Embargo (academic publishing)

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In academic publishing, an embargo is a period during which access to academic journals is not allowed to users who have not paid for access (or have access through their institution). The purpose of this is to ensure publishers have revenue to support their activities, [1] although the impact of embargoes on publishers is hotly debated, with some studies finding no impact[ citation needed ] while publisher experience suggests otherwise. [2] [3] A 2012 survey of libraries by the Association of Learned, Professional, and Society Publishers on the likelihood of journal cancellations in cases where most of the content was made freely accessible after six months suggests there would be a major negative impact on subscriptions, [4] but this result has been debated.

Contents

Various types exist:

Purpose

There are various purposes:

Moving wall

In academic publishing, a moving wall is the time period between the last issue of an academic journal available in a given online database and the most recently published print issue of a journal. It is specified by publishers in their license agreements with databases (like JSTOR), and generally ranges from several months to several years. [8]

Sustainability of embargo periods

Currently used embargo times (often 6–12 months in STEM and over 12 months in social sciences and humanities), however, do not seem to be based on empirical evidence on the effect of embargoes on journal subscriptions. [9] In 2013 the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills already concluded that "there is no available evidence base to indicate that short or even zero embargoes cause cancellation of subscriptions". [note 1]

There are some data available [note 2] on the median "usage half life" (the median time it takes for scholarly articles to reach half of their total downloads) and the difference therein across disciplines, but this in itself does not prove that embargo length will affect subscriptions. [note 3]

The argument that immediate self-archiving risks subscription revenue is seen as ironic where archiving of postprints is concerned. If the value publishers add to the publication process beyond peer review (e.g. in typesetting, dissemination and archiving) were worth the price asked, people would still be willing to pay for the journal even if the unformatted postprint is available elsewhere. An embargo can be seen as a statement that in fact the prices levied for individual articles through subscriptions, are not commensurate with the value added to a publication beyond organizing the peer review process. [9]

Publishers have, in the past, lifted embargo periods for specific research topics in times of humanitarian crises, or have been asked to do so (e.g. outbreaks of Zika and Ebola [note 4] ). While considered commendable in itself by scholars, this is seen as an implicit acknowledgement that embargoes stifle the progress of science and the potential application of scientific research; particularly when it comes to life-threatening pandemics. While arguably, not all research is potentially critical for saving lives, it is hard to imagine a discipline where fellow researchers and societal partners would not benefit from un-embargoed access to research findings. [9]

Evidence suggests that traditional journals can peacefully coexist with zero-embargo self-archiving policies, [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] and the relative benefits to both publishers and authors via increased dissemination and citations outweigh any putative negative impacts. For publishers, the fact that most preprint repositories encourage authors to link to or upload the published version of record (VOR) is effectively free marketing for the respective journal and publisher. [9]

Plan S has zero-length embargoes on self-archiving as one of its key principles. [9] Where publishers have already implemented such policies, such as the Royal Society, Sage, and Emerald, [note 5] there has been no documented impact on their finances so far. In a reaction to Plan S, Highwire suggested that three of their society publishers make all author manuscripts freely available upon submission and state that they do not believe this practice has contributed to subscription decline. [note 6] Therefore there is little evidence or justification supporting the need for embargo periods.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "Open Access, Fifth Report of Session 2013–14" (PDF)., House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, September 2013.
  2. ↑ "Journal Usage Half-Life" (PDF)., Phil Davis, 2013.
  3. ↑ "Half-life is half the story". 16 October 2015., Danny Kingsley, 2015.
  4. ↑ "Global scientific community commits to sharing data on Zika". 10 February 2016., Wellcome Trust.
  5. ↑ "Zero embargo publishers"., database maintained by Stuart Taylor.
  6. ↑ "Plan S: The options publishers are considering". 2019-01-10., Highwire Press.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scientific journal</span> Periodical journal publishing scientific research

In academic publishing, scientific journal is a periodical publication designed to further the progress of science by disseminating new research findings to the scientific community. These journals serve as a platform for researchers, scholars, and scientists to share their latest discoveries, insights, and methodologies across a multitude of scientific disciplines. Unlike professional or trade magazines, scientific journals are characterized by their rigorous peer-review process, which aims to ensure the validity, reliability, and quality of the published content. With origins dating back to the 17th century, the publication of scientific journals has evolved significantly, playing a pivotal role in the advancement of scientific knowledge, fostering academic discourse, and facilitating collaboration within the scientific community.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Preprint</span> Academic paper prior to journal publication

In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before or after a paper is published in a journal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic publishing</span> Subfield of publishing distributing academic research and scholarship

Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or thesis. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

An article or piece is a written work published in a print or electronic medium, for the propagation of news, research results, academic analysis or debate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-archiving</span> Authorial deposit of documents to provide open access

Self-archiving is the act of depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as well as theses and book chapters, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact. The term green open access has become common in recent years, distinguishing this approach from gold open access, where the journal itself makes the articles publicly available without charge to the reader.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Postprint</span> Electronic version of a scholarly manuscript after peer review

A postprint is a digital draft of a research journal article after it has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, but before it has been typeset and formatted by the journal.

