Category: Open Access

"The Costs of Open and Closed Access: Using the Finnish Research Output as an Example"

Jyrki Ilva et al. have published "The Costs of Open and Closed Access: Using the Finnish Research Output as an Example" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

As business models of Open Access publishing are still under development, the aim of our paper is to assess the statistical tools and data that the Finnish libraries currently have for comparing the costs associated with different modes of disseminating scientific publications. We will also analyse the potential costs associated with Open Access publishing models and compare them with the current cost structure of—mostly—paywalled (PW) access. . . . We will discuss the alternatives on how best to develop statistical tools to estimate the true costs of scientific publishing.

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"Small Scholar-Led Scholarly Journals: Can They Survive and Thrive in an Open Access Future?"

Heather Morrison has published "Small Scholar-Led Scholarly Journals: Can They Survive and Thrive in an Open Access Future?" in Learned Publishing (open access article).

Here's an excerpt:

This article presents early results of a research project designed to further our understanding of how to ensure that small scholar-led journals can survive and thrive in a global open access knowledge commons. This phase of the research focuses on generation of ideas through interviews and focus groups with 15 participants involved in producing small scholar-led journals that either are or would like to become open access. Although a couple of journals reported that they could survive in an open access future based on existing resources, most were concerned about survival and none expressed confidence that they could thrive in an open-access future.

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University of Arizona Faculty Senate Passes Open Access Policy

The University of Arizona Faculty Senate has passed an open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

On April 4, 2016, the University of Arizona Faculty Senate passed an open access policy that calls on the faculty and university to distribute faculty-authored scholarly articles to the widest possible audience through the UA Campus Repository. The new policy was drafted by a faculty task force charged to "review how we as a faculty might act in order to expand access to our scholarly and research outputs."

The task force put forward a framework largely on open access policies previously passed by faculty bodies at universities including Harvard, MIT, Duke, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Penn State, Oregon State University, and the University of California system.

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"Open Access, Open Science, Open Society"

Thomas Margoni et al. have self-archived "Open Access, Open Science, Open Society."

Here's an excerpt:

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that Open Access is a key enabler of Open Science, which in turn will lead to a more Open Society. Furthermore, the paper argues that while legislative interventions play an important role in the top-down regulation of Open Access, legislators currently lack an informed and systematic vision on the role of Open Access in science and society. In this historical phase, other complementary forms of intervention (bottom-up) appear much more "informed" and effective. This paper, which intends to set the stage for future research, identifies a few pieces of the puzzle: the relationship between formal and informal norms in the field of Open Science and how these impact on intellectual property rights, the protection of personal data, the assessment of science and the technology employed for the communication of science.

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Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics Publishes 10,000th Article

The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) has published its 10,000th article.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

SCOAP3 celebrates the publication of its 10,000th Open Access article. Since the start of its operation in 2014, the initiative has supported Open Access publication of High-Energy-Physics articles in 10 high-quality peer-reviewed journals. More than 18,000 scientists from over 90 countries have benefited from this initiative without any financial or administrative burden, retain copyright of their work and automatically comply with their institutional or funders Open Access mandates.

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OA2020 Initiative Launched

The OA2020 Initiative has launched with an "Expression of Interest in the Large-scale Implementation of Open Access to Scholarly Journals."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

A growing number of research organizations want to establish an international initiative which aims to convert the majority of today's scholarly journals from subscription to Open Access (OA) publishing. This is the result of the 12th Berlin Open Access Conference hosted by the Max Planck Society in December 2015. An Expression of Interest, published today and already adopted by thirty signatories, invites all parties involved in scholarly publishing to collaborate on a swift and efficient transition for the benefit of scholarship and society at large.

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"Open Access Publishing in Higher Education: Charting the Challenging Course to Academic and Financial Sustainability"

Mark I. Greenberg has published "Open Access Publishing in Higher Education: Charting the Challenging Course to Academic and Financial Sustainability" in the Journal of Educational Controversy.

