Beware of License to Publish agreements: or ensuring authors retain rights to their openly published work – OA2020

“One of the key points coming out of the 16th Berlin Open Access Conference was the crucial need to fully enable author choice and author rights when publishing their research open access:

We strongly support retention of copyright and all rights therein by authors. Open access agreements with publishers should stipulate that authors only grant “limited” or “non-exclusive” licenses to publishers, and liberal Creative Commons (CC) licenses (e.g., CC BY) should be applied as the default choice. (…) author “license to publish” agreements should not limit the author’s rights in any way.

Not rarely authors are misled by the language of “License to Publish” agreements, unwittingly granting an exclusive license to all rights held in copyright to publishers, which is against the spirit of open access publishing and the licenses that support them.

In this webinar, Arjan Schalken of UKB (Netherlands) and Rich Schneider of University of California San Francisco (USA) talked about problems with current license to publish agreements and discussed strategies to prevent publishers from abusing restrictive CC licenses and ensure that authors retain all their rights and can decide how their work is disseminated and used….”

Open access encyclopedia: an important component of knowledge infrastructure | PUBMET

Abstract:  Since the era of Enlightenment, the role of encyclopaedias has been to organise and structure knowledge, and communicate it to society. In the digital age, professionally edited encyclopaedias have not lost its enlightenment mission; on the contrary, its role in enabling systemic and reliable orientation within the ever-increasing amount of data and information is even more emphasised. By entering the digital age the functionality and usability of encyclopaedias are enhanced enormously. Digital technologies transformed the ways in which encyclopaedic knowledge is prepared, organised and presented, and more importantly facilitated its distribution, accessibility and usage (Jermen & Jeci?, 2018; Jermen & Jeci?, 2020).

Professionally edited open access national encyclopaedias contribute to raising the level of public knowledge by dissemination of reliable and verified information in users’ mother tongue. They provide a connection between experts and average citizens, acting as an important science communication tool, and as such should be at the core of the research and didactic infrastructure of any modern society (Jeci? & Jermen, 2020). Furthermore, in fierce competition with various, often unreliable online information sources, they could also play an important role in the struggle against the speedy growth of disinformation and misinformation (Bentzen, 2018).

As one of the prominent examples of the importance of encyclopedistics in the modern age is the very existence of the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography in Croatia, a publishing house and a scientific institution, which is defined in the governmental act as a “public institution of relevance for the Republic of Croatia”. With the mission to systematise and disseminate scientifically verified knowledge in the broadest span of scientific disciplines, its publications (encyclopaedias, encyclopaedic monographs, lexicons, dictionaries, etc.), targeted for a broader audience, as well as specialists, have been produced in collaboration with numerous high-profile researchers from academia since its foundation in 1950. Since 2008, the Institute has been developing freely accessible collections of digital encyclopaedic editions, which currently comprise approximately 270,000 articles. A great number of Institute’s editions (along with the additional digital content) that are available in open access surely contributes to their increased visibility (more than 15 million page views in 2022) and hence the potential for creating societal impact.

This presentation aims to provide an overview of the development of lexicography and encyclopedistics in the digital environment, primarily from the perspective of the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography. It places special emphasis on the Institute’s open access publishing efforts over the past 15 years. Considering the fact that there are still no dedicated open access publishing schemes for books in Croatia, and that open access still represents a relatively small part of the book publishing landscape in Europe (Gimenez-Toledo et al. 2022), the Institute’s endeavours in this area have been rather innovative. Along with the dissemination of scientifically verified information, open access encyclopaedias give the possibilities of linking to the digital data and collections of other research and cultural institutions, thus serving as the important component of digital knowledge infrastructure (Jermen & Jeci?, 2018). Thanks to this increased connectivity, the Institute has taken part in several projects, initiatives, and communities, both in Croatia and abroad, which will be described in this presentation.

Support community led open access publishing: Help shape the future of scholarly communications – YouTube

“International Open Access Week is an opportunity for the global research community to learn about and share the benefits of Open Access, and to inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

This year’s theme is ‘Community over Commercialisation’ and with this in mind, Jisc and the Open Institutional Publishing Association have joined forces to discuss how libraries can come together as a community and support open access publishing initiatives. Jisc set up the Open Access Community Framework (OACF) in response to community calls to make it simpler for libraries to support open access publishing – and other similar schemes are beginning to emerge too. In this webinar, we will ask ‘what’s stopping us?’ and we will consider the levers that are at our disposal, as a strong and active community, including library and publisher perspectives.”

