Over 220 African Journals Online (AJOL) titles have been added to JournalTOCs. Many of these journals will be of interest to researchers everywhere, but especially to those in developing countries. They cover subjects such as anthropology, economic development, health and medical sciences, history, librarianship, sustainable development, education, agriculture, and more.
A hybrid journal is a journal that publishes Open Access articles together with others articles that require a subscription or payment to access and read. Thus, a hybrid journal is a subscription-based journal where only some articles are Open Access, usually after financial sponsorship by the author. The sponsorship is in fact a publication fee (known as Article Processing Charge (ACP)) that the author chooses to pay to the publisher in order that the article is published as Open Access (OA).
Most publishers include Open Access articles in their subscription-based journals in order to gradually migrate their subscription-based titles to full Open Access in a safe and economically sustainable way for their business. Thus hybrid journals can arguably be seen as part of a transitional publishing business model. They are an important business option because they give the publisher the opportunity of testing the potential demands for Open Access for their mature journals; without the risks associated with launching new full Open Access journals that normally would take a long time to be highly ranked and economically sustainable.
Hybrid journals first appeared 10 years ago and there is little evidence that they will not be around in the future. Every year, more subscription-based journals start to include Open Access articles in their issues. In some cases (e.g. Springer, Taylor & Francis, John Wiley and Sons, SAGE, Inderscience, Emerald) the vast majority of subscription-based journals are de facto hybrid ones, because all of them are offering an Open Access option. Being able to provide a standard mechanism to identify Open Access articles increases the potential for hybrid journals to be accepted as a fully functioning optional model, rather than just a midway post on the journey towards fully OA journals.
Publishers have an interest in offering a fair and transparent Open Access business model. When publishers make the effort of clearly announcing and helping to identify the Open Access articles that have been published in their hybrid journals, they cannot be accused of using a “double dipping” practice, where publishers do not attempt to reflect the amount of OA articles in their subscription prices. Some publishers have agreed to decrease subscription fees when a certain percentage of the articles have been published in Open Access via the hybrid model. In this case hybrid journals become a fair and desirable publishing path towards Open Access publishing, where publishers decrease the subscription fees for the hybrid journal as its number of OA articles increases. Publishers such as Oxford University Press, the American Institute of Physics, Walter de Gruyter and Nature Publishing Group have committed to adjusting the subscription prices for their hybrid journals as they receive increasing levels of income from OA articles published in those journals. It is natural to expect that one benefit of hybrid journals should be the decreasing of subscription prices based on the number of their Open Access articles.
The hybrid model is also attractive for authors because it gives them the chance to publish their Open Access articles in prestigious journals. Moreover, the authors’ own institutions and many funding agencies are willing, or require, to let authors use grant funds to pay publication fees so their authors can publish Open Access articles in high-ranked journals, which have impact in promotion and systems assessing the quality of research in higher education institutions (e.g. UK REF).
Hybrid journals need to have a transparent and easy mechanism to support the clear and systematic identification of their Open Access content. If they don’t, the publishers’ hybrid business model risks being put in question by the very sources of their Open Access income. For example, the Wellcome Trust expressed concerns about hybrid journals being a fair commercial option for libraries and readers. Providing a systematic mechanism, such as including Open Access metadata in their RSS feeds, would send a clear signal that publishers have nothing to hide, and instead are working to help the wider community be aware and benefit from Open Access content published in their important journals.
Discovery services cannot say for sure whether an article is Open Access or not, if it has been published in a hybrid journal: A systematic solution, including standard metadata schemas, could also enable library discovery services to provide proper and timely Open Access information. Web-scale discovery services are nowadays considered indispensable components of any important digital library. However, most of these services cannot discover information about Open Access, which is increasingly becoming important for patrons. Thus, discovery services cannot make users aware of OA articles which appear in hybrid journals to which an institution does not subscribe. The fact is that discovery services cannot say for sure whether an article is Open Access or not if it has been published in a hybrid journal. This scenario can be improved by making available for the discovery services’ harvesters, standard metadata elements that provide Open Access information at the article level.
