Having received no education and training on open science, researchers are often puzzled on what to do, in practice, to start reaping the benefits of open science. This study offers a succinct  Open science, Open access, Preprint, Self-archiving, Scholarly publishing. In 1831 the French mathematician explicitly called for a new scientific system in which “scientists will team up to study, instead of sending sealed envelopes to the academies, hastening to publish their slightest observations as long as they are new, adding: ‘I do not know the rest’” .Fig.Fig26].FMaking research immediately and freely accessible to anyone, the preprint eliminates the prolonged delay due to the peer review process, thereby accelerating the dissemination of new knowledge. For example, the average delay between manuscript submission and journal publication ranges from 18 months in business/economics through 9 months in chemistry and biomedicine, 14 months in social science and arts/humanities, and 12 months in earth science .Physical Review D between 1996 and 2012, received their first citation before they were published in the journal [In addition, preprints are readily and frequently cited. For instance, 69.1% of all preprints posted in arXiv and subsequently published as peer reviewed articles in  journal . Besides journal .Immediate publication allows authors to establish credit and priority for the new ideas, methods, and approaches disclosed by the preprint, providing “scoop protection” . This iseLife, have gone further and now accept for peer review only preprints [Finally, no conflicts any longer exist between the early publication of research in preprint form and subsequent publication in peer reviewed journals. Nearly all major scientific journals not only accept preprint manuscripts for peer review, but their editors actually survey preprint research platforms inviting authors to submit selected preprints to their journal. Certain journals, such as reprints .Even chemistry journals, whose editors and publishers once fiercely opposed preprints, now actively encourage authors to submit their preprint . The fivThe practice of open science through the immediate publication of new research findings in preprint form adds the crucial benefit of enhanced research reproducibility. Along with the preprint, indeed, scholars can freely publish also the underlying data, the protocols and software (code) used to collect and interpret the data, as well as links to the records for the dataset, deposited protocol, or to pre-analysis plans .https://osf.io/4qs68/for the full version of the questionnaire” [For example, the peer reviewed study on preprint credibility published by Nosek and co-workers in 2020 included the following statement: “The final survey included questions in four categories: engagement information, the importance of cues for credibility, credibility of service characteristics, and demographics  . Called As suggested by a reviewer of this work, this single example shows that “if the community changes the practice, then the rules will follow”.Regardless of numerous thoughtful pleas to institutions and funding agencies to diversify and improve research evaluation , researcenhanced citations and citation-based metrics. Preprints indeed are frequently cited [longer time compared to non-OA papers [Amid the five main guidelines to shape the curriculum of such a course, Pagliaro has suggested to teach students the relevance of preprints and how to undertake regular publishing of research in preprint form .Attendinly cited , and publy cited . SimilarA papers .Learning open science, doctoral students and researchers will become aware that rather than publishing preprints and research papers as portable document format (PDF) documents only, it is necessary to publish them also in a computer-readable markup language (HTML and its extensions) so as to make research data and meta-data easily retrieved by online search engines and databases, unlocking the accessibility of research findings. Being the equivalent of “a digital photograph of a piece of paper” , indeed,Accordingly, scholars may wish learn the use of one of today's numerous online web research authoring platforms  through which research teams can work online without the need to exchange subsequent versions of the manuscript, or to follow journal guidelines and citation styles. It is enough to specify the desired format out of numerous journal formats, and the software will automatically format the document, and insert metadata to optimize its indexing by search engines .5vademecum for the uptake of the main open science practices when dealing with scholarly communication.Amid the current global search for new and effective ways to approach scientific research, higher education and service to society “in a context of digitalization and openness” , this stBeyond scientific publishing, however, the practice of open science enhances work and outcomes also in the two additional areas of scholarly activity, namely education and service to society. How the practice of open science effectively enhances student education and learning and scholarly service to society in the context of new evaluation of scholarship in the open science age , will foRosaria Ciriminna, Antonino Scurria: Conceived and designed the experiments; Analyzed and interpreted the data.Sumalatha Gangadhar, Saikiran Chandha and Mario Pagliaro: Analyzed and interpreted the data; Wrote the paper.This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.Data will be made available on request.The authors declare no conflict of interest.No additional information is available for this paper.


To evaluate the reviewing behaviour in the German-speaking countries in order to provide recommendations to increase the attractiveness of reviewing activity in the field of radiation oncology.In November 2019, a survey was conducted by the Young DEGRO working group (jDEGRO) using the online platform “eSurveyCreator”. The questionnaire consisted of 29 items examining a broad range of factors that influence reviewing motivation and performance.A total of 281 responses were received. Of these, 154 (55%) were completed and included in the evaluation. The most important factors for journal selection criteria and peer review performance in the field of radiation oncology are the scientific background of the manuscript (85%), reputation of the journal (59%) and a high impact factor . Reasons for declining an invitation to review include the scientific background of the article (60%), assumed effort (55%) and a low IF (27%). A double-blind review process is preferred by 70% of respondents to a single-blind (16%) or an open review process (14%). If compensation was offered, 59% of participants would review articles more often. Only 12% of the participants have received compensation for their reviewing activities so far. As compensation for the effort of reviewing, 55% of the respondents would prefer free access to the journal’s articles, 45% a discount for their own manuscripts, 40% reduced congress fees and 39% compensation for expenses.The scientific content of the manuscript, reputation of the journal and a high IF determine the attractiveness for peer reviewing in the field of radiation oncology. The majority of participants prefer a double-blind peer review process and would conduct more reviews if compensation was available. Free access to journal articles, discounts for publication costs or congress fees, or an expense allowance were identified to increase attractiveness of the review process.The online version of this article (10.1007/s00066-020-01729-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. The field of radiation oncology is continuously changing due to development of new radiation delivery and planning techniques, new systemic anticancer agents and demographic changes. Scientific journals have the important goal of disseminating these latest study results and contribute to the cumulative knowledge of the scientific community. With an increasing number of oncology journals listed in the Journal Citation Reports , 2, fromIn the present survey, we aimed to evaluate and analyse the reviewing behaviour in German-speaking countries  in the field of radiation oncology. Based on the analysis, we sought to identify current trends and challenges in order to develop recommendations to increase the attractiveness of peer review activity.A web-based questionnaire was developed within the survey platform “eSurveyCreator.com”  containing 29 items regarding demographics and experience in publishing and reviewing scientific articles in the field of radiation oncology (see Supplementary I). Branching logic was used to tailor the questions on the basis of previous responses.The data sample was collected through an online anonymized survey of radiation oncologists, biologists and physicists in German-speaking countries . In order to broadly address eligible participants, invitations were initially sent to members of the German Society of Radiation Oncology (DEGRO), German Society for Biological Radiation Research (DeGBS), German Society for Medical Physics (DGMP), Austrian Society of Radiooncology (ÖGRO) and the Swiss Society of Radiation Oncology (SRO) as well as through direct peer-to-peer contacts. A first invitation was sent to all participants on 8 October 2019 and a reminder email on 29 October 2019 to maximize the response rate. The survey was closed for any contribution on 24 November 2019. Multiple responses to the survey were prevented by locking the participants IP (internet protocol) address and setting cookies.Raw data of the results were received directly from the online platform and were analysed using Microsoft Excel  and SPSS .We received a total of 281 responses from 8 October to 24 November 2019. Of these, 154 (55%) questionnaires were completed and included in the evaluation.Table The most common platform to showcase scientific experience and publications was Researchgate (80%). Other platforms used by the participants are ORCID (58%), Scopus (23%) and Publons (16%).p < 0.001; 90 vs. 56, p < 0.001) than younger reviewers and reviewers with less experience. In 2018, the majority (63%) reviewed 1 to 12 manuscripts. Profession was not associated with reviewing (p = 0.634). Furthermore, male participants performed more peer reviews compared to female participants . 