Here's an excerpt:

The benefits, pitfalls, and sustainability of open access publishing are hotly debated. Commercial publishers dominate the marketplace and oppose alternative publishing models that threaten their bottom line. Scholars' use of open access remains relatively limited due to awareness and perceived benefits to their professional goals. Readership of open access publications is generally strong, but some people disagree that more readers leads to increased citations and research impact. Libraries have grown their influence by supporting and promoting open access, but these efforts come with significant financial costs. Today, open access has flourished most significantly as a philosophy: the belief that the world's scholarship should be freely available to readers and that publicly funded research, in particular, should be accessible to the taxpayers who paid for it.

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"Researchers’ Adoption of an Institutional Central Fund for Open-Access Article-Processing Charges: A Case Study Using Innovation Diffusion Theory"

Stephen Pinfield and Christine Middleton have published "Researchers' Adoption of an Institutional Central Fund for Open-Access Article-Processing Charges: A Case Study Using Innovation Diffusion Theory" in SAGE Open.

Here's an excerpt:

This article analyzes researchers' adoption of an institutional central fund (or faculty publication fund) for open-access (OA) article-processing charges (APCs) to contribute to a wider understanding of take-up of OA journal publishing ("Gold" OA). Quantitative data, recording central fund usage at the University of Nottingham from 2006 to 2014, are analyzed alongside qualitative data from institutional documentation. The importance of the settings of U.K. national policy developments and international OA adoption trends are considered. Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) is used as an explanatory framework.

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Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences

The Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication has released a draft of Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences for comment.

Here's an excerpt:

This report identifies ways through which subscription-based scholarly journals have converted their publishing models to open access (OA). The major goal was to identify specific scenarios that have been used or proposed for transitioning subscription journals to OA so that these scenarios can provide options for others seeking to "flip" their journals to OA.

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"Creative Commons Licenses: Empowering Open Access"

Thomas Margoni and Diane M. Peters have self-archived "Creative Commons Licenses: Empowering Open Access."

Here's an excerpt:

Open access (OA) is a concept that in recent years has acquired popularity and widespread recognition. International statements and scholarly analysis converge on the following main characteristics of open access: free availability on the public Internet, permission for any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, and link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, and use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself. The only legal constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

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"Developing Infrastructure to Support Closer Collaboration of Aggregators with Open Repositories"

Nancy Pontika et al. have published "Developing Infrastructure to Support Closer Collaboration of Aggregators with Open Repositories" in Liber Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

The COnnecting REpositories (CORE) project has been dealing with these challenges by aggregating and enriching content from hundreds of open access repositories, increasing the discoverability and reusability of millions of open access manuscripts. As repository managers and library directors often wish to know the details of the content harvested from their repositories and keep a certain level of control over it, CORE is now facing the challenge of how to enable content providers to manage their content in the aggregation and control the harvesting process. In order to improve the quality and transparency of the aggregation process and create a two-way collaboration between the CORE project and the content providers, we propose the CORE Dashboard.

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"Making OA Monographs Happen: Library-Press Collaboration at the University of Ottawa, Canada"

Tony Horava has published "Making OA Monographs Happen: Library-Press Collaboration at the University of Ottawa, Canada" in Insights: The UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

At the University of Ottawa, Canada, the UO Press and the UO Library have developed a strategic partnership to publish and disseminate selected new monographs as gold open access (OA). Starting in 2013, the Library agreed to fund three books at C$10,000 per book (a total of C$30,000 per year) in order to remove barriers to accessing scholarship and to align with scholarly communication goals of the University. In 2015 this agreement was renewed for another three years and the funding was increased to cover four books (a total of C$40,000 per year). Ten titles have so far been published under this model. The data reveals that there have been 12,629 downloads as well as 16,584 page views of these titles, as of September 2015. There have been over 4,700 copies (print and EPUB) sold in spite of the free availability of the PDF version.

