6th September, 2016: What’s 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 update
Recent writing & resources on OA
Comments on this month’s news and suggestions for inclusion in the next newsletter, planned for October, are always welcome.
Follow @openaccess_anz on twitter for daily updates.
Australia & New Zealand
AOASG is delighted to have formed affiliations with both Creative Commons Australia and Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand. We already work with Creative Commons in a number of ways. Last year we collaborated with Creative Commons Australia on the production of a resource “Know your rights” to explain what the licenses mean for users. Together, we run regular online meet ups in Australia and New Zealand thus supporting communities of practices in both places.
ORCID adoption in New Zealand
New Zealand is joining the wave of countries to support and adopt ORCID. On July 26 New Zealand’s peak bodies representing the scientific and research community, along with funding agencies, released a joint statement of principle supporting the adoption and use of ORCID identifiers across the research and science system.
Internet New Zealand and Creative Commons Aotearoa
Internet New Zealand has announced a renewed partnership with Creative Commons Aotearoa which sees $50,000 of funding focused on education and research around Internet use and open access information. A focus will be on copyright and licensing of online content in primary and secondary schools.
Big Business rally’s against data sharing
Australia’s largest enterprises are lobbying against the possibility of new regulations governing the sharing of data, arguing they should be allowed to come up with such arrangements on their own.
New ALIA Open Access Hub
Called ALIA READ (Resources, Electronic and Archived Documents), it’s designed to be an open access hub for ALIA (Australian Libraries Information Association) generated information.
Europe
Breast Cancer Now – OA policy released
After a recent reviewed of its OA policy, the UK’s largest breast cancer research charity group Breast Cancer Now will now support a Green OA model instead of a Gold OA model due to cost and the rapidly evolving OA landscape.
Call for OA study tenders
The European Research Council Executive Agency (ERCEA) has published a call for tenders in relation to a study on open access to publications and research data management within ERC projects.
EU “link tax” concern
The “introduction in EU law of a related right covering online uses of news publications” is exactly what civil society groups like Save the Link are criticising as a link tax.
How to support OA journal Editors & Publishers
Raising visibility of their journals on the Web: Serbian journal editors take part in one of four popular edit-a-thons at which they created entries for their journals on Wikipedia.
Status of OA in Nordic countries
Nordic Open Access policies and guidelines that are harmonised in relation to each other could make research more visible with wider international impact.
LIBER’s New Open Access Working Group
The Association of Europe’s Research Libraries put together the Working Group on Open Access to further advance the shift towards openness.
National Library of Sweden signs deal for pre-paid OA
The National Library of Sweden has signed an agreement with Springer, which KTH royal Institute of Technology has joined. More than 1650 hybrid journals are included in the agreement.
eLife reveals publication costs
Life sciences journal spends just over £3,000 per article, and has challenged high-profile rivals to release details of their costs
Institutional spending on open access publication fees in Germany
This study contributes to the evolving empirical basis for funding these charges and examines how much German universities and resource organisations spent on open access publication fees.
ERU posts guidelines under Horizon 2020
Guidelines on the Implementation of Open Access to scientific publications and research data in projects supported by the European research Council under Horizon 2020.
Open access agreement for UK authors
New Infographic on Open Science target audiences and geographic reach
(Foster 2014-2016).
USA
Elsevier patent shock
On August 30, the Patent Office issued U.S. Patent No. 9,430,468, titled; “Online peer review and method.” The owner of this patent is none other than Elsevier, the giant academic publisher.
Publisher charged with deceiving researchers
The US Federal Trade Commission has charged the publisher of hundreds of purported online academic journals with deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
Publishers of fake journals charged in Beijing
And in another move, this time in China, a pay-to-publish chain of fake academic journals has been shut down and its operators now face charges.
NASA launches OA portal
NASA is the latest of the US funding agencies to announce its policy on Access to Federally Funded Research – a list is maintained by SPARC. NASA’s is especially interesting, as it is to be delivered via a repository managed by PubMed Central, and is called “PubSpace”. They note specifically “Papers available through publishers’ web sites do not fulfil the authors’ obligations under the NASA Public Access Policy.”
