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Eric Schares

@eschares.bsky.social

1.8K followers 1.1K following 300 posts

Collection Analysis Librarian, Iowa State University & Research Associate, #ScholCommLab. Views my own. Data science, bibliometrics, python, Open Access, academic publishing, (applied) stats, causal inference, Learned League. More at eschares.github.io

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Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · Nov 18

🚨 Preprint! We combine our recent open dataset of #APC prices with the article counts per journal-year from #OpenAlex to estimate how much the academic community has paid in APCs over the last 5 years.

A. $8.349 billion ($8.968 B in 2023 USD)

$2.5B in 2023 alone.

arxiv.org/abs/2407.16551 #metasci

Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023

This study presents estimates of the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. APCs are fees charged for publishing in some ...

arxiv.org

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Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · 3h

SQL is hard because you can use something before you create it.

Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · 2d

I had a new experience last week - a journalist asked for my comment on a news story!

In this case it was AAAS's response to the NIH proposed APC cap scenarios. I agreed with some things in the release but disagreed with others.

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-usa-...

Eric Schares, engineering and collection analysis librarian at Iowa State University, told Research Professional News he agreed with AAAS that APC caps would become floors, but he said the AAAS response “contorts itself to both defend and criticise APCs at the same time”.
Schares co-authored an analysis of NIH publishing scenarios earlier this month and noted that AAAS charges an APC of $5,450 at Science Advances, its one gold open access journal.
The analysis found 433 NIH-funded papers published this year, making it the sixth most popular NIH journal. “I would ask why Science Advances has an APC at all and if the AAAS will consider moving it to align with the rest of their portfolio in providing open access through the green route without an APC,” Schares said.
He also questioned the AAAS’s suggestion that the NIH should only cover APCs if publishers can demonstrate integrity practices. “This seems at odds with priorities stated elsewhere in the document, including the very next paragraph that emphasises researcher choice,” he said.

Reposted by Eric Schares

Ludo Waltman @ludowaltman.bsky.social · 7d

Fully agree with Aaron's advice: "Libraries, institutions, open science advocates must redouble efforts to push for genuinely open metadata policies. We need to explore linking this advocacy to subscription renewal negotiations, making value of open abstracts part of conversation with publishers."

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Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · 7d

New OpenAlex logo looks like QSS.

blog.openalex.org/a-new-logo-f...

Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · 9d

OurResearch rebrands to OpenAlex.

blog.openalex.org/were-now-ope...

We’re now OpenAlex - OpenAlex blog

For years, we’ve been working under the name OurResearch. That name sat at the top of our org chart, with three child projects under it: OpenAlex, Unpaywall, and Unsub. Starting today, things are simp...

blog.openalex.org

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Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · 9d

It sounds like what you're searching for is a way to indicate a preprint has gone through MetaROR review vs. a preprint that hasn't. Putting some sort of graphic or stamp on the MetaROR formatted copy that indicates this would be enough to warrant a new DOI I think. Or update the exising DOI record.

Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · 10d

I haven’t gone through the MetaROR process myself yet. Is the preprint hosted on MetaROR exactly the same as on the original server, or is there some difference that is applied? If I held them up side by side could I tell the difference?

Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · 10d

You are right of course, unless you consider formatting content.
A new DOI is also likely needed so the publisher has edit rights to the paper’s record, which as I understand it they wouldn’t have if they reuse the existing DOI.

Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · 11d

Now that I've actually read the post, my opinions are:
1) Don't mint a new DOI until the actual content of the manuscript changes. Having it duplicated at MetaROR with supporting files isn't enough
2) Define a new type, such as "reviewed preprint"

Ludo Waltman @ludowaltman.bsky.social · 12d

We need good practices for DOI registration for publish-review-curate platforms like @metaror.bsky.social and others.

@andre-brasil.bsky.social and I wrote a blog post about this: doi.org/10.64000/76j...

Together with @crossref.bsky.social we hope to receive input from the community on this issue!

Innovation in scientific publishing and its implications for Crossref DOI registration practices - Request for input - Crossref

Lots of exciting innovations are being made in scientific publishing, often raising fundamental questions about established publishing practices. In this guest post, Ludo Waltman and André Brasil disc...

doi.org

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Reposted by Eric Schares

RAYGUN @raygunsite.com · 12d

Parents at the Des Moines RG just got a notice that DMPS's superintendent, Dr Ian Roberts was detained by ICE.

#raygun #ICE

News: www.weareiowa.com/article/news...

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Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · 12d

Perhaps adapting the "Release" language of GitHub could help. I can assign a DOI on Zenodo that points to a cluster of related documents.

Can have a new DOI for each major update (after peer review or author edits). Or use a top-level DOI that will always resolve to the most recent files.

eschares/unsub_extender: v1.3

Text in How to Use dropdown Change from using 'era_subjects' to 'subjects' column, while still keeping logic to handle 'era_subjects' Update to Streamlit 1.9.0 Add award information

doi.org

Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · 17d

Sorry to barge in, but I have a (probably simple) question about Ch.16 in Bayes Rules! May I ask it here?

Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · 19d

Timeline cleanse. I do love Jon Batiste.

youtu.be/nNOCkG_HI2M?...

Creating Cartoon Sounds with Jon Batiste!

YouTube video by Josh Harmon

youtu.be

Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · 27d

@stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca @lucyces.bsky.social

Reposted by Eric Schares

LSE Impact Blog @lseimpactblog.bsky.social · 27d

💥New: Shaking up the scholarly publishing market – Why caps on APCs could backfire

✍️@stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca @eschares.bsky.social, @juancommander.scholcommlab.ca Flavia Camargo, @lmatthia.bsky.social Lucía Céspedes, Constance Poitras & Dorothea Strecker

#AcademicSky #ScholComm #OpenAccess

Shaking up the scholarly publishing market – Why caps on APCs could backfire - Impact of Social Sciences

An analysis of APC pricing and the impact of proposed NIH caps on APCs, suggest imposing price caps on author fees could lead to further market concentration.

blogs.lse.ac.uk

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Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · Sep 8

Absolutely has happened to me.

bsky.app/profile/esch...

