Group items tagged

"his study tries to systematically identify claims about societal benefits of Open Access by analyzing different documents written by Open Access supporters. Three types of documents are used: key declarations and statements in support of Open Access, Open Access policies issued by public funding agencies and journal editorials announcing the adoption of Open Access. Analysis shows these three types emphasize different benefits for Open Access as they address different audience. There is strong support of the idea that Open Access has benefits to different groups of people outside side the university/credentialed research institutes. It is not clear how much evidence is available to support these claims, but identifying them would suggest new stakeholders to involve in the conversation and perhaps also inform the ongoing debate about who should bear the cost of Open Access."

"The open access model for publishing monographs by the members of the Spanish Universities Publishers Association (UNE) is analyzed. The study focused on production data from 2015-2017, as well as the positioning and arguments of the editors in relation to the open access movement, publication, related policies, and financing modalities. Data was collected by a questionnaire (with a response rate of 58% of the publishers associated with UNE) and includes in-depth interviews with seven of them. The results show that 75% of UNE members publish titles in open access, most consider open access a good way to increase the dissemination of monographs, and that there are no differences in content quality with non-open access works. Publishers do not see that publishing in open access is compatible with the commercial exploitation of printed copies. Publishers consider the most effective financing channels to be institutional payment (i.e., the university), followed by publisher's self-financing, and payment by the author."

"Key points Sci-Hub has made nearly all articles freely available using a black open access model, leaving green and gold models in its dust. Why, after 20 years of effort, have green and gold open access not achieved more? Do we need 'tae think again'? If human nature is to postpone change for as long as possible, are green and gold open access fundamentally flawed? Open and closed publishing models depend on bundle pricing paid by one stakeholder, the others getting a free ride. Is unbundling a fairer model? If publishers changed course and unbundled their product, would this open a legal, fairer route to 100% open access and see off the pirates?"

"In this article two scholars engage in a conversation about open access and open science in research communication with a specific focus on the Humanities.  The two scholars have very different points of departure. Whereas Jean-Claude Guedón has been a professor of Literature in North-America for many years and part of the open access movements since its beginning, Thomas Wiben Jensen is in the early part of his carreer and fairly new to the concept of open access.  The conversation begins with a focus on the Danish national strategy for open access and this strategy's consquenses for the journal NyS where Thomas Wiben is part of the editorial board. However, the conversation brings the reader on an unexpected journey through the history of science communication and through alternative ways of understanding knowledge production as frozen moments or crystals in the Great Conversation of science. It is the hope of the editor and the contributors that the conversation can lead to a debate about innovative ways of communicating and distributing scientific results. "

"Open access (OA) is advocated by science funders, policymakers and researchers alike. It will most likely be the default way of publishing in the not-so-distant future. Nonetheless, the dominant approach to achieve OA at the moment - journal flipping - could have adverse long-term effects for science. To try to stir debate, we here present two dichotomic scenarios for open access in 20 years' time. Our approach is collaborative and open - we recognise that our position is not uncontroversial and welcome engagement from those who would advocate otherwise. What is missing in the scenarios presented below? Which scenario would be better? Which is most realistic?"

"Open peer review (OPR) is a cornerstone of the emergent Open Science agenda. Yet to date no large-scale survey of attitudes towards OPR amongst academic editors, authors, reviewers and publishers has been undertaken. This paper presents the findings of an online survey, conducted for the OpenAIRE2020 project during September and October 2016 that sought to bridge this information gap in order to aid the development of appropriate OPR approaches by providing evidence about attitudes towards and levels of experience with OPR. The results of this cross-disciplinary survey, which received 3,062 full responses, show the majority of respondents to be in favour of OPR becoming mainstream scholarly practice, as they also are for other areas of Open Science, like Open Access and Open Data. We also observe surprisingly high levels of experience with OPR, with three out of four (76.2%) respondents reporting having taken part in an OPR process as author, reviewer or editor. There were also high levels of support for most of the traits of OPR, particularly open interaction, open reports and final-version commenting. Respondents were against opening reviewer identities to authors, however, with more than half believing it would make peer review worse. Overall satisfaction with the peer review system used by scholarly journals seems to strongly vary across disciplines. Taken together, these findings are very encouraging for OPR's prospects for moving mainstream but indicate that due care must be taken to avoid a "one-size fits all" solution and to tailor such systems to differing (especially disciplinary) contexts. More research is also needed. OPR is an evolving phenomenon and hence future studies are to be encouraged, especially to further explore differences between disciplines and monitor the evolution of attitudes. "

