Category: Open Access

Shifting Tides: The Open Movement at a Turning Point


At the turn of 2022 and 2023, we conducted a series of interviews with leading voices in the open movement. We spoke with professional activists who address openness from varied perspectives and work in different fields of open. Some have been engaged in activism for decades, while others are looking at it with a fresh set of eyes. Many of our interviewees lead organizations advancing openness, and we were particularly interested in talking with those who have been exploring new approaches and strategies.

Our research aims to understand the current state of the open movement, as seen through the eyes of people actively involved in its endeavors and leading organizations within the movement. We want to make sense of shared positions and understand whether there are any clear division lines. We are particularly interested in identifying trends that transform the movement and understanding the challenges and needs of activists and organizations as these changes occur. The report signals a shift to what can be best described as a post-copyright approach to openness. However, while our focus is on how the movement is changing, this does not mean that the whole movement is subject to that shift. There still exists a need for copyright advocacy work in the movement, and many organizations maintain the course developed at the outset. Nonetheless, we hope that they, too, will find this report’s insights worth examining.

https://openfuture.eu/publication/shifting-tides/

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"Transformative Agreements and Their Practical Impact: A Librarian Perspective"


This case study aims at describing how transformative agreements (TAs) have affected our profession with new tasks and workflows at two university libraries in Sweden, namely Karolinska Institutet University Library and Södertörn University Library. TAs are one of the mechanisms by which scientific publications are made open access; they involve moving libraries’ contracts with publishers from payment to read toward payment to publish. We will summarize the status and progress of open access in Sweden, in particular the significant growth of TAs over a short time span. We will then focus on describing how TAs have affected our everyday work and what new tasks they have imposed. We will share our experiences and point out things we find challenging, for example, we will explore questions about eligibility, the verification process, publication types and title changes during the contract period. We will also give some recommendations on how we would prefer the workflows surrounding the TAs to be. Finally, we will share our conclusions and comments about the impact of TAs on the publishing landscape and speculate about what will happen next.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.612

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Digital Scholarship Has Released the Academic Libraries and Research Data Management Bibliography

The Academic Libraries and Research Data Management Bibliography includes over 345 selected English-language articles and books that are useful in understanding how academic libraries plan for, implement, provide, evaluate, and conduct studies about research data management (RDM) services. Most sources have been published from 2012 through 2023. It includes full abstracts for works under certain Creative Commons Licenses. It is available as a website and a website PDF with live links.

Digital Scholarship’s other bibliographies about research data curation include the Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography (over 800 works), the Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography (over 225 works), and the Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography (over 200 works).

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"Can Open Access Increase LIS Research’s Policy Impact? Using Regression Analysis and Causal Inference"


The relationship between open access and academic impact (usually measured as citations received from academic publications) has been extensively studied but remains a very controversial topic. However, the effect of open access on policy impact (measured as citations received from policy documents) is still unknown. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of open access on the policy impact, which might initiate a new controversial topic. . . . Linear regression models, logit regression models, four other matching methods, open access status provided by different databases, and different sizes of data samples were used to check the robustness of the main results. This study revealed that open access had significant and positive effects on the policy impact.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04750-1

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"Mastodon over Mammon — Towards Publicly Owned Scholarly Knowledge"


Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record — encompassing text, data and code — to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7643817

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"Beyond BPCs: Reimagining and Re-infrastructuring the Funding of Open Access Books"


A major issue is that the sheer cost of BPCs [Book Processing Charges] makes them an extremely expensive way of funding Open Access books. For large commercial publishers, BPCs of £11,000 and more for a conventional academic book are typical. Given very few academics would themselves have the capacity to easily cover these kinds of costs, BPCs are usually paid by universities or funders — sometimes from a specific fund set aside to cover the costs of Open Access publishing, sometimes from a general unallocated part of a university/department budget, sometimes from the budget of a research grant.

