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."

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

"Citizen science (CS) terms the active participation of the general public in scientific research activities. With increasing amounts of information generated by citizen scientists, best practices to go beyond science communication and publish these findings to the scientific community are needed. This letter is a synopsis of authors' personal experiences when publishing results from citizen science projects in peer-reviewed journals, as presented at the Austrian Citizen Science Conference 2018. Here, we address authors' selection criteria for publishing CS data in open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journals as well as barriers encountered during the publishing process. We also outline factors that influence the probability of publication using CS data, including 1) funding to cover publication costs; 2) quality, quantity and scientific novelty of CS data; 3) recommendations to acknowledge contributions of citizen scientists in scientific, peer-reviewed publications; 4) citizen scientists' preference of the hands-on experience over the product (publication) and 5) bias among scientists for certain data sources and the scientific jargon. These experiences show that addressing these barriers could greatly increase the rate of CS data included in scientific publications."

"Almost everyone is enthusiastic that 'open science' is the wave of the future. Yet when one looks seriously at the flaws in modern science that the movement proposes to remedy, the prospect for improvement in at least four areas are unimpressive. This suggests that the agenda is effectively to re-engineer science along the lines of platform capitalism, under the misleading banner of opening up science to the masses. "

"Frustrated with the slow transition toward open access (OA) in scientific publishing, 11 national funding organizations in Europe turned up the pressure today. As of 2020, the group, which jointly spends about €7.6 billion on research annually, will require every paper it funds to be freely available from the moment of publication. In a statement, the group said it will no longer allow the 6- or 12-month delays that many subscription journals now require before a paper is made OA, and it won't allow publication in so-called hybrid journals, which charge subscriptions but also make individual papers OA for an extra fee.  "

" This month, Kentucky's General Assembly overrode Gov. Matt Bevin's veto of the budget, restoring many of the cuts in education that Bevin had proposed in January. But the funding Bevin eliminated for the University Press of Kentucky was not restored. To remain open, the press has a rough road ahead."

"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."

"When you're offered the chance to speak about one of your favorite topics, in one of your favorite cities, it's very hard to say no. So of course, when Anthony Watkinson invited me to participate in a panel on Collaboration to Improve Scholarship at the Fiesole Library Collection Retreat in Barcelona in April, I enthusiastically agreed. My fellow speakers were Bob Boissy (Springer Nature), Toby Green (OECD), Pierre Mounier (OpenEditions), and Roger Schonfeld (Ithaka S+R and fellow Scholarly Kitchen chef). Collectively, we covered a wide range of issues and initiatives around the topic, some of which I was already familiar with, some of which I learned about for the first time."

"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 "

"Everything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures. We propose a set of principles by which Open Infrastructures to support the research community could be run and sustained. - Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin, Cameron Neylon"

"El portal AccesoAbierto.net quiere ser el principal canal de divulgación de los avances del grupo de investigación "Acceso abierto a la ciencia" respecto de la situación del acceso abierto en España y también concentrar la información existente sobre esta cuestión en el ámbito hispánico. El portal se dirige fundamentalmente a los autores (que buscan información sobre derechos y condiciones para poder autoarchivar sus publicaciones), a los bibliotecarios (que necesitan datos sobre los derechos de las revistas y los repositorios existentes), los gestores científicos y universitarios (que precisan conocer cuáles son las políticas que se están llevando a cabo en este ámbito) y a los interesados en el acceso abierto en general."

"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."

"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. "

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

"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."