals in DOAJ but only 1% of the APC journals.

Subject Number of journals in DOAJ Percentage of journals in DOAJ % of journals from sample with APC Subject tendency to charge APCs
Medicine 2,235 23% 47% 24%
Biology and Life Sciences 664 7% 14% 7%
Technology and Engineering 970 10% 13% 3%
Physical Sciences and Math 666 7% 9% 2%
Science General 134 1% 1% -1%
Agriculture 414 4% 3% -1%
Law 183 2% 0% -2%
General Works 502 5% 2% -3%
Education 596 6% 2% -5%
Social Sciences 1,984 20% 8% -13%
Humanities 1,360 14% 1% -13%

Reference

Morrison, H.; Salhab, J.; Calvé-Genest, A.; Horava, T. Open Access Article Processing Charges: DOAJ Survey May 2014. Publications 2015, 3, 1-16. http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/3/1/1

Cite as:

Morrison, H. (2015). Which subjects are most likely to charge article processing charges? Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/05/which-subjects-are-most-likely-to-charge-article-processing-charges/

L’économie du don

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par Alexis Calvé-Genest & Heather Morrison (English)

Y a-t-il d’autres modes d’échange que l’échange marchand? Surestimons-nous la place de ces échanges lorsque nous tentons de jeter un regard sur la nature des transactions humaines? Si tel est le cas, quelques leçons peuvent-elles en être tirées aux fins de soutenir un projet de savoirs communs?

Il y a près de cent ans déjà, ce questionnement faisait l’objet d’un texte qui a depuis été pour ainsi dire redécouvert par les anthropologues et autres intéressés de la question humaine. Bien entendu, ce texte est au fondement d’une question beaucoup plus large sur la nature humaine que nous éviterons ici. Retenons cependant la possibilité que les échanges humains soient empreints d’une qualité qui perdure après que l’échange soit conclu, que cet échange soit entre groupes ou individus. En sommes, retenons l’idée de réciprocité dans les échanges par contraste à un échange fini où les parties impliquées se doivent d’en rester sur leurs gains.

Un échange basé sur le don, tel que conçu par Marcel Mauss il y a déjà très longtemps, implique une obligation morale, sociale, qui établit un enchevêtrement de relations entre groupes et individus intéressés sans pour autant paraître obligatoire. Cette relation en est une de prestige et de rivalité et elle sous-tend les échanges en société de manière universelle, tel que tente de le concevoir Mauss en 1924. Sans pour autant nier l’échange marchand, Mauss le pose comme superficiel à un type de transaction qui lui, est plus répandu dans toutes les sociétés de son temps, y compris celles du passé. Évidemment, nous faisons ici un bon en avant en posant que cela n’a que peu changé depuis son analyse quasi centenaire.

L’obligation de donner, de recevoir et de redonner est à la base de son économie du don, pour ainsi dire. En rivalisant par le don, les groupes et individus créent des liens et les renforcent sous peine de mort, si ce n’est que symbolique. Rappelons que la perception des anthropologues étudiant les sociétés dites primitives (qui ne le sont pas du tout d’ailleurs) est que l’accumulation y est bien malvenue. Le principe de la redistribution y règne et les cérémonies et événements du type potlatch, sur lesquels Mauss se base pour conceptualiser un système d’échange basé sur le don socialement obligé, sont des phénomènes cruciaux pour comprendre la cohésion sociale des groupes et leurs relations à autrui.

Si l’on considère que Mauss a mis le doigt sur un rouage important des échanges humains nous nous devons alors de considérer les notions de rivalité de prestige et d’obligations sociales comme parties prenantes de toute compréhension des transactions humaines qui dépassent le simple troc ou l’échange marchand. Il en va de même si l’on veut changer la nature d’une transaction humaine ou en créer de plus soutenables, réciproques, juste.

Est-ce que la théorie de l’économie du don peut s’appliquer à l’érudition? Prenons en considération le réseau international des établissements et des dépôts institutionnels, il y en a plus de 2600 répertoriés sur OpenDOAR http://opendoar.org/, et les plus de 72 millions de documents érudits qui furent légués de par le monde par les dépôts répertoriés par le Bielefeld Academic Search Engine http://www.base-search.net/about/en/index.php.

