Open access solutions for biodiversity journals: Do not replace one problem with another
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For much of the twentieth century, many or most scholarly journals in biodiversity, ecology, biogeography and conservation were owned and published by scientific societies and made available tothe broader scientific community at relatively low cost. However, the past several decades have seen a dominant process of commercialization of the publication process in this field, either by commercial publishing firms taking over publication of journals owned by a society (e.g., Evolution), or by commercial publishers starting new journals to fill "niches" that were until then empty in the scholarly publishing ecosystem. Diversity and Distributions is an example of this latter category of journals, having been created by Wiley Publishers in 1993 (as Biodiversity Letters). Being a journal owned by a commercial publisher, it has always been accessed by readers via subscription, but the publication process has been free to potentialauthors whose work has passed peer review. A recent announcement from Wiley Publishers on the Diversity and Distributions website, however, was as follows:We are pleased to announce that Diversity and Distributions will join the Wiley Open Access portfolio as of 1st January 2019, when all articles (includingthe entire back catalogue) will become free to read, download and share for all. This exciting development will place the journal at the forefront of open science in the community.This change would appear to be positive, as it would remove the for‐pay subscription barrier to reader access to the journal, and thus would appear to constitute an intriguing step in a series of advances in opening access to the scientific literature, in line with recent proposals as those of cOAlition S (https://www.scienceeurope.org/coalition-s/). However, the good news on the webpage is followed by a more ominous, "... all submissions received after 8th October 2018 will be subject to an Article Processing Charge (APC)." We have come to understand that these APCs will be US$2,200 per paper published, which is very expensive compared with the bulk of open access journals accessibleto ecology and conservation science
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Scholarly communicationOpen science Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Not applicable | medium |
| gpt | Scholarly communication Domain: not available · Genre: Commentary About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Other design | low |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.084 | 0.267 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.044 | 0.137 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.038 |
| Research integrity | 0.035 | 0.047 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.050 | 0.051 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".