54.4% of all participants indicated that Radiation Oncology, Strahlentherapie und Onkologie or Radiotherapy and Oncology are the most common journals where participants perform reviewing , reputation of the journal (59%) and a high IF  invitations to review a manuscript in 2018. The most important criteria for declining an invitation were the scientific background of the manuscript (60%), effort of reviewing  and low IF of the journal . Participants with less than 15 years of experience in scientific publishing would review more frequently if receiving rewards when compared to participants with more experience (p = 0.025). Compensations preferred by the participants for writing a peer review are free access to journal articles (55%), partial waiver of future publication fees (45%), voucher for registration fees of various events such as scientific meetings (40%), salary (39%), review certificate (23%), voucher for English language editing (22%), automatic recognition for the review via Publons/ORCID etc. (20%) and others  or an open review process , the reputation of the journal 59%) and a high IF (40%). These findings are consistent with recent literature underlining the important role of the IF and the respectability of the journal for reputation, funding and career development % and a h. HoweverThe majority of the participants (70%) of our survey prefer a double-blind review process over single-blind or open review. These findings go along with the published literature , 11. IntThe increasing workload placed on peer reviewers due to a rapidly growing volume of publications and inappropriate selection of reviewers by the editorial board are frequently discussed . TherefoThe association between the likelihood of accepting an invitation for review and its scientific background as well as the choice of a journal based on high IF and visibility in the field creates particular strain for journals with a lower IF. Most manuscripts will at first be submitted to higher-IF journals where many of them will undergo a first round of peer review . In caseHigh-IF journals perform a rigorous preliminary selection before external peer review, resulting in fewer review requests and a more effective peer review process. In order to improve the peer review process, pre-selection by the editorial office would result in significantly reduced review times. However, preliminary selection may undermine the neutral stance of the peer review process.Especially for young researchers, the invitation to review a research article based on the recognition of expertise can be considered a great honour and important part on the way to becoming an independent researcher. However, as our results show, particularly established participants over 35 years of age with more than 10 years of experience in scientific publishing are willing to review manuscripts on a regular basis. A possible cause, according to younger scientists, could be the lack of relevance of peer reviewing for advancing their career and the lack of compensation for the often time-consuming work. Instead of conducting peer review, young scientists may be more interested in publishing their own research results and increasing their reputation. In addition to the reduced level of scientific expertise, this could explain why the participants were mainly postdoctoral researchers (45%), habilitated scientists (21%) and professors (24%). This hypothesis is underlined by survey results from Nicholson et al. , where aIn our survey, only 12% of the participants have been rewarded for writing a peer review, namely partial waiver of publication fees (67%), free access to articles of the journal (56%), salary (6%) and vouchers for registration fees of various events such as scientific meetings (6%). Importantly, 59% of all participants stated that they would review more frequently if some kind of compensation or reward were offered. A Wiley study with more than 2900 participants revealed that reviewers are not satisfied regarding recognition for their work and stated that they should be rewarded for their effort .Our survey demonstrates that scientific experience is correlated to review activity. However, due to the rising submission rates, we see an urgent need to actively engage early career researchers in the review process. In order to facilitate and promote peer review, peer review trainings for young researchers may improve both the motivation for and the quality of peer review reports . The suiThe results of this survey must be interpreted in light of its limitations: non-responders and participants with incomplete surveys (127 of 281 [45%]) might have answered differently and, therefore, our findings cannot be applied to a general statement. However, we believe that the diversity of our responder characteristics concerning age, gender, profession and scientific publishing expertise is comparable to the scientific community in radiation oncology and increases the informative value. Moreover, the used Likert scales may capture only broad perspectives in this complex issue of scientific publishing.In summary, the suitability of the reviewer and the scientific background of the manuscript are the crucial criteria for willingness to peer review. Therefore, rigorous preliminary selection before external peer review may result in fewer review requests, more manuscripts that are suitable and a more effective peer review process. The review procedure should be performed in a double-blind manner. Rewards for peer review activity such as partial waiver of publication fees and free access to articles of the journal would increase the willingness to peer review. Peer review trainings for young researchers may improve both the motivation for and the quality of peer review reports.Peer review activity in radiation oncology is determined by the suitability of the reviewer, reputation and a high IF of the journal. Rigorous pre-selection may result in fewer review requests and more effective peer review process. A double-blind peer review process is recommended by the majority of the participants. Review activity would increase if compensation were available. Free access to journal articles, discounts for publication costs or congress fees, or an expense allowance are ways to make the review process more attractive.Supplementary I Survey questions/statements


We thank Priori et al. for their case study reporting the clinical, pathological, and radiological findings they observed in COVID-19 patients at their teaching hospital in Milan, Italy .The “Living” Systematic Review strives to stay updated as new evidence emerges in this continuously evolving field of research. The second version of this review was published in November 2020 , and theMA conceived and presented the idea. AA put the data together and presented it coherently into a draft manuscript. All authors took part in obtaining relevant accurate information and contributed to the final manuscript through editing and fact-checking.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.


RSC Chemical Biology, a Gold open-access journal dedicated to publishing breakthrough research at the interface of chemistry and biology.Welcome to the inaugural issue of  RSC Chemical Biology, a Gold open-access journal dedicated to publishing breakthrough research at the interface of chemistry and biology. We are delighted to launch this journal to broaden the Royal Society of Chemistry portfolio and create a publishing platform for research at the frontier of chemistry and biology. We will support our community by providing them with a dedicated venue open for conversation, exchange of ideas, and collaboration, and until mid-2022, the journal is completely free to publish in.Welcome to the inaugural issue of quality research where our editorial and data policies safeguard the reproducibility of published papers. We collaborate with Kudos which helps our authors to optimize the website traffic and in result increase the discoverability of their papers. A Gold open-access model coupled with extensive content promotion gives our authors enhanced visibility. In addition to the above, we are offering a pioneering RSC transparent peer-review process to show our commitment to transparency and open science.We present a truly modern product that aims to become a home for high-RSC Chemical Biology welcomes contributions that integrate concepts and approaches of chemistry, biology, and related disciplines that examine and engineer complex biological systems. We particularly invite papers that propose innovative solutions to existing challenges and help to drive research forward. We aim to position this new journal as an authoritative platform to exchange knowledge and ideas and foster collaboration between chemical and biological communities, as well as academia and industry, and thus we welcome the submission of Opinions and Comments. All published articles must be of significant general interest to the broad chemical biology community.RSC Chemical Biology, led by Hiroaki Suga (University of Tokyo), comprises leading scientists in the field dedicated to and expert in discerning state-of-the-art developments and achievements in the chemical biology discipline.The Editorial Board of RSC Chemical BiologyHiroaki Suga, Editorial Board Chair, Hiroaki Suga leads the journal in the role of Editorial Board Chair. He is a Professor of the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science at the University of Tokyo. With broad research interests in the fields of bioorganic chemistry, chemical biology and biotechnology related to RNA, translation, and peptides and with a wide international collaboration network, he is perfectly placed to recognize the needs of the community and shape the journal accordingly.RSC Chemical Biology will cover all these interdisciplinary areas, and most importantly the journal will keep the high quality of publications along with rapid and fair peer-review.”“I am very excited to be involved in this new Royal Society of Chemistry initiative. The notion of chemical biology has been aggressively growing in the fields of chemistry and biology, and I believe that this trend will continue expanding into pharmaceutical science and translational research and further into materials and information technologies. RSC Chemical Biology. We strive to publish only thorough and credible research and thus engage outstanding researchers to handle our peer-review and ensure the process is fair and rigorous. At the same time, we aim to serve authors and meet their needs and expectations, making sure that our peer-review is timely and constructive. Now we have decided to take a step forward and innovate the process by making it even more open and transparent.The Royal Society of Chemistry journals are recognized by the community for their quality review process. The same holds true for RSC Chemical Biology is the first Royal Society of Chemistry journal to offer our authors the option of Transparent Peer-Review. Authors are given a choice as to whether they want to publish the peer-review history for their paper. If they decide to do so, the editor's decision letter, reviewers’ comments and authors’ response for all versions of the manuscript are published alongside the article under an Open Access Creative Commons license (CC-BY). In this way, we bring peer-review to light and acknowledge our community of reviewers for the work they put into shaping our publication landscape. You can read through the first openly published peer-review here.In the first issue, we cover trending topics in Chemical Biology and we hope that you enjoy reading the first papers. We will strive to retain this quality level in the future and invite you to help us build this journal by joining our upcoming initiatives.Twitter or Facebook, or sign up to our newsletter to keep up to date with the latest news and some of our most recently published content.Follow us on RSC Chemical Biology forward so that the journal fully meets the needs of our authors and readers. We always welcome comments, suggestions, and feedback, so please do contact us at chembio-rsc@rsc.org with your views and feedback.Finally, we are committed to developing and taking  Professor Hiroaki Suga, Editorial Board ChairDr Anna Rulka, Executive EditorKathryn L. Gempf, Deputy Editor


