17 May 2016: in this month’s newsletter
What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in AU & NZ
What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally
Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing
OA week is back!
Recent writing & resources on OA
What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in AU & NZ
One of its recommendations was:
“15.1 All Australian, and State and Territory Governments should implement an open access policy for publicly-funded research. The policy should provide free access through an open access repository for all publications funded by governments, directly or through university funding, within 12 months of publication. The policy should minimise exemptions. The Australian Government should seek to establish the same policy for international agencies to which it is a contributory funder, but which still charge for their publications, such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.”
Among a range of other comments was this: it is “important when crafting policies relating to open access to delineate exactly what is meant by the term.”
The report garnered a lot of positive comment, internationally, including from TechDirt – “the Productivity Commission, released one of the most amazing reports on copyright that you’ll see out of a government body.”
A second consultation is on Data Availability and Use for which an issues paper was released on 18 April to assist anyone wanting to prepare a submission to the public inquiry. It outlines a range of issues about which the Commission is seeking information. Initial submissions are due by Friday 29 July 2016. Further comment will be sought upon release of the draft report in November 2016.
An International Alliance of Research Library Associations, including CAUL, endorsed an Accord on Open Data.
Richard White, the University of Otago’s copyright officer, took a look at the recent revelations about Sci-Hub usage (see more below).
Jane McCredie at the Medical Journal of Australia wrote on OA in this blog: Open access, the modern dilemma.
What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally
In speech to the AACR US Vice-President Joe Biden came out strongly in support of OA, data sharing and collaboration as part of the $1 billion Cancer Moonshot initiative. SPARC reported on this here.
How do researchers access scholarly publications?
There was even more discussion about Sci-Hub following an article in Science (Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone). along with a feature on its founder and a responsefrom the Editor-in-Chief of Science.
To continue the theme of the ways in which academics access research, a paper which surveyed how students access the resources they need found only one in five obtain all resources legally.
Creative Commons and rights statements
Ryan Merkely, CEO of Creative Commons, wrote in Forbes: You Pay to Read Research You Fund. That’s Ludicrous. And in the courts, a judgement (Court Correctly Interprets Creative Commons Licenses) on Creative Commons was hailed as an important interpretation of the issues.
RightsStatements.org – an initiative of Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America – announced the provision of 11 standardized rights statements for online cultural heritage.
Meetings on open scholarship
Two pan-European goals for 2020
- Full open access for all scientific publications.
- A fundamentally new approach towards optimal reuse of research data.
- New assessment, reward and evaluation systems. ‘
- Alignment of policies and exchange of best practices.
The Force 11 meeting covered many forward looking discussions. A specifically interesting one was reported here Working Beyond Borders: Why We Need Global Diversity in Scholarly Communications
Policy and more
JISC in the UK outlined released its OA Publisher Compliance document.
A paper defending hybrid journals by the Publishers Association triggered a strong response from RLUK.
COAR and UNESCO issued a Statement on Open Access, responding to European initiatives focused on gold OA. They note: “This statement highlights a number of issues that need to be addressed by organizations during the large-scale shift from subscription-based to Open access mode of publishing”
News from OA publishers
The DOAJ announced it had removed more than 3000 journals from its database for failing reapply by the deadline. This is part of a long-term project to curate the DOAJ list of journals.
Two new manuscript submissions systems for open access publishing were launched. From eLife there was Continuum, a new open-source tool for publishing and from the PLOS journals, Aperta was launched on PLOS Biology. In other journal news, Canadian Science Publishing announced the launch of FACETS, Canada’s first and only multidisciplinary open access science journal.
An analysis of two publishers, Springer Open and de Gruyter, have shown that they are developing a model whereby institutions sponsor a journal, that then has no article processing charge for authors.
OA papers and data in particle physics
In news from CERN, the SCOAP3 initiative was extended for three more years and CERN put 300TB of data from the Large Hadron Collider online.
Costs of publishing now more transparent than ever
More and more data on costs in publishing are being released, with the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) publishing its Publication Cost Data 2015
In the annual Periodicals Price Survey 2016 the authors found an “average e-journal package price increase of 5.8% to 6.3%, down slightly from last year’s average of 6.6%. this year’s feature examines pricing for 18,473 unique titles, our largest sample to date. Increasing the sample makes the results more reliable”
Preprints
Preprints and their place in scholarly communication are a hot topic for discussion. Hilda Bastian dissected some of the issues in her blog, Breaking Down Pros and Cons of Preprints in Biomedicine – where she also draws the cartoons.
But in further new of their increasing acceptability, Crossrefannounced that members will soon be able to assign Crossref DOIs to preprints.
Growth of OA
Heather Morrison continues her excellent regular summary, Dramatic Growth of Open Access with a March 31, 2016 update. More controversially, she noted that Elsevier is now the worlds largest publisher of OA journals (by number of journals) which is prompted discussion on twitter about what that really means for OA .
Repositories
The COAR annual meeting had a theme of The Role of Collaboration in Building a Global Knowledge Commons. Following the meeting, COAR announced a new initiative – the COAR Next Generation Repositories Project “to position repositories as the foundation for a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication, on top of which layers of value added services will be deployed, thereby transforming the system, making it more research-centric, open to and supportive of innovation, while also collectively managed by the scholarly community.”
Book publishing
And finally… prizes!
In Phase I of the Open Science Prize, an initiative from the Wellcome Trust, US National Institutes of Health and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, six winning teams received prizes of $80,000 to develop their prototypes. Winners included MyGene2: Accelerating Gene Discovery with Radically Open Data Sharing, a collaboration between researchers at the University of Washington, United States, and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney.
Want more OA news?
The newsletter archive provides snapshots of key issues throughout the year.
Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing
The theme for this years’ aaDHDigital Humanities Australasia Conference in Hobart, 20-23 June is “Working with Complexity“.
Open Con will be on 12-14 November in Washington, DC, with satellite events hosted around the world. From the website Open Con describes itself as “a platform for the next generation to learn about Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data, develop critical skills, and catalyze action toward a more open system for sharing the world’s information—from scholarly and scientific research, to educational materials, to digital research data.”
OASPA’s 8th Conference on OA Scholarly Publishing (COASP) will be on 21st & 22nd September, 2016. at Westin Arlington Gateway, Virginia.
OA week is back!
SPARC has announced that the theme for this year’s 9th International Open Access Week, to be held October 24-30, will be “Open in Action.” Details below.
International Open Access Week has always been about action, and this year’s theme encourages all stakeholders to take concrete steps to make their own work more openly available and encourage others to do the same. From posting pre-prints in a repository to supporting colleagues in making their work more accessible, this year’s Open Access Week will focus on moving from discussion to action in opening up our system for communicating research.
Established by SPARC and partners in the student community in 2008, International Open Access Week is an opportunity to take action in making openness the default for research—to raise the visibility of scholarship, accelerate research, and turn breakthroughs into better lives. This year’s Open Access Week will be held from October 24ththrough the 30th; however, those celebrating the week are encouraged to schedule local events whenever is most suitable during the year.
The “Open in Action” theme will also highlight the researchers, librarians, students, and others who have made a commitment to working in the open and how that decision has benefitted them—from researchers just starting their careers to those at the top of their field.
Recent writing & resources on OA
The Open Access Directory listing of social medial sites about OA has been updated and revised. You can help improve it by suggesting edits.
In Fifty shades of open Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peek take an entertaining and highly informative trip through “open” everything – from open beer and puppies to open code and open access
Australasian Open Access Strategy Group 