As Open Book Collective colleagues have argued again and again, in line with the aims and mission of the COPIM project, as well as arguments made by other project colleagues, a BPC-based Open Access publishing model is fundamentally unsustainable and unscalable. Any requirement for the higher education sector to pay BPCs on a broadscale basis would require an unparalleled national and global injection of funding. . . .

The Open Book Collective’s online presence " its "platform" serves many functions, including providing information about our aims, governance, model and values, as well resources about Open Access. However, a key part of the platform is the area where publishers and publishing "service providers," as we call them (the organisations that provide the crucial infrastructures for Open Access book publishing) make available ‘Offers’ that universities and other organisations can potentially subscribe to. . . .

In the Open Book Collective model, we give publisher/service provider members substantial — but not total — control over how their individual Offers are priced. Each initiative proposes a "tiered" costing Offer to us (tiered pricing involves varying subscription prices by university’s size and/or national context), which we assess to determine whether it is fair and reasonable. If so, and our Membership Committee agrees that the initiative meets our broader membership criteria, then it is eligible to become a member of the Open Book Collective, with its Offer potentially hosted on our platform.

https://bit.ly/45yZsXQ

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Paywall: "Interoperability of Open Science Metadata: What About the Reality?"


This paper leads to identify complementary ways to improve dataset interoperability: (1) to adapt mapping algorithms to the issues raised by metadata schema matching; (2) to adapt metadata schemata, for instance by sharing a core vocabulary and/or reusing existing standards; (3) to combine various trends in a more complex interoperability approach that would also make available and operational the (RDA) crosswalks between schemata and that would promote good practices in metadata labeling and documentation.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33080-3_28

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A Guide for Social Science Journal Editors on Easing into Open Science (FULL GUIDE)


Journal editors have a large amount of power to advance open science in their respective fields by incentivising and mandating open policies and practices at their journals. The Data PASS Journal Editors Discussion Interface (JEDI, an online community for social science journal editors: www.dpjedi.org) has collated several resources on open science in journal editing (www.dpjedi.org/resources). However, it can be overwhelming as a new editor to know where to start. For this reason, we have created a guide for journal editors on how to get started with open science. The guide outlines steps that editors can take to implement open policies and practices at their journal, and goes through the what, why, how, and worries of each policy/practice.

https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/hstcx

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"Wiley Inks 22 Open Access Agreements across North America"


These agreements, which all begin in 2023, span individual universities, research labs, and academic consortia across 18 U.S. states and Mexico. They allow participating institutions access to all of Wiley’s hybrid and subscription journals and grant researchers the ability to publish accepted articles open access across Wiley’s extensive publishing portfolio. . . .

A full list of participating partners includes:

  • Individual Institutions: University of Alabama at Birmingham, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon University, Colorado State University, Montana State University, Princeton University, Southern Methodist University, Syracuse University, UMass Lowell, West Virginia University, Texas Tech University Health Services Center, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Portland State University, Northeastern University, Texas A&M University, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN (CINVESTAV), University of North Texas Health Science Center, Washington State University, and Texas Christian University.
  • Consortia: The Carolina Consortium, and the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC).

https://bit.ly/3ORnyqT

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"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a License"


This column describes how one library seeks to mitigate harms or to optimize protections and advantages resulting from journal licenses. Progress toward improved licensing outcomes is described with examples or with qualitative data, from a comprehensive overview of one library’s journal licenses. Discussion includes so-called transformative agreements, a variety of rights, non-disclosure and data privacy clauses, term and termination, and transfer obligations.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102737

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"Eleven Strategies for Making Reproducible Research and Open Science Training the Norm at Research Institutions "