Open access for monographs and book chapters is a relatively new area of publishing, and there are many ways of approaching it. This document provides some guidance for publishers to consider when developing policies and processes for open access books.The guide was written by the Wellcome Trust, which extended its open access policy to include monographs and book chapters in October 2013. Section 4 of this guide sets out Trust policy, but otherwise the recommendations made here are intended as helpful suggestions for best practice rather than requirements.We recognise that implementation around publishing monographs and book chapters open access is in flux, and we invite publishers to email Cecy Marden at c.marden@wellcome.ac.uk with any suggestions for further guidance that would be useful to include in this document.

"With Open Access and the Humanities, Martin Paul Eve offers a slender, but surprisingly thorough, volume engaging many of the major preoccupations of the open access movement in scholarly communication. In fact, the book's strongest virtue may be the clarity and economy with which Professor Eve gathers and presents the benefits, risks, and feasible means of adapting Humanities disciplines to open access licensing, distribution, and funding models. Much of this gathering and presenting can feel fairly familiar to anyone already immersed in the slightly more mature conversation associated with STEM publishing (many of the "contexts" and "controversies" to which the book's subtitle alludes). There really is much to review, however, and as a primer for the open-access curious humanist, Eve's review should come across as congenial, convenient, and in many cases even demystifying."

"Given that "Open Science" is becoming a popular policy object around the world, this study sought to identify key narratives about Open Science in policy, and critically examine the extent to which they are sustaining or strengthening multi-layered domination and inequality schemes that pre-exist in scientific knowledge production. To do so, we conducted a content analysis of Open Science policies stemming from Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia and Africa to understand which narratives about Open Science policies are produced, reproduced and by whom; and in turn, whose interests may be neglected in this process. We found that Open Science policies, mostly stemming from Europe, frame "openness" as a vehicle to promote technological change as part of an inevitable and necessary cultural shift to modernity in scientific production. The global reach of these narratives, and the technologies, standards and models these narratives sustain, are dictating modes of working and collaborating among those who can access them, and creating new categories of exclusion that invalidate knowledge that cannot meet this criteria, putting historically marginalized researchers and publics at further disadvantage."

"In April 2016, Heidelberg University's newly founded open access publisher heiUP launched the first volume of the new book series Heidelberg Studies in Transculturality. This article reports on the challenges, accomplishments, and setbacks that informed the entire editorial production process, not only of the first volume but also of the series and the publishing enterprise overall. The authors offer insights on crucial issues that any new open access publishing endeavour at an institution might face, namely acquiring manuscripts, designing and building workflows, and collaborating with partners to build an outlet for hosting the finished product. This article also illustrates how the goal of providing a new digital reading experience through an innovative HTML format, in addition to print-on-demand and PDF versions of each manuscript, affected the progress of the entire project. Finally, we report on what it took to deliver results."

"Why aren't articles on arXiv -or any other open access repository- formally credited as publications? What is it exactly that separates open access repositories from publishers? The simple answer is that publications in journals come with an amorphous quality indicator associated with the journal's perceived prestige. Articles posted on a repository on the other hand, are considered to be "provided at the reader's own risk", as they are not accompanied by any measurable guarantee of their scientific merit. We think the time has come to change all that."

"When researchers, funders, universities and libraries started thinking about open access and improving scholarly communication in the late 1990s, the focus was on access. Indeed, the most immediate challenge was to make it possible to access scientific literature resulting from public funding."

