Category Archives: oa.green

Open Access: Understanding the Mission, the Models, and the Mindsets

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“Over the past 20 years, Open Access publishing has evolved from an aspirational idea into a widely accepted practice in scholarly communications. For those just getting started in publishing and scholarly communications, it can seem like everyone just “knows” what is meant by open access. But how OA is defined and how widely it is adopted differs among institutions, regions, and disciplines. Understanding how open access is funded, how it is operationalized, and to what extent content it is truly “open” can vary widely depending on the stakeholder—librarian, funder, publisher, or researcher. 

Attendees of this introductory workshop will learn about the history and evolution of open access, from the Budapest Open Access Initiative to Plan S, and explore the evolution from the original green and gold OA models to the latest transformative agreements and other business models.

Specifically, the workshop will cover:

Brief history of open access and its position in the broader context of Open Science
Different types of open access and how these definitions are contested
Affordances and limitations of open access
Perspectives of different stakeholders 
Approaches to funding models: transformative agreements, pure publish agreements, memberships, subventions, and micro-payments
Ways that open access may develop in the future…”

All the Research That’s Fit to Print: Open Access and the News Media

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Abstract:  The goal of the open access (OA) movement is to help everyone access the scholarly research, not just those who can afford to. However, most studies looking at whether OA has met this goal have focused on whether other scholars are making use of OA research. Few have considered how the broader public, including the news media, uses OA research. This study sought to answer whether the news media mentions OA articles more or less than paywalled articles by looking at articles published from 2010 through 2018 in journals across all four quartiles of the Journal Impact Factor using data obtained through Altmetric.com and the Web of Science. Gold, green and hybrid OA articles all had a positive correlation with the number of news mentions received. News mentions for OA articles did see a dip in 2018, although they remained higher than those for paywalled articles.

 

 

SPARC Statement on Public Access Provisions in the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act – SPARC

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“We are pleased to see the U.S. Senate endorse language that strongly supports providing faster access to taxpayer-funded research results with today’s passage of the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (S. 1260). 

Section 2527 of the bill, formerly the Endless Frontier Act, (titled “Basic Research”) includes language originally written by Senator Wyden and supported by Senator Paul that directs federal agencies funding more than $100 million annually in research grants to develop a policy that provides for free online public access to federally-funded research “not later than 12 months after publication in peer-reviewed journals, preferably sooner.” 

The bill also provides important guidance that will maximize the impact of federally-funded research by ensuring that final author manuscripts reporting on taxpayer funded research are:

Deposited into federally designated or maintained repositories;
Made available in open and machine readable formats; 
Made available under licenses that enable productive reuse and computational analysis; and
Housed in repositories that ensure interoperability and long-term preservation. …”

Dissemination of applied research to the field: attitudes and practices of faculty authors in social work

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Abstract:  In applied research disciplines like social work, there is a clear disconnect between the production and dissemination of research and the access and use of research in practice. This research/practice divide is particularly problematic for practitioners required to work within evidence-based or research-informed frameworks. To explore this issue, we conducted a nationwide survey and qualitative interviews with social work faculty regarding their research dissemination attitudes and practices, especially to non-academic audiences. The survey and interviews provide data on faculty dissemination methods, attitudes toward gold and green open access and promotion and tenure considerations. Results demonstrate that faculty are primarily engaged with traditional publishing models and much less engaged with dissemination to non-academic audiences. Faculty are skeptical of open access journals, avoid article processing charges and are only minimally engaged with institutional repositories. Faculty are conflicted regarding the dissemination of their research, especially in the context of promotion and tenure. Shifting dissemination outside of non-academic audiences would require increased confidence in open access, support for the creation of practitioner-focused materials and prioritizing the impact of research on practice.

 

Full Text of Open Access Policy – Open Access – LibGuides at California State University, East Bay

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”

I. Preamble

The Faculty of California State University, East Bay is committed to disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In particular, as part of a public university system, the Faculty is dedicated to making its scholarship available to the people of California and the world. Faculties across leading universities have adopted comparable open access policies to retain rights to publicly share their articles, and CSUEB, which strives to be a national model of public comprehensive higher education and a leader in the CSU system, would be the first in the California State University system to adopt such a policy. Furthermore, the Faculty recognizes the benefits that accrue to themselves as individual scholars, the University as a whole, as well as the scholarly enterprise for such wide dissemination, including greater recognition and a general increase in scientific, scholarly, and critical knowledge. Faculty further recognize that with this policy they can more easily and collectively reserve rights of their scholarly articles that might otherwise be signed away, often unnecessarily, in agreements with publishers. Such a policy will give CSUEB a legal basis to host and provide public access to future Faculty scholarly articles. In keeping with these considerations, the Faculty adopts the following policy:
 

II. Grant of License, Limitations, and Scope

The Faculty is committed to making their scholarly articles widely and freely available in an open access repository. In keeping with that commitment, each Faculty member grants to CSUEB a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of their scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. This policy does not transfer or affect copyright ownership, which is determined by existing CSUEB policy1. This policy applies to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a faculty unit employee2 or emeritus faculty member3, except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy or any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or publishing agreement before the adoption of this policy….”

An indexing system for the relevance of academic production and research from digital repositories and metadata | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose

This paper aims to propose a set of quantitative statistical indicators for measuring the scientific relevance of research groups and researchers, based on high-impact open-access digital production repositories.

Design/methodology/approach

An action research (AR) methodology is proposed in which research is associated with the practice; research informs practice and practice is responsible for informing research in a cooperative way. AR is divided into five phases, beginning with the definition of the problematic scenario and an analysis of the state of the art and ending with conducting tests and publishing the results.