Across disciplines, researchers increasingly recognize that open science and reproducible research practices may accelerate scientific progress by allowing others to reuse research outputs and by promoting rigorous research that is more likely to yield trustworthy results. While initiatives, training programs, and funder policies encourage researchers to adopt reproducible research and open science practices, these practices are uncommon in many fields. Researchers need training to integrate these practices into their daily work. We organized a virtual brainstorming event, in collaboration with the German Reproducibility Network, to discuss strategies for making reproducible research and open science training the norm at research institutions. Here, we outline eleven strategies, concentrated in three areas: (1) offering training, (2) adapting research assessment criteria and program requirements, and (3) building communities. We provide a brief overview of each strategy, offer tips for implementation, and provide links to resources. Our goal is to encourage members of the research community to think creatively about the many ways they can contribute and collaborate to build communities, and make reproducible research and open science training the norm. Researchers may act in their roles as scientists, supervisors, mentors, instructors, and members of curriculum, hiring or evaluation committees. Institutional leadership and research administration and support staff can accelerate progress by implementing change across their institutions.

https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/kcvra

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Walt Crawford: "Gold Open Access 8 Is Now Available"


Gold Open Access 2017-2022: Articles in Journals (GOA8) is now available in print book, PDF ebook, and dataset forms. The print book–a 6×9 trade paperback with color graphs–is $11.50 (or the nearest equivalent in other currencies supported by Lulu), of which I receive a stunning $0.24. The PDF ebook and dataset are both free, and all versions are CC-BY.

https://cutt.ly/WwqKXwVM

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"Towards an Author-Centered Open Access Monograph Program: Understanding Open Access Cultures in Scholarly Publishing"


Author attitudes towards Open Access (OA) remains an important area of investigation in academic publishing. The successful implementation of new OA infrastructure and business models depend on their reception within scholarly communities. This paper proposes "Open Access Culture"—the set of beliefs, practices, and attitudes towards OA publishing shared by members of an academic field—as a framework to understand how OA innovations are and will be received by different scholarly communities. The investigation of OA culture helps identify the needs of individual academic fields (e.g., the importance of print publishing for a particular field), thus foregrounding author preferences in the publishing process. The University of Michigan Press (UMP) is drawing upon the OA Culture framework to aid the implementation of its OA monograph initiative. UMP has undertaken research (author survey as well as editor, author, and librarian interviews) to understand how the monograph initiative will integrate different fields. This paper presents results of this research demonstrating the application of the OA Culture framework to several fields, as well the Humanities, Arts, and Humanistic Social Sciences (HSS) more broadly. This is one way that University Presses may take an author-centered approach to OA publishing programs, one that foregrounds the needs of individual authors and considers their unique disciplinary context. Moreover, the paper offers a recent view of sentiments towards OA in the HSS and thus helps to contextualize the current OA landscape.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3332

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UC System: "Re: UCOLASC [University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication] Statement on Retention of Author Rights in License to Publish Agreements"


As discussed at our joint UCOLASC and Council of University Librarians (CoUL) meeting held on February 15, 2023, the Project Transform Negotiating Team (PTNT) and Project Transform Working Group (PTWG) have learned that many publishers are requiring University of California (UC) authors to sign "License to Publish" (LTP) agreements, which purport to grant exclusive rights to publishers and contravene the spirit of the open access (OA) policies and declarations strongly endorsed by UC faculty.We find this now-common practice to be unacceptable and therefore ask you to prioritize the issue of author rights and act on our behalf when you negotiate with publishers. . . .

UCOLASC urges the Project Transform Negotiating Team (PTNT) to negotiate transformative open access agreements with publishers stipulating that authors only grant "limited" or "nonexclusive" licenses to publishers. Liberal Creative Commons (CC) licenses (e.g., CC BY) should be applied as the default choice, and licenses that restrict commercial and derivative uses of the work (e.g., CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, and CC BY-NC-ND) should function as originally intended with authors always free to do whatever they want with their own works.

https://bit.ly/43uzuDd

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"What is Your Threshold? The Economics of Open Access Scholarly Book Publishing, the ‘Business’ of Care, and the Case of punctum books"


