Consulting

Broadening Horizons in Scholarly Communication
Consulting Project for Frontiers Media S.A.

Project launched in December 2024.

My contribution:

Principal Investigator: Development of the project, conducting all research packages, drafting the final report and communicating my findings to the public.

Summary of the planned project:

1. Background and Motivation

   1. 1. 1. The global academic community thrives on the diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices. Yet, scholarly publishing often reflects systemic imbalances, with editorial boards, peer reviewers, and authorship disproportionately dominated by individuals from specific regions, genders, and institutional affiliations. These disparities hinder the breadth of scholarly  discourse and limit the impact of research from underrepresented groups. This project seeks to explore how the scholarly publishing ecosystem can evolve to better  reflect the diversity of the academic community. By examining both structural and cultural  barriers, it aims to generate actionable insights that foster inclusivity in editorial practices and  decision-making.

2. Objectives

   1. 1. 1. Investigate trends in representation within academic publishing, focusing on editorial boards and authorship.

         2. Identify challenges faced by underrepresented groups and institutions in accessing publishing opportunities.

         3. Develop and disseminate strategies to enhance inclusivity and diversity in scholarly communication.

3. Methodology: The project will adopt a multifaceted research approach:

1. Mapping Diversity: Analyze publishing patterns to identify areas of underrepresentation using publicly available data.

2. Understanding Barriers: Gather perspectives from stakeholders in publishing (authors, editors, reviewers) through conversations and exchange.

3. Economic Evaluation: Sketching the economic consequences of existing disparities in the present publishing ecosystem

4. Crafting Solutions: Developing policy recommendations to better align publishing practices with economic incentives for institutions, publishers, and researchers.

Galvanising the Open Access Community: A Study on the Impact of Plan S
Report commissioned by cOAlition S - evaluation study conducted in partnership with scidecode science consulting.

• OA Advance Project under the Horizon Europe Programme [GA 101157697]. 

• joint international project with Pablo de Castro (U Strathclyde, UK), Ulrich Herb (SULB, Saarland U, DE), Laura Rothfritz (IBI, HU Berlin, DE), and Joachim Schoepfel (U Lille, FR)

• Presentations: OASPA Panel Session. My slides can be found here.

• Replication Package: Schmal, W. B. (2024). Data and Code for the "Study on the Impact of Plan S" [Data set]. Scidecode. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12523229 

My contribution:

Developing an microeconoemtric regression design that allows the causally identify the effect of Plan S on Open Access choices of supported researchers. Regular communication with the client, being responsible for the  coordination with the data supplier, data cleaning, preprocessing, and analysis. Writing the chapter of this microeconometric analysis ("Counterfactual Impact Evaluation). 

Summary of the report:

This is the report arising from the study on the impact of Plan S commissioned by the cOAlition S group of funders to assess the impact of their policy intervention five years on since its release in Sep 2018. The study was conducted by Scidecode Science Consulting from Oct 2023 to Sep 2024. Its title "Galvanising the Open Access Community" hints at the significant effect that Plan S has had in terms of moving the dial on immediate Open Access. The report is divided in two broad sections addressing the quantitative and the qualitative assessment of the impact of Plan S. For the quantitative analysis, a counterfactual impact evaluation (CIE) has been conducted. This has measured the influence of Plan S on Open Access publishing trends for subsets of publications funded by funding agencies in various countries and regions across the world, both within and outside cOAlition S. The second half of the report is devoted to the qualitative analysis of the impact of Plan S. A series of snapshots examine the current status of different Open Access routes and strategies in the academic publishing domain and the influence Plan S has had and keeps having on these developments. These insights arise from a comprehensive stakeholder engagement exercise whereby interviews and conversations have been held with all relevant actors in the scholarly communications landscape. In view of the findings from both the quantitative and qualitative assessment, the report examines the areas where Plan S and cOAlition S have largely succeeded vs fallen short and issues a number of recommendations to consolidate the impact of Plan S and deepen the effect of cross-funder collaboration. The datasets and code underpinning the Counterfactual Impact Evaluation (CIE) of Plan S are available in an independent 'data + code' record in Zenodo, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12523229. The files stored in the dataset are also described in Annex 1 in the report.

Impact:

• Featured in Science

• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world's largest private research funders, decided - after preliminary results were communicated to cOAlition S, of which BMGF is part, to end the support of Gold OA and to support Green OA, in line with the findings of my analysis.