Library Support for UW Faculty Open Access Policy

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Hello from the Campus Library Open Access Team and welcome back! As you settle into the new quarter, we wanted to highlight how the Open Access Team and the Library can help you make your work more openly available.

In 2018, the Faculty Senate approved the UW Open Access Policy, enabling faculty to make their articles available in an open access repository. If you have questions, we can help! See below for some resources and readings:

If you are ready to deposit scholarly work into UW’s institutional repository, ResearchWorks, instructions are available on the UWB Digital Scholarship Guide.

For questions related to the UW Open Access Policy, please contact Sarah Leadley, Associate Dean and Library Director, at leadley@uw.edu, or Denise Hattwig, Head of Digital Scholarship and Collections, at dhattwig@uw.edu.

For the Public Good: Our values in a changing scholarly communication landscape

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This is a collaborative post by Lizabeth (Betsy) A. Wilson, Vice Provost for Digital Initiatives and Dean of University Libraries; Denise Pan, Associate Dean for Collections & Content; Chelle Batchelor, Interim Associate Dean, Research and Learning Services; Director of Access Services; Tania P. Bardyn, Associate Dean & Director, Health Sciences Library; Corey Murata, Director, Collection Analysis & Strategy; Gordon J. Aamot, Director, Scholarly Communication & Publishing; and Elizabeth Bedford, Scholarly Publishing Outreach Librarian.

Like many of you, we have been following the negotiations between the University of California (UC) and the giant commercial scholarly publisher, Elsevier. UC’s announcement that they have broken off talks with Elsevier has sparked a wave of interest and commentary reaching beyond the walls of the academy. In a blog post by our colleagues at Duke and Iowa State University, they called this a movement, “closer to a tipping point in the ongoing struggle to correct asymmetries in the scholarly information ecosystem.”

There is a disconnect in the scholarly publishing ecosystem between the creators of scholarship and the ownership and distribution of scholarship, especially with mega-publishers like Elsevier. Researchers publish their findings without the expectation of additional compensation in the interest of advancing human knowledge and building careers. Researchers also evaluate each other’s work for free by doing peer review. But the results of this scholarly output are almost always controlled by publishers and usually hidden behind paywalls.

While the breakdown of the UC/Elsevier negotiation is big news, it is just the latest in a growing list of cancellations by our peer institutions of publisher “big deal” journal packages. In its Big Deal Cancellation Tracking list, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) provides the names of institutions and the packages they have recently cut. These cancellations are a reflection of the widening gulf between for-profit publishers’ demands to continually increase package cost well beyond the rate of inflation, and the ongoing erosion of support for higher education. In her annual address to the University of Washington last fall, President Ana Mari Cauce highlighted the unsustainability of the funding model for higher education in our state. While UW Libraries has been fortunate to receive strong support from the faculty and University, we can see that gulf forming.

With the Libraries in the implementation phase of our recently developed 2018-2021 Strategic Plan, it is valuable to step back and reflect on our values as we think about this changing landscape of scholarly communication and our future negotiations with publishers. Among these values are a focus on sustainability, equity and user-centeredness.

  • Sustainability: While we are committed to providing collections and resources for our students, faculty and researchers, we are unwavering in the knowledge that we must be good stewards of allocated funding to support research and teaching at the University of Washington. In our negotiations with publishers, we continually balance researchers’ needs with fiscal responsibility. Working collaboratively with our campus community to build collections can accelerate scholarship and learning through responsive collections.
  • Equity: We believe the current proprietary, closed, for-profit scholarly information ecosystem is broken, exclusionary and undermines the democratic ideals of liberal education. We view access to information as a social justice issue, and for-profit publishers’ unsustainable pricing models, demand for nondisclosure agreements and insistence on paywalls hinders the pursuit of knowledge, impedes our support of an informed citizenry and restricts research for the public good
  • User-centeredness: Our commitment to users remains at the forefront of our collections strategy and decision-making. We know that scholarship is a conversation — and that research progresses only when scholars have an understanding of what has come before and are able to share new knowledge. Because our library collections form the lifeblood of this conversation, we are keenly concerned with ensuring UW scholars have access to the materials they need to progress their research.

