Category: Open Access

"UC Terminates Subscriptions with World’s Largest Scientific Publisher in Push for Open Access to Publicly Funded Research"

The University of California has released "UC Terminates Subscriptions with World's Largest Scientific Publisher in Push for Open Access to Publicly Funded Research."

Here's an excerpt:

As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC's key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals.

In negotiating with Elsevier, UC aimed to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by ensuring that research produced by UC's 10 campuses — which accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output — would be immediately available to the world, without cost to the reader. Under Elsevier's proposed terms, the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university's multi-million dollar subscription, resulting in much greater cost to the university and much higher profits for Elsevier. . . .

Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC's reasonable contract terms, which would integrate subscription charges and open access publishing fees, making open access the default for any article by a UC scholar and stabilizing journal costs for the university.

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"Strategies for Supporting OER Adoption through Faculty and Instructor Use of a Federated Search Tool"

Talea Anderson and Chelsea Leachman have published "Strategies for Supporting OER Adoption through Faculty and Instructor Use of a Federated Search Tool" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION Open educational resources (OER) are gaining traction in higher education and becoming accepted by academics as a viable means for delivering course content. However, these resources can be difficult to find and use, both due to low visibility and confusion about licensing. This article describes one university’s work with faculty members to identify barriers in their search process when they are looking to adopt OER. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM A scholarly communication librarian and science librarian partnered to collect faculty and instructor reactions to a particular OER search tool, with the intention of better understanding the difficulties encountered during the search process. Eight interviews were conducted as participants were asked about their preferences when it comes to locating OER, understanding licensing information, and adopting materials for class. NEXT STEPS From these interviews, the librarians identified practical recommendations for instruction/liaison librarians and technical services/systems librarians as they continue working to support faculty and instructors through the OER discovery and selection process. These recommendations relate to four themes uncovered in interviews with faculty and instructors: the need for increased transparency in search tools, the importance of intuitive narrowing and broadening features in search tools, the need for detailed and consistent metadata in OER records, and the need for clarity in intellectual property statements. The librarians note that these recommendations might best be pursued through wide-scale collaboration across library units and, more generally, between libraries, consortia, and institutions.

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"Merits and Limits: Applying Open Data to Monitor Open Access Publications in Bibliometric Databases"

Aliakbar Akbaritabar and Stephan Stahlschmidt have self-archived "Merits and Limits: Applying Open Data to Monitor Open Access Publications in Bibliometric Databases."

Here's an excerpt:

Identifying and monitoring Open Access (OA) publications might seem a trivial task while practical efforts prove otherwise. Contradictory information arise often depending on metadata employed. We strive to assign OA status to publications in Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus while complementing it with different sources of OA information to resolve contradicting cases. We linked publications from WOS and Scopus via DOIs and ISSNs to Unpaywall, Crossref, DOAJ and ROAD. Only about 50% of articles and reviews from WOS and Scopus could be matched via a DOI to Unpaywall. Matching with Crossref brought 56 distinct licences, which define in many cases the legally binding access status of publications. But only 44% of publications hold only a single licence on Crossref, while more than 50% have no licence information submitted to Crossref. Contrasting OA information from Crossref licences with Unpaywall we found contradictory cases overall amounting to more than 25%, which might be partially explained by (ex-)including green OA.

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"Improving the Discoverability and Web Impact of Open Repositories: Techniques and Evaluation"

George Macgregor has published "Improving the Discoverability and Web Impact of Open Repositories: Techniques and Evaluation" in Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

In this contribution we experiment with a suite of repository adjustments and improvements performed on Strathprints, the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, institutional repository powered by EPrints 3.3.13. These adjustments were designed to support improved repository web visibility and user engagement, thereby improving usage. Although the experiments were performed on EPrints it is thought that most of the adopted improvements are equally applicable to any other repository platform. Following preliminary results reported elsewhere, and using Strathprints as a case study, this paper outlines the approaches implemented, reports on comparative search traffic data and usage metrics, and delivers conclusions on the efficacy of the techniques implemented. The evaluation provides persuasive evidence that specific enhancements to technical aspects of a repository can result in significant improvements to repository visibility, resulting in a greater web impact and consequent increases in content usage. COUNTER usage grew by 33% and traffic to Strathprints from Google and Google Scholar was found to increase by 63% and 99% respectively. Other insights from the evaluation are also explored. The results are likely to positively inform the work of repository practitioners and open scientists.

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UC Office of Scholarly Communication: "Transitioning Journals to Open Access: Guidance from and for the Field"

The University of California Office of Scholarly Communication has released "Transitioning Journals to Open Access: Guidance from and for the Field."