The ABCD - Brazilian Archives of Digestive Surgery, as can be seen in the “Presentation”In the early years it was edited by Prof. Pinotti, assisted by the group of assistants and professors linked to him, among which can be cited Profs. Drs. Bruno Zilberstein, Ivan Cecconello and Joaquim José Gama Rodrigues. At the end of the 90’s, Prof. Pinotti transferred the journal to be edited by the Brazilian College of Digestive Surgery (CBCD) and, since then, it has become that way, thanks to the efforts of Profs. Drs. Bruno Zilberstein, Osvaldo Malafaia and, from 2010, also by Prof. Dr. Nelson Adami Andreollo, proposing new directions for the journal .The first full article published in 1986  was by t“...due to the fact that most surgical patients are in the field of Gastrointestinal Surgery, there are few specialized sources to disseminate updated information. For some time now, we have been considering the publication of a Journal dedicated to this specialty, with articles by Brazilian and foreign authors, to be distributed abroad as well as in Brazil. Since English is more commonly used in medical and scientific specialties, it would be published in both languages”...Prof. Pinotti in his speech during the beginning of the activities of the Brazilian College of Digestive Surgery (CBCD) in 1988 emphasized that:...”With education, not only information is provided, but high-level professionals are formed, who can develop their knowledge, who know how to correctly apply their resources and thus able to benefit their patients... We must in our College, in the area of education, to develop the spirit to each person who wants to teach can find many who want to learn”. And that the successes achieved in the safe training constitute stimuli for new doors of knowledge”.During all these years, since the publication of the first issue, many changes and advancesIn 2009, ABCD was accepted and included in the list of national journals indexed in SciElo (Scientific Electronic Library Online) and started to be published in Portuguese and English online in PDF and HTML, in addition to the printed edition in Portuguese, thus having more visibility, appreciation and representing another leap in quality. In 2010, also through an agreement with other specialty societies, it became the official scientific organ of: Brazilian Association of Gastric Cancer, Brazilian Chapter of the International Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Association, Pancreatic Disease Study Group, until 2017 to the Brazilian Society of Bariatric and Metabolic Surgery and the Brazilian Society of Minimally Invasive and Robotic Surgery (2014-2017).Whoever wants to live the century that is beginning will have to be focused on the “Information Age” and “Integration” applying them in their actions, as they will guide the winners of this century.” It was with this thinking that the north of the ABCD was directed, not only in computerization and the use of digital technology, but also in the integration with similar societies. With regard to its publications and, understanding that integration is the word of intelligence today, it sought to approach the aforementioned similar associations and encouraged them to join forces instead of competing in isolation in the dissemination of their researches, showing signs that with acceptance of this way of thinking we can get the master lever to catapult oneself into the future, with gallantry and great success.This intersociety integration was awakened in me by Richard M. Satava, Professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, exponent of technological medicine and NASA consultant for medical affairs in spacecraft, when speaking during a magnificent conference in Munich in 2000 - he stated that: ... “From 2012, it was with great pride that the editors communicated to CBCD members and all researchers in the great field of gastroenterology involving the aforementioned areas that the ABCD was included in the MEDLINE/PUBMED database, thus being placed among the best in the worldThe editing process of a scientific journal in medicine - although very little known by those who do not work in it - is extremely complex and laborious, and is permanently audited by the indexing databases in order to maintain its international visibility.ABCD has had a brilliant career until today, which started from articles taken from the master’s/doctoral theses filed in the library of the Digestive Surgery Department of the University of São Paulo/Hospital de Clínicas, provided by Prof. Gama Rodrigues, and taken by me in suitcases (yes suitcases!) to Curitiba in order to be “photocopied” parts that, using them, were manually formatted for articles. At the time, there were not enough articles for the three-monthly editions. Today, we have approximately 300 submissions annually! Starting with indexing in SciELO in 2010 - after an incredible 11 years of trial and error! - the journal started to be not only printed as it had been until then, but with three editions: printed in Portuguese, online in Portuguese and online in English. What would they serve? The printed would continue like this since the birth of ABCD and would be distributed to all CBCD members in return for their association with the College and, also, sent to university libraries. Online in Portuguese would serve to publicize what we do in the country to Brazilians with digital access (let’s not think that everyone reads English). Online in English would serve for the journal’s internationalization, which is necessary to maintain the indexes we have, and which is the most important qualitative indicator for maintenance in the indexing databases.In this way, and at this moment, it is easier to think of something that will further help the journal’s future. From this past many good things have happened. Speaking not of difficulties, but of achievements, we are today with very high academic recognition, nationally and internationally.stricto sensu graduate programs in recent years. Renowned Brazilian authors have also frequently honored us, enhancing the merit of our journal, which is officially confirmed by its impact value currently provided: 1.797 , SciELO, Google Scholar, LILACS e DOAJ) that reassure us about the worldwide visibility of what we publish. It is always good to remember that the internationalization of any journal is no longer measured by the territoriality of a country, but by the virtual visibility that the journal’s digital media offer, regardless of its country of origin. Also, in relation to the international scenary, ABCD occupies 74est! Q2! . Of courBut none of this diminishes the need to move towards the ABCD. Suggestions are always welcome! And the most recent one was the use of Altmetrics to publicize what is done in the academy for social media. Focused mainly on Facebook, Tweeter and Mendeley, and describing what we do in less formal words coming from the academy, the advances and benefits of science for the population that use digital media to update themselves go viral in amazing numbers. It’s very interesting and it’s the modernity that all the big journals are using lately. For this, three small inserts were created: Image, Central Message and Perspectives. They can be viewed, and their content perceived, with a PDF download of any article from the last two years of ABCD . Modernl But, for this to happen, it is necessary that the basic knowledge about what we are going to discuss to improve our journal can be measurable. If not, personal opinions are offered, which are often taken out of context.The feeling at the end of my work in front of the ABCD is one of great satisfaction and of the duty fulfilled towards Brazilian surgeons, towards the members of the CBCD and towards the medical society in general. A journal that published over 1600 articles in its history and, of these, 1321 in the period I was Editor-in-Chief (2001/2021) is to be respected! All manuscripts underwent a detailed and thorough review by the editors and peers (peer-review), both with regard to their ethical and scientific content, as well as their writing in Portuguese and English (including comma review!), as well as its results and conclusions, its teachings and its final message. Certainly, the ABCD has reached its maturity. It is interesting to note that each article published has an average of 3000 words; if we multiply the number of articles during my editorial period it will mean a 3.9 million words in each of the two languages, that had to be analyzed for merit, spelling and their position in the linguistics of the text! Reinforcing: in Portuguese and in English, that is, 7,8 milion words! This huge number might be equivalent to an encyclopedia! We understand that our journal can have even greater national and international visibility and accreditation, if the better papers - which go to external journals - be concentrated on ABCD. It is the medical society as a whole that needs to collaborate. ABCD has done its part. Now!... Brazilians need to put aside other journals from outside Brazil - often with even less impact than ours - and publish on ABCD. I repeat: It is no longer the country where it is published that matters, as the internationalization of a journal is measured by the visibility contained in the “Information Age” . With this thinking and the concentration of intellectual production in Brazil, showing what is produced here, this is how authors will be more valued and will also directly and indirectly increase the global number of national publications, raising our place in the world ranking of intellectual production measured by the indexing platforms. Let’s no longer impoverish our journals by sending “outside” (and sometimes saying it with pride!) what we think is best. ABCD is giving, with its demonstration of integration and strength, an opportunity to make our country more respectable and scientifically respectable, as it already is in other activities of knowledge and human development.stricto sensu graduate programs, recommended by CAPES, who sent their theses for publication and all the editors, reviewers and collaborators who directly or indirectly contributed to the Journal’s permanence.On this occasion, I have to thank the authors and co-authors who believed and sent their articles to ABCD over these 20 years, thus contributing to the dissemination of this fantastic and important amount of quality knowledge that we have, and who believed in the Journal’s progress. I have to thank the Finally, I believe that it is necessary to dream to crave and grow with victories and successes; but, for that, it takes a lot of dedication, detachment and teamwork! I leave the position of Editor-in-Chief of ABCD with great joy in my heart and soul, for delivering to CBCD a diamond of great carat - therefore of great value - and with exquisite cut, which reflects the brilliance it has today globally and in throughout Latin America.I must thank all 13 ex-presidents for whom I served as Editor-in-Chief of ABCD. Many thanks to you for the unstinting trust, respect and support that I have been awarded in these 20 years. It is my deep desire that ABCD will continue to shine and increase its value, as we need it to have a better Brazil on the world scientific scenery.I wish, from the deepest point of my heart and soul, success with the new guidelines to be drawn up and implemented for the continuity of the ABCD.


