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While the number of hybrid journals has increased with the conversion from subscription journals, article processing charges (APCs) have not been examined as frequently as gold open access journals. This study compared the factors affecting APCs for hybrid and gold open access journals by formulating a charge equation.

This study examined the APCs for 1,354 hybrid and gold open access journals in the Springer imprint. Using the ordinary least squares method, it investigated the determinants of charges, including the relationship between subscription prices and APCs for hybrid journals.

The results revealed that the charges set by hybrid journals were higher than those set by gold open access journals by US$1,620, after controlling for other variables. A reason could be the oligopolistic market structure of the leading publishers. Although the publisher imprint set the APCs based on the journal characteristics, the difference in the determinants of the charges between the two journal types may be due to the business models specific to the journal types.

The findings suggested that policymakers must consider the market power of leading publishers to establish a healthy scholarly communication market.

This study examined the relationship between subscription prices and charges for hybrid journals as well as the determinants of charges for both journal types, considering various characteristics of individual journals.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the evolution of Gold open access (OA) rates in different countries and disciplines, as well as explore the influencing factors.

In this study, employing the OA filter option of Web of Science (WoS), the authors perform a large-scale evaluation of the OA state of countries and disciplines from 1990 to 2016. Particularly, the authors consider not only the absolute number of Gold OA literature but also the ratio of them among all literature.

Currently, one-quarter of the WoS articles is Gold OA articles. Brazil is the most active country in OA publishing, while Russia, India and China have the lowest OA ratios. The OA percentage of Brazil has been decreasing dramatically in recent years, while the OA percentages of China, UK and the Netherlands have been increasing. There also exist huge differences of OA percentages across different subject categories. The percentages of OA articles in biology, life, and health-related areas are high, while those in physics and chemistry-related subject categories are very low.

With the availability of large-scale data from WoS, this study conducts a comprehensive evaluation of the Gold OA state of major countries for the first time. The variation of OA percentages is considered in light of the research profiles. OA policies in different countries and funding organizations also have an influence on the OA development.

This paper aims to uncover the central purposes of institutional repositories, how developments are being affected by policies and researcher behaviour and also what services and approaches are appropriate in supporting repositories from those partners involved in scholarly communication with a particular focus on services that support the publication of research.

The research reviews the literature and current practices within higher education with regard to the core purposes of institutional repositories, the possible causes of low population of repositories in some institutions and subject disciplines, how this is being addressed and likely future developments. A qualitative survey using semi-structured interviews explores current best practices and tests the specific research questions that emerged from the literature review.

The rate at which institutional repositories have grown in number has been very fast in recent years, but the population of repositories with research has been relatively slow. The research identified a number of reasons as to why the population of repositories was likely to accelerate in the future and have a more significant impact on scholarly communication. The main catalysts are: strengthening of national and funder policies that serve to both mandate open access (green or gold) and raise awareness of open access amongst faculty; the alignment of repositories with current research information systems within universities; and the development of metadata and open archives initiative harvesting that will improve discoverability and usage data.

As many of the issues around the development of repositories centre on the attitudes of faculty, it would also provide an interesting extension to the research to understand their views of the role of institutional repositories, too.

The study presents a number of possible new ways of working by both information professionals and publishers to improve scholarly communication through the inclusion of research within institutional repositories and how perceived barriers could be overcome.

The study provides guidance on how the communication of scholarly research could be improved and reach a wider audience. This, in turn, will benefit researchers, corporate organisations and the public at large.

The paper provides a review of current best practices in managing institutional repositories and identifies new ways of addressing some of the perceived barriers to populating repositories and the benefits for each stakeholder in the scholarly communication process.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of one of the most important and controversial areas of scholarly communication: Open Access publishing and dissemination of research outputs. It identifies and discusses recent trends and future challenges for various stakeholders in delivering Open Access (OA) to the scholarly literature.

