Eric Schares

@eschares.bsky.social

1965 Followers 1113 Following

Collection Analysis Librarian, Iowa State University; Research Associate, ScholCommLab; PhD candidate, CWTS. Data science, bibliometrics, python, Open Access, academic publishing, causal inference, Learned League. Views my own. More at eschares.github.io

The Winner - "I'm headed to the 2030 games." Eric Schares, Ames, Iowa

Bayesian Workflow cover and a thumbs up

Inglorious Basterds three finger gesture scene

Cartoon of two turtles, one with a soccer ball shell and satellite dish. Three possible captions: It's really popular across the pond; I have no idea what's going on, I just like to watch them run; I'm headed to the 2030 games.

Red Lightning McQueen car behind velvet ropes, me in shirt and khakis gesturing and smiling

For the first two years of operation, there will be no article processing charges of any kind, removing all financial barriers to publication. Beyond that period, the association will strive to keep costs as low as possible and to offer waivers for submissions from the Global South

Selfie with gray car in background

Key phrase :pivot_long expanding to pivot_longer() syntax. Same for pivot_wide, ggplot, and "Thanks, Eric"

Is AI Profitable Yet? NO.
Tracking the spend and revenue of Frontier AI companies (May 2026).

Still from ending of Clue (1985). Miss Scarlett pointing gun at Wadsworth.

Sir James Richards, quoting his father in Memoirs of an Unjust Fella (20th century):

"There are three kinds of man you must never trust: a man who hunts south of the Thames, a man who has soup for lunch, and a man who waxes his moustache"

Same picture as above, but showing how it actually looks - just a black square in the middle of the scoreboard

Outdoor track meet, athletes in the foreground, scoreboard in back with Photoshopped information - 4x800 relay, Final - Shuttle Hdl relay, 2nd call - 100m, 1st call, Distance Medley, 400m

R scatter plot titled "Nested x-axis using { legendry }", showing publishers ABC, DEF, XYZ with Gold and Hybrid in ABC and XYZ

Screenshot that says:
Publication & Data Deposition
Once the article has passed the prepublication checks, a fully typeset version is published with a DOI enabling immediate viewing and citation as well as indexation in Google Scholar. Once the article is published it cannot be sent to another journal for review and publication.

Low shot of cat watching male and female cardinal through sliding glass door

Spreadsheet screenshot showing:

ID Journal Papers in 2025 (all authors) Papers with NIH funding journal share of NIH funded papers in 2025 Publisher oa_status apc_usd apc_usd_originalORconverted

jour.1018370 Bulletin of Mathematical Biology 173 13 0.075144509 Springer Nature Hybrid OA 3090 original

Screenshot of NIH page reading:

Supplemental Guidance to the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy: Publication Costs
Notice Number:
NOT-OD-25-048
Key Dates
Release Date:
December 17, 2024

Related Announcements
April 30, 2025 - Revision: Notice of Updated Effective Date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy. See Notice NOT-OD-25-101.
December 17, 2024 - 2024 NIH Public Access Policy. See Notice NOT-OD-25-047.
December 17, 2024 - Supplemental Guidance to the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy: Government Use License and Rights. See Notice NOT-OD-25-049.
August 23, 2024 - Notice of the Reopening of the Public Comment Period for NOT-OD-24-144. See Notice NOT-OD-24-166.
June 24, 2024 - Notice of Availability: National Institutes of Health Draft Public Access Policy. See Notice NOT-OD-24-144.
February 21, 2023 - Request for Information on the NIH Plan to Enhance Public Access to the Results of NIH-Supported Research. See Notice NOT-OD-23-091.
Issued by
Office of The Director, National Institutes of Health (OD)

Purpose
Purpose

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) reiterates that compliance with the Public Access Policy is free. However, NIH recognizes that some peer-reviewed publishing routes may result in publication costs, including, but not limited to, article processing charges (APCs). Publication costs are allowable when they comport with the existing NIH cost principles (Grants Policy Statement (GPS) 7.2 and GPS 7.9.1 (Publication and Printing Costs)). Cost principles clarify when costs should be allocated as direct versus indirect costs, and they clarify charges and fees that are allowable under the outlined conditions.

Picture of two hockey players with missing teets - Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita.

One player summed up the feelings of many: "It's foolish not to wear a helmet. But I don't - because many of the other guys don't. I know that's silly, but most of the players feel the same way. If the league made us do it, though, we'd all wear them and nobody would mind."

Horizontal strips of blue, pink, red, yellow, orange. Each strip made up of smaller segments.

Stacked bar graph showing journal title on the x, and color coded blue/red bar segments showing counts of articles for that journal from Dimensions (blue) and OpenAlex (red). Some bars all nearly all red

Moreover, children generate tradition. They turn your choices into traditions by accident. You do it once, they demand to do it again, and then it’s a tradition. You discover that you are the one creating tradition, that it all rests on you. It feels like an inappropriate amount of power. If I’m too tired to follow through on something, it just disappears forever. But by the same measure, I can now sieve all the traditions I was given to those that I love the most, make sure they continue, and add to them whatever I want to add to the world.

Book cover of The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton

Older white house with wood frame on the face and tatters of a flag

Frozen box that says HyVee Turducken.

Dag showing total number of balls -> % red <- num red

House with giant Trump flag displayed flag against the siding, but all torn, half gone, barely readable now

Bananas with a sign that says Manager Special. Was 54c, now 53c

Screenshot from Lecture 14 showing correlated features model definition over a Cthulhu

Dog leaning back by a pizza. "Yeah I'm into fitness. Fitness whole pizza in my mouth"

Venn diagram between Macbeth witches and bad baseball umps, with overlap being "what's fair is foul, what's foul is fair"

Homemade Sign that says All the money that you made will never buy back your soul

Six apples in a row

Q1. WORLD HIST - In 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller published the first map using what name for the New World? The name was chosen in honor of the explorer who had described a Mundus Novus back in 1504.

AMERICA

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.

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.

Desk showing various Intel awards won by Eric Schares from 2008-2014

Calico cat looking directly at the camera

Web of Science Core Collection metrics
h-index, publications, sum of times cited, citing articles

By contrast, the Company of Biologists, a non-profit organization in Cambridge, UK, is continuing with paid review on its journal Biology Open after a successful trial. The journal paid reviewers £220 (US$295) per review, and — unlike Critical Care Medicine — told them it expected a first response within four days, to allow editors to decide on manuscript acceptance or rejection within a week of submission.

R code snippets showing relocate(Q3_deadline_stress) suddenly appearing as q3 with lowercase q

Me turning around in search of, smiling with stage and CHICAGO in lights in background

one player summed up the feelings of many: it's foolish not to wear a helmet but i don't because the other guys don't i know that's silly but most of the players feel the same way if the league made us do it though we'd all wear them and nobody would mind

Screenshot of paragraph that reads "This hypothesis is confirmed by a a statistical analysis available in an online appendix" superscript 15. Footnote 15 has no link but says "We checked the validity of this hypothesis through a binary logistic regression where the dependent variable is the presence or absence of voucher utilization. In Natural Sciences and Economics and Social Sciences, there is a higher propensity to use the vouchers compared to Health Sciences. The rest of the coefficient variables are not significant. Therefore, we can infer from these results that there is no substantial difference between the two types of transformative articles with respect to the academic position and gender of the CAs and the ranking of the journals."

View from inside a white tent of a main st full of bike riders. One in a Colorado jersey buys something. People everywhere.