Neurotrauma Reports. This new, open access journal will serve as the companion journal to Journal of Neurotrauma. We will publish articles that may be more limited in scope or content that focus on a niche patient population. Additionally, as rejection rates have risen for the Journal of Neurotrauma, Neurotrauma Reports will be a valuable conduit for those articles that warrant publication as well. Authors will reach a wide audience as Neurotrauma Reports will be available online with no required subscription. As the competitive nature of science expands, publishing in a reputable open access journal is crucial for maintaining research integrity.We are pleased to announce the launch of Neurotrauma Reports. I will continue to maintain a close relationship with the Journal of Neurotrauma by remaining on the editorial board. Ms. Jean Ann Sanford will also extend her role as managing editor of Journal of Neurotrauma to include Neurotrauma Reports. Additionally, the current Journal of Neurotrauma editorial board has been offered the opportunity to serve on the editorial board of Neurotrauma Reports as well. These three points emphasize the continuity of operations for the new journal. My vision for this journal is to provide the neurotrauma field with not only another avenue for publishing original basic, translational, and clinical articles but also to reach individuals who have been impacted by central nervous system injury and disease with the availability of open access articles.I am extremely excited to serve as editor-in-chief of Neurotrauma Reports is to support basic, translational, and clinical neurotrauma publications to disseminate important information, increase education, and support awareness. Our goal is to publish quality articles for a global market.The mission of www.liebertpub.com/neur To serve as a volunteer peer reviewer, please contact hbramlett@med.miami.eduFull submission instructions are available on the journal's website at Neurotrauma Reports will allow us to advance the field of neurotrauma with unparalleled access to this expanding area of research.Finally, we thank the members of the editorial board for participating in the launch of this new important journal.


The “experiments of nature” that underlie genetics engage all organisms equally: from microbes and slime molds to plants and vertebrates, the inextricable connection between genotype and phenotype lies at the core of our community. That community is remarkably diverse, spanning an array of not only organisms but also approaches and questions; indeed, diversity is one of the main reasons we enjoy contributing to the journal.PLOS Genetics receives, considers, and publishes submissions on human genetics, we have come to realize that we can and should do a better job of letting our authors, readers, and reviewers know that. As a result, we are making a change to emphasize the variety of ways we embrace work on variation, including an emphasis on the importance of human genetics. To that end, we have recruited several new associate editors with relevant expertise, and we are changing the name of our Natural Variation section to Human Genetic Variation and Disease.Of course, one leaf on the tree of life carries a special kind of weight, and while Natural Variation was one of the original sections when the journal was founded 16 years ago. Led by Greg Gibson, it balanced phenotypic  and genotypic  variation across the organismal spectrum. The section was also a home for human genetics, including studies of mendelian and common disease, normal variation, demography, and genetic architecture. The two of us who currently lead the section work primarily with humans, and while we appreciate and enjoy submissions that focus on all organisms, it has become clear that it makes sense to codify and further strengthen the ability of the journal to serve that portion of our community interested in the “leaf with a special kind of weight”.PLOS Genetics anticipates and expects to see and feature manuscripts on both rare and common disease, as exemplified by the interests of our new associate editors.Therefore, along with a change in name, we have recruited several new Associate Editors to the board, including Karen Avraham (diseases of hearing), Neil Hanchard (complex diseases of childhood), Sudha Iyengar (genomics of disorders with complex inheritance), Anne O’Donnell-Luria (genomics of rare variation), and Melissa Wasserstein  . These nPLOS Genetics as an overlapping Venn diagram among which there is frequent and vibrant interchange, another reason the two of us who lead the “general genetics” section enjoy contributing to the journal. Indeed, Garrod quoted another famous physician, William Harvey, whose words in 1657 were inspired by human disease but apply equally well to all leaves of the tree, “Nature is nowhere more accustomed more openly to display her secret mysteries than in cases where she shows traces of her workings apart from the beaten path” [What about the rest of the tree of life? We remain committed to publishing work on genetic diversity across all 5 kingdoms. We expect that some submissions may fit well with existing sections such as Epigenetics, Evolution, Methods, Plant Genetics, and Prokaryotic Genetics, as well as the “general genetics” section. More broadly, we view the 7 sections at en path” .


The evolution of open excess (OA) publishing which has rapidly evolved in last two decades has its heart at the right place with the ultimate goal being timely, and rapid distribution of published scientific work to a wider scientific community around the world and thus ultimately promoting scientific knowledge in global sense. However, quality OA publishing of cancer research involve an average publishing fee of around 1,500 USD which poses a challenge for Low middle income countries (LMICs), where per capita income is low. This has led to deterioration of science in LMICs in the form of publication in Cheap OA predatory journals for sake of securing academic promotions as well as authors ending up paying exorbitant publishing charges out of pocket to get their quality scientific work published. In countries like India and other LMICs, the funding agencies and institution have so far not addressed this problem. Here we assess the framework of open access publishing in LMICs like India and what are the steps which can be taken to facilitate open access publishing in LMICs. Dissemination of the scientific literature is as paramount as scientific studies. Scientific publishing has come a long way from localized distribution of few physical copies of journal to widespread and rapid distribution via internet in the 21 The emergence of open access (OA) publishing stems from a phenomenon that has created a crisis situation faced by the academic institutions around the world called “Serial crisis” in the 1990s. Serial crisis was the result of high subscription cost which eventually led to many libraries being unable to afford these elevated subscription cost and the libraries were left with very few options. Serial crisis had its parallel with the emergence of the world wide web which has revolutionized information sharing across the world, leading to emergence of open access platform for scientific literature. The Association of Research Libraries established the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), in 1997 which was an alliance of academic and research libraries as well as related organizations, to address the serial crisis and promote viable alternatives such as open access.The first scientific open access platform was founded by Paul ginsparg who developed arXiv registry for archiving physics preprints at Los Alamos National Laboratory which promoted the preprint culture that was existent in high energy physics at that time . arXiv was a success and now includes papers from varied fields including computer science, synthetic biology etc. Subsequently in 1997 U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) made Medline, the most comprehensive index to medical literature on the planet, freely available in the form of Pubmed. Medline was an important step ahead, as it opened up a whole new form of use of scientific literature accessible to both public and professionals alike . The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) one of the first open access journals in medicine, was created in 1998, publishing its first issue in 1999 and continues to publish till today demonstrating the importance and acceptance of open access platforms. In 1999, then director of NIH Prof. Harold Varmus proposed a journal called E-biomed with the aim of combining a preprint server with articles that have been peer reviewed which is now known as Pubmed central which comprises of peer reviewed post print articles. In the year 2000, NIH floated Pub Med central, An open access platform for NIH funded research which has continued to grow exponentially and is a major source of dissemination of NIH funded research around the globe. The framework of open access publishing The root of OA publishing lies in the serial crisis which led to the emergence of OA platform in the 2000’s. The scientific community felt the need to have a framework to guide the implementation of open access publishing. The first initiative in this direction was the Budapest open access initiative (BOAI) at a conference convened by open society institute in late 2001, which was represented by group of academic researchers and its affiliates to promote open access policies by deposition of referred journals to open access platforms and development of OA journals accessible to all without the pay per view policy. BOAI is generally regarded as a defining event in history of OA. BOAI was followed by Bethesda statement of OA initiative which was issued at a meeting held at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. It further defined the elements of OA publishing by defining how users will share OA and license granting rights for the reuse of the work. . In a follow up the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002, and the Bethesda Statement on OA Publishing in 2003, the Berlin Declaration is regarded as the third event which defined the OA movement which was drafted at conference held by the Max Planck Society in October 2003 which was a huge gathering of many cultural and political societies. Overall these three events defined the principal and values of open access publishing with a common theme that scholarly publishing should be free and accessible to all and the cost associated with this publishing should be taken care by the scientists and associated funding agencies/Institutes, Such a model will relieve the pressure on the institutions and will address the problem that arose due to serial crisis. The journals can operate as exclusively open access journals or can function in a hybrid mode by offering the author OA choice as well as traditional publishing. In general all of these declarations defined two types of open access: Firsts is the Green OA in which the manuscripts can be put in institute repository or authors website which will be different then the final edited published version of the manuscript and this final version is subjected to period of embargo as determined by the publishing house following which the work can be placed on online platforms like research gate etc. Second and the most popular OA is Gold OA in which the authors, Funding agencies or institution cover the publication charge. Gold OA has gradually evolved as the most popular form of OA. In early 2000, Biomed central which is a for profit publishing house was launched by current science group which now has many prominent open access cancer research journals like Molecular Cancer and BMC Cancer etc. PloS was another commercial publishing house that emerged during these times with PLoS Biology and subsequently PLoS Medicine and PLoS one. Plan S (Plan Science) and its impact on scientific publishingPlan S is the recent phenomenon in scientific publishing and has been framed by the coalition of funding agencies in Europe. cOAlition S