Here's an excerpt:

Given OSC's mission to make educational materials about publishing more widely available, we are excited to have distilled these recent experiences into a practical toolkit aimed at supporting journal editors and publishers and the organizations or libraries that work with them. This toolkit, which you can find on our new OSC page Transitioning Journals to OA, includes a variety of resources for those interested in the OA transitioning process:

  • For all audiences: Anyone interested in transitioning their journals to OA — or in supporting journals through this process — may find it helpful to start with our Guide to Transitioning Journals to Open Access Publishing. This guide is designed to help stakeholders understand basics about journal ownership, operations, and funding models, and to begin gathering important information necessary for OA publishing decision-making.
  • For libraries and professional staff: If you are a librarian, repository manager, or other professional who supports scholarly communication services or journal publishing, you may be interested in our Checklist for Conversations About Transitioning Journals to OA. Mirroring our own such consultations, we developed this checklist to facilitate discussions with OA-aspiring journal editors about their journal’s operations, finances, and strategies. Running through these questions will enable journal boards and editors to come away from your conversation with a clearer understanding of how to proceed with an OA transition.
  • For journal editors: In August 2018, UC San Francisco and UC Press offered a round table discussion and training for journal editors interested in flipping their journals to open access. The round table was so successful that OSC has decided to share program documentation so that any interested editorial board or institution could iterate on this model. We will be preparing guidance on hosting OA transition round tables, so stay tuned to this space!

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"Crowdsourcing Open Citations with CROCI: An Analysis of the Current Status of Open Citations, and a Proposal"

Ivan Heibi et al. have self-archived "Crowdsourcing Open Citations with CROCI: An Analysis of the Current Status of Open Citations, and a Proposal."

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper, we analyse the current availability of open citations data in one particular dataset, namely COCI (the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations; this http URL) provided by OpenCitations. The results of these analyses show a persistent gap in the coverage of the currently available open citation data. In order to address this specific issue, we propose a strategy whereby the community (e.g. scholars and publishers) can directly involve themselves in crowdsourcing open citations, by uploading their citation data via the OpenCitations infrastructure into our new index, CROCI, the Crowdsourced Open Citations Index.

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Library Publishing Coalition: "Article on LPC Published in Library Trends"

Melanie Schlosser has published "Article on LPC Published in Library Trends" in the LPC Blog.

Here's an excerpt:

There’s an article about the Library Publishing Coalition in the Fall 2018 issue of Library Trends! . . . . This issue’s editor is Lewis G. Liu (City University of New York), and its theme is "The Role and Impact of Commercial and Noncommercial Publishers in Scholarly Publishing on Academic Libraries."

The post includes a link to an OA version of her "Building Capacity for Academy-Owned Publishing through the Library Publishing Coalition" article.

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"Library Publisher Resources: Making Publishing Approachable, Sustainable, and Values-Driven"

Jenny Hoops and Sarah Hare have published "Library Publisher Resources: Making Publishing Approachable, Sustainable, and Values-Driven" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

This article highlights exemplary library publishing resources that are educational and prompt editorial team reflection about author rights, open access, or experimental publishing. We hope that this will serve as an immediately useful resource for those embedded in library publishing work, as many of these resources can be easily adapted and remixed.

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"Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier; Stands Firm with Projekt DEAL Negotiations"

The Max Planck Digital Library has released Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier; Stands Firm with Projekt DEAL Negotiations.

Here's an excerpt:

The President and scientific council members of the Max Planck Society (MPS), one of the world's largest research performing organizations, counting 14,000 scientists who publish 12K new research articles a year—around 1500 of which in Elsevier journals, have mandated the Max Planck Digital Library to discontinue their Elsevier subscription when the current agreement expires on December 31, 2018. With this move the Society joins nearly 200 universities and research institutions in Germany who have already cancelled their individual agreements with Elsevier in the course of 2016 and 2017 and affirmed their support of the national licensing framework Projekt DEAL, led by the German Rector’s Conference.

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"DOAJ’s New Governance Model"

DOAJ has released "DOAJ's New Governance Model."

Here's an excerpt:

In January 2019 DOAJ will inaugurate a new governance model providing the structure and transparency that it needs to meet its strategic goals, and ensure the organisation is fit-for-purpose for at least the next 5 years.

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"Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S"

cOAlition S has released "Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S."

Here's an excerpt:

Members of cOAlition S have read with interest the many comments made on Plan S. After discussion and consideration, the coalition has approved the implementation guidance on making full and immediate Open Access a reality. The guidance is now open for public feedback.

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