A low-barrier standard-based systematic identification of OA articles would enable the creation of subject clusters where anyone could access OA articles relevant for their research field: Last but not least, a low-barrier systematic identification of Open Access articles, using well-adopted standard metadata schemas such as Dublin-Core and PRISM (widely implemented in over 48% of journal TOC RSS feeds), would enable an additional benefit for the research community. It raises the possibility of grouping all OA articles, regardless of where they appear (i.e. in full OA journals or hybrid journals) in subject clusters – something which will help to disseminate research findings, and which will enable the creation of different subject clusters or one-stop shops at which anyone could access Open Access articles relevant for their research and collected from all types of scholarly journals. This subject-based approach has proven to be a very successful model in cases such as PubMed in medical sciences and arXiv for physics, computer science, mathematics and statistics. In fact, the European Research Council had implicitly acknowledged the benefits of this approach when, recently, it took the decision to directly fund arXiv.
During the first months of the JEMO Project, nearly 1,000 new journal titles have been manually added to JournalTOCs, in preparation for: (1) helping publishers to implement standard access-rights elements in their RSS feeds to enable the systematic identification of Open Access (OA) articles from hybrid and Green OA journals and; (2) broadening the benefits of current awareness on scholarly publications for researchers from developing countries.
As well as a systematic trawl through the publication lists of about 50 major journal publishers, which resulted in many titles being added from De Gruyter/Versita, Oxford University Press, Project Muse, Sage and Taylor & Francis, etc, the Directory of Research Journals Indexing (DRJI) was checked. Many titles included in DRJI are published in developing countries, however the list includes some titles that feature in Beall’s List: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers plus basically published titles which do not produce RSS TOC feeds, therefore care was taken to add only quality journals listed in the DRJI to JournalTOCs.
Redalyc provides access to over 800 journals published in Latin America. Some Redalyc titles were failing in JournalTOCs, and so the entire list of Redalyc journals was checked, and this resulted in many new titles being added to JournalTOCs plus all existing records updated. There are now about 450 Redalyc titles in JournalTOCs. The remaining titles listed at the Redalyc website are either already in JournalTOCs because they are also listed by SciELO or another publisher, or have ceased publication.
All journals on the PePSIC website were checked in a similar way. A number of new titles were subsequently added to JournalTOCs.
The DOAJ produces an RSS feed of new titles added. About 60 or so titles are added by DOAJ each week. These were checked against JournalTOCs. Now that DOAJ have a reasonable quality control policy, most titles with feeds are added to JournalTOCs.
During the period in question, [NewJour] restarted posting details of new (to it) journals. These were checked against JournalTOCs and added where applicable.
The JURN blog notes new additions to their service. These were checked, and added to JournalTOCs, where applicable.
Additions to ZETOC were checked, and added to JournalTOCs, where applicable.
The new titles were blogged here (105 titles), here (103 titles), here (324 titles), here (287 titles) and here (135 titles).
Most new additions were weeted by @journaltocs
By using a Google URL Shortener in the tweets, the number of people who click through to the JournalTOCs website from the tweets can be checked.
The JEMO proposal for a conference session on “Hybrid journals: Ensuring systematic and standard discoverability of latest Open Access articles” has been accepted for the NASIG 29th Annual Conference on Taking Stock and Taming New Frontiers to be held in Texas (USA) May 1st to 4th 2014.
The session will be presented by the renowned library and information science presenter Brian Kelly, who will discuss the challenge for research discovery and information providers to systematically identify the crucially important free full-text availability of OA articles published in hybrid journals, which are published together with pay-per-view or subscription articles. The need for an urgent solution to this challenge has been recognised through the creation of various initiatives initiated by national and worldwide institutions. For example the NISO Task Force on Open Access Metadata and Indicators.
The JEMO Research Team is working with six important publishers and is using the JournalTOCs service to trial possible solutions developed by using standard elements that are in agreement with the task force instigated by NISO to resolve this issue in a standardised manner. Brian will describe how the solutions have been prototyped by embedding article-level OA metadata in the TOC RSS feeds produced by the participant publishers. He will discuss the viability, advantages and issues found when using the proposed solution to systematically discover OA content from those eight publishers’ hybrid journals.