an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations has take action towards implementation of Plan S. It underlines the fundamental principles of open access publishing in modern times as OA publishing has come a long way since Budapest, Berlin and Bethesda declaration which were framed in early 2000s. It states that no science should be locked behind paywalls. Plan S does not stress upon any particular OA business model and therefore publishers have a set of principals on which they can rely upon. Plan S states the fundamental principles for future OA publishing. As per Plan S Science Europe, funders, the European Research Council and the European Commission will work together to clarify and publish implementation details. Plan S states that “With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in OA Journals, on OA Platforms, or made immediately available through OA Repositories without embargo” . The aims of plan S is to have Scientific knowledge which is free from all boundaries but the global applicability of Plan S is still a question that needs to be addressed specifically for scientific community working in developing economies. Plan S has its limitation if it is applied in perspective of LMICs specially in view of pre existing funding crunch with research being at the lower end of financial spectrum of the government. The obvious question arises who is going to pay for the publication of research in quality OA journal as many governments in LMICs don’t consider research as a priority so Research publications are still a far cry for them. Recently the trend in LMICs has shifted to promoting research that can have consequences in near future which has discouraged the basic research which is the corner stone of innovation in long term. This trend needs to change and policymakers need to understand that promoting quality basic research with its subsequent dissemination using Quality OA platform is important for any country in the long term. The importance of such approach can be seen in the outbreak of SARS Cov2 epidemic where countries like USA and many European countries who have already promoted RNA vaccine development in 90s with no immediate benefits have been able to contain the virus more effectively as compared to countries like India where people have tremendously suffered due to lack of scientific policies and infrastructure. The rapid development of safe and effective vaccine was possible due to preexisting knowledge of SARS viruses and as well as mRNA Vaccine technology .High cost of Open access/ No open access publishing in cancer research and its impact on publishing qualityAs of today many prominent traditional publishing house like Cell Press have launched exclusive open access cancer journals like Cell reports, iScience, Heliyon as well as new publishing houses with exclusive open access journals like MDPI, Frontiers have emerged. However it should be remembered that many prominent journal in both basic and clinical cancer research which operate in hybrid mode like Cancer cell, Journal of clinical Oncology, JAMA Oncology, Journal of National Cancer institute, Molecular cancer, Clinical cancer research, Cancer research etc have very high cost of publishing as listed in The culture of publish or perish world and its relevance in developing countriesThe conception of ‘Publish or Perish’ has been a central doctrine in academia, especially in high-income Western countries for years. Its effects are apparent as the rate of academic publishing continues to grow exponentially. Faculties, Researchers and Scientists at the academic institution believe that strong research and publication track are necessary in their academic review and promotion . Moreover, faculties and scientists are apprehended by the quantity and publication type  expected from them. In developing countries like India, PhD or Master degree students look towards good academic Institutes in USA and Europe for their Post Doctoral training or PhD degree. Because of good infrastructure and funding in West, they publish decent amount of publication in peer-reviewed and high impact journals, within a span of 4-5 years. The main reason behind their publication success stems from a good amount of Research/publication money which is provided in the granted projects/or by institutional support. In India, for a faculty position a candidate is suppose to have international postdoctoral exposure with good publication records, so getting a job for individual with good publication record is not a problem. However, after joining , such faculties and scientists are not able to maintain their good publication track, mainly due to lack of publication support by the grant agencies, even after carrying out good research work. The great benefit of publishing in OA journal is association with increased citation index that plays a key role in uplifting individual research work as well as fostering international collaboration . In our experience, we have observed that cancer researchers working as faculties and scientists in developing countries like India, find it difficult in publishing in OA journals (due to high publication charges), hence funding agencies should device strategies to support publication costs in sanctioned grants. Paid OA/ Quality publishing and predatory journals where to draw a line“Predatory publishers” is the term coined by Jeffery Beall about a decade back, for the publishers who circulate fake journals and take advantage of the open-access model with deceitful practices . Such journals has been given various names like fake journals, predatory journals, and many others. These journals influence and exploit the open access publishing model but leave out the quality checks and editorial scrutinise that are normally provided by genuine or legitimate journals, such as peer review process, plagiarism recognition, and authentication of ethical approval of experiments. The major goal of these fake journals is to generate revenue from article processing charges, and therefore have modest consideration for the scientific quality or integrity of the work they accept. They also promise expedient rapid publication, review process, and relatively low author processing charges/or publication fees, compared to legitimate OA journals . In all, Predatory journals are damaging the quality of open access (OA) Journals. Hence, traditional journals are convincing researchers to avoid OA routes so they might not fall in predatory journals trap. In LMICs, where researchers or scientists are not exposed to international research due to inland education often get entrapped in predatory journals web, and when the true nature of these journals come to light, it interferes with their academic jobs or promotion. In oncology, a recent study identified 281 potential predatory journals and 222 legitimate journals from bibliographic databases like PubMed/MEDLINE, and Science Citation Index/Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI/SCIE) . The damaging effect of Predatory OA publishing was demonstrated by a 2013 paper by John Bohannon in which they submitted fake scientific papers to 304 journals which were so called paid OA publishers, The articles were designed in such a way that the scientific flaws in the submitted manuscripts should have led to their immediate rejection at editor or reviewer level but as per the data provided in this landmark paper about 60% of journal accepted them which lay bare the non-existent or substandard peer review policies in these journals. What was more disturbing was that among the journals, who accepted the fake manuscript near about 80% were operating from India .Current scientific policies in India and what needs to be changedTill date, there are no strong policies devised by the government funding agencies or by the educational institutes that exists in supporting the OA framework in LMICs including India. In the average extramural funding grants (in India), a contingency money is provided  that will be around 1 lakh/year (~1300 USD). Furthermore, contingencies apart from publication fees includes other expenditures like registration fees for conference, membership for scientific societies, stationary spending etc. So, it is difficult to pay for average OA charges with such a nominal amount. As most extramural grants are for three years, by the time research article from that project come into pictures theses funding are long gone . Funding agencies however don’t have any provision for separate allocation for publication money, after the project has been successfully submitted. Due to all these hurdles, majority of Indian authors cover their expenditure for OA out of their pockets, and that to in predatory journals , as they are affordable compared to the legitimate publishing houses like Frontiers, MDPI, Impact Journals etc. We have some recommendations that might be helpful for government aided funding agencies and educational institutes in supporting OA charges:1. Publication money (cost for at least one OA article) should be allocated to every extramural grant provided to the Principle Investigator (PI), with a clause that money should be used within 5 years from the date of start of the project. This money should either be given to the PI directly or he can claim from funding agencies as and when required (during these 5 years).2. Government should promote funding agencies to tag itself with legitimate publication houses that provide OA, where research articles can be submitted by PI without paying or discounted OA charges. Similar platform has been developed between NIH and Oxford journals.3. Government aided/or public institutes should also formulate policies to publish OA articles coming from their institutional/or intramural grants. For example, each year amount has to be fixed by administration for the allocation of publication charges for OA journals. Departments that are actively involved in research can claim such funds for publishing. Just like research funds this money should not come under income-tax bracket, hence promoting research.4. Funding agencies should also plan to advertise special calls, where PI can claim OA charges that has already been paid from their pockets for the research articles published in legitimate OA platforms, from the specific grant provided to PI.Recently a few steps have been taken by Indian Government to revamp India Science policy called Science Technology and Innovation policy 2020. An Expert group has came up with some recommendations with predominantly one recommendation having a bearing on paying APCs according to which authors can pay APCs through the sanctioned grant for publication in journal of repute. It further proposes a system through which government can be directly invoiced and a central payment system for APCs is being done , Though this policy is still not implemented but if it is implemented in timely manner it will have far reaching positive consequences on research in India.In conclusion, there are no doubts that OA enhances visibility and impact of research work as OA articles are downloaded and cited more often, than articles from non-OA or traditional journals. Free access to scientific information is key to knowledge. Researchers in LMICs and small research institutions should have access to all Open Access articles but a simultaneous push to promote quality OA should be practised. Open Access articles are published faster and reach broader audiences, compared to non-Open Access journals. Hence, for the developing countries like India, policies should be formulated to cover the OA charges as no such provision are available in the current policy framework. In the present article, we have touched upon the policies that need to be implemented regarding publication charges coverage in developing countries and how they can be implemented. Such policies will not only boost the research activities but also make researchers to not fell into the trap of predatory journals. Study conception and design: MS, CPP; Draft manuscript preparation: MS, CPP; Final Editing: MS, CPP and AS. All authors reviewed and approved the final version of the manuscript.