A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee to the publisher in order to publish an article open access, in addition to the continued payment of subscriptions to access all other content. Strictly speaking, the term "hybrid open-access journal" is incorrect, possibly misleading, as using the same logic such journals could also be called "hybrid subscription journals". Simply using the term "hybrid access journal" is accurate.

Delayed open-access journals are traditional subscription-based journals that provide free online access upon the expiry of an embargo period following the initial publication date.

SHERPA is an organisation originally set up in 2002 to run and manage the SHERPA Project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Suber</span> American philosopher advocate of open access

Peter Dain Suber is an American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of law and open access to knowledge. He is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP). Suber is known as a leading voice in the open access movement, and as the creator of the game Nomic.

An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open access (1) by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional repository or disciplinary repository or (2) by publishing them in an open-access journal or both.

A copyright transfer agreement or copyright assignment agreement is an agreement that transfers the copyright for a work from the copyright owner to another party. This is one legal option for publishers and authors of books, magazines, movies, television shows, video games, and other commercial artistic works who want to include and use a work of a second creator: for example, a video game developer who wants to pay an artist to draw a boss to include in a game. Another option is to license the right to include and use the work, rather than transferring the copyright.

Academic journal publishing reform is the advocacy for changes in the way academic journals are created and distributed in the age of the Internet and the advent of electronic publishing. Since the rise of the Internet, people have organized campaigns to change the relationships among and between academic authors, their traditional distributors and their readership. Most of the discussion has centered on taking advantage of benefits offered by the Internet's capacity for widespread distribution of reading material.

This is a summary of the different copyright policies of academic publishers for books, book chapters, and journal articles.

An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access in France</span> Overview of the culture and regulation of open access in France

In France, open access to scholarly communication is relatively robust and has strong public support. Revues.org, a digital platform for social science and humanities publications, launched in 1999. Hyper Articles en Ligne (HAL) began in 2001. The French National Center for Scientific Research participated in 2003 in the creation of the influential Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Publishers EDP Sciences and OpenEdition belong to the international Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of open access</span>

The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arXiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Version of record</span> Official version of an article, published by a publisher

The version of record of an article is the fully copyedited, typeset and formatted copy of a manuscript as published, in contrast with earlier versions such as preprints and postprints. The terminology is used in a wide variety of written media.

References

  1. ↑ "Publication embargo « SPARC Europe". sparceurope.org. Archived from the original on 2015-11-18. Retrieved 2015-10-19.
  2. ↑ "Is Free Affordable". Nature.
  3. ↑ Delamothe, T. (2003). "Paying for bmj.com". BMJ. 327 (7409): 241–242. doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7409.241. S2CID   71168147.
  4. ↑ "ALPSP Survey on Journal Cancelations" (PDF). Retrieved 10 December 2015.
  5. ↑ Laakso, Mikael; Björk, Bo-Christer (2013). "Delayed open access: An overlooked high-impact category of openly available scientific literature". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 64 (7): 1323–1329. doi:10.1002/asi.22856. hdl: 10138/157658 .
  6. ↑ "SHERPA/RoMEO – Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving". www.sherpa.ac.uk. Retrieved 2015-10-19.
  7. ↑ "EBSCO Support: What are Publication Embargoes?". support.ebscohost.com. 2016-06-13. Retrieved 2015-10-19.
  8. ↑ "What is a moving wall?". JSTOR. Archived from the original on 1 November 2015. Retrieved 19 October 2015.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 Vanholsbeeck, Marc; Thacker, Paul; Sattler, Susanne; Ross-Hellauer, Tony; Rivera-López, Bárbara S.; Rice, Curt; Nobes, Andy; Masuzzo, Paola; Martin, Ryan; Kramer, Bianca; Havemann, Johanna; Enkhbayar, Asura; Davila, Jacinto; Crick, Tom; Crane, Harry; Tennant, Jonathan P. (2019-03-11). "Ten Hot Topics around Scholarly Publishing". Publications. 7 (2): 34. doi: 10.3390/publications7020034 .
  10. ↑ Journal Publishing and Author Self-Archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration, 2005
  11. ↑ Swan, Alma; Brown, Sheridan (May 2005). "Open Access Self-Archiving: An Author Study". Departmental Technical Report. UK FE and HE Funding Councils.
  12. ↑ Gargouri, Yassine; Hajjem, Chawki; Lariviere, Vincent; Gingras, Yves; Carr, Les; Brody, Tim; Harnad, Stevan (2006). "Effect of E-Printing on Citation Rates in Astronomy and Physics". Journal of Electronic Publishing. 9 (2): 2. arXiv: cs/0604061 . Bibcode:2006JEPub...9....2H. doi: 10.3998/3336451.0009.202 .
  13. ↑ Houghton, John W.; Oppenheim, Charles (2010). "The Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models". Prometheus. 28: 41–54. doi: 10.1080/08109021003676359 . S2CID   153641302.
  14. ↑ Bernius, Steffen; Hanauske, Matthias; Dugall, Berndt; König, Wolfgang (2013). "Exploring the Effects of a Transition to Open Access: Insights from a Simulation Study". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 64 (4): 701–726. doi:10.1002/asi.22772.
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