Chaque érudit fait don de son propre travail – un article, un livre, un ensemble de données – sans s’attendre à un retour sur investissement immédiat, mais plutôt avec l’espoir d’avoir un impact sur leur discipline ou une autre, de voir des contributions d’autres chercheurs à leurs travaux et de les voir reconnus comme apport à un savoir humanitaire collectif. Cela satisfait l’obligation de donner. D’autre lisent et utiliser ces dons, qui peuvent être applaudis et appréciés, ou tournée en dérision et critiqués. Peu importe ; ces actions satisfont l’obligation de recevoir. La réception du don contient avec elle l’obligation morale et sociale d’ajouter au don et de partager son travail, pas avec le donateur original, mais plutôt avec le monde entier ; c’est l’obligation subséquente de donner (ou redonner). Comme le potlatch, le prestige s’accroit au donateur des meilleurs dons. Ce n’est pas un troc direct, mais plutôt un réseau mondial de donateurs et de donataires qui ressemble beaucoup aux bases d’une économie du don émergente dans le monde de l’érudition.

Référence

Mauss, M. (1924, 2002 version numérique). Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés primitives. Disponible via Les Classiques des sciences sociales http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1522/cla.mam.ess3

Calvé-Genest, A., & Morrison, H. (2015). L’économie du don. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/04/28/leconomie-du-don/

The gift economy

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by Alexis Calvé-Genest & Heather Morrison (Français)

Are there other modes of exchange besides the market? Are we overestimating the place of market exchange when we look at the nature of human transactions? If so, are there lessons to be learned concerning possible approaches to sustaining the knowledge commons?

It has been almost a hundred years since this question has been considered and reconsidered by anthropologists and others since the publication of Mauss’ seminal work The Gift (free version at Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/giftformsfunctio00maus). The focus of this work is a much bigger question about human nature than we can address in this post. However, let’s consider the possibility that human exchange includes the possibility of a quality that lasts long after the exchange is concluded, whether the exchange is between groups or individuals. Let’s consider the principle of reciprocity and in contrast with the one-time market exchange.

The gift economy as conceived by Mauss nearly a century ago, based on empirical anthropological studies of actual human societies, contemporary and ancient, involves moral and social obligations that creates a bond between groups and individuals without necessarily being obligatory obligations.

Without denying the importance of market exchange, Mauss presents this as superficial in comparison with the gift economy that has pervaded human societies since ancient times. We argue that the gift economy is every bit as relevant today. At the heart of the gift economy are the obligations to give, receive, and give again. Rivalries in giving both create and reinforce social bonds. Remember that in most societies, hoarding is not well received; redistribution, often through ceremonies such as the potlatch, is the norm. Perhaps by studying the gift economy we can work towards both scholarship and societies that are more sustainable, reciprocal, and just.

Can the theory of the gift economy be applied to scholarship? Consider the worldwide network of institutional and disciplinary repositories, the over 2,600 repositories listed in OpenDOAR http://opendoar.org/, the more than 72 million documents scholars have gifted to the world through the repositories indexed by the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine http://www.base-search.net/about/en/index.php

Each scholar gifts their own work – an article, a book, a dataset – with no expectation of immediate rewards in return, rather the hope of having an impact, having their work built upon by others and recognized as a contribution to the collective knowledge of humankind. This fulfills the obligation to give. Others read and use these gifts, which may be met with applause and appreciation, or derision and critique. No matter; either one fulfills the obligation to receive. The receipt of a gift carries with it a social and moral obligation to build on the gift and share one’s own work, not with the original gift-giver but rather with the whole world; this is the downstream obligation to give (or re-give). Like the potlatch, prestige accrues to the giver of the best gifts. This is not one-time barter, rather a worldwide network of givers and receivers that looks a lot like the basis of an emerging global gift economy in scholarship.

Reference

Mauss, M. (1924, 1966 english ed.). The gift. London: Cohen & West. Available via Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/giftformsfunctio00maus

Cite as:

Calvé-Genest, A., & Morrison, H. (2015). The gift economy. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/04/28/the-gift-economy/

Open access and copyright: let’s open the conversation

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Thanks to Allan Press for an opportunity to talk about this important emerging issue in open access publishing (and to colleagues on the global open access list) – here are the slides from my talk.

hgmEmergingTrendsforposting

The final version is available here:

Morrison, H. (2015). Open access & copyright: Let’s start the conversation. Invited speaker presented at the Emerging trends in publishing, Washington, D.C. Retrieved from http://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/39972