The North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) is the preeminent organization for the North American serials community, and it assumes a leadership role in the global information environment. NASIG offers the most influential and dynamic annual conference in the serials industry, at which issues are intensely debated and speakers challenge assumptions and traditions. The focus of the NASIG 29th Conference includes: Electronic resource life cycle and management; Standards and systems of cataloguing and classification, metadata, and indexing; Technology and providing for discovery and access to electronic resources; Electronic resources standards, initiatives, best practices, and workflows and; Scholarly communication initiatives.
We will be posting summaries and updates on the research in progress to be done between now and the conference date. If successful, Brian would be presenting to NASIG participants an efficient method for enabling M2M discovery of OA articles regardless of where and how such articles have been published.
This year PubMed Central (PMC) has started to use the <dc:rights> element to inform aggregators about the type of CC license (if available) used by the Open Access (OA) articles included in the PMC OAI-PMH Repository. While this initiative points in the right direction (helping OAI aggregators to identify Open Access rights at the article level), it is not convincing that PMC has used the correct metadata element to identify the type of licence granted by the copyright holder.
Example of use of <dc:rights> in a PMC OAI-PMH Record:
PMC uses three times <dc:rights> to define the article’s copyright and licence. The first one is a valid use of <dc:rights> because it uses a valid copyright notice to indicate the copyright holder (e.g. the word “copyright” followed by the copyright symbol, the year in which the article was published and, the identification of the copyright owner.) However using the second and the third <dc:rights> elements to include a link to the CC-BY site and to describe the CC type, is less convincing. This is where CC should really come into play. Using a CC element seems to really be a more suitable alternative to using <dc:rights> to state who has access rights to the article’s content and the type of rights granted to the end-user once the article has been accessed.
The main purpose of the <dc:rights> element is to inform about the rights held in and over an article. Although copyright can be ‘licensed’, this doesn’t make copyright strictly the same as licence. In this context, probably it is not necessary to use the <dc:rights> element as a placeholder of Open Access Licensing when we already have a well defined CC element to describe possible licensing options.
When an OA author licences his/her copyright, she/he is simply granting permission to the licensee to use the article in a specific way and for a specific purpose, typically as described by one of the CC type of licenses. The author always retains the copyright on the OA article. Over time, the author or the publisher can change the type of CC licensing of a published OA article at any time. Thus, a publisher may want to reverse a CC-BY-NC-ND licence to CC-BY to be compliant with new guidelines produced by OA funders. However, as the copyright doesn’t change with those licence changes, it doesn’t make sense altering the value of <dc:rights> when in fact what is changing is the type of licence of the article.
There are other arguments against using <dc:rights> instead <cc:license>. For example, having licensing and rights different meanings, it is not clear why we should use <dc:rights> to represent the value of <cc:license>. Licensing is a universal concept with the same meaning in any country. However, copyright laws are not the same throughout the world. On the other hand, when PMC uses three times the same <dc:rights> element to identify three different things (copyright holder, CC Licence’s URL and the CC licence type), it is creating an extra barrier for aggregators, because they would need to deal with three instances of the same metadata element that is being used for different purposes without having a pre-agreed standard vocabulary to help aggregators to unambiguously interpret the content from those metadata elements.
JEMO’s proposal recognises the importance of using the <dc:rights> element in the article metadata. However it restricts its use to the identification of the copyright holders and the date range of the copyright, which is in agreement with the DC specifications for <dc:rights>. It supports the use of the <cc:license> element to indicate who has access rights to the article’s content as well as the restrictions and type of access licensed to the end-user. The proposal suggests using the <dc:rights> and <cc:license> elements by following this pattern:
For Non-OA articles:
<dc:rights>Copyright © Publication_Year Publisher_Name</dc:rights>
<cc:license></cc:license>
For OA articles:
<dc:rights>
Copyright © Publication_Year First Author_Surname, First_Author_Initial [et al]
</dc:rights>
<cc:license rdf:resource=”Selected_CC_License“ />
Thus, the above PMC example could be rewritten as:
These elements should be included in the journal RSS feeds and in any metadata exposed by publishers for aggregators and discovery services. Consequently any A&I, aggregator and discovery service will be able to identify an item as an OA article by checking that the <cc:license> element is pointing to a specific CC license. If the <cc:license> element is absent or without a value, no assumptions is made about the access rights with respect to the article. With the collaboration of its publisher partners, JEMO is testing and prototyping the implementation, use and feasibility of this proposal. This blog will be reporting on the partial results and findings obtained with the prototype.
