Talk:List of academic publishers by preprint policy

Too much non-free material

I don't see how we can justify copying out the policy of every journal out there. This material needs to be removed, since the other alternative, summarizing, is presumably what the entry is already doing. Mangoe (talk) 16:38, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Would an alternative be to have categories and then link to policy? Possibly quote parts of policies if novel? MrChristian - Beyond the stars (talk) 13:34, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

@MrChristian and Mangoe: I'd support categories and links option. Sherpa Romeo does a good job of simplifying down the policies into more categorised system. I actually don't thing the quotation amount is excessive from a fair-use point of view, but more of an issue of unnecessary verbosity that makes the table harder to navigate. E.g.:

• Current = "To support the wide dissemination of research, the journal encourages authors to post their research manuscripts on community-recognized preprint servers, either before or alongside submission to the journal. This policy applies only to the original version of a manuscript that describes primary research. Any version of a manuscript that has been revised in response to reviewers’ comments, accepted for publication or published in the journal should not be posted on a preprint server. Instead, forward links to the published manuscript should be posted instead."
• Revised = "Preprint: Yes, Postprint: No"

There's also some duplication, e.g. BMJ is in the publishers section, but some BMJ journals are also listed in the journals section. Same for Nature publishing group and Nature Neuroscience. Eventually this entire table would be a perfect candidate for an automated list from wikidata. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 11:00, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Example formatting of similar table: Copyright_policies_of_academic_publishers#Academic_books_and_book_chapters. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 02:02, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Consolidating to publishers where possible

Most publishers have consistent policies across all of their journals. I think it's therefore reasonable to prioritise the top table. Notes or footnotes can be included for cases where one or more journals within a publishing group differ. This should also help with the duplication noted in the sections above. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 06:38, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Some info out of date

For those journals listed as not compatible, it'd be worth doing another check of the current policies. Some of the info in the table is out of date. e.g.:

• Wiley's Biology of the Cell was listed as "Likely Incompatible / Unclear" but the reference listed states "Wiley believes journals should allow for the submission of manuscripts which have already been made available on such a [preprint] server."

I'm consolidating this into the top table, since all 1600 Wiley-published journals appear to have the same policy. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 06:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Correction, Wiley's Journal of Orthopaedic Research doesn't allow preprints for one of their article types, but the journal specifically highlights it in a policy. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 08:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Though some info on this article was out of date, so are some publishers. Nucleic Acids Research specifically prohibits submissions from PLOS Currents which shut down in 2018! It only stopped prohibiting Nature Precedings in 2017, five years after that closed down. Good to know that we're not the only one that can get a bit behind! T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 07:00, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

References

Major update

@Kramer, Debivort, Pigsonthewing, Jessica Polka, Charles Matthews, Hildabast, Mangoe, Headbomb, Dream Focus, A3nm, and XOR'easter: as those who've previously contributed lots to this page, or commented on the deletion discussion.

I've made a stack of changes (before, after), so would value people's opinions on the updates below:

1. Consolidated the lower list of journals into the upper list of publishers, since almost all publishers have unified policies now (with exceptions noted)
2. Converted prose policy statements to structured info columns (many of which have changed since originally being added to the page)
   • Server restrictions (I've currently left in the examples stated by the publishers, but not sure if useful)
   • Version restrictions (though sharing of post-review versions to preprint servers prohibited by other publisher policies in some cases)
   • License restrictions (I think very worth highlighting)
   • Journal-specific exceptions
3. Eventually this info should be in some way encoded into wikidata
   • Could enable possible display here as a {{Wikidata list}}
   • Could enable simple search-by-journal tool, similar to sherpa romeo

The main information lost from converting to structured data is framing (e.g. "we encourage" vs "we permit"), inclusion vs exclusion (e.g. "can pace any version pre- or post- review on a preprint server" vs simply not mentioning), and which explicitly state common requirements (e.g. "link to the published version on the preprint"). If the text quotes are particularly useful, they could be included in the references? Please take a look through and let me know what you think. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 01:27, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

The first comment is the "compatible" column. The big question here is compatible with what? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:16, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Second one is I would nix the individual journals from the list too. That's unmaintainable and arbitrary. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:25, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm not too sure I remember the context, but this looks like a great initiative! It's true that "compatible" in the list of journals is a bit unclear. I think it would be great to have this in Wikidata as well (and/or reconcile it with Sherpa Romeo). Thanks again for the effort! --a3nm (talk) 13:05, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

@A3nm and Headbomb: I've finished merging up the single-journal-publishers from the lower list up into the top table (which also solves the old compatible column that attempted to summarise whether preprints were compatible with the journal's policy). At the very least, I think all the major publishers are all included, though there's of course a long tail of societies that independently publish a single journal. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 23:58, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

@Evolution and evolvability: Thanks for the update! That looks great. Just one thing: when you have "Exception" in a cell, it's a bit unclear what the "non-exceptional" situation is. If it's always "Unrestricted", maybe it would help writing "Unrestricted" at the top of every cell with an exception, or changing "Exception" to "Unrestricted except" or something similar. In any case thanks again for your great work on this! --a3nm (talk) 21:03, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

@A3nm: Good idea. Done. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 22:55, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

@Evolution and evolvability: Thanks also from me! What about using a lighter green for the cases with few exceptions? For example, the template template:yes2 --Ita140188 (talk) 06:25, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

@Ita140188: I can see that being useful for readers. My only hesitation is using those templates prevents the cell contents being editable in visualeditor, which is usually pretty useful for tables. For the "unrestricted" cells it's less of a problem because the content is always the same, so they can still be copy-pasted around in VE. However, perhaps ease for readers is a higher priority than ease for editors. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 01:55, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

@Evolution and evolvability: I have an alternative: just explicitly specifying the color without using templates. You can see an example on the Elsevier entry. This allows easy editing with the visual editor. What do you think? --Ita140188 (talk) 06:37, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

@Ita140188: Nice idea. I've gone through and added that. It there's some unforseen issue that we've not considered it's pretty easy to reverse anyway. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 06:14, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Draft wikidata encoding

A possible way of organising data on the item of a publisher (e.g. Wiley (Q1479654)):

• Statement: permits (P8738) preprint (Q580922) (or possibly create item for "submission from / sharing of preprint")
  • Qualifier: prohibits (P8739) create items for common restrictions e.g. "commercial preprint server" or "version after peer review"
  • Qualifier: has characteristic (P1552) alternatively the inverse of the above e.g. "Non-commercial preprint server only" or "version before peer review only"
  • Qualifier: Not sure how to encode conditions such as "If preprint is CCBY, then must pay APC"
  • Qualifier: exception to constraint (P2303) for journals that list exceptions to the general publisher policy
  • Qualifier: start time (P580) if people want to add in when different publishers/journals changed policy
  • Reference: quotation (P1683) if people want to quote the policy txt (along with reference URL (P854), obv.)

Any ideas? I'll post at a couple of places on wikidata too. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 05:00, 2 March 2021 (UTC)