Findings

The proposed indicators were used to characterise group and individual output in a major public university in south-eastern Mexico. University campuses hosting a large number of high-impact research groups. These indicators were very useful in generating information that confirmed specific assumptions about the scientific production of the university.

Research limitations/implications

The data used here were retrieved from Scopus and open access national repository of Mexico. It would be possible to use other data sources to calculate these indicators.

Practical implications

The system used to implement the proposed indicators is independent of any particular technological tool and is based on standards for metadata description and exchange, thus facilitating the easy integration of new elements for evaluation.

Social implications

Many organisations evaluate researchers according to specific criteria, one of which is the prestige of journals. Although the guidelines differ between evaluation bodies, relevance is measured based on elements that can be adapted and where some have greater weight than others, including the prestige of the journal, the degree of collaboration with other researchers and individual production, etc. The proposed indicators can be used by various entities to evaluate researchers and research groups. Each country has its own organisations that are responsible for evaluation, using various criteria based on the impact of the publications.

Originality/value

The proposed indicators assess based on the importance of the types of publications and the degree of collaborations. However, they can be adapted to other similar scenarios.

Ural federal university: The University’s Open Archive has Risen Again in Repository Rankings – India Education | Latest Education News | Global Educational News | Recent Educational News

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“In the ranking of institutional repositories, the university’s archive has risen two positions and is ranked 26th in the world out of more than 3,100 other resources. Moreover, the Ural Federal University archive continues to hold first place in Russia among institutional archives….”

COAPI Community Call: Making Green Open Access Work for Society Publishers: A Panel Discussion – Jun 16, 2021 – SPARC

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“Policy-driven author rights retention has been around for some time; many academic institutions have implemented rights-retention policies over the past decade. 

 

More recently, the Rights Retention Strategy proposed by cOAlition S has sparked a healthy debate about the impact of this strategy on academic publishers and about its utility as a pathway to Green Open Access more generally. This panel presentation will bring together representatives from two academic libraries and three society publishers to discuss rights retention strategies in the spirit of fostering open dialogue, sharing perspectives, and increasing understanding across these two communities. Specifically, the panelists will discuss the following questions:

What are your concerns about rights retention policies adopted by institutions or funders? 
How can we work together to enact policies that at a minimum don’t harm society publishers, and that ideally benefit them? 
How can librarians help society publishers in their efforts to transition to Open Access? …”

The Scholcomm Chronicles #1. Rambling about Misconceptions of Open Access | Zenodo

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Abstract:  This is a short essay/opinion-like article in comics form on some misconceptions of Open Access. “Rambling about Misconceptions of Open Access” is also the first installment of “The ScholComm Chronicles”, which will hopefully develop into an ongoing series.

 

 

When free access is not open access | CCSD

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“You have downloaded your article from the website of the journal and you think that, since it is available free, you can deposit this published version in HAL. Well, sometimes it is true but …. sometimes it is not.

Does the mention “Open Access” or “Open” is included in your file? or a Creative Common license (CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, etc) ? If so, you can deposit this publisher’s version in HAL. You sometimes need good eyes to find the licence: in the Elsevier’s files, it is at the bottom of the first page (example); idem for the articles published by Oxford University Press (example). On the other hand, for articles in journals published by Nature Publishing Group and MDPI, the licence is on the last page of the file (example).

But if these mentions are not included in the file, you cannot deposit the published version without first checking if the publisher approves it….”

University of Hull Open Access Policy – revised May 2021 – Digital Repository

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“The University of Hull recognises open access publication as a valuable component of dissemination for research outputs. Open access publication channels for journal articles in particular now sit alongside more traditional publication channels as options: equivalent options are rapidly developing for monographs and research data. Open access dissemination of research outputs broadens the audience that can be reached and enables wider awareness of the research. This can generate more and quicker impact, with concomitant reputational benefits for future research.

Research funders are increasingly advocating and requiring consideration of open access as a means of publication to realise these advantages. Similarly, openness of research generally is now at the forefront of public research funding policy, and open access is a key component of this. This policy describes an approach to open access for the University of Hull that blends the advantages of open access with the requirements laid out by funders in following this path.

This revised and updated policy was agreed in May 2021….”

Open access: it works best when enforced | Campus Morning Mail

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“Last month the National Health and Medical Research Council sought submissions on going immediate OA on publication. If publishers refuse the council suggested authors’ accepted manuscripts could be made available by named institutional repositories (CMM April 16).

Which is good, but Drs Kingsley and Smith (both ex Cambridge University’s Office of Scholarly Communication) suggest tighter wording to make intent impossible to ignore.

And they call for checks, which institutions could use to make sure OA actually occurs. “There is evidence that even ‘light touch’ compliance checking results in significant behavioural change,” they write. Especially if “there is a significant consequence for non-compliance,” – which could be tying grants to OA rules….”

Indian Contribution to Open Access Literature: A Study Based on OpenDOAR

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Abstract:  The study provides a comprehensive view of Indian contribution towards open access repositories particularly the repositories in OpenDOAR. The DOAR contains a total of 5391 repositories. These are scattered among the five continents namely Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. A total number of 94 repositories are from India. Out of 5391 repositories, 901 (16.71%) were contributed by the United States of America, 544 (10.09%) by Japan and 311 (5.77%) by the United Kingdom. India has 94 (1.74%) repositories with 16th position. The paper gives an analysis of the subject areas of coverage, software platform, language coverage and type of hosting organisation of the Indian share in OpenDOAR.