We studied journal articles published by researchers at all eight New Zealand universities in 2017 to determine how many were freely accessible on the web. We wrote software code to harvest data from multiple sources, code that we now share to enable others to reproduce our work on their own sample set. In May 2019, we ran our code to determine which of the 2017 articles were open at that time and by what method; where those articles would have incurred an Article Processing Charge (APC) we calculated the cost if those charges had been paid. Where articles were not freely available we determined whether the policies of publishers in each case would have allowed deposit in a non-commercial repository (Green open access). We also examined citation rates for different types of access. We found that, of our 2017 sample set, about two out of every five articles were freely accessible without payment or subscription (41%). Where research was explicitly said to be funded by New Zealand’s major research funding agencies, the proportion was slightly higher at 45%. Where open articles would have incurred an APC we estimated an average cost per article of USD1,682  and USD2,558  at a total estimated cost of USD1.45m. Of the paid options, Gold is by far more common for New Zealand researchers . In terms of citations, our analysis aligned with previous studies that suggest a correlation between publications being freely accessible and, on balance, slightly higher rates of citation. This is not seen across all types of open access, however, with Diamond OA achieving the lowest rates. Where articles were not freely accessible we found that a very large majority of them (88% or 3089 publications) could have been legally deposited in an institutional repository. Similarly, only in a very small number of cases had a version deposited in the repository of a New Zealand university made the difference between the publication being freely accessible or not (125 publications). Given that most New Zealand researchers support research being open, there is clearly a large gap between belief and practice in New Zealand’s research ecosystem. Researchers seek to change the world and writers seek to be read, but for many years a dysfunctional scholarly publishing system has walled off most published research findings from the majority of its potential readership. Since the transition from print to electronic publishing began in the late 1990s, various initiatives explored the potential for this digital transformation to make research literature more accessible to the public. University libraries, concerned about continuing growth in journal subscription costs, hoped an open access system would provide a more affordable alternative. At the same time they sought to advance the mission of their host institutions to create social capital through the promulgation of quality peer-reviewed research.Three major developments in the early 2000s set the scene for the current open access environment: •The growth of “Gold open access” journals, funded by Article Processing Charges (APCs) rather than by subscriptions. •The adoption of “Hybrid open access” options by subscription journals, making individual papers openly accessible through the payment of APCs. •The growth of institutional and subject-specific repositories, providing an alternative route of “Green open access” to individual papers without publication charges.Since then there has been considerable interest in the potential of open access to contribute to universities’ own goals as a result of supporting broader society to access research outputs. This includes a growing understanding that, as a result of their enhanced availability, openly accessible papers are likely to be cited at a higher rate than those behind paywalls.Unfortunately, open access has not produced the anticipated reduction in costs. Subscription costs of research journals continue to rise while APCs for Gold and Hybrid journals add another cost to university budgets . FurtherNew Zealand has no specific guidance from government or major research funding agencies on open access publishing or centralised support to pay APCs. While government has established an open access framework that applies to government agencies, this does not extend to the university sector . A recenIn 2019 the Council for New Zealand University Libraries (CONZUL) established a project team with representatives from seven of the eight New Zealand universities to research the current environment of open access in New Zealand. A major stream of this project sought to establish how much of our universities’ research outputs were open access. While other tools provide a figure for the proportion of research that is open, we wanted to extend our understanding to determine: •how much our researchers might be spending on Article Processing Charges (APCs) on top of what libraries pay in subscriptions; •how much of our work could be freely accessible via self-archiving but is not; and •the relationship between openness and citations or other measures of impact.This paper reports on the findings of this project and makes our method and software code available to others to create their own sets of data and their own analyses.This paper focuses on one element of the CONZUL Open Access Project. The wider project produced a full report  examininAs the prevalence of open access publication of research results has increased over the years , so too Perhaps the most influential study in recent years was carried out by Because of this diversity, it is difficult to draw comparisons between results. Most recent studies point to an overall open access rate of between 45 and 55% . This isIt is important to note that all of these results can only be viewed as accurate at a given point of time. Both The funding of open access through article processing charges (APCs) is another matter of high concern, although there is limited consensus in the literature around how these costs are to be estimated. A journal is classified as Gold if all articles are immediately open and APCs for these titles are recorded in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), while for Hybrid journals the articles are paywalled unless an APC is charged. One method of estimating the cost of APCs to institutions is by examining financial records  which aidis advantage for Gold open access  to establish publications’ open access status, APC price, and ability to be self-archived.Our work depended on many open API services, the most integral being Unpaywall. As such our definition of ‘open’ in this study largely aligns with that of Unpaywall, including Bronze as initially proposed by Unpaywall uses a hierarchy to determine a single status for each paper. Priority is given to those statuses which imply immutability, specifically through publication in a Gold journal or through the payment of an APC in a Hybrid journal. For Gold journals no distinction is made between those that charge APCs and those that do not, following the definition of Gold as any form of open publication regardless of business model, as offered by Overlaying the access dimension is the question of authorship. The number of authors of a published research article can range from one (sole authorship) to several thousand (project participation). Multiple authorship is a significant issue when we attempt to link published research to institutions and countries, particularly when there are no established norms for allocating divisions of responsibility. Where there are, say, 200 authors in a research group the fact that one of them is employed at University A tells us very little about the behaviour and performance of that institution, although a productive project may end up crediting it with numerous publications on the basis of participation by this single team member. This may be an insoluble problem for affiliation-based bibliometric research but in a project like the present one it is advisable not to ignore it. One means of creating a “strong link” between a paper and an institution is through the “corresponding author” who takes overall responsibility for the publication process. While this is often the first-named author, this is not universal.For our purposes, we limited our sample set to journal articles with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) published in 2017 that included at least one author affiliated with a New Zealand university. This provided a comprehensive dataset representing a large proportion of the research outputs of all eight universities in the country. Although we were carrying out the work in 2019 we chose to use 2017 as our sample set because, firstly, the research outputs were more likely to have passed the date for embargo set by publishers for self-archiving (one of our key interests) and, secondly, citation counts would be more mature than for more recent research.DOIs for 2017 journal articles were gathered from each university, then amalgamated into a single file of more than 12,600 journal articles. If there was a local corresponding author at any university for a given article then it was designated as having a New Zealand corresponding author. During the course of the project we found that a small percentage of articles with large numbers of authors and large numbers of citations skewed the data so articles with more than 20 authors were excluded on the grounds that they had a tenuous connection to the New Zealand University that had submitted the DOI. This reduced the sample size to 12,016. These were fed into the Program.https://github.com/bruce-white-mass/conzul-oa-project.At the heart of our work was the ‘Program’, written in Python. One of our primary aims in publishing this paper is to share the code for the Program for others to use as well as detailing the results of our own work. The code is available here: A set of DOIs can be submitted to the Program, which uses a number of APIs to produce a set of results, whether for a single department, an institution, a discipline, a country (as in our case) or any other parameter. For our project, having compiled our list of DOIs as described above, we fed them into the Program using a Comma Separated Value file (.CSV). For each article the following information was obtained from a range of sources as shown in Errors are reported by the Program where information could not be found, for example if a DOI was not recognised.DOIs were obtained from the individual universities. It was then possible to “chain” the data gathering. For example, Unpaywall provided ISSNs which were then submitted via API requests to Sherpa/Romeo to capture data on publisher allowances for the use of publications in institutional repositories. ISSNs were also used to capture data on APCs for individual journals.However, not all the data used by the Program was accessible through APIs. Crossref was an excellent source of information for authors, even when these numbered in the thousands, but provides very limited data on author affiliations. On the other hand, Web of Science and Scopus provide detailed author-affiliation data, including identifying corresponding authors, but this needed to be output manually as CSV files for subsequent access by the program. A similar process was followed with APC data.While this paper is focused on the national picture for New Zealand, for those who may be interested in utilising our code on their own DOIs we note that author affiliation data is included in the output. Therefore results can also be broken down to analyse subsets at the level of individual institutions.The process described here is also presented in The Program was run on 30 May 2019. The output was analysed and the following information extracted: •the overall percentage of open and closed papers both for all authors and the subset of New Zealand corresponding authors; •the total percentage of papers in each of the access categories: Closed, Gold, Hybrid, Bronze, Green, Diamond (note that the “best version” is reported so there was no overlap between categories.); •the total percentage of papers available through repositories (note that because an article can be published and in a repository there is some overlap with the other categories); •the total percentage of open and closed papers funded by major New Zealand agencies; •the total cost for Gold and Hybrid papers if all APCs had been charged as advertised; •the total cost of APCs as advertised if they had been paid on papers available in repositories; •the total number of closed papers that could be made open as Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) as deduced from allowances recorded in Sherpa/Romeo; •the total cost of APCs as advertised if these papers were made open in Hybrid mode.Overall 59% of all the articles in our sample set were only available behind a subscription paywall see .any of the authors being from a New Zealand university) we found the proportion of open articles was significantly less  total papers were available via a reputable repository. 