Session Information
12 SES 13 A, Paper Session: Information Literacy and Open Research Practice
Paper Session
Contribution
Open Access (OA) publications are increasingly established in Educational Sciences. The Open Science Monitor of the European Union points to 23,7 % of Open Access journal publications in Educational Sciences (Open Science Monitor, 2009-2018). An online survey conducted in 2012 describes a fundamental change in publication behavior since some years (Bambey 2016: 275).
The publishing world has responded to the changing demands with new business models. In order to enable free access to the literature, publishing fees (APC) were introduced for the lost revenue from subscriptions (Rummler, Schindler 2018; Schimmer et al. 2015). In the so-called hybrid business models, the subscription model has been combined with APC, which has opened up additional sources of revenue for publishers.
The new model of publication-based funding runs the risk of missing one of the goals of OA, namely the radical reduction of costs in publishing, and of the large academic publishers continuing to make disproportionate profits (Asai 2020). Rather, there is a danger that the serial crisis of the 1990s will turn into a new APC crisis (Khoo 2019; Herb 2017).
In order to facilitate a transition from the subscription model to the APC model and the associated shift in budgets, transformation contracts (e.g. DEAL) have been concluded at national level, under which so-called publish and read fees are paid until the journals shift to a fully OA mode. These transformation contracts have led to a significant increase in the number of hybrid OA articles published. However, they carry the risk that they are associated with an increase in costs, especially for the HSS disciplines. Also, these contracts are only available to large publishers and exclude the breadth of smaller publishers (Schindler, Rummler 2018; Ferwerda et al. 2017).
A number of studies have been conducted that focus on OA status or the route to OA (e.g. Piwowar et al. 2018; Melero 2018; Wohlgemuth et al. 2017, Picarra et al. 2015). If the financial aspects are covered, mostly data driven approaches, based on available and processable data are used (Jahn et al. 2022, Stern 2017). The lack of a reference base of journals established in the research community, used as poulation, is evident. Approaches that do not follow a thematic or disciplinary approach have only limited explanatory power.
This paper examines the status of the OA transformation for core journals in the defined field of educational research in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. A differentiated presentation of the availability in Fully OA or Hybrid OA Journals as well as Green OA self-archived articles in OA Repositories is given.
In addition, the diversity of business models offered by the publishers is examined, assessing their efficiency in tearms of transformation as well as their impact on public funding.
In order to be able to make a reliable statement on the status of the OA transformation, this paper focuses on a concrete publication output of the educational research community. The bibliometric analysis carried out focuses on on a defined set of journals with high relevance for the discipline, published by publishing houses located in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
Method
This paper conducts a scientometric methodological approach based on the bibliometric data of the German Education Index (FIS Bildung). The registry of journals of the Index (Zeitschriftenregister, n = 1.090) has been used as a bibliographic data basis for identifying a core collection of Educational Research journals (n = 43) and their related articles. The corpus of 43 Journals has been selected based on the following criteria: 1) It is published by a commercial publisher based in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland. 2) The quality assurance is ensured by a defined peer review. 3) Since the German Education Index also evaluates journals from related disciplines, a further selection was finally made on journals whose thematic orientation lies entirely in the field of educational research, including teaching methodology journals with peer-reviewed research articles. Thereby, the systematic thematic delimitation is used following the German definition of educational research, described as a transdisciplinary, empirical and/or theroretical scientific endeavor related to educational processes (Deutscher Bildungsrat 1974, 16). The metadata of the corpus were then supplemented with detailed data on the OA conditions through research on the publishers' websites and in databases such as the German Union Catalogue of Serials (ZDB) and Sherpa-Romeo. The following aspects were examined for the journal corpus: -->Status of the journal as Fully OA, hybrid OA or Closed Access -->Participation of the journal in a national hybrid transformation contract -->Amount of APC for fully Gold OA and hybrid OA variants -->Availability of publishing regulations for Green OA for the article versions submitted version and accepted version, stating the respective embargo deadlines -->Contractually agreed OA archiving in the subject-specific OA repository peDOCS
Expected Outcomes
The analysis of the core journals shows that the transformation towards OA is only partial. 26% of the journals do not offer any options for OA publication at all and just 37% allow for self-archiving of a postprint in a subject oriented or institutional repository (Green OA). 49% of the journals run a hybrid OA model, paying for reading and publishing in OA, 23% are financed by national transformation contracts (e.g. DEAL). Only 21% of the journals are fully OA and offer all articles immediately OA. Alternative transition models as Suscribe to Open where not applied by any publisher. These results show that there is still considerable potential for Green OA. Although the embargo and the postprint version do impose limitations on use, Green OA is suitable for improving access and findability. Additionally, Green OA exerts pressure on publishers' pricing policies through cost-effective alternatives. The results show as well that just large international publishers Springer and Wiley and the medium-sized publisher Hogrefe profit from national transformation consortia. Publishers who are not included run the risk of being left behind at the development of services and technical infrastructure. In the long run, they are in danger of disappearing from the market. Scientists and science policy strive for OA publishing. For Educational Sciences there is a risk of loosing its characteristic broad publishing landscape with small and medium-sized companies (bibliodiversity)(Ferwerda et.al. 2017). At the same time, a further concentration of publication output among the major publishers is expected, which can thus consolidate their oligopolistic position. However, there is the need for Educational Sciences to play an active role together with libraries and research infrastructure in finding viable models for financing their core journals and maintaining the publication landscape.
