Open book: a librarian’s view


copies of articles which were published in open access journals or simply linked to them. Although the discussion did not mention the earlier news of the disappearance of OA journals, it was certainly timely. A significant portion of mainstream


OA journals have established plans for the longevity of their content including participation in cooperative archiving programs such as CLOCKSS and Portico. (Information on archiving plans and practices for many OA titles is collected in the Directory of Open Access Journals.) Despite recent reports of the disappearance of OA journals, these institutional commitments to established archiving programs – although not a guarantee of permanence – should be enough to allow many repository collections managers to concentrate their


“In managing repository content there are difficult choices to make”


limited resources on other content where discovery, access and longevity are less certain.


One might argue that just as the OA


author-pays model has an inherent free- rider problem, the same situation could exist with centralised archiving solutions for OA journals – the benefits are enjoyed by many but the costs are borne by very few. And while it is possible that these mainstream archiving programs that include OA journals could one day face financial hardship or even insolvency,


the same could be said of just about any organisation, nonprofit or commercial. Institutions that have enacted OA mandates or which perform text-mining and other machine operations against a full corpus of organisation’s research output may have good reason to collect papers published in accepted OA journals. But for purposes of researchers having access to individual papers, leave the open access articles to the open access journals – at least from the established publishers. Many are covered by consortial and cooperative archiving efforts and collecting them locally in our IRs is increasingly a luxury most repository managers cannot afford..


Alvin Hutchinson is an information services librarian at Smithsonian Institution


How AI is accelerating research publishing Peer review-based publishing is under more pressure than ever to become faster and more open, writes Rachel Burley


Covid-19 has created a greater sense of urgency to drive this change, and some academic publishers are responding by transforming their workflows and processes to reduce the editorial bottlenecks caused by growing research output coupled with limited human capacity to assess and review it. There are several trends simultaneously leading to this pressure. Global research output has continued to increase at a rate of about seven per cent per year since 2012, reaching a new high of 4.7 million published articles in 2020, according to the Dimensions database. The most prestigious journals are selective, and acceptance criteria include ‘originality’ or ‘importance of the contribution to the field’. Acceptance rates can be as low as five to 10 per cent of submitted manuscripts. But an increasing number of journals accept research that is methodologically sound without the requirement for novelty, an approach introduced by mega-journals and


www.researchinformation.info | @researchinfo


subsequently adopted by discipline- specific titles. This ‘low selectivity’ standard was thought to accelerate publication as reviewers are not asked to judge the importance of the research, but may have, in fact, slowed publication times by increasing the volume of eligible manuscripts. With surging submissions, the demands on the peer review community are becoming unsustainable. More research than ever before is being published open access and approximately 30 per cent of all scholarly articles are now published as paid-for open access. This has changed the customer dynamic for publishers, who have transitioned from serving a relatively small customer base of institutional subscribers to a large


“How can we make sharing research results faster and more efficient?”


number of individual authors paying article processing charges. This represents a transition from a B2B to a B2C model; and connecting payment with publication in this way has led to increased expectations for speed and that might not be met with traditional journal workflows. Preprinting is becoming commonplace


across research disciplines. An estimated eight per cent of biomedical research papers were preprinted before publication in a journal in 2020, compared to 0.2 per cent in 2013. Preprints provide authors with a rapid pathway for sharing research independently of traditional publishing and with new services emerging to peer review and verify preprints, there is real potential for preprints to become the basis for an alternative publishing model. These trends underscore the


importance of improving the current academic publishing system and creating more efficient ways to assess and disseminate research results. While peer review remains a critical step in validating research results, the pandemic and the accompanying urgent need for rapid


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