As a result of work being done on the JEMO Project, the number of scholarly journals whose latest Tables of Contents (TOCs) are included in the JournalTOCS alerting service for researchers has passed the 23,000 mark. The increase has resulted from a systematic review of current journal titles being offered by several of the largest publishers included in JournalTOCs, plus the addition of a number of relatively new journals, several of which are of interest to researchers in developing countries and/or medical researchers.
Of the 23,000 Tables of Content included in JournalTOCs, more than 6,500 are Open Access. Of the non OA titles, a rapidly growing number are hybrid journals, i.e. ones where some, but not all, of the articles are Open Access. For example, Elsevier, the largest journal publisher, now offers OA options to authors in over 1600 of their journals. Other publishers are following a similar course and most are offering OA options in a percentage, or in some cases all, of their titles.
Following the increase in coverage of JournalTOCs, the JEMO Project will be better placed to fulfil its twofold objectives: (1) to help publishers to implement standard access-rights elements in their RSS feeds to enable the systematic identification of Open Access (OA) articles from hybrid and Green OA journals and; (2) to broaden the benefits of current awareness on scholarly publications for researchers from developing countries.
It is not only about quantity, of course. Quality of content is also important, and JournalTOCs does not include journals that do not adhere to appropriate standards.
More details about further progress being made by JEMO will appear shortly in this blog.
JournalTOCs adds new journals to its collection of Tables of Contents on a daily basis.
Many of the titles recently added are of interest to researchers in developing countries, and medical professionals. To see these announcements, plus various tweets about journal publishing, go to @JournalTOCs
Welcome to JEMO, a project funded by EPSRC and Heriot Watt University, with the support of five scholarly publishers and two large library organisations. JEMO is associated with JournalTOCs, the popular journal current awareness service, where thousands of researchers keep up-to-date with the latest scholarly publications.
JEMO will implement standard RSS (Really Simple Syndication) elements to enable the systematic identification of Open Access (OA) articles from hybrid and Green OA journals.
The Need for Article-Level Open-Access Metadata … by Todd A. Carpenter
At the same time JEMO will broaden the benefits of the JournalTOCs Premium product to researchers from developing countries, under the umbrella of consortia with INASP.
A Nepali Participant of INASP
Project References
“The overall growth of OA together with new funder mandates and the creation of hybrid journals creates a landscape laden with OA articles that may possess different associated rights and responsibilities, and contributes to confusion as to who may take what action under what circumstances.”
Source: Lagace N. and Tananbaum G. (2013) The Serials Librarian. Taylor & Francis. Volume 65, Issue 2. pp. 123–127. 10.1080/0361526X.2013.813892
Journal Article Retrieval in an Age of Open Access: How Journal Indexes Indicate Open Access Articles by Xiaotian Chena. Published in Journal of Web Librarianship, Volume 7, Issue 3, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19322909.2013.795426
Library report shines light on developing world by Matthew Reisz
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/library-report-shines-light-on-developing-world/2006336.article
As Hybrid Open Access Grows, the Scholarly Community Needs Article-level OA Metadata by Todd A Carpenter
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/12/05/as-hybrid-open-access-grows-the-scholarly-community-needs-article-level-oa-metadata/
Open access, Primo Central and addressing accessibility to open access articles in hybrid journals by Christine Stohn
http://initiatives.exlibrisgroup.com/2012/09/open-access-primo-central-and.html
JEMO 