In this article, we share how a small, independent, academic open access (OA) press, punctum books, has survived and can maybe thrive financially, but also in terms of human quality of life dividends, in the very precarious landscape of making and funding open books. Tracing the history of the press and our bumpy road to better financial sustainability, and the ways in which we have settled upon a business model that purposefully "scales small," we argue that the mission and the business model of any OA book publisher must be in better alignment than is currently the case in much of academic publishing and that bibliodiversity, along with an ethics of care—of ourselves, our authors, and the librarians who fund us—should be paramount in everything we do as a publisher. We also offer a brief survey of the current state of the field of library funded OA books initiatives in order to raise some questions about the weight and logics of these initiatives and, with more and more players entering this scene, about the viability more largely of consortial library funding for OA books in the United States.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3627

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Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All


In Athena Unbound, Peter Baldwin offers an up-to-date look at the ideals and history behind OA, and unpacks the controversies that arise when the dream of limitless information slams into entrenched interests in favor of the status quo. . . .

Baldwin addresses the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the development of the university and research establishment. As he notes, the hard sciences have already created a funding model that increasingly provides open access, but at the cost of crowding out the humanities. Baldwin proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world.

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14887.001.0001

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"European Scholarly Journals from Small- and Mid-Size Publishers: Mapping Journals and Public Funding Mechanisms"


This study investigates the relationship between scholarly journal publishing and public funding, specifically concerning the context of small- and mid-sized journal publishers in European countries. As part of the movement towards open science, an increasing number of journals globally are free to both read and publish in, which increases the need for journals to seek other resources instead of subscription income. The study includes two separate components, collecting data separately for each European country (including transcontinental states): (1) the volume and key bibliometric characteristics of small- and mid-sized journal publishers and (2) information about country-level public funding mechanisms for scholarly journals. The study found that there are 16,387 journals from small- and mid-sized publishers being published in European countries, of which 36 per cent are already publishing open access. There is a large diversity in how countries reserve and distribute funds to journals, ranging from continuous inclusive subsidies to competitive grant funding or nothing at all.

https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scac081

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Council of the European Union: "Council Calls for Transparent, Equitable, and Open Access to Scholarly Publications"


In its conclusions, the Council calls on the Commission and the member states to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers. Some Member States have introduced secondary publication rights into their national copyright legislation, enabling open access to scholarly publications which involve public funds. The Council encourages national open access policies and guidelines to make scholarly publications immediately openly accessible under open licences. The conclusions acknowledge positive developments in terms of monitoring progress, like within the framework of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and suggest including open science monitoring in the European Research Area monitoring mechanism. The Council conclusions also encourage Member States to support the pilot programme Open Research Europe (to create a large-scale open access research publishing service), the use of open-source software and standards, to recognise and reward peer review activities in the assessment of researchers as well as to support the training of researchers on peer-review skills and on intellectual property rights.

https://bit.ly/3MS2leY

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"Gold Open Access Output and Expenditures in the United States in the Past Decade"


In this study we demonstrated some of the main differences in Gold Open Access publications and expenditures across various states and institutions in the United States. Our data shows that the majority of states published between 1,000 – 7,000 Gold Open Access publications and spent up to 6million dollars in the past 10 years. However, there are some noteworthy outliers such as Washington, Minnesota and Maryland with relatively low number of publications and high expenditures while states such as California, Ohio and especially New York which published relatively high number of Gold Open Access papers with relatively low costs comparatively.

https://doi.org/10.55835/64410a4a643beb0d90fc4707

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"Research Libraries Advance Open Scholarship and Community Engagement"


The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published brief profiles of the eight institutions that participated in the 2021–2022 pilot program Accelerating the Social Impact of Research (ASIR). The pilot engaged small teams from eight ARL member libraries who wanted to share strategies to accelerate the adoption and implementation of open-science principles for social-impact and community-engaged research and scholarship.

https://bit.ly/3pZKqtU

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"Books in a Bubble.: Assessing the OAPEN Library Collection "


Open access infrastructure for books is becoming more mature, and it is being used by an in-creasing number of people. The growing importance of open access infrastructure leads to more interest in sustainability, governance and impact assessment. For this paper, we will assess the OAPEN Library. In the spring of 2022, it passed the milestone of 20,000 titles. This was a good moment to evaluate the core asset of the OAPEN Library: its collection.