2172 articles were available openly via the publisher and also via a repository, representing a considerable overlap. Of particular interest is the Bronze category, since these publications are of uncertain status and could revert to Closed. We found that 288 of 1089 Bronze papers in We were also interested to determine how many publications were only available via a New Zealand university repository. Our dataset provides the URL for the repository version and by filtering for the string ‘.ac.nz’  we found that a total of 125 of the 1256 Green publications (10%) were only open because of that deposit. In other words the other 90% were available either as a published open version or in a non-New Zealand institutional or discipline-specific repository.Again we analysed the subset of articles where a New Zealand university researcher was the corresponding author for the article see .The pattern is broadly similar to the dataset for all authors , compared with Bronze (34%), Closed (25%)—each of these sitting on zero of the Y axis in our boxplot—and with the remaining categories closely grouped . In general, We extrapolated the total number of articles that might have incurred an APC by adding together Hybrid and Gold figures. We see that 697 Gold articles and 152 Hybrid ones were published in 2017 in our local author subset . The Program included a calculation of APCs for each article, where this was known via publicly-available data sources. This was calculated only for New Zealand university-affiliated authors on the basis that the corresponding author is the most likely to be responsible for paying an APC. While this is a far from certain means of determining how an APC was paid, as discussed by Thus We were also able to estimate the total APCs paid. Most publishers provide information on publishing charges and this data has been collected by Lisa Matthias of the Freie Universität Berlin . The ‘Kn •it is not possible to know where APCs may have been waived or whether they were paid from research funding, institutional funds, researchers’ own money or another source; and •this information is not available for all journals.The APC costs in our tables are effectively a total of the ‘list price’ for each article based on APC information that is publicly-available. Accordingly, the total amount for both categories was US$1.45 million at 2017 prices.Sherpa/Romeo data let us examine which of the Closed articles could be self-archived according to publishers’ policies. n = 3501) in our sample set. If all of these were deposited then the overall open proportion would catapult from 41% to 67%. A further 212 articles have an embargo period of two years or more. It is worth noting that 12 months is by far the most common length of embargo period but also that for almost one-fifth there is no embargo. As we have noted above in the ‘Articles by type of access’ section, deposit in a New Zealand university repository only made the difference between open and Closed for 125 publications.We ran the Program in mid-2019, meaning any embargo period of 18 months or less would have expired. 3089 articles could have been archived but were Closed, representing 88% of all the Closed articles  the publisher allowed the published version to be used, as opposed to the accepted manuscript.The above calculations only consider publications where the corresponding author was from a New Zealand university, since the corresponding author is the most likely to have an accepted manuscript for deposit. However, if we extend our examination of Closed articles that could be deposited to all corresponding authors, again 88% have passed the embargo expiry date, which would mean 6,204 of all the 7,056 Closed papers could be placed in a repository. This would mean 93% of 2017 publications would be freely accessible without payment.Funder information from Web of Science and Scopus enabled us to estimate how much research funded by our major funding agencies is openly available, as shown in More than half of articles in our 2017 sample that were funded by our largest research funders are behind a paywall (55%)—that is, this research is inaccessible to the government agencies that funded it as well as to the New Zealand public. Therefore, this subset of articles was more likely to be open than the total sample (45% open against 41% open). The Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment has the lowest rate of open research at 35%, while the Health Research Council of New Zealand had the highest proportion with 55% of papers open. Papers with New Zealand corresponding authors and supported by these New Zealand funders were less likely to be open (44%) than those without New Zealand corresponding authors (49%). Detailed figures are presented in We can also see in Our sample set was large enough to allow comparisons with publications supported by public funding from Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom which showed substantially higher proportions of open publications for both New Zealand and non-New Zealand corresponding authors, as presented in We found that three out of five articles with an author from a New Zealand university were only available by paying for access (59%). This figure increases to nearly two-thirds of all articles being closed when the corresponding author is a New Zealand university researcher (66%).For validation of our results we looked at the Leiden ranking measure for openness. The Leiden Ranking  uses a dWe also used the Leiden Ranking tool to measure New Zealand’s proportion of open articles against a selection of other countries. We clearly see that New Zealand’s proportion of research that is openly available is below that of all the others in this selection, nearly half the figure of the highest-ranked nation, the United Kingdom. This is reinforced by our analysis of publications funded by New Zealand’s major funding agencies, where we can very clearly see that research funded by agencies in other countries is far more likely to be openly accessible.A huge proportion (88%) of the Closed articles could be self-archived in line with publishers’ policies and thereby made open. Our findings suggest that New Zealand researchers do not self-archive as often as researchers elsewhere and/or that the systems for ensuring work is archived are not effective. This is despite the fact that 87% of New Zealand researchers believe that, at a policy level, publicly-funded research should be free to access . Our worWhen it comes to paid open access (Gold & Hybrid articles), New Zealand researchers are far more likely to use the Gold route (82% of paid open access articles were Gold). One reason for this may be the higher average APC for Hybrid, which may be seen by researchers as a luxury and opted for when publishing work in a prestigious journal that will garner interest within the discipline and/or from the public. This would require further analysis that was beyond the scope of the present project. We estimated a total of US$1.45 million at 2017 prices could have been spent by our researchers: US$1.17 million of this would have been an entirely additional cost to subscriptions for Gold OA publications; US$281 thousand would have been on Hybrid publications, a potential double-dipping cost on top of subscriptions to those same publications. As we mention in our introduction, discussion of transformative agreements with publishers is outside the scope of our paper but our data can certainly be used by libraries and institutions to estimate the costs that are potentially being paid by researchers on top of subscription costs.For our methodology, using the Unpaywall categorisation of openness means Bronze articles pose something of a quandary. Bronze was introduced by Unpaywall to be able to include papers openly accessible at a given point in time, but lacking definitive licensing information. With our Program this meant, however, that later iterations using the same DOIs (not reported on in the present paper) revealed that many papers categorised as Bronze in May 2019 had reverted to Closed or had switched to Green. The Unpaywall hierarchy places Bronze above Green, since it is the published version, but there is no way of knowing which papers will become Closed if publisher paywall restrictions are reimposed and which will continue to remain accessible through repositories. Fortunately, because Unpaywall provides repository locations in addition to the primary status it is possible to identify these Bronze/Green articles, which, for our sample, constituted 26% of all Bronze Papers.In terms of citations, the complicated nature of citation advantage (or disadvantage) is well documented in the literature . As noteNevertheless, our work does seem to support previous findings that there is a positive correlation between open access and higher citations , though Also of note, articles that listed a major New Zealand funding agency achieved a higher overall rate of openness than the whole sample set (45% as opposed to 41%). However, this is still low considering such projects are funded specifically because they are deemed to be socially or economically valuable research to pursue and therefore worthy of targeted public funding. It should also be noted that there is a good deal of variance within the individual agencies (as low as 35% to as high as 55% open), which again evidences the lack of co-ordination amongst funders, including the government, in New Zealand. We can also see that Gold and Hybrid account for 22% of papers with a New Zealand corresponding author and that it is more likely that researchers with this kind of funding publish by paying an APC.As we have seen, 3,089 articles that were Closed could have been deposited in a repository. This number will have increased in the time that has elapsed since