The study is based on a number of interrelated strands of evidence which make up the current discourse on OA, comprising the peer-reviewed literature, grey literature and other forms of communication (including blogs and e-mail discussion lists). It uses a large-scale textual analysis of the peer-reviewed literature since 2010 (carried out using the VOSviewer tool) as a basis for discussion of issues raised in the OA discourse.

A number of key themes are identified, including the relationship between “Green” OA (deposit in repositories) and “Gold” OA (OA journal publication), the developing evidence base associated with OA, researcher attitudes and behaviours, policy directions, management of repositories, development of journals, institutional responses and issues around impact and scholarly communication futures. It suggests that current challenges now focus on how OA can be made to work in practice, having moved on from the discussion of whether it should happen at all.

The paper provides a structured evidence-based review of major issues in the OA field, and suggests key areas for future research and policy development.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the findings of a survey of Bulgarian faculty about the extent to which their research is openly available, awareness of the European Union Competitiveness Council open access goal, support for the goal and preferences for achieving it.

The authors conducted a survey of 584 faculty at six universities in Bulgaria using the Qualtrics online survey software. There were 222 effectively surveyed respondents.

Bulgarian researchers are aware of arguments in favor of open access and believe that it benefits researchers in their discipline. Only a little more than a third of Bulgarian faculty are familiar with the E.U. goal of open access to all publicly-funded research by 2020. Once the goal is explained, they support it. Authors may not understand the intricacies of green and gold open access, but they are willing to meet the E.U. goal by either publishing in open access journals (the gold method) or depositing articles in open access repositories (the green method).

The results are useful to countries and funding agencies interested in achieving open access to state funded research.

To date, there has been no research that seeks to determine the degree to which researchers are aware of the E.U. Competitiveness Council’s goal or that seeks to determine faculty preferences for achieving that goal. This paper explores methods available for achieving open access to the results of publicly funded research in Bulgaria.

This paper aims to examine the level of open access (OA) adoption by researchers in Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), identify predictors of OA status (OA vs non-OA) and explore the availability of OA versions of the articles and venues used by the researches for hosting of their articles.

Articles contributed by the researchers in IITs were searched using an advance search option in the Web of Science Core collection database. The search was restricted to journal articles published in English language in the year 2015. Of the 10,049 articles retrieved, 1,023 (10 per cent of the total) were chosen randomly. Articles selected after randomizations were exported to MS Excel for further analyses. Title of each article was searched in Google Scholar to assess its OA availability and venues used by the author for self-archiving. Details of ten articles could not be traced in Google Scholar, and they were excluded from the analysis. Based on the analysis of URLs, all OA articles were classified into three categories: gold OA, green OA and both gold and green OA. The OA articles available through green route were further classified into six categories based on the analysis of the websites and the self-archiving venues used by the authors: institutional repository, subject repository, researcher or scholar’s website, organizational website, ResearchGate and other websites.

Of 1,013 articles examined, OA versions were found for 68.70 per cent of articles. Of the total OA articles, 10.26 per cent articles were available through gold OA and 58.44 per cent were available through green OA, while remaining 6.21 per cent were available via both gold and green OA routes. Although researchers use different venues for self-archiving their articles, ResearchGate and institutional repositories are the most preferred choices by the researchers in IITs. Researchers in IITs are seemed to be unaware of the self-archiving policies of publishers, as more than 85 per cent self-archived articles were found as final PDF versions that are normally not allowed by the publishers.

This study is limited to IITs, but it offers theoretical implications for extending its scope to different subjects and institutes. The findings of the study may be useful for the publishers and institutions for formulating OA policies. The findings of the study might be used for raising awareness of OA among researchers and encouraging them to contribute their research outcome in OA outlets.

This is the first study in India focusing on the availability of OA research.

Citation is an important measure of quality, and it plays a vital role in evaluating scientific research. However, citation advantage varies from discipline to discipline, subject to subject and topic to topic. This study aims to compare the citation advantage of open access and toll access articles from four subfields of computer science.