And in other international news…
6 new journals to join humanities library
The Open Library of Humanities platform has announced 6 new journals to join its library later this year.
Thomson Reuters blog on paying for OA APCs
A blog that discusses the Pay It Forward project from UC Davis and California Digital Library: Investigation of the Institutional Costs of Gold Open Access
De Gruyter Open author survey
Examination of the attitudes of academic authors around the world towards open access publishing, including their experiences.
Sci-Hub is viewed by the publishing community and many authorities as a major pirate of copyright protected material while at the same time, seen by the global scientific research community, especially those located in less affluent nations, as an essential source of information. This blog takes a look at it from a legal standpoint.Open access papers always attract more citations
A study on citations by 1Science of 3.3 million papers indexed in Web of Science published between 2007 and 2009 found increased citations across all fields. In agriculture, for example, the average citations of OA papers was 35% higher than of non-OA papers.Going beyond impact factors
While the “publish or perish” culture in science won’t break bones, it does have a negative impact – the prevalence of scientific fraud. A view from an academic at the frontline of publishing
Preprints
OSF have launched a new cross-archive search engine for Preprints in many different fields.More funding for biology preprint server
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s free, not-for-profit preprint service bioRxiv has received new financial support. BioRxiv hosts more than 5,500 manuscripts featuring the work of 23,500 scientists from more than 40 countries.
American Chemical Society to establish preprint server
The American Chemical Society has announced its intention to form ChemRxiv, a chemistry preprint server for the global chemistry community, proposed as a collaborative undertaking that will facilitate the open dissemination of important scientific findings.
Repositories
SpaceNet Open Data debut
SpaceNet is a collaboration between DigitalGlobe, CosmiQ Works, and NVIDIA. Images are now freely available as a public data set on Amazon Web Services.
NUV institutional digital repository has been created to collect, preserve and distribute the scholarly output of Navrachana UniversityPalestine Unis launch OA project
Four universities in Palestine will work with universities in Europe and EIFL to set up open access repositories that will open up their research to the world
Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing
InternetNZ has announced three NetHui events for 2016: Nelson on 13 October, South Auckland on 15 October, and Rotorua on 17 October.
OpenTrials to launch at Berlin World Health Summit
The launch of the OpenTrials project in which Open Knowledg
e is developing an open, online database of info about the world’s clinical research trials will take place at the ‘Fostering Open Science in Global Health’ workshop 10/10/16.
The DARIAH Winter School “Open Data Citation for Social Science and Humanities” is set to take place in Prague on 24th-28th of October, 2016. Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
OASPA’s 8th Conference on OA Scholarly Publishing (COASP) will be on 21st & 22nd September, 2016. at Westin Arlington Gateway, Virginia.
OA week 2016
The theme for this year’s 9th International Open Access Week, to be held October 24-30, is “Open in Action.”
We will be hosting a page at aoasg.org to highlight regional initiatives and will be featuring them in the newsletter next month. Please email eo@aoasg.org.au with any you want added. You can also add events directly to the list of global OA week events which is here.
Recent writing & resources on OA
New OA book on OA
Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future published by Cambridge University Press, offers a background to open access and its specifics for the humanities disciplines, as well as setting out the economics and politics of the phenomenon. Preface by Peter Suber.
Dangerous predatory publishers threaten medical research
Measuring Altruistic Impact: A Model for Understanding the Social Justice of Open Access
Continuing Professional Education in Open Access ̶ a French-German Survey
Literature Review on Shifting Journals to Open Access | Inside Higher Ed
A literature review on converting scholarly journals from subscription to open access has been published by the Harvard University Office for Scholarly Communication.
Updated GOAJ & Countries of OA World by Walt Crawford
EC Research & Innovation H2020 online manual
These guidelines clarify the rules on open access that cover beneficiaries in projects funded or co-funded under Horizon 2020.
CC Exploring open textbooks to improve education in Uganda
Open policy project – Institute for Open Leadership.
Want more OA news?
We can’t cover everything here! For daily email updates the best ways to keep up to date is the Open Access Tracking Project.
We Tweet throughout each day and our curated newsfeed on the website is updated regularly.
The newsletter archive provides snapshots of key issues throughout the year.
Australasian Open Access Strategy Group 