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The OCLC has published its 2018/19 Survey of Open content Activity in Libraries. The report, Same Direction, Different Trajectories is the culmination of efforts from across the OCLC membership to answer the question “What is the status of open access and open content in libraries across the globe?” The underlying open content survey was conducted in 2018-2019 by the OCLC Global Council in partnership with staff from OCLC Research. |
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newsletter
In OA, local news trumps international
With more than 750 individual and many more institutional subscribers here at the AOASG we feel we have a pretty good idea about what sort of news piques the interest of our regular AOASG newsletter readers.
Looking at our readership stats, it’s comforting that our most frequently clicked links are those in the Australia & New Zealand news section. Given the global nature of open access, this level of engagement on the local scale warms the cockles of our hearts. Also noteworthy is that the newsletter is increasingly being read by those outside university sector which shows how Open Access is becoming a matter of public interest in the wider community.
Of much interest to readers (11.8% of all clicks) in our most recent newsletter was an Open Access ‘cookbook’ – Engaging Researchers with Data Management. This freely available online book is a collection of case studies from around the world showing how to engage researchers with managing their data. We hope that by sharing these types of resources, as well as the blogs and scholarly writing we are reading, we can continue to keep the scholarly community informed. Australia is by far the most common location for our newsletter readership with around 81% of all readers, then the US with around 7%, New Zealand with 5%, the UK 2.5% and Switzerland with around 1%.
Those who do read the newsletter will be aware that we cover Open Access news from around the globe, and over past 18 months have provided a regular section on the Plan S initiative, along with our other areas of interest including Preprints, Reports, Data & upcoming Conferences. If there is any other news you think we should be covering, we would love your feedback is appreciated so please contact us. And if you don’t subscribe to the newsletter already, you can sign up here.
AOASG September Newsletter
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
Springer makes national agreement with UK institutions with access to more than 2,000 of Springer’s subscription journals, to allow all (participating institution) authors to publish open access in subscription journals that offer the Open Choice option.
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 website causing major controversy
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
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
New open science Preprints
OSF have launched a new cross-archive search engine for Preprints in many different fields.More funding for biology preprint server
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.
Indian Uni launches Open repository
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
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
Mike Wolfe of the Authors Alliance will be coming to Aotearoa for a few days this month. He’ll be speaking a variety of events, listed here.
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
Open Con will be on 12-14 November in Washington, DC, with satellite events hosted around the world.
OASPA’s 8th Conference on OA Scholarly Publishing (COASP) will be on 21st & 22nd September, 2016. at Westin Arlington Gateway, Virginia.
New Zealand’s National Digital Forum Conference at Te Papa in Wellington will run from 21 -23 November 2016.
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.
AOASG May 2016 Newsletter: Australian Productivity Commission & US VP on OA; OA week theme & what “open” really means
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
The Productivity Commission of the Australian Government issued its Draft Report on Intellectual Property Arrangements.
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.”
Responses are invited by June 3, 2016.
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
US Vice-Presidential support for open access
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.
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
The European Union Presidency Conference on Open Science was held on April 4 and 5. The conference preamble noted that “Open Science is a key priority of the Dutch Presidency. The Netherlands [who hold the presidency currently] is committed to open access to scientific publications and the best possible re-use of research data, and it would like to accelerate the transition this requires.” The output of that conference was the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science, which feedback was solicited on (the AOASG gave feedback on this). The final version of this document is not yet released. The draft document proposed ambitious goals around open access and data sharing and reuse in science, ie:
Two pan-European goals for 2020
Two pan-European goals for 2020
- Full open access for all scientific publications.
- A fundamentally new approach towards optimal reuse of research data.
Two flanking policies
- New assessment, reward and evaluation systems. ‘
- Alignment of policies and exchange of best practices.
There were then twelve concrete actions proposed as a result of these goals.
Danny Kingsley reported on the first OSI workshop in this blog Watch this space.
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
The HathiTrust Research Center announced that it had expanded its services to support computational researchon the entire collection of one of the world’s largest digital libraries, held by HathiTrust.
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?
We can’t cover everything here! For daily email updates the best ways to keep up to date is the Open Access Tracking Project. Our Twitter account has posts throughout each day and our curated newsfeed on the website is updated daily.
The newsletter archive provides snapshots of key issues throughout the year.
Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing
11th Annual Conference on Open Repositories takes place at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) from the 13th – 16th June 2016.
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
AOASG April 2016 newsletter
In this month’s newsletter
What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in AU & NZ
What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally
Has academic publishing reached its Napster moment?
Are funders of OA getting good value for money?
Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing
Recent writing & resources on OA
What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in AU & NZ
It was Open Data Day on March 5 and as part of that the Queensland Government Science Division of the Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation highlighted a number of data sets that are available for use and re-use through the Queensland Government Open Data Portal,
In an article for the Conversation, Roxanne Missingham from ANU discussed the cost of textbooks and how an open access model could be the answer.
Linda O’Brien from Griffith University highlighted the need for access to research to support the Australian government’s Innovation and Science Australia agenda.
