Open Science

Your guide to Open Access publishing and Open Science

Tag: Key Challenges

The green attitude

In my recent post I have discussed open access to academic book chapters. However, I was focused on one of its form only, which is organized by publishers. And similar to the case of academic articles, and also in the case of book chapters, other ways of making content open exists. It occurs when an author of a chapter submits a copy of his/her work that was originally published in toll access, to a freely accessible website. This is called ‘self-archiving’ or ‘green open access’ in the case of academic papers, and I think we can use these terms when […]

The dataset from our Author Survey is now open

After some time spent on anonymizing data and analyzing their integrity I can now publish a whole dataset from the Key Challenges of Research Communication – De Gruyter Open Author Survey. The main goal of the research was to examine the attitudes of academic authors around the world towards open access publishing. We asked about their experiences with open access, their publishing practices and their opinions about different publishing models. Our respondents, who are members of the academic community, found time to answer the survey, probably in the hope that its outcome will help in shaping good policies for research […]

Not only journals – open access to academic book chapters

The results of the Key Challenges of Research Communication De Gruyter Open Author Survey suggest that gold open access to academic book chapters is far from being a marginal phenomenon, despite its absence in the debate on open access. Similarly to the case of academic articles, gold open access is more popular among researchers from the global periphery, however the disciplinary differences are shaped here by a totally different pattern. The dominant voice in discussion on open access (OA) comes from the community of life scientists, who welcomed the success of numerous open access journals in the recent decade. These […]

To open or not to open? – Hard to say

Green and gold open access should be discussed as separate phenomenons, with a different set of factors that may foster or inhibit their growth. While green open access is driven mostly by the ethical beliefs of researchers it also requires knowledge that a lot of academic authors lack. In my second post presenting the output of the Key Challenges of Research Communication De Gruyter Open Author’s Survey, I wrote that there is no link between authors’ habits considering gold and green routes to open access. Now I must confess, that is not the complete truth. In fact, between a share […]

The APCs market – What amounts are available to academic authors?

1 000 euros a year is the average amount that an author with Article Processing Charges funding will spend on publishing his or her articles. The top quarter have access to 2 000 euros annually or more. 241 academic authors in our sample declared to have access to funds that may cover their article publication costs in the year 2016. This number represents slightly more than one fourth (26.8%) of all surveyed academic authors and is a little bit bigger than the number of authors who already paid an APC in the last 3 years (18.2%). These two numbers show […]

Who pays the bill?

11.4% of authors from the peripheral countries are ready to treat their own money as a resource that may cover Article Processing Charges, which is true for only 6.1% of those based in the core countries. In the global periphery, academic authors have less access to grant funding that would cover publication fees. However, due to the substitution of their own money, authors from less wealthy countries are able to pay APCs as often as their richer colleagues. In my previous post I pointed out that 26.8% of academic authors predicted that they will have access to some money to […]