News: Academic Publishing Weekly

REF open access policy, Journal Citation Reports, and summer reads

Posted on June 21, 2024 in News

Thoughts on the Research Excellence Framework (REF) Open Access Policy

Many have voiced their concerns as the consultation period for the UK Research Excellence Framework 2029 open access policy comes to a close. Taking a critical approach, several leaders from the University of Oxford addressed issues with placing the cost of managing OA on research institutions and the policy’s impact on open research more broadly. In particular, they suggested that instead of imposing an OA policy, “national obligations to OA are more logically driven through UK funder mandates attached to individual research projects.” In response, Scholarly Kitchen chef Rick Anderson underscored that authors should be left to “exercise their own judgment in deciding how, where, and under what conditions to publish” so that no one is responsible for the cost of enforcement or compliance. On the flip side, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) made a case for gold OA, writing that “Publishing methods that allow for different versions of an article to be disseminated with different licences challenge publishers’ stewardship efforts.” The International Association of Scientific, Medical, Technical Publishers (STM) similarly supported gold OA, but suggested changes to embargo periods and licensing conditions to maintain an author’s agency. STM also advocated for the removal of OA requirements for longform content and stressed the need for continued consultations before moving forward with the policy.  

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Journal Citation Reports and Nature Index Research Leaders

Clarivate published its annual Journal Citation Reports, covering more than 21,000 journals across 113 countries. Clarivate noted several changes to this year’s reports such as unified subject rankings and the inclusion of the Emerging Sources Citation Index. As Dr. Nandita Quaderi, Senior Vice President & Editor-in-Chief of the Web of Science at Clarivate, stressed, “…we are sending another strong signal that all trustworthy journals…should be valued and given consideration, regardless of how highly cited they are.” The Nature Index 2024 Research Leaders were also announced, revealing the regions with the most output in the Nature Index database. In particular, Nature highlighted India’s growing contributions, ranking 9th overall. Nature underlined how India’s adjusted Share, “a metric that takes account of annual fluctuations in the number of Nature Index articles each year,” tops China’s and attributed the increase to the country’s number of research institutions and scholarships. By contrast, the United States’ adjusted Share declined, with Nature citing the effects of inflation and the removal of the journal eLife from the Nature Index.  

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EBSCO Experiments with AI and How to Determine Chatbot Hallucinations

EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is testing two AI features, AI Insights and Natural Language Search. Testing for AI Insights, a tool that “will generate a short list of insights from full-text articles,” finished in May and “90 percent of participants confirmed it was beneficial.” The beta release for Natural Language Search will be this July, and beta programs for AI Reference Assistance and Literature Review will be released next year. Next up, a Nature report revealed a new way to detect AI hallucinations. Co-author Sebastian Farquhar, a computer scientist at the University of Oxford, analyzed a large language model’s (LLM) level of “semantic entropy” in its responses, using a second LLM to determine the similarity in meaning of the original model’s answers. Farquhar noted that there is “nothing about the method that is sensitive to a specific model that’s used,” but cautioned that “there are still ways models can go wrong that are not addressed by our method at all.” 

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Women’s Prize Winners, New AUPresses President, and Strike at OUP Press

The Women’s Prize winners were honored last week, including the first recipient of the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction. V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night took home the fiction prize, and Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World won the nonfiction award. In other news, Anthony Cond, Director of Liverpool University Press, began his term as the president of AUPresses. Cond is AUPresses’s first president from outside of North America, succeeding the director of the Cornell University Press Jane Bunker. Commenting on his inauguration, Cond stressed that “…providing a sustainable, high-quality forum to amplify humanities scholarship has never felt more important.” Lastly, several members of the Oxford University Press USA Guild organized a strike this week. Publishers Weekly explained that the guild believes OUP “has been outsourcing vacant union jobs in the U.S.” and violated labor law with the layoff of Scott Morales, unit chair of the guild, over “an email signature that contained a message about their working conditions.” 

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Supporting Inclusive Research and Considering the Cost of OA

First up, Sage announced two resources centered on advancing diverse research. Sage Research Methods: Diversifying and Decolonizing Research uses several resources from the Sage Research Methods platform to show “researchers and students [how] to use inclusive, critically aware methodologies when producing research.” Sage Video: Social Justice utilizes videos to teach students about social justice movements and the ways academics can contribute to activism. Next, several African research funders will be indexed in Dimensions. Joy Owango, Executive Director of TCC Africa and Project Lead at the Africa PID Alliance, explained that this action “allows these African national funders to increase transparency around their research investments, demonstrate the impacts and outcomes of funded projects, facilitate new regional and global collaborations, inform strategic funding priorities through insights on research trends, and amplify Africa’s overall research contributions on the international stage.” Last, Delta Think provided an analysis of current article processing charges (APCs), considering how their cost compares to inflation. Delta Think looked at differences among fully-OA journals and the general open access market, finding that while fully OA prices are increasing faster than inflation, APCs overall paint a different picture.  

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New Releases and Nonfiction for the Summer

Looking for a summer read? Literary Hub shared 27 new works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to kick off the season. Titles span topics including ecology, migration, and the life of Harriet Tubman. Trudier Harris’s Bigger: A Literary Life from Yale University Press on Richard Wright’s fictional character Bigger Thomas is featured. NPR staff also revealed their top nonfiction picks of the year. The books range from lessons on slow productivity, works that uncover the role of presidents after their terms end, and a firsthand account of being a nun.  

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