OPERAS resources

"The Manifold team is delighted to launch a public beta of its new publishing platform for interactive scholarly monographs: http://staging.manifoldapp.org/."

"The Analysis & Policy Observatory is an award-winning research collection and information service curating key resources to support evidence-informed policy and practice. APO hosts and provides free access to a wide range of grey literature, data, journal articles and books, audio and video and online resources and the tools to publish, search, manage and track content, people and organisations."

"Journal.fi is a new journal management and publishing service provided by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. The site features 40 Finnish scholarly journals, with more to come. Journal.fi is designed to meet the needs of authors, readers, publishers and funders in the age of Open Access journals. The service is using the Open Journal Systems 3.0 software."

"Jyväskylä University Library and University Museum merged in January 1, 2017 into the Open Science Centre. It will provide reliable library and museum services to its customers."

"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."

"In the past decade, a number of initiatives have been taken to provide new sources of information on scholarly book publishing. Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics) has supplemented the Web of Science with a Book Citation Index (BCI), while Elsevier has extended Scopus to include books from a selection of scholarly publishers. More complete metadata on scholarly book publishing can be derived at the national level from non-commercial databases such as Current Research Information System in Norway and the VIRTA (Higher Education Achievement Register, Finland) publication information service, including the Finnish Publication Forum (JUFO) lists (Finland). The Spanish Scholarly Publishers Indicators provides survey-based information on the prestige, specialization profiles from metadata, and manuscript selection processes of national and international publishers that are particularly relevant for the social sciences and humanities (SSH). In the present work, the five information sources mentioned above are compared in a quantitative analysis identifying overlaps and uniqueness as well as differences in the degrees and profiles of coverage. In a second-stage analysis, the geographical origin of the university presses (UPs) is given a particular focus. We find that selection criteria strongly differ, ranging from a set of a priori criteria combined with expert-panel review in the case of commercial databases to in principle comprehensive coverage within a definition in the Nordic countries and an open survey methodology combined with metadata from the book industry database and questionnaires to publishers in Spain. Larger sets of distinct book publishers are found in the non-commercial databases, and greater geographical diversity is observable among the UPs in these information systems. While a more locally oriented set of publishers which are relevant to researchers in the SSH is present in non-commercial databases, the commercial databases seem to focus on high

"Fulcrum is a publishing platform currently under development that helps publishers present the full richness of their authors' research outputs in a durable, discoverable, and flexible form"

"In 2014, my Mellon colleague, Helen Cullyer, and I sat in on a roundtable discussion of deans of humanities divisions in about 25 research universities in the U.S.  Of the questions that occupied them, one directly concerned the future of the monograph.  Wondering how they could make the humanities more interesting to their students, the deans observed that the present generation is immersed in the interactive web of multimedia to a degree that makes it harder for them to appreciate the book-based humanistic traditions. "

"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. "

"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. "

"The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) was launched on April 6th, 2017. Over the course of about six months, the initiative has made a large fraction of the citation data that link all scholarship freely available. Mark Patterson (eLife) and Catriona MacCallum (PLOS) were two of the people involved and below they describe how this initiative started and where it might lead. "

"Author's note: With my colleague Karen Barch and the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, I have been working on a project to determine how many books university presses publish, and in particular, how many of these could be termed original monographs in the humanities. The full report is available below as a PDF and also on Scribd. The text of this blog post is a slightly edited version of the report's Introduction. For the quantitative aspect of the study, I refer you to the full report.]"

"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."

"CON­FER­ENCE ON PHILO­SOPHY AND HIS­TORY OF OPEN SCI­ENCE #PHOS16 (HEL­SINKI, NOV 30 - DEC 1, 2016) Open communication has been a central cornerstone of research since the early days. In our increasingly data-intensive era, research practice and dissemination are facing new challenges as well as opportunities. What is the overall significance of the open science movement and what are, if any, the historical roots and varieties of this movement? This two-day conference brings together contemporary open science advocates and scholars to discuss particular themes relevant to openness in contemporary research practice, including reproducibility, transparency, reusability, politics of science, and other topics as well as their historical roots, in order to gain a broader perspective on these issues. Participation is free and open for the research and the general public"

"A new economic model for analysis of scholarly publishing-journal publishing in particular-is proposed that draws on club theory. The standard approach builds on market failure in the private production (by research scholars) of a public good (new scholarly knowledge). In that model publishing is communication, as the dissemination of information. But a club model views publishing differently: namely as group formation, where members form groups in order to confer externalities on each other, subject to congestion. A journal is a self-constituted group, endeavouring to create new knowledge. In this sense 'a journal is a club'. The knowledge club model of a journal seeks to balance the positive externalities due to a shared resource (readers, citations, referees) against negative externalities due to crowding (decreased prospect of publishing in that journal). A new economic model of a journal as a 'knowledge club' is elaborated. We suggest some consequences for the management of journals and financial models that might be developed to support them. "

"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."

"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 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."

"Les étudiants doivent-ils moins lire pour réussir ? La politique documentaire suivie par les établissements d'enseignement supérieur français pourrait le laisser croire. alors que le coût de la documentation académique augmente, les dépenses consacrées à l'achat d'ouvrages ne cessent de baisser, pénalisant en premier lieu les étudiants, mais aussi la recherche en sciences humaines et sociales ou en mathématiques. Côté documentation électronique, l'offre de e-books ne décolle pas, et si les dépenses pour l'abonnement à des revues en ligne continuent d'augmenter, certains établissements ont défrayé la chronique en 2015 en coupant drastiquement dans leurs dépenses documentaires de niveau recherche. Retour sur les principales conclusions de l'enquête annuelle de l'adbu sur les dépenses documentaires des bibliothèques universitaires (période 2002 - 2015)."