Beyond compliance: Curation as essential open science infrastructure

Abstract:  Presented October 19, 2023: “Developing New Approaches to Promote Equitable and Inclusive Implementation of Open Scholarship Policies.” Hosted by The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship.

 

Academic Libraries and Open Climate Research: A Call to Action – YouTube

“In this webinar we give a short overview of the state of open access in climate science and frame the importance of open access to address the climate crisis followed by presentations from Chris Bourg, Director of Libraries at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Peter Suber, Senior Advisor on Open Access, Harvard Library and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project. Each presented on successful initiatives from their institutions that have catalyzed action around climate change. The event concludes with a brainstorming session.”

Experts Assure Library Community that CDL Continues – SPARC

“Despite recent litigation, the practice of controlled digital lending (CDL) continues — and is likely here to stay, according to experts recently gathered for a webinar hosted by SPARC.

“CDL is not dead. It’s been around for a long time. It’s ingrained into a lot of libraries as a means of considering access differently,” said Kyle K. Courtney, a lawyer, librarian, and director of copyright and information policy at Harvard University. “It’s another viable solution for collections that are rare, local, and have little zero market harm, but have high value to communities.” …”

Konferenz „Wissenschaftsgeleitetes Open-Access-Publizieren“ | Zenodo

Slides from the “Satellite Conference on ‘Scholar-Led Open Access Publishing’ for the Open Access Days 2023” in Berlin are now online. / Folien der Satelliten-Konferenz „Wissenschaftsgeleitetes Open-Access-Publizieren“ zu den Open-Access-Tagen 2023 sind online. 

ACM Announces New Open Access Publishing Model for the International Conference Proceedings Series

“ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has announced it will transition its International Conference Proceedings Series (ICPS) to a fully Open Access (OA) publishing model beginning January 1, 2024. Making its ICPS program Open Access represents an important step in ACM’s comprehensive shift to full OA publication of all content in the ACM Digital Library, which is planned for completion by December 2025….

The ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (ICPS) provides a mechanism for publishing the contents of high-quality conferences, technical symposia and workshops in the ACM Digital Library, the world’s leading repository of computer science research, thereby increasing their visibility among the international computing community.

ACM has published more than 75,000 research papers in the ACM Digital Library (DL) from over 2,000 conferences through the ICPS program since it was established in 2002. All ICPS published articles appear in the DL and are assigned digital object identifiers (DOIs), enhancing discovery, enabling persistent reference linking and archiving in digital preservation repositories, all while ensuring perpetual access. Publication in the ACM DL ensures high visibility. The ACM DL averages over 4 million unique users from 195 countries every month. On average, users generate 4.4 million page views and 1.75 million downloads each month….”

Improving the Research Culture: COS Celebrates 10 Years

“Improving the Research Culture: COS Celebrates 10 Years

May 25th, 2023,Center for Open SciencePosted in: Open Science, Culture ChangeBlue background with COS logo and tagline that reads “Science Works Best in the Open”

The Center for Open Science (COS) celebrated its 10th anniversary on Monday, May 8, 2023 at the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, DC. This event featured a day-long symposium with partners and supporters to discuss the progress and future direction of open science.

The anniversary symposium included presentations by COS staff and board members about the progress, strategy, and direction to advance its mission, along with stakeholders and colleagues giving presentations that highlighted particular areas of open science practices, impact, and COS’s Theory of Change.

Recordings from this event are now available….”

AIMOS Tip Talk – YouTube

“We often hear that practising open and reproducible research is hard; it takes too much time to learn the new ways of working.

But we know there are tips and hacks that our colleagues have accumulated over years of practice. Simple things that can make big improvements to research quality. It could be some new software that makes reproducible research easier, a great method that you’ve found to be robust, or just a different way of thinking about research, like “randomise everything!”. In this one-hour online session we gathered these great tips from our meta-research community….”

‘Responsible use of what?’ Navigating US university governance to approve an institutional statement on the responsible use of metrics

A slide presentation by Rachel Miles, Research Impact Coordinator at Virginia Tech University Libraries.