The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible books and chapters, all of which have undergone external peer review. In other words, it functions as an academic library and in our assessment we should treat it as such. However, it is an online library and the limitations of physical books do not play a part. Shelf space is not to be considered.

More important is the question of how well the collection meets the needs of its users. The OAPEN Library sees global usage; the collection reflects this by offering titles in over 50 languages. The collection is not focused on a specific subject area, but the choice of medium — books and chapters, not journals and articles — is more strongly associated with the humanities and social sciences. It does not track its users, but the supporters of the OAPEN Libraries are globally dis-tributed academic institutions, scientific and scholarly funders and publishers. An assessment of the OAPEN Library should therefore take into account the diversity of languages, subjects and stakeholders.

https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-498

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"Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) Releases the National Advocacy Framework for Open Educational Resources (OER)"


The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) is proud to announce the release of a comprehensive document, A National Advocacy Framework for Open Educational Resources in Canada, aimed at advancing the adoption and support of open educational resources (OER) across the country.

This framework is the result of collaborative efforts involving diverse stakeholders, including national student groups, provincial open education organizations, scholars, advocates in open education, and representatives from higher education institutions. Its purpose is to help advance and inform advocacy efforts directed at the Federal government. The ultimate goal is to provide guidance to stakeholders in advocating for federal involvement in OER.

https://bit.ly/3OvhBzL

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"Rethinking Transparency and Rigor from a Qualitative Open Science Perspective"


To further complicate matters, many qualitative researchers would posit that while secondary data are a combination of the researcher’s perceptions and observations, even primary data, such as interview transcripts, are filtered to some extent through the researcher. This is because, in qualitative research, the researcher is an instrument of both data collection and analysis . . . .

The researcher-as-instrument tradition also complicates discussions around reproducibility (i.e., the ability for another researcher to look at someone’s data and reproduce the analyses), one of the key components of rigor as it is currently discussed in the open science movement (NIH, n.d.). Quantitative researchers’ focus on reproducibility is often contrary to the tenets of qualitative research, particularly in methodologies aiming to uncover new ways of knowing, such as constructivist and grounded theory approaches. If one understands the researcher as a data collection instrument and a filter through which data is processed, strict quantitative-focused reproducibility becomes less likely—not through misconduct or error, but because ultimately, people conduct research, and people are not likely to have exactly the same perspectives. Guidelines that reinforce reproducibility without addressing this tension are not going to be useful for all researchers.

https://bit.ly/3MEbtnk

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"PeerJ Announces a New Open Access Model and the University of Bath as Their First Institutional Partner"


PeerJ has announced a new Open Access model and their first institutional partner. The award-winning publisher intends to move towards collective action for globally equitable Open Access, and their first step to this goal is a new model for institutional partners — Annual Institutional Memberships (AIMs). AIMs remove payment barriers to Open Access for authors, reduces the administration of Open Access payments, and guarantees value for partners. The University of Bath is PeerJ’s first partner in this new program, which will provide unlimited publishing for Bath’s faculty for a flat annual fee.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/989462

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"A Scoping Review on the Use and Acceptability of Preprints"


Preprints are open and accessible scientific manuscript or report that has not been submitted to a peer reviewed journal. The value and importance of preprints has grown since its contribution during the public health emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic. Funders and publishers are establishing their position on the use of preprints, in grant applications and publishing models. However, the evidence supporting the use and acceptability of preprints varies across funders, publishers, and researchers. The purpose of this scoping review was to explore the current evidence on the use and acceptability of preprints by publishers, funders, and the research community throughout the research lifecycle.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/nug4p

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