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"Making Sense of Journal Research Data Policies"

Linda Naughton and David Kernohan have published "Making Sense of Journal Research Data Policies" in Insights: The UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

This article gives an overview of the findings from the first phase of the Jisc Journal Research Data Policy Registry pilot (JRDPR), which is currently under way. . . . The project undertook an analysis of 250 journal research data policies to assess the feasibility of developing a policy registry to assist researchers and support staff to comply with research data publication requirements. The evidence shows that the current research data policy ecosystem is in critical need of standardization and harmonization if such services are to be built and implemented. To this end, the article proposes the next steps for the project with the objective of ultimately moving towards a modern research infrastructure based on machine-readable policies that support a more open scholarly communications environment.

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"Beams of Particles and Papers. The Role of Preprint Archives in High Energy Physics"

Alessandro Delfanti has self-archived "Beams of Particles and Papers. The Role of Preprint Archives in High Energy Physics."

Here's an excerpt:

The role of preprint archives is also highlighted by the existence of viXra.org, arXiv's evil twin. This dissenting and independent archive, that mimics the appearance and functioning of the original one, is aimed at overcoming the forms of policing that keep undesired papers outside of arXiv. ViXra claims to be " truly open" and to serve "the whole scientific community." In fact, the review processes enforced by arXiv are seen as failing to meet the standards of openness preprint archives are supposed to live up to.

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Webinar Recording: "VIVO plus SHARE: Closing the Loop on Tracking Scholarly Activity"

DuraSpace has released "VIVO plus SHARE: Closing the Loop on Tracking Scholarly Activity."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

On February 24, 2016, Rick Johnson (Program Co-Director, Digital Initiatives and Scholarship Head, Data Curation and Digital Library Solutions Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame; Visiting Program Officer for SHARE at the Association of Research Libraries) and Mike Conlon (VIVO Project Director, DuraSpace; Professor Emeritus, University of Florida) presented, "VIVO plus SHARE: Closing the Loop on Tracking Scholarly Activity."

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"A Library-Publisher Partnership for Open Access: Building an Innovative Relationship between Scholarly Publishers and Academic Libraries"

Monica Ward and Joanie Lavoie have published "A Library-Publisher Partnership for Open Access: Building an Innovative Relationship between Scholarly Publishers and Academic Libraries" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

This article presents an overview of a strategic partnership undertaken by the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and the Érudit Consortium (Érudit) to support the move towards open access for Canadian francophone scholarly journals.

CRKN and Érudithave had a relationship through a traditional commercial subscription model since 2008. In 2014, the two organizations recognized the need for a new relationship that would address two major challenges: the fragility of the Canadian not-for-profit scholarly publishing environment and the increasing pressure from libraries and funding agencies for scholarly journals to move towards open access. Érudit and CRKN have worked collaboratively to create an innovative partnership, which provides a framework for a new relationship between publishers and libraries, and helps to provide financial support to Canadian publishers during the transition to a fully open access model.

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"Coupling Pre-Prints and Post-Publication Peer Review for Fast, Cheap, Fair, and Effective Science Publishing"

Michael Eisen and Leslie B. Vosshall have self-archived "Coupling Pre-Prints and Post-Publication Peer Review for Fast, Cheap, Fair, and Effective Science Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

Pre-prints will be not be embraced by biomedical scientists until we stop treating them as "pre" anything, which suggests that a better "real" version is yet to come. Instead, pre-prints need to be accepted as formally published works. This can only happen if we first create and embrace systems to evaluate the quality and impact of, and appropriate audience for, these already published works.

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"OA in the Library Collection: The Challenges of Identifying and Maintaining Open Access Resources"

Nathan Hosburgh and Chris Bulock have self-archived "OA in the Library Collection: The Challenges of Identifying and Maintaining Open Access Resources."

Here's an excerpt:

At this session, they [the authors] shared survey results, reflected on OA workflows at their own libraries, and updated audience members on relevant standards and initiatives. Survey respondents reported challenges related to hybrid OA, inaccurate metadata, and inconsistent communication along the serials supply chain. Recommended solutions included the creation of consistent, centralized article-level metadata and the development of OA collection development principles for libraries.

