Global Summit on Diamond Open Access: Directory

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“The purpose of the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access is to bring together the Diamond OA community of journal editors, organizations, experts, and stakeholders from the Global South and North, in a dialogue that seeks to implement collective action in the spirit of the Recommendations on Open Science from UNESCO and BOAI 20 years, where Equity, Sustainability, Quality and Usability are the pillars of our journey.

For the first time the global OA Diamond community will meet in Toluca, Mexico to exchange and coordinate actions to better support equity in scholarly communication practices. The summit, co-organised by Redalyc, the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, AmeliCA, UNESCO, CLACSO and the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, will combine two conferences during Open Access Week….”

SPARC Europe / ENOEL Workshop #1: Embrace the Open: An Introduction to Open Textbooks. June 13, 1pm (CEST)

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This is the first event in our ENOEL Workshop series, organized by SPARC Europe and the European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL) Our three workshop facilitators are: – Sylvia Moes (VU University, Netherlands) – Mira Buist-Zhuk (University of Groningen, Netherlands) – Lambert Heller (TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, Germany) In this workshop, you will learn about the benefits of open textbooks and identify opportunities for integrating them effectively into courses. Using several engaging examples, you will get to explore the current open textbook publishing practices in several European universities and engage in reflective discussions on the challenges and opportunities of open textbooks. Whether you are an enthusiastic academic librarian, an experienced educator, or an open textbook self-starter, come join us and unlock the full potential of open textbooks in education. The chat will be open for the audience to ask questions and engage in the discussion directly with our experts. Attend this session, and you will: – Understand the concept and benefits of open textbooks – Identify opportunities for integrating open textbooks effectively into course design and instructional practices – Explore the current landscape of open textbook publishing practices in several European universities – Reflect on the challenges and opportunities presented by open textbooks.

Shifting tides: The Open Movement at a Turning Point | Open Future

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by Alek Tarkowski and Zuzanna Warso

At the turn of 2022 and 2023, we conducted a series of interviews with leading voices in the open movement. We spoke with professional activists who address openness from varied perspectives and work in different fields of open. Some have been engaged in activism for decades, while others are looking at it with a fresh set of eyes. Many of our interviewees lead organizations advancing openness, and we were particularly interested in talking with those who have been exploring new approaches and strategies.

Our research aims to understand the current state of the open movement, as seen through the eyes of people actively involved in its endeavors and leading organizations within the movement. We want to make sense of shared positions and understand whether there are any clear division lines. We are particularly interested in identifying trends that transform the movement and understanding the challenges and needs of activists and organizations as these changes occur. The report signals a shift to what can be best described as a post-copyright approach to openness. However, while our focus is on how the movement is changing, this does not mean that the whole movement is subject to that shift. There still exists a need for copyright advocacy work in the movement, and many organizations maintain the course developed at the outset.  Nonetheless, we hope that they, too, will find this report’s insights worth examining.

At Open Future, we talk about the future of open and the need to redefine and reimagine some of our goals and activist strategies. We believe that having a perspective that connects the different fields of open activism is valuable. A shared movement identity and a shared advocacy agenda can make our collective effort stronger. With this study, we aim to see whether this perspective is shared and whether it can form a basis for building a shared movement agenda for the decades to come.

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Fluid dynamics good for 19,000 jobs, but funding lags

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More than 19,000 people work on flows in Dutch industry. The export of products and services in the field of fluid dynamics provides great added value for the economy and society. This is evident from the report ‘Flow to the Future in the Netherlands’, that was presented to members of the House of Parliament (Tweede Kamer) in the Hague on 6th June. From the University of Twente, Prof Detlef Lohse is one of the initiators of the report.

Transformative agreements and their practical impact: a librarian perspective – Insights

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Abstract:  This case study aims at describing how transformative agreements (TAs) have affected our profession with new tasks and workflows at two university libraries in Sweden, namely Karolinska Institutet University Library and Södertörn University Library. TAs are one of the mechanisms by which scientific publications are made open access; they involve moving libraries’ contracts with publishers from payment to read toward payment to publish. We will summarize the status and progress of open access in Sweden, in particular the significant growth of TAs over a short time span. We will then focus on describing how TAs have affected our everyday work and what new tasks they have imposed. We will share our experiences and point out things we find challenging, for example, we will explore questions about eligibility, the verification process, publication types and title changes during the contract period. We will also give some recommendations on how we would prefer the workflows surrounding the TAs to be. Finally, we will share our conclusions and comments about the impact of TAs on the publishing landscape and speculate about what will happen next.

