Disciplinary Scholarly Communication Services Guide

Collects updated plans, requests for information, and additional information from U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), National Institute of Standards Technology (NIST), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) , National Science Foundation (NSF), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Department of Transportation (DOT), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), National Institutes of Health (NIH)

This study and website seek to more deeply investigate the characteristics of U.S. federally funded research over a 5-year period from 2017-2021 to better understand the impact of the updated guidance. It uses a manually created custom filter in the Dimensions database to return only publications that arise from U.S. federal funding.

Results show that an average of 265,000 articles are published each year that acknowledge U.S. federal funding agencies. These research outputs are further examined to look at patterns by publisher, journal title, institutions, and Open Access status.

APCs for both Hybrid and Fully Open journals have risen over the years. An analysis of the four largest fully OA publishers found that the rate of APC increases outpaced that of inflation between 2012 and 2018.
The average APC for fully open journals rose from $2,995.02 in 2023 to $3,024.96 in 2024 (a 1.00% increase); the average APC for hybrid journals rose from $3,999.23 in 2023 to $4,072.14 in 2024 (a 1.82% increase).
As of May 2024, over 24 thousand preprint records citing NIH funding support and posted to an eligible preprint server after January 1, 2023 have been added to PMC. ... It is now common practice for journals to accept articles for review that have been published as preprints, recognizing that preprints are becoming a popular mechanism for researchers to share their results early.
The lack of clarity on funding sources to cover APCs makes it difficult to estimate the percentage of federal research and development expenditures that go towards APCs. ... While some publishers have taken steps to implement pricing transparency frameworks,49 there remains limited public information on per-article publication costs, such as those associated with content acquisition, peer review, production, and dissemination, on the revenues collected by the publishing industry, and on how such factors affect APCs.

Companion website showing interactive versions of graphs from the study at https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00237.

This paper looks at the ethical, legal, and practical aspects of GenAI, highlighting its potential to transform scholarly communications, and covers a range of topics from intellectual property rights to the challenges of maintaining integrity in the digital age. It provides best-practice principles and recommendations for authors, editorial teams, reviewers, and vendors, ensuring a responsible and ethical approach to the use of GenAI tools.

Gendron, Andrew, Cooper

The Generative AI Product Tracker lists generative AI products that are either marketed specifically towards postsecondary faculty or students or appear to be actively in use by postsecondary faculty or students for teaching, learning, or research activities. The Tracker is a living document, which we update regularly as new products enter the market or new information about existing products becomes available.

A comprehensive living database of over 700 AI risks categorized by their cause and risk domain.

This issue of The Brief covers Peer replication, paper mills, and critiques of “Report to the US Congress on Financing Mechanisms for Open Access Publishing of Federally Funded Research,” “The Oligopoly’s Shift to Open Access: How the Big Five Academic Publishers Profit from Article Processing Charges,” and “Towards responsible publishing: a proposal from cOAlition S.”

Quinn Galbraith, Alexandra Carlile Butterfield, and Chase Cardon claim that Google Scholar accounted better for journals in non-English languages than Scopus and Web of Science and doubled the number of journals available compared to Scopus and tripled compared to Web of Science. Google Scholar has the highest percentage of journals classified in the areas of physical science, humanities, social science (tied with Scopus), education, engineering, and law. Compared to other metrics systems, Google Scholar’s high coverage of law journals (60%) is particularly impressive. The best indexed field was the life sciences at 82 percent, followed closely by the physical sciences and engineering at 76 percent and the social sciences at 75 percent. Business was also fairly well indexed, with more than half the journals indexed in every metric system. All the other disciplines—fine arts, law, education, and humanities—averaged at less than half indexed. With the highest rate of classification at 82 percent, the full range of academic journals in a discipline is not being wholly represented.

Leigh-Ann Butler, Lisa Matthias, Marc-André Simard, Philippe Mongeon, Stefanie Haustein state that fees between $200 and $1,000 per article are sufficient to sustain a gold OA journal.

According to AAAS's 2022 report, nearly two-thirds of researchers reported that they did not budget for publishing costs, and of the researchers who had paid APCs and answered a question about their ability to obtain APC funds, a minority reported that it was easy to obtain funds for APCs. AAAS suggests clarifying the definition of an “author accepted manuscript.” AAAS also suggests new directives should ensure consistency between OA policies and federal data-access and data-management policies.

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