References
Asai, S. (2020). Market power of publishers in setting article processing charges for open access journals. Scientometrics, 123(2), 1037–1049. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03402-y Bambey, D.: Fachliche Publikationskulturen und Open Access. Fächerübergreifende Entwicklungstendenzen und Spezifika der Erziehungswissenschaft und Bildungsforschung. Darmstadt 2016. DOI: 10.25656/01:12331 Deutscher Bildungsrat (1974): Empfehlungen der Bildungskommission. Zur Neuordnung der Sekundarstufe II, 38. Sitzung der Bildungskommission, 13./14. Februar 1974 in Bonn. Ferwerda, E., Pinter, F., & Stern, N. (2017). A Landscape Study on Open Access and Monographs: Policies, Funding and Publishing in Eight European Countries. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.815932 German Education Index (FIS Bildung) Zeitschriftenregister https://www.fachportal-paedagogik.de/literatur/zeitschriftenregister.html Herb, U. (2017). Open Access zwischen Revolution und Goldesel: Eine Bilanz fünfzehn Jahre nach der Erklärung der Budapest Open Access Initiative. Information - Wissenschaft & Praxis, 68(1), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1515/iwp-2017-0004 Jahn, N., Held, M., Walter, H., Haupka, N. & Hillenkötter, K. (2022). HOAD: Data Analytics für mehr Transparenz bei Open-Access-Transformationsverträgen. ABI Technik, 42(1), 64-69. https://doi.org/10.1515/abitech-2022-0007 Rummler, Schindler 2018 Khoo, S. (2019): Article Processing Charge Hyperinflation and Price Insensitivity: An Open Access Sequel to the Serials Crisis. LIBER Quarterly 29(1). http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10280 Marques, M.;, Woutersen-Windhouwer, S.; Tuuliniemi, A. (2019): Monitoring Agreements with Open Access Elements: Why Article-level Metadata Are Important. Insights 32 (1): 35. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.489 Melero, R; Melero-Fuentes, D.; Rodríguez-Gairín, J.-M. (2018): Monitoring compliance with governmental and institutional open access policies across Spanish universities. El profesional de la información, v. 27, n. 4, pp. 858-878. https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2018.jul.15 Open Science Monitor: Trends for open access to publications. https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/strategy/strategy-2020-2024/our-digital-future/open-science/open-science-monitor/trends-open-access-publications_en Picarra, M., Swan, A. and McCutcheon, V. (2015) Monitoring Compliance with Open Access policies. PASTEUR40A. https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/113944/ Piwowar H, Priem J, Larivière V, Alperin JP, Matthias L, Norlander B, Farley A, West J, Haustein S. 2018. The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ 6:e4375 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375 Rummler, K. Schindler, C. (2018): Transforming the Publication Landscape in Educational Research through Open Access - Exploring the Situation in Educational Science. ECER 2018. https://eera-ecer.de/ecer-programmes/conference/23/contribution/45216/ Schimmer, R., Geschuhn, K. K., & Vogler, A. (2015). Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access. doi:10.17617/1.3. Stern, N. (2017): Knowledge Exchange consensus on monitoring Open Access publications and cost data: Report from workshop held in Copenhagen 29-30 November 2016. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.480852 Wohlgemuth, M., Rimmert, C.; Taubert, N. (2017). Publikationen in Gold-Open-Access-Journalen auf globaler und europäischer Ebene sowie in Forschungsorganisationen. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-29128079
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.