James Fraser @fraserlab.com · Sep 8

Why hasn't Preprint Peer Review caught on more?

I discovered a small, but simple reason - authors are missing out on the JOY of getting feedback because they aren't notified when feedback occurs.

more in thread below!

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Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · Sep 8

This has happened to me as well bsky.app/profile/esch...

Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · Jul 20

Thanks, I had no idea this existed. We do plan to revise and improve the preprint, schedules permitting. Will consider these comments!

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Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · Sep 8

I do think a count of submissions should get recorded somewhere. ORCiD? Each journal could then choose their own threshold of how many articles an author has submitted to any journal in a calendar year, below which they consider as usual and above which they auto-reject. Resets Jan. 1. #scholcomm

Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · Sep 6

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

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Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · Sep 6

Is each grid line 1% or 0.5%?

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Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · Sep 6

…what’s happening with the y-axis?

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Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · Sep 4

Proud to have played even a small role on this project! Great summary post and an excellent job by the entire IOI team.

After two years of intensive research, IOI's project “Investigating "reasonable costs" to achieve public access to federally funded research and scientific data” has concluded.

The Publishing Profiler: Visualizing Research Output Footprints
The Publishing Profiler represents a tool to help institutions understand their federal research publication landscape. Built by consultant Eric Schares and expanding on his earlier work at Iowa State University, this interactive dashboard combines data from Dimensions and OpenAlex to provide comprehensive insights into institutional publishing patterns.

Using an eight-year analysis period (2016-2023) to capture trends and context, the Publishing Profiler reveals:

Total publication output with breakdowns by corresponding authorship status
Federal funding acknowledgments extracted from acknowledgment text and metadata
Nelson Memo-implicated publications—the crucial intersection of corresponding authorship and federal funding that would fall under new policies
Publisher and journal patterns showing where researchers are publishing and how this is changing over time
Open access status across different forms of OA
Funding agency breakdowns allowing deeper dives into specific federal funders
For example, Iowa State University's 2023 data showed 2,776 total published articles, with 48% having ISU corresponding authors and 55% of those acknowledging federal funding, resulting in 733 articles that would be subject to the Nelson-era open-access policies.

The tool's practical applications are immediate: libraries can gauge future demand for institutional repositories based on the percentage of non-OA publications that will need compliance support, while research offices can help investigators budget for article processing charges or plan to publish in fully open access journals.

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Reposted by Eric Schares

Juan Pablo Alperin @juancommander.scholcommlab.ca · Sep 3

NEW POST: NIH explores capping APCs: Let’s look at the evidence! We used data of NIH funded from 2025, and found that APCs for a few as 7% journals (or 6% of papers) would be fully covered by a $2K cap, 25% of journals (or 21% of papers) by a $3K cap. Read more! www.scholcommlab.ca/2025/09/03/n...

NIH explores capping APCs: Let’s look at the evidence

by Stefanie Haustein, Eric Schares, Juan Pablo Alperin, Flavia Camargo, Lisa Matthias, Lucía Céspedes, Constance Poitras & Dorothea Strecker On April 30 2025, the US National Institutes of Heal…

www.scholcommlab.ca

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Reposted by Eric Schares

Stefanie Haustein @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca · Sep 3

Here it is: www.scholcommlab.ca/2025/09/03/n...
Haustein, S., Schares, E., Alperin, J.P., Camargo, F., Matthias, L., Céspedes, L., Poitras, C., & Strecker, D. (2025). APCs of 2,228 journals where NIH-funded authors published in 2025 (Version v1) [dataset]. Harvard Dataverse. doi.org/10.7910/DVN/...

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Reposted by Eric Schares

Stefanie Haustein @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca · Sep 3

Expanded this study to 2,200+ journals=87% of NIH funded papers in 2025 so far. Blog post with @eschares.bsky.social @juancommander.scholcommlab.ca @lucyces.bsky.social and other #ScholCommLab members coming later today.

Stefanie Haustein @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca · Aug 6

Of the 199 journals, as little as 7% of journals/5% of papers would be fully covered by a $2k cap. 11% of journals/14% of papers wouldn't even make due with a $6k cap. A good place to remind ourselves of the disconnect between what it COSTS to produce a paper and what publishers CHARGE to do so..

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Reposted by Eric Schares

Open Access Tracking Project @oatp.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy · Aug 31

Investigating Document Type, Language, Publication Year, and Author Count Discrepancies Between OpenAlex and Web of Science https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18620

Investigating Document Type, Language, Publication Year, and Author Count Discrepancies Between OpenAlex and Web of Science

Bibliometrics, whether used for research or research evaluation, relies on large multidisciplinary databases of research outputs and citation indices. The Web of Science (WoS) was the main supporting infrastructure of the field for more than 30 years until several new competitors emerged. OpenAlex, a bibliographic database launched in 2022, has distinguished itself for its openness and extensive coverage. While OpenAlex may reduce or eliminate barriers to accessing bibliometric data, one of the concerns that hinders its broader adoption for research and research evaluation is the quality of its metadata. This study aims to assess metadata quality in OpenAlex and WoS, focusing on document type, publication year, language, and number of authors. By addressing discrepancies and misattributions in metadata, this research seeks to enhance awareness of data quality issues that could impact bibliometric research and evaluation outcomes.

arxiv.org

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