The negotiations between UC and Elsevier are part of an accelerating, worldwide movement to transform scholarly communication, to ensure knowledge is shared broadly and without barriers, and to further enhance inquiry and discovery. We applaud UC’s attempt to explore new and different models for providing access to scholarship. And we stand in support of finding new pathways to build and negotiate transformative models that create collaborative and sustainable long-term solutions. As stated in our Strategic Plan, UW Libraries works to advance research for the public good because we believe that “UW research attains its greatest impact on our most pressing global challenges when we advocate for open, public and emerging forms of scholarship.”

Please contact us with questions or comments:
Sarah Leadley, Associate Dean of UW Libraries and UW Bothell/Cascadia Library Director, leadley@uw.edu

Preprints: What, Why, and Where?

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The paths of Scholarly Publishing and Open Access can be difficult to follow.  What are your rights as a researcher and scholar, when and how do those rights change, what are publisher rights, who pays whom, and who has access to the published research?  When you have managed to figure out your way on that path, you may encounter various acronyms and terms that can also make the going slow, e.g. CTA, Gold OA, IR, SHERPA, & preprint. What do they mean, and do they really matter?

Let’s just start with one of these terms: the preprint.  In our previous post on Understanding Your Author Rights, we mentioned that you may be able to archive a preprint of your article in our institutional repository (IR), ResearchWorks.  So, what is a preprint and why might you want to archive it?

A preprint is generally understood to be a working paper or a pre-publication version of a paper. Publishers often define preprints more precisely, and may specify that a preprint is an author’s final version, a version prior to peer review, or any version of the paper prior to its final editing and formatting. Review your CTA (Copyright Transfer Agreement) to determine your publisher’s definition of a preprint. Searching SHERPA/RoMEO by journal or publisher can also provide you with specific preprint archiving policies.

If you determine that it is permitted and you would like to archive your preprint, your research and other scholars can enjoy the following benefits:

  • The core of your research becomes available more quickly
  • Your research will have broader exposure, reaching those both with and without access to expensive databases and journals
  • Articles can be open access
  • OA funder mandates can be met (consult your funder or Sherpa/Juliet to determine funder mandates
  • Payments to publisher for Open Access status are not required

Okay, you have made it this far down the road with us and you have determined your CTA allows you to archive your preprint.  You want to quickly provide open access to your scholarship for other researchers. Where do you go?

The University of Washington has its own institutional repository called ResearchWorks.  ResearchWorks is a permanent archiving service for UW faculty and student researchers.  More information about UWB archiving services, including a submission form, can be found on this Campus Library guide.

You may also want to consider archiving your preprints in a disciplinary repository. Amongst the many out there:

Humanities Commons for arts, literature, and digital humanities
SocArXiv  for Social Sciences
PsyArXiv for Psychological sciences
EngrXiv  for Engineering
PubMedCentral (PMC) for the biomedical and life sciences
ArXiv for Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics

Check out OpenDOAR if you want to search for more repositories in your field, or search within repositories.

If you have additional questions, please contact Sarah Leadley, Campus Library Director, at leadley@uw.edu.

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References & Resources:
SHERPA on preprints: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeoinfo.html#prepostprints

 

Predatory Journal Publishing

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Does this sound familiar? A new message appears in your inbox: the Questionable Journal of Mysterious Origins wants to publish your research! They promise a quick turnaround time and wide readership, increasing the potential impact of your work, all for the low, low price of $300-$3000! But is this really a deal you can’t refuse?

Predatory journal publishing is an increasingly pressing issue in higher education. A study out of Finland reports a significant increase in the number of articles published in predatory journals since 2010. Stories range from the sad, as marginalized scholars succumb to the pressure of publish-or-perish, to the absurd, with Marge Simpson’s foray into computer science. Most recently, the FTC is taking action, filing a civil complaint against one particularly large and pernicious predatory publisher.