 

UT professor Bram Nauta receives Dutch Stevin Prize

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UT professor Prof Dr Bram Nauta will be awarded this year’s Stevin Prize, one of the highest honours in Dutch science. This was announced today by NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. The Spinoza and Stevin Prize winners will each receive 1.5 million euros to be spent on scientific research and activities related to knowledge exploitation. The Stevin Prize will also be awarded to Prof Dr Corien Prins of Tilburg University, while the Spinoza Prize will go to Prof Toby Kiers of the VU and Prof Joyeeta Gupta of the University of Amsterdam.

NSF Public Access Plan 2.0

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“NSF’s updated public access plan integrates new agency guidance issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in August of 2022. This guidance, which includes zero-embargo public access for research publications and their supporting data, was developed with leadership from the National Science and Technology Council Subcommittee on Open Science, in which NSF has always been actively engaged. NSF developed its plan while considering issues of importance to our many partners across academia and industry, and in alignment with all other U.S. agencies which fund scientific research. This plan is a first step, and we look forward to its further evolution as we address changes in technology and in the needs of members across our communities. Promoting immediate public access to federally funded research results and data is a critically important aspect of achieving the NSF mission of promoting the progress of science, securing the national defense, and advancing the national health, prosperity, and welfare. Indeed, scientific openness, academic freedom, scientific integrity, equity in science, and fairness are American values that rest on the pillar of public access to federally funded research and data….

The sections of this plan describe how NSF will ensure: • That all peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from NSF-funded research will be made freely available and publicly accessible by default in the NSF Public Access Repository, or NSF-PAR, without embargo or delay. • That scientific data associated with peer-reviewed publications resulting from NSF awards will be made available in appropriate scientific disciplinary repositories. • That exceptions to the data-sharing requirements will be made based on legal, privacy, ethical, intellectual property and national security considerations. • That persistent identifiers, or PIDs, and other critical metadata associated with peer-reviewed publications and data resulting from NSF-funded research will be collected and made publicly available in NSF-PAR. • That the agency coordinates with other federal funders of scientific research in implementing new public access requirements….

Primary areas of interest that will shape NSF policy as implementation approaches are formulated include: • Minimizing the equity impact of over-reliance on article processing charges, or APCs, also known as the “Gold Open Access” publication model, including inequity for fields, organizations or researchers lacking access to funding; consequences of possible citation bias; the impact on ability to fund research and training activities; and potential negative impacts with respect to public trust. • Promoting use of author’s accepted manuscripts, or AAMs, as a no-cost option to comply with public access requirements. • Minimizing the consequences of changing publishing ecosystems, including impacts for organizations least able to weather dramatic changes to subscription policies, which can increase precarity for those affiliated with these organizations. • Ameliorating the possible impacts of large APCs on small awards. • Involving affected communities regarding issues associated with data collection, data governance, verifying permitted data access, and data destruction, particularly for groups that have previously suffered from the appropriation or misuse of data. 19 • Ensure accessibility of data and results, including access to data cyberinfrastructures for under-resourced and underserved institutions/researchers, as well as considerations for persons with visual disabilities. 20 • Maximizing the reach and impact of U.S. research while seeking to minimize both access barriers in underresourced and underserved communities and challenges related to the language or interpretability of data. • Identifying the full range of costs (tangible and intangible) associated with data provision and addressing any inequities introduced by these costs. • Developing processes for addressing inequities identified in sharing and accessing research findings….”

Here’s another important reason why academics should publish in open access titles: self interest – Walled Culture

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“What this means in practice is that for the general public open access articles are even more beneficial than those published in traditional titles, since they frequently turn up as Wikipedia sources that can be consulted directly. They are also advantageous for the researchers who write them, since their work is more likely to be cited on the widely-read and influential Wikipedia than if the papers were not open access. As the research notes, this effect is even more pronounced for “articles with low citation counts” – basically, academic work that may be important but is rather obscure. This new paper provides yet another compelling reason why researchers should be publishing their work as open access as a matter of course: out of pure self interest.”

Debra Roberts appointed as parttime professor at ITC

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As of now, Debra Roberts will fulfill the role of part-time professor (0.2 FTE) at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science at the University of Twente. Roberts will hold the new Professor Willem Schermerhorn Chair, funded by the ITC Foundation. This chair, which is named after ITC’s founder, is about Open Science from a Majority World Perspective. Roberts will take on this role for the next four years.