“There’s a lot of different terminology around open access, particularly around various levels of open access. I thought it might be helpful to aggregate some of the disparate information into one source on the TOPS Github, which is below! This is sourced from Open Book Publishers, Researcher.Life, and Taylor & Francis.There are many kinds of open access, but they broadly fit into three categories: libre, which is open access that allows content to be free to read and generally, there are no barriers for reuse, gratis, which is open access that allows content to be free to read, but has barriers for reuse, and then there’s one level (black) that fits into neither libre nor gratis….”
Category Archives: oa.gratis
When free access is not open access | CCSD
“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….”
Intellectual Property Rights and Access in Crisis | SpringerLink
Abstract: The importance of access to intellectual property rights (IPR) protected subject-matter in two crucial areas – public health, and educational and cultural engagement – has been extensively demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although they involve separate legal areas, patent and copyright, the common thread linking the two is intellectual property’s difficult relationship with access in the public interest. This paper examines the tensions caused by access barriers, the tools used to reduce them and their effectiveness. It is clear that the access barriers magnified by COVID-19 are not restricted to narrow or specific contexts but are widespread. They are created by, and are a feature of, our existing IPR frameworks. Open movements provide limited remedies because they are not designed to, nor can adequately address the wide range of access barriers necessary to promote the public interest. Existing legislative mechanisms designed to remove access barriers similarly fail to effectively remedy access needs. These existing options are premised on the assumption that there is a singular “public” motivated by homogenous “interests”, which fails to reflect the plurality and cross-border reality of the public(s) interest(s) underpinning the welfare goals of IPR. We conclude that a systemic re-evaluation is required and call for positive and equitable legal measures protective of the public(s) interest(s) to be built within IPR frameworks that also address non-IPR barriers. The current pandemic and development of a “new normal” provides a crucial opportunity to comprehensively consider the public(s) interest(s), not just during a global health crisis, but on an ongoing basis.
News & Views: Open Access is not just for Open Access Journals – Delta Think
“We can also use this break-out to assess what might happen if hybrid journals flipped. Assuming submissions stay constant, the currently Paid Access proportion gives us our maximum additional APC-based income. The economics of the Public Access content depend on how much the market would pay to flip the license to an open access one given the content is already free to read. Pressure to reduce subscription prices (and even flip to OA) could be determined by adding the open and public access components, as neither require subscriptions. At a little over 20%, this is not insignificant….
Perhaps the most surprising finding in content outside fully OA journals, is that journals with no OA option make proportionally more content Open Access and Public Access than their hybrid counterparts….
Literature search strategies focus on finding articles, and so looking at per-article access options is useful and relevant for researchers. Here we see that the proportion of content that is Open Access and Public Access is growing, although the growth appears to be slowing….
Across the market as a whole, it seems that you are LESS likely to find OA content in a hybrid journal which offers OA options, than in a journal with no advertised OA options at all.”
News & Views: Open Access is not just for Open Access Journals – Delta Think
“We can also use this break-out to assess what might happen if hybrid journals flipped. Assuming submissions stay constant, the currently Paid Access proportion gives us our maximum additional APC-based income. The economics of the Public Access content depend on how much the market would pay to flip the license to an open access one given the content is already free to read. Pressure to reduce subscription prices (and even flip to OA) could be determined by adding the open and public access components, as neither require subscriptions. At a little over 20%, this is not insignificant….
Perhaps the most surprising finding in content outside fully OA journals, is that journals with no OA option make proportionally more content Open Access and Public Access than their hybrid counterparts….
Literature search strategies focus on finding articles, and so looking at per-article access options is useful and relevant for researchers. Here we see that the proportion of content that is Open Access and Public Access is growing, although the growth appears to be slowing….
Across the market as a whole, it seems that you are LESS likely to find OA content in a hybrid journal which offers OA options, than in a journal with no advertised OA options at all.”
Underline | Watch lectures from the best researchers.
“The world’s first repository platform for cutting-edge scientific lectures, research, discussions and conference live-streaming….”
We are building a forum-like platform for speakers and peers to engage with each other and spark ideas….
Each lecture has it’s own DOI number, it can be referenced, cited and shared across platforms and scientific literature….
Cite and share any lectures across the platforms. Be it a colleague from your organisation or collaborator overseas, Underline makes it easy for you to keep everyone on the same page.”
Apparently gratis at best, not libre. See the terms of use.
https://www.underline.io/terms-of-use
‘Don’t close the definition of “open” for books’ | Research Information
“Open access began about 20 years ago – with the formal definition, justifying O and A capitalisations, being largely settled by 2003. Since then this definition of open access has been most successfully applied to journal articles.
Now books are getting focused attention. Some research funders, particularly in Europe but elsewhere too, are determined to radically increase the pace at which open access grows. Research they fund that is published as books may in many cases need to become open access. However, current approaches to open access for journals cannot work for books at a large scale.
If we apply open access to books in the way it is applied to journals, we will fail. If the failure is simply that books do not become more ‘open’, that would be one thing. But it is possible that academic researchers will find themselves required to publish books in ways that will be unsustainable for academic publishers. For Cambridge University Press, where I work, if our books earned only a few percentage points less revenue than they do now, our books programme would become loss-making. Academic books are a vital part of many researchers’ lives and careers. We must not put them at risk….