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"Evaluating an Open Access Publishing Fund at a Comprehensive University"

Sarah Beaubien, Julie Garrison, and Doug Way have published "Evaluating an Open Access Publishing Fund at a Comprehensive University" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

Wanting to learn how faculty have benefitted from an open access publishing fund, Grand Valley State University Libraries surveyed recipients of the fund. The survey asked authors why they chose an open access publishing option and whether the fund influenced this decision. Authors were also asked whether they perceived that selecting an open access option broadened exposure to their work and about their likelihood of choosing open access in the future.

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"An Interview with Jeffrey Beall"

Joseph Esposito has published "An Interview with Jeffrey Beall" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

[Beall] In the scholarly open access segment of the scholarly publishing industry, we are seeing that the most prosperous publishers are the larger ones, those able to offshore their production work. Hindawi (in Egypt) and MDPI (with most of its work done in China) are two examples. I think the industry will continue to select for publishers like these, meaning many production-related jobs in North America and Europe will move to South Asia and East Asia.

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Association of Universities in the Netherlands and John Wiley Announce Open Access Agreement

The Association of Universities in the Netherlands and John Wiley and Sons, Inc. have announced an open access agreement.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The negotiations between VSNU and Wiley resulted in an unprecedented agreement covering 2016 – 2019. It provides students and researchers at Dutch universities affiliated to the VSNU with access to all Wiley subscription journal content and enables authors at Dutch universities affiliated to the VSNU to enjoy unlimited open access publication in Wiley's hybrid journals (c.1400), with no publishing charge levied at the article level.

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"Are ‘Predatory’ Journals Completely Negative, or Also a Sign of Something Positive?"

Jan Velterop has published "Are 'Predatory' Journals Completely Negative, or Also a Sign of Something Positive?" in SciELO in Perspective.

Here's an excerpt:

Yet, even with the drawback of being polluted by predatory journals, a functioning market is preferable to a quasi-market, completely dominated by monopolies or monopoly-like players. A system of subscriptions, in which the party who pays—the institutional library—has practically no meaningful choice of what to buy, differs from one of article processing charges (APCs, which make open access possible), in that the party who pays—the author—is the party who does have a meaningful choice of where to submit and publish. So 'flipping' the system from subscriptions to APCs does deliver something much more akin to a functioning market, and 'caveat emptor', 'buyer beware', applies to all markets.

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"CHORUS Signs Agreement with US Department of Defense to Advance Public Access to Research"

CHORUS has released "CHORUS Signs Agreement with US Department of Defense to Advance Public Access to Research."

Here's an excerpt:

DTIC will employ CHORUS' services to build on open standards, distributed networks and established infrastructure to advance access to scholarly articles reporting on DoD-funded research, as well as enable agency indexing and long-term preservation of those articles. The DoD system will dovetail with the interoperable CHORUS framework, along with Crossref's Open Funder Registry, to provide an article submission workflow for DoD-funded researchers and facilitate public access to all articles that report on DoD-funded research. The agreement enables readers searching DTIC's Public Access Search to follow links that point to publicly available articles/accepted manuscripts in context of the journal where they were published.

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Rachel Burley Named as Publishing Director, BioMed Central and SpringerOpen

Springer Nature has named Rachel Burley as Publishing Director, BioMed Central and SpringerOpen.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Burley was previously with John Wiley & Sons, where she was Vice President and Director of Open Access and Business Development. There, she led the strategic planning and development of Wiley's open access initiatives and was instrumental in identifying and implementing strategic partnerships. Prior to that, Burley was Vice President and Publisher of Life Sciences at Wiley, and spent seven years at Nature Publishing Group.

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"Open Access 2015: A Year Access Negotiators Edged Closer to the Brink"

Hilda Bastian has published "Open Access 2015: A Year Access Negotiators Edged Closer to the Brink " in Absolutely Maybe.

Here's an excerpt:

It's the year many negotiators got seriously tough on double dipping—charging for both the ability to read (via subscriptions) and for publishing (author processing charges, or APCs).

Last year it was France getting tough on the toughest negotiator: Elsevier. This year, the Netherlands took it right to the brink of cutting Elsevier loose. It was summed up by a January headline: "Dutch universities dig in for long fight over open access".

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