What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally
March 7-11 was Open Education Week . A nice visualisation of initiatives is shownhere. One specific one worth calling out is Poland’s national program of open textbooks.
An analysis written for the Smithsonian Institution on The impact of open access on galleries, libraries, archives, and museums concluded that “A strengthened institutional brand, increased use and dissemination of collections, and increased funding opportunities have been some of the benefits associated with open-access initiatives.”
The Open Library of the Humanities expanded with all eleven sites of the University of California Library system joining its Library Partnership Subsidy scheme.
Knowledge Unlatched launched a new German branch and announced it will be scaling up more in 2016.
Europe
The European Union Presidency Conference on Open Science kicks off on April 4. The conference preamble notes that “Open Science is a key priority of the Dutch Presidency. The Netherlands [who hold the presidency currently] is committed to open access to scientific publications and the best possible re-use of research data, and it would like to accelerate the transition this requires.”
The follow up to the Berlin 12 meeting was launched in March. The initiative, called OA2020 has as its aim “the swift, smooth and scholarly-oriented transformation of today’s scholarly journals from subscription to open access publishing.” The site is worth looking at with its suggestion of the steps needed for such a transition, which include crucially “a better understanding of publishing output and cost distribution.” Thus far theexpression of interest has 39 signatories, most from Europe.
Meanwhile, it seems that France is heading towardsgreen open access
The UK’s HEFCE OA policy began on 1st April 2016. The policy requires that to be eligible for submission to the next Research Excellence Framework, (REF), authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts that have been accepted for publication must have been deposited in an institutional or subject repository.
At the Research Libraries UK conference OA was a prominent topic including a presentation from Gerard Meijer of Radboud University, Nijmegen on the OA transformation in the Netherlands.
The Open Data button launched – a follow up to the Open Access Button.
USA
The review commissioned by Harvard University’s Library Office for Scholarly Communication on Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences – more informally known as “Journal-flipping” opened for public comment.
A draft code of conduct for altmetrics providers & aggregators has been launched and is available for comment on the NISO site.
Japan
A new open science site for Japan launched with links to policies, events and updates.
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. Our Twitter account has posts throughout each day and our curated newsfeed on thewebsite is updated daily.
The newsletter archive provides snapshots of key issues throughout the year.
Has academic publishing reached its Napster moment?
Last month we reported on debate around Sci-Hub. Since then the debate has reached the mainstream media in a big way with discussions in the New York Times, and Washington Post. Whatever comes next it is clear that the site has stirred up much debate and has re-focussed attention on the problem of lack of access to academic papers.
Meanwhile an interesting parallel debate has been provoked by the two recent global health crises of Ebola and Zika virus. Again, as we discussed last month scientists have committed to sharing data and science publishers have committed to make access to this research free – at least for the duration of the epidemics, not necessarily long term. The Economist reported on how new models of publishing are desperately needed in such settings, but as yet are slow to catch on. Meanwhile,NPR reported on the concern that many who work in countries affected by these epidemics have when western scientists “parachute in” to do all the interesting analyses which may or may not be shared, and rarely includes local scientists in a meaningful way.
Are funders getting good value for money?
The Wellcome Trust published its 2014/5 analysis of where its money goes in OA. It’s worth comparing with last year’s analysis. All the data are on Figshare.
Points to note include:
- As in 2014 hybrid publishing is the most expensive model.
- OA journals published by subscription publishers tended to have higher APCs then their “born digital” counterparts.
- Elsevier is the most expensive publisher
- 392 articles for which the Wellcome paid an APC were not available OA – ie in PMC or Europe PMC. As they say “In financial terms this equates to around £765,000. Spending this level of money – and not having access to the article in the designated repository – is clearly unacceptable.”
- 50% of Wiley papers were non-compliant with the policy
- There were many examples of papers where the licence cited on the PMC article was different to the licence cited on the publisher web site.
The blog ends by noting that the Wellcome will be developing “a more detailed set of principles and requirements which have to be met before we regard a journal to be compliant. Journals which confirm that they can meet these will be compliant with our policy; those which don’t, will not.” They add that they will still fund hybrid journals for now but “If hybrid publishers are unable to commit to the Wellcome Trust’s set of requirements and do not significantly improve the quality of the service, then classifying those hybrid journals as “non-compliant” will be an inevitable next step.”
A critical issue in the acceptance of OA via the APC route has to be that it guarantees OA and hence the Wellcome’s statement on what it is doing in compliance is important. It’s worth noting that SCOAP3 has > 99% compliance for its OA model – which has now published more than 10,000 articles.
A useful briefing paper on costs in scholarly publishing was released by Alma Swan on behalf ofPasteur4OA. This is one of a series of Pasteur4OA resources.
Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing
The FORCE11 FORCE16 conference will be in Portland Oregon on April 17 -19, 2016.
OASPA’s 8th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) will be held on the 21st & 22nd September, 2016.
Recent writing & resources on OA
Peter Suber’s book Knowledge Unbound: Selected Writings on Open Access, 2002–2011 was published and is OA to read.
Creative Commons launched its 2016-2020 strategy
Australasian Open Access Strategy Group 