Comprehensive Approach to Open Access Publishing: Platforms and Tools

Abstract

The Open Access Initiative is gaining momentum due to the worldwide availability of advanced digital tools, online publishing platforms, and systems for tracking academic contributions. Several declarations and initiatives, including Plan S, have already laid a foundation for moving away from subscription to full and immediate open-access publishing. The global initiatives imply targeting journals satisfying the upgraded quality and visibility criteria. To meet these criteria, a comprehensive approach to Open Access is recommended. This article overviews the essential components of the comprehensive approach, increasing transparency, adherence to ethical standards, and diversification of evaluation metrics. With the increasing volume of quality open-access journals, their indexing with free databases and search engines is becoming increasingly important. The Directory of Open Access Journals and PubMed Central currently free searches of open-access sources. These services, however, cannot fully satisfy the increasing demands of the users, and attempts are underway to upgrade the indexing and archiving of open-access sources in China, Japan, Korea, Russia, and elsewhere. The wide use of identifiers is essential for transparency of scholarly communications. Peer reviewers are now offered credits from Publons. These credits are transferrable to their Open Researcher and Contributor iDs. Various social media channels are increasingly used by scholars to comment on articles. All these comments are tracked by related metric systems, such as Altmetrics. Combined with traditional citation evaluations, the alternative metrics can help timely identify and promote publications influencing education, research, and practice.

Information and Misinformation on COVID-19: a Cross-Sectional Survey Study

“…Although most peer-reviewed journals have embarked on fast-track processing of COVID-19 submissions, pre-publication archiving at various preprint servers is also encouraged by large publishers to prioritize and avoid delays in dissemination of potentially valuable scientific hypotheses and research results. Praised as essential tools of the Open Access initiative, 9 countless specialist preprint platforms have emerged over the past few months, with medRxiv.org and bioRxiv.org becoming the main hubs of unpublished reports and opinion pieces on COVID-19. Some, but not all of these items, enter the peer review and get published in scholarly journals.…”

Scholarly publishing and journal targeting in the time of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic: a cross-sectional survey of rheumatologists and other specialists

“…This will also allow publicly funded research to be freely available immediately upon publication. Although China and India, the world's largest producers of scholarly articles, have already demonstrated willingness to join this global initiative, the transition may take longer than anticipated [12,16].…”

“…While the Open Access global initiative has been a boon and added significant impetus to a free-for-all educative experience, it is important to recognise that some open-access journals may charge publication fee without offering quality services, indexing, and scholarly credit [ 15 ]. The implementation of Plan S may abrogate this concern by authorizing only quality open-access with appropriate archiving and related global visibility [ 16 ]. This will also allow publicly funded research to be freely available immediately upon publication.…”

Letter to the Editor: Social Media is a Double-Edged Sword in the COVID-19 Pandemic

“… 5 6 One way to overcome the issue can be the use of open peer review and linking reviewer comments to social media sites. 7 This can help provide reviewer recognition as well as accountability. Also, it can help readers on social media sites to have a critical view of studies by reading a third person's viewpoint.…”