What is predatory publishing and why is it spreading? Predatory publishers take advantage of the upsurge in gold Open Access (OA), a digital, peer-reviewed journal publishing model that offers free, online, public access to research, often, though not always, by transferring publishing costs to the author (via Article Processing Charges, or APCs). Many legitimate and highly competitive peer-reviewed journals (such as PLoS Biology and IEEE Access) operate under the gold OA model and levy APCs, which are frequently covered by research funders rather than individual authors. Open access has gained so much traction that, in 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directed federal agencies to develop public access plans, requiring recipients of federal funding to make both their articles and data publically accessible.

With any growing and potentially profitable market, however, comes the opportunity for scammers to exploit the system. Predatory publishers establish charlatan gold OA journals, charging APCs and producing online issues, without establishing or engaging in a rigorous peer review and editorial process. Essentially, they’re designed to take your money and run, copying and pasting your unedited work into poorly designed websites that, at best, may one day be crawled by Google Scholar. Yikes.

So, how does one filter out the sham journals from the legitimate publications? Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado Denver has long produced a directory of predatory journals known as Beall’s List. While this may be a good place to start, it must also be mentioned that Beall and his List have come under criticism of late for some arguably extreme anti-OA views. Furthermore, York University librarian John Dupuis and Barbara Fister from Inside Higher Ed point out that the obvious spam-like efforts documented by Beall and others distract us from the real problem: more underhanded and mainstream predatory practices employed by corporate publishers like Elsevier and Wiley.

Thus, as always and with any source, we recommend practicing what we preach to our students: think critically, evaluate, and verify. CUNY librarians Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella laid out the case for this more well-rounded approach, and both Grand Valley State University Library and the Directory of Open Access Journals have published comprehensive quality indicators to be used as part of a holistic review process. Authors can also enjoy all the advantages of open access while circumventing these concerns by opting for green OA, publishing their article in the journal of their choice and depositing a pre- or post-print copy in UW’s institutional repository, ResearchWorks.

Interested in publishing in a gold OA journal but hoping to avoid the pitfalls? Your subject librarians are here to help!

Understanding Your Author Rights, Part One

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After the years-long process of proposing the project, collecting the data, analyzing the data, and positing conclusions, you are finally ready to share your findings with the world. But do you know what rights you have to your work, both before, during, and after you submit your research for publication?

BEFORE

Even if you have yet to make your research public, it is protected under copyright. This gives you, the creator, the exclusive right to:

  • Distribute
  • Reproduce
  • perform and/or display publicly
  • and modify your work.

DURING

Once accepted for publication, most publishers require that you sign a Publication or Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA). Many journals use boilerplate CTAs that often ask authors to sign over their copyright wholesale. This is a problem if you hope to:

  • Use sections of or build off your research in later works;
  • Distribute copies of your article to colleagues or students; and/or
  • Upload your article to a personal or institutional website.

The good news: CTAs are negotiable, as publishers technically do not need the full copyright in order to legally publish your work. The publisher needs:

  • The non-exclusive right to publish, distribute, and receive financial return from your article;
  • To receive attribution as the journal of first publication; and
  • Permission to migrate your article to any future formats and include in collections.

With those rights granted, you retain:

  • The right to re-use and build on your work without restrictions;
  • The ability to increase access, shareability, and citations by sharing your work online; and
  • Your attribution and citation rights as the author.

A simple way to negotiate your rights is to fill out and attach the SPARC Author Addendum (http://www.sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/Access-Reuse_Addendum.pdf) to the CTA provided by your publisher.   Even if the publisher does not sign the addendum, publication of your article represents tacit acceptance of addendum terms.

It is also important to remember that many organizations providing grant funding also require certain types of access, archiving, and data sharing. You can easily check the requirements of major funding organizations by using SHERPA/JULIET, a UK-based database that is searchable by funder name or country of origin.