we conducted our analysis and the publication of this paper, since 24-month embargoes will have also expired. This represents an interesting consideration for universities. Clearly our institutional repositories are under-utilised if only 125 publications from 2017 are the only open version available. If those 3,089 Closed articles were deposited then the overall proportion of open would catapult from 41% to 67% with the Green contribution increasing from 10% to 36%. A 2015 study found that the processing cost of depositing an article in an institutional repository, including the time of the author, was £33 (or about US$43) . Using tWe reiterate that the programmatic nature of our method means this does not represent all research, only articles with a DOI. Thus there will be disciplinary skews to the sample set, since journal articles and DOIs are more prevalent in certain disciplines. The research could easily be expanded to incorporate book chapters or other types of work that have a DOI. Nevertheless, not all research falls within the scope of our analysis.As we have noted in our discussion above, Unpaywall, upon which much of our data gathering depends, updates its database constantly, including the repositories it sources information from. Thus any time the Program is run the results depend on the current state of the Unpaywall database. This can result in fluctuations in results even using the same set of DOIs when the Program is run at different times. Bronze access articles may, by their nature, change status over time. This is not, in itself, problematic, but is noted here only because any set of data produced by the Program is a snapshot of a moment in time. We do intend to re-run the Program and do an analysis each year to track trends over time.https://core.ac.uk/services/api/). Use of different databases would naturally lead to different results, though we do not anticipate this would affect the overall findings significantly for New Zealand-based articles.It is also possible that other open access discovery APIs could be utilised, such as the CORE API . This is the first time we have an evidence-based picture of access to research by New Zealand universities with such detail since, as a result of our work, we have far more than a simple overall proportion: we can investigate the ways in which work has been made accessible, we can compare the citation rates for these different modes of access, we can quantify the volume of works that are closed access and could be made open and we can estimate how much paid forms of open access have cost.Since our code is publicly available, anyone can run their own set of DOIs to perform their own analysis of these aspects.Overall, we see that more New Zealand research from 2017 is behind a paywall than is freely accessible . However, when the corresponding author was a New Zealand researcher the open figure drops to around a third (34%). When our major funding agencies have specifically funded the research the proportion of articles that is accessible is higher but still just under half is accessible without a subscription.Where work is freely accessible, Gold is the most likely means of achieving this at an average cost of USD1,682 per article; while Hybrid is used significantly less often it comes with a higher average price . In all the two paid methods of making research accessible comes with an estimated price tag—on top of library subscription costs, of course—of USD1.45m.Green open access accounted for about one-quarter of our open articles. One further avenue we can investigate is where this work was archived, whether in our own university repositories or in public ones like PubMed. We found that this proportion could be greatly increased if our authors utilised the rights afforded to them by publishers to make versions of their work freely accessible in non-commercial repositories. Fully 3,089 (88%) of Closed articles could be made available in this way but in our 2017 sample we identified a paltry 125 articles in New Zealand’s institutional repositories that made the difference between open and closed.These findings beg several questions worthy of further research that are outside the scope of this paper. What are the barriers to self-archiving? The most likely reasons—of which we are aware from our own anecdotal experiences—are lack of time, lack of awareness of the possibility of self-archiving, confusion about copyright and embargo periods, negative perceptions of the status of author accepted manuscripts, and the lack of user-friendliness of software used to deposit works in a repository. Why do our researchers choose one mode of publication over another? Which publishers do our researchers favour when choosing open? What influences them to choose to pay a Hybrid APC? Does journal impact factor play a role in decisions or in citation rates? Are there disciplinary differences?Our data can also be interrogated further than was possible within the scope of this paper. While our focus was on a national snapshot of open and closed publications, it is also possible for individual institutions to examine their own subsets of our data to determine costs and identify closed publications that could be deposited in their repositories. We have already mentioned that information garnered about APC payments can help institutions to estimate amounts paid by researchers for publishing when looking at the value of transformative publishing agreements with publishers.What we do know is that New Zealand research is less likely to be open than research of other countries. Our overall proportion of open work lags behind other countries, our corresponding authors are less likely to make research open than corresponding authors from other countries and, clearly, we could be taking advantage of Green open access to a far greater extent than we are. This last point in particular suggests there are important policy and systemic issues that should be considered by New Zealand’s research community. Despite the fact we know most authors support open access to research in principle, there is a very large gap between this belief and their practices in making New Zealand’s research outputs free to access.10.7717/peerj.11417/supp-1Supplemental Information 1Click here for additional data file.


Chemical Science.A welcome to 2021 from May Copsey, Executive Editor,  Chemical Science.Diamond or platinum open access; open and free, for authors and readers. However you describe it, being open and accessible is at the heart of what we are aiming to achieve in status quo. We want articles in Chemical Science to provoke thought and to inspire new directions and perspectives. This is why we have been giving the purpose of the reviews in the journal some thought.It's not just about who can read our articles, we also want to ensure we are open in many other ways too, such as being receptive to ideas that challenge the Chemical Science, we offered the option to authors of publishing Mini-Reviews or Perspective articles. Now is a good time to reflect on this, and we realised that we’d like to refresh these article types to emphasize how the journal is developing. This will be two-fold:Ten years ago, when we launched (1) We are evolving our existing Mini-Reviews to be simply Reviews. This is to provide our authors with a more flexible review article type that will do away with length restrictions. This approach will complement the Edge article (which has been doing this for ten years for primary research).(2) We are refocussing our Perspective articles. These will now be a more personalised account of a research area. We aim to provide a platform for authors to provide a personal or speculative viewpoint on a given subject and its future development. To encourage authors to think about how the field will develop over the next 5–10 years, we are including a ‘Future outlook’ section. We also want authors to comment on how they see their own research contributing to the future direction of an area. Contributions by early career researchers are particularly welcome.Chemical Science Editorial Board. However, suggestions from authors are welcome and enquiries should be directed to the editorial office by email CHEMICALSCIENCE-RSC@rsc.org.Both article types will continue to be subject to the same level of rigorous peer-review as is used for our current reviews and Edge articles. Perspectives and Reviews are normally published by invitation of the 10.1039/D0SC05008C), nanogenerators for self-charging power systems by Xiong Pu and Zhong Lin Wang (DOI: 10.1039/D0SC05145D), and the role of supramolecular approaches for artificial photosynthesis by Tom Keijer, Tessel Bouwens, Joeri Hessels and Joost Reek (DOI: 10.1039/D0SC03715J).The formal description of these articles types is given below  and is aChemical Science are given the credit they deserve. So we are now asking all our authors to now include an Author Contribution Statement in their future articles.We want to make sure all of the authors featured in 1 We have been encouraging the inclusion of Author Contribution Statements, however due to the importance of promoting responsible research assessment practices, we are taking the step of making this mandatory in future Chemical Science articles. We appreciate that this will take more time for authors to prepare, but we feel that recognition of those who have done all the hard work is truly important, and deserves to be called out in each article.In 2020, the Royal Society of Chemistry signed the San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA) and its principles highlight a need to assess research on its own merits.2 We’ll also be looking for ways we can further recognise the achievements of our authors and reviewers later this year.Guidelines on how to prepare these statements can be found on our website, under our author responsibilities.It goes without saying that 2020 will be a memorable year for everyone, as it has thrown many challenges at us all. At the beginning of the year, we saw increasing submissions as researchers went into lockdown around the world. The pressure was on for our reviewers, who as we can all appreciate were also juggling family and caring responsibilities, as well as managing their groups remotely.Chemical Science reviewers do is crucial to ensuring readers can trust what they see in the journal.So I wanted to take this opportunity to particularly thank all our reviewers from this year. The primary purpose of the review process is to improve the quality of the research articles that are published, and so the work that However it is more than this, reviewer reports are also a way of training the next generation of researchers, as they take their first steps in the publication process. It is a way of sharing experience and knowledge, ideally in a positive and constructive way, which will help research projects and ideas to grow for the future. Perhaps now more than ever, it’s important for us to recognise the importance and value of that part of a reviewer’s role.Chemical Science team and Editorial Board, I’d like to take this chance to wish everyone a very happy New Year and a safe and happy 2021.Finally on behalf of the whole  May CopseyChemical ScienceExecutive Editor,  https://www.rsc.org/news-events/articles/2020/jun/rsc-signs-dora(1) https://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/journal-authors-reviewers/author-responsibilities/(2)