This research studies the articles published by two prestigious publishers: Springer and Elsevier in the author-pays charges model from 2011 to 2015. For experimentation, four sub-domains of computer science are selected including (a) artificial intelligence, (b) human–computer interaction, (c) computer vision and graphics, and (d) software engineering. The open-access and toll-based citation advantage is studied and analyzed at the micro level within the computer science domain by performing independent sample t-tests.

The results of the study highlight that open access articles have a higher citation advantage as compared to toll access articles across years and sub-domains. Further, an increase in open access articles has been observed from 2011 to 2015. The findings of the study show that the citation advantage of open access articles varies among different sub-domains of a subject. The study contributed to the body of knowledge by validating the positive movement toward open access articles in the field of computer science and its sub-domains. Further, this work added the success of the author-pays charges model in terms of citation advantage to the literature of open access.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the citation advantage of the author-pays charges model at a subject level (computer science) along with four sub-domains of computer science.

This paper aims to bring together information on whether any evidence exists of a commercial conflict between the creation of digital archives at research institutions and by key subject centres of excellence, and the business of journal publishing.

Relevant publications, including articles published in refereed books and journals, as well as informal commentaries on listservs, blogs and wikis, were analysed to determine whether there is any evidence of a commercial relationship.

Most of the published comments are highly subjective and anecdotal – there is a significant emotional overtone to many of the views expressed. There is precious little hard evidence currently available to support or debunk the idea that a commercial conflict exists between repositories and journal subscriptions. The situation is made more difficult by the many technological, sociological and administrative changes that are taking place in parallel to the establishment of repositories.

Separating the key drivers and their impact is a major strategic challenge facing all stakeholders in the scholarly communication industry in future.

This is an important area which requires close monitoring – the possible threat that the established journal publishing system could be eroded away by a new “free” scholarly information system needs attention. One significant study in this area is being undertaken by the PEER group, funded by the European Commission with hard evidence being collected by UCL's CIBER research group. The results from this impartial investigation will be very welcome.

The paper shows that relationship between repositories and journal subscriptions is vague.

This paper aims to analyze open access (OA) scholarly publishing patterns as well as OA policies and mandates across European countries.

The study is based on a descriptive research approach using data from Web resources, directories and bibliographic and citation databases, namely, DOAJ, OpenDOAR, SCImago journal and Country Ranking portal, ROARMAP and Web of Science.

The findings indicate that the initiatives and measures in Europe that promote OA are adequate. OA journals and digital repositories have progressively increased over the past two decades. Of the total journals (n = 25,231) published worldwide and indexed in Scopus, 53% are published in European countries, with 23.7% being OA journals. In total, 34% of the OA repositories (n = 5,714) are in European countries. The proportion of OA journal papers has grown significantly in all European countries, with a 14.3% annual growth rate. The average proportion of OA publications in European countries is significantly higher (39.07%) than the world average (30.16%), with a clear inclination for making research literature openly accessible via the green OA route (79.41%) compared to the gold OA route (52.30%). Most European research funders and institutions have required researchers to make OA available for their research findings, either by publishing them in OA journals or depositing accepted manuscripts in repositories.

The study analyzed OA trends in Europe; other continents and countries were not included in the analysis. The study only described OA policies and mandates; the extent to which the OA policies and mandates were implemented was not studied. However, the results of the study may be helpful to policymakers, funders, research institutions and universities in other countries in adopting and implementing OA policies and mandates.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is the first that used multiple data sources for investigating different facets of OA publishing in European countries, including OA journals, digital repositories, research output, mandates and policies for publicly funded research. The findings will be helpful for researchers and policymakers interested in promoting OA adoption among researchers worldwide.

The purpose of this paper is to review the current LIS literature relating to Interlending and Document Supply and related issues such as open access.

This paper is based on a reading of about 150 journals together with reports, blogs, web sites, etc.

This paper argues that the tipping point for open access has already arrived and is now acknowledged widely. Now new tensions and complications are emerging to do with funding and control. Significant changes in UK copyright law, specifically contract no longer trumping copyright will have widespread ramifications.

This paper is the only review of the LIS literature that focuses on Interlending and Document Supply and related issues.