AFTER

Depending on the specifics of your CTA, you can archive a pre-print, post-print, or publisher’s version of your article in ResearchWorks, University of Washington’s online institutional repository. Doing so will increase access to and visibility of your work and provide you with a permanent, stable URL to your article.

If you need additional assistance, we’re here to help! Contact Sarah Leadley, leadley@uw.edu, with your questions.

References & Resources:

Why Open Access?

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Why Open Access?

We engage and invest in research in order to encourage innovation and creativity, enrich education, and accelerate the pace of discovery.  Communication of the results of research is an essential component of the research process, and enabling broad, unfettered access to new knowledge plays a key role in ensuring that the scholarly publishing system supports the needs of scholars and the academic enterprise as a whole.

Yet because of cost barriers or use restrictions, research results are often not available to the full community of potential users.  The Internet gives us the opportunity to bring this information to a worldwide audience at virtually no marginal cost and allows us to use it in new, innovative ways. This has resulted in a new framework: Open Access.

What is open access and why does it matter?  Materials published in an open access journal or digital repository are available online to anyone anywhere for download and use without restrictions or payment by the user.  There are many benefits to a system of open access scholarship:

  • Research is more accessible and useable.
  • Articles published open access may be cited more and be more influential than those that have not.
  • Institutions that support research – from public and private research funders to higher education institutions – are implementing policies that encourage (and in some instances require) researchers to make research generated from their funding openly accessible to and fully useable by the public.
  • Researchers have access to scholarship regardless of institutional affiliation.
  • Students have access to scholarship after they graduate.
  • Scholarly conversations are advanced through broader participation.
  • Creative work and new discoveries are encouraged as scholars can build on open research.

OA at the UW: In April 2009, the UW Faculty Senate approved a Class C Resolution on Scholarly Publishing Alternatives and Authors’ Rights,  encouraging faculty to publish in “moderately priced journals, in journals published by professional societies and associations, or in peer-reviewed ‘open access’ journals,” and to archive their work in open access repositories.  In 2015 the Senate advanced this work via another resolution, Concerning the UW Open Access Repository & Request for Advice on an Open Access Policy, which requested that a UW Open Access Policy be drafted for review by the faculty. This work is ongoing, more on this to come!

Additional Resources:

Faculty and Open Access

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How can faculty be involved in supporting and promoting Open Access efforts? Here are a few suggestions, adapted from SPARC and International Open Access Week:

  • Submit your research articles to OA journals as appropriate to your field.
  • Deposit your preprints in an OA archive, such as UW’S institutional repository ResearchWorks (learn more about ResearchWorks here).
  • If allowed by the Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA) you signed with your publisher, deposit your postprints in an OA archive like ResearchWorks. If you’re not sure what your CTA allows or have not yet signed a CTA, check out our posts on understanding your author rights, part one and part two.
  • Deposit your data files in an OA archive along with the articles built on them (learn more about data management via our earlier post). Whenever possible, link to the data files from the articles, and vice versa.
  • Explore using Open Educational Resources (OER) in lieu of expensive textbooks in the courses you teach (learn more about OER via our previous post).
  • When asked to referee a paper or serve on the editorial board for an OA journal, consider accepting the invitation.
  • If you are an editor of a toll-access journal, start an in-house discussion about converting to OA, experimenting with OA, and letting authors retain copyright.
  • Volunteer to serve on your university’s committee to evaluate faculty for promotion and tenure. Make sure the committee is using criteria that, at the very least, does not penalize faculty for publishing in peer-reviewed OA journal, and at best, gives faculty an incentive to provide OA to their peer-reviewed research articles and preprints, either through OA journals or OA archives.
  • Work with your professional societies to make sure they understand OA. Persuade the organization to make its own journals OA, endorse OA for other journals in the field, and support OA eprint archiving by all scholars in the field.
  • And last, but certainly not least, educate the next generation of scientists and scholars about OA, and support their efforts to engage with scholarship in this environment (such as participating in UWB’s Open Access research journal, Interdisciplinarities).

If you have any questions, please contact us.