"The effective implementation of OpenScience calls for a scientific communication ecosystem capable of enabling the "Open Science publishing principles" of transparency and reproducibility. Such ecosystem should provide tools, policies, and trust needed by scientists for sharing/interlinking (for "discovery" and "transparent evaluation") and re-using (for "reproducibility") all research products produced during the scientific process, e.g. literature, research data, methods, software, workflows, protocols, etc. OpenAIRE fosters OpenScience by advocating its publishing principles across Europe and research communities and by offering technical services in support of OA monitoring, research impact monitoring, and Open Science publishing. Its aim is to provide Research Infrastructures (RIs) with the services required to bridge the research life-cycle they support - where scientists produce research products - with the scholarly communication infrastructure - where scientists publish research products - in such a way science is reusable, reproducible, and transparently assessable. OpenAIRE is fostering the establishment of reliable, trusted, and long lasting RIs by compensating the lack of OS publishing solutions and providing the support required by RIs to upgrade existing solutions to meet OpenScience publishing needs (e.g. technical guidelines, best practices, OA mandates). To this aim, OpenAIRE is working closely with existing RIs to extend its service portfolio by introducing two services implementing the concept of "Open Science as a Service" (OSaaS): The Research Community Dashboard. Thanks to its functionality, scientists of RIs can find tools for publishing all their research products, such as literature, datasets, software, research packages, etc. (provide metadata, get DOIs, and ensure preservation of files), interlink such products manually or by exploiting advanced mining techniques, and integrate their services to automatically publish

"On the 22nd August 2017 - some nine months after the platform was first launched - Wellcome Open Research published its 100th article. To mark this milestone, we provide an overview of the type of research that has been published since launch including how it has been used; give an analysis of the datasets underlying these publications; and provide information about the speed of publication and volume of peer review activity. We conclude by looking at how the number of publications on this platform compared with other journals used by Wellcome-funded researchers."

"ROAD, the Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources, is a service offered by the ISSN International Centre with the support of the Communication and Information Sector of UNESCO.  Launched as a beta version on 16th December 2013,  ROAD has been developped during 2014 (extension of the coverage, additional features...)."

"The European Commission held a workshop on 12 October 2015 in Brussels to collect information about the alternatives to Green and Gold open access, including how the alternatives work, how they have evolved, whether they work well, and what challenges they don't manage to tackle. This report synthesises the presentations and discussions from the workshop."

"The second progress report is already available for the EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot providing information on the first four months of the project with data as of Sep 30th. The results show that the initiative is gradually taking up, with more than double funding requests having been granted in this 4-month period than in the first two months of the Pilot. The rhythm of growth is however slower than initially expected, due to both the season which the initiative has been launched in and the difficulty to reach out to eligible researchers on a rather specific funding policy. The activity is however steadily increasing and factors like the enhancement of the system for collecting and processing funding requests and the consistent dissemination work being done by NOADs and institutions will surely provide the basis for a steeper growth in forthcoming months."

"The second progress report is already available for the EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot providing information on the first four months of the project with data as of Sep 30th. The results show that the initiative is gradually taking up, with more than double funding requests having been granted in this 4-month period than in the first two months of the Pilot. The rhythm of growth is however slower than initially expected, due to both the season which the initiative has been launched in and the difficulty to reach out to eligible researchers on a rather specific funding policy. The activity is however steadily increasing and factors like the enhancement of the system for collecting and processing funding requests and the consistent dissemination work being done by NOADs and institutions will surely provide the basis for a steeper growth in forthcoming months."

"At a conference last week, I spoke of the intent to extend the open access (OA) requirements in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) to include long-form scholarly works and monographs in 2027. Some seemed to think I was making a new announcement, as a fait accompli. In fact the overall intention was signalled more than a year ago - and it will take much more discussion and consultation to develop the policy details and finalise the conditions."

"Simply adding an 'open access' option to the existing prestige-based journal system at ever increasing costs is not the fundamental change publishing needs, says Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman "

"One of Europe's biggest science spenders could soon branch out into publishing. The European Commission, which spends more than €10 billion annually on research, may follow two other big league funders, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and set up a "publishing platform" for the scientists it funds, in an attempt to accelerate the transition to open-access publishing in Europe. "