OPERAS resources

"On 11 March this year, a brief announcement by the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Amsterdam University Press (AUP) marked the latter's transfer into private hands. The upbeat text conjures up a healthy image: a rigorous restructuring had saved an ailing organization. Following a dire diagnosis, AUP achieved a great "track record" and "international visibility" and was "stable and growing." "A good moment" presented itself to let AUP direct its own destiny, a "long-cherished dream" of its new owner, whose "network in the sector" reassured UvA Ventures Holding B.V., the company through which the UvA formally owned AUP, of the press's bright future."

"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."

"Follow the steps in this guideline to open up your publications."

"13-14 February 2018 saw ALPSP (Association of Learned and Society Publishers) in association with UCL Press host the second international conference for University Presses, called REDUX 18. "

"While there are new and enabling conditions for university presses to increase production and to widen distribution, the question remains: How can African university presses make the most of these opportunities? Most likely, the answer lies in deploying the technological changes in production, distribution and marketing made possible by digitisation and network effects of the internet.  At the same time, propelled by a growing perception in academia of 'robber capitalism' on the part of publishers as they protect their oligopoly in the face of dissolving spatial barriers and diminishing value add, we are witnessing a contrary trend: the emergence of the knowledge commons. However, this emergence takes place in an institutional context long dominated by an editorial logic and, in more recent times, by the logic of the market.  A holistic way of approaching the question of how African university presses can reposition themselves in support of the broader shift of some African universities towards a greater focus on research, is to consider shifts in the dominant institutional logic in the academic publishing industry. Based on a baseline survey of university presses in Africa, in-depth case studies of selected university presses, and an analysis of the publishing choices made by African academics, this research project examined the opportunities and constraints faced by university presses in Africa.  It provides an overview of the African university press landscape and shows that there is a small, active group of university presses. University presses in Africa are not yet making use of technological advances to reconfigure their production, distribution and marketing processes, nor are they experimenting with new publishing models such as open access. While case studies of selected university presses surfaced unsurprising challenges (such as scarce resources and limited capacity), they also show that university presses in Africa are constrained by institut

"The UK-SCL is an open access policy mechanism which ensures researchers can retain re-use rights in their own work, they retain copyright and they retain the freedom to publish in the journal of their choice (assigning copyright to the publisher if necessary) Re-use rights retention enables early public communication of research findings and use in research and teaching, including online courses. Increased visibility of research outputs greatly improves opportunities for increased impact and citations. A single deposit action under the model policy ensures eligibility for REF2021 and compliance with most funder deposit criteria. Researchers retain copyright and remain free to assign it to the publisher"

"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

"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?"

"L'offensive des éditeurs contre les réseaux sociaux académiques est lancée ! Elle aura mis du temps, mais la voilà. Alors qu'Academia et ResearchGate semblaient, faute de réaction jusque-là, en position de force, la puissante association STM, qui regroupe notamment Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis ou encore Wiley, vient en effet d'envoyer à ResearchGate le 15 septembre 2017 un courrier pointant directement du doigt ce qu'elle considère comme les lacunes et les abus du réseau. Mais parce qu'il n'y a pas que les éditeurs qui sont concernés, voici une synthèse 2017 pour comprendre les forces en présence d'une guerre du partage plus totalement larvée désormais."

"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 academic reward structure focuses heavily on the publication of novel results in high impact journals. This talk considers the problems this narrow focus is creating in research and its dissemination and how these activities go against some of the basic tenets of science itself. It suggests that Open Research offers a way to improve the veracity of scientific claims and then looks at some of the recent examples of a move away from the status quo over the past 18 months."

"Today, the I4OC (Initiative for Open Citations) announced new supporting publishers joining to release reference data for more than 16 million articles. This is a major step forward as publishers such as Emerald, the American Physical Society, SciELO and De Gruyter team up with Springer/Nature, Wiley, Sage and many more to unlock the powerful information encoded in citation networks."

"OpenCitations is now populating the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC), an open repository of scholarly citation data made available under a Creative Commons public domain dedication (CC0), which provides accurate bibliographic references harvested from the scholarly literature that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse for any purpose, without restriction under copyright or database law"

"Today, we announced a new project collaboration between Substance, Stencila and eLife, to support the development of an open technology stack that will enable researchers to publish reproducible manuscripts through online journals. In this blogpost, we outline the background and remit of this project. We welcome feedback and contributions: please comment publicly on the article using Hypothes.is or email innovation@elifesciences.org."

"Each year, the coalition will invite non-commercial OA/OS services to apply for SCOSS co-ordinated funding. The SCOSS board will evaluate applicants rigorously based on criteria including the service's value to communities such as funders, universities, libraries, authors, research managers and repositories; and on details pertaining to their governance structure, costs, sustainability measures, and future plans."

"A number of our members have asked if they can register their peer reviews with us. They believe that discussions around scholarly works should have DOIs and be citable to provide further context and provenance for researchers reading the article. To that end, we can announce some pertinent news as we enter Peer Review Week 2017: Crossref infrastructure is soon to be extended to manage DOIs for peer reviews. Launching next month will be support for this new content type, with schema specifically dedicated to the reviews and discussions of scholarly content."

"Frau König, was bringt es Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern neben ihrer täglichen Arbeit, einen Blog zu führen?"

"The unique authority of scholarly publishing arises from the rigorous evaluation and assessment works must go through before they are published-known as the peer review process. Peer Review Transparency is an initiative of scholarly publishers, academic librarians, technology innovators, and thought leaders in scholarly communication, with support from the Open Society Foundations, to create agreed definitions of how peer review is conducted, and to disclose clearly and efficiently to readers the kind of review a published work has undergone. "

"Leading Swedish researchers appeal to research councils: Withdraw support for Plan S "