A definition of ‘open’ for books will therefore need to focus on content being freely readable while relaxing the requirements for allowing re-distribution and re-use. …”
Universalisation of Scientifc Dissemination
“This is a presentation given on September 28th by Dr. Eric Archambault, world expert in bibliometrics and founder of 1science, during Scielo 20 Years Conference in São Paulo, Brazil.The panel was entitled ” Open Access – routes towards universalization : gold and hybrid journals, green, and others” His contribution, “Universalization of (OA) scientific dissemination”, demonstrates the limitation of traditional databases in measuring OA and shows how the 1findr product has universal discovery and inclusive measures.”
A few thoughts on OA Monitoring and CRISs (I) | euroCRIS | Pablo de Castro
“In the wake of the AT2OA workshop on Open Access monitoring to be imminently held in Vienna, the post looks into recent attempts to coordinate the various national-level initiatives that are taking place in the area and suggests some possible prerequisites for this international endeavour to be able to succeed. It also argues that a successful OA monitoring in the pioneering countries should pave the way for other ones to eventually follow for their own progress assessment needs. A European Council statement was issued in May 2016 aiming to achieve full Open Access to research outputs by 2020. This was hailed at the time as a major step forwards in the push to widen access to the results of publicly-funded research. Nearly two years later there’s a generalised awareness of the difficulty to reach this political goal across the EU by the proposed deadline. This should however not stop the efforts to achieve further progress and to improve the way Open Access is being implemented – this 100% Open Access objective is clearly achievable in specific countries that will then to some extent provide a best practice approach. One of the areas where more work needs to be done is the actual monitoring of the progress in Open Access implementation. This has been on the cards for some time now, since national roadmaps with specific milestones and deadlines for reaching this 100% Open Access started to be produced quite a long time before the European Council meeting itself was held. This national-level discussions have resulted in a number of initiatives to monitor Open Access that are being implemented in different countries. The Knowledge Exchange, that brings together stakeholders like the Jisc in the UK, the DFG in Germany, SURF in the Netherlands, DEFF in Denmark or CSC in Finland, have taken a particularly relevant role in the past couple of years in ensuring that the various national-level approaches to Open Access monitoring would have the opportunity to discuss the progress with each other at a number of workshops….”
Research: Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature | eLife | Daniel Scott Himmelstein et al.
“Abstract: The website Sci-Hub enables users to download PDF versions of scholarly articles, including many articles that are paywalled at their journal’s site. Sci-Hub has grown rapidly since its creation in 2011, but the extent of its coverage was unclear. Here we report that, as of March 2017, Sci-Hub’s database contains 68.9% of the 81.6 million scholarly articles registered with Crossref and 85.1% of articles published in toll access journals. We find that coverage varies by discipline and publisher, and that Sci-Hub preferentially covers popular, paywalled content. For toll access articles, we find that Sci-Hub provides greater coverage than the University of Pennsylvania, a major research university in the United States. Green open access to toll access articles via licit services, on the other hand, remains quite limited. Our interactive browser at https://greenelab.github.io/scihub allows users to explore these findings in more detail. For the first time, nearly all scholarly literature is available gratis to anyone with an Internet connection, suggesting the toll access business model may become unsustainable.”
Lokaverkefni: “Opinn aðgangur að rannsóknum : tækifæri og áskoranir fyrir háskólasamfélagið á íslandi” | Skemman
A thesis by Sigurbjörg Jóhannesdóttir, submitted in October 2015.
Abstract: Open Access (OA) are introduced and discussed associated with open scholarship and the international scientific community. The status of Open Access in Iceland is explored through the laws and policies relating to OA, gratis and libre publications within scholarly journals, publication within open repositories, and the opportunities that scientists have to publish scholarly papers in OA.
Data was collected through interviews with experts in the Open Access field. Two questions were used from a study of OA that was conducted among scientists at Reykjavik University (RU) 2014, as well as an analysis of a list of their published articles in scholarly journals in 2013.
The results show that OA is growing slowly in Iceland. Four institutions have OA policies. Icelandic scientists are not taking full advantage of the rules of journals about publishing articles within OA. Scientists’ beliefs concerning the barriers standing in their way for publishing sholarly papers in OA are based on a lack of knowledge and a lack of access to institutional repositories in which they might wish to publish their articles.
The opportunities and challenges that Icelandic universities face regarding open sholarship are outlined and discussed. The universities need to have policies for OA and Open Educational Resources (OER) which are consistent with what is happening internationally. Academics need to receive helpful information on OA, they also need to receive encouragement, advice and support concerning publishing in OA. The universities and the scientific community in Iceland need to take a joint decision on what are the best ways for the continued preservation and publication of research and educational resources in OA.
Is Openness Enough? | Morsi
Abstract: Openness, applied in scholarly and research practices, has garnered increasing interest in recent years. With the broadening reach of Open Access as an alternative scholarly publishing model, there is anticipation that open scholarship practices will produce desirable outcomes for research and access to knowledge. The purpose of this article is twofold: firstly to highlight that Open Access is more than just the removal of paywalls, and that it is part of a wider set of open practices that can potentially yield a more collaborative and equitable global landscape of knowledge production. Secondly, to present the IDS [Institute of Development Studies] Bulletin as a case study for an Open Access publication that has evolved to adapt to a changing scholarly publishing landscape. By critiquing prevalent discourse on openness alongside this case study, we hope that this article contributes to conversations on issues at the intersection of open scholarship, collaborative research and equitable access to knowledge.
Knowledge Unbound: Selected Writings on Open Access, 2002–2011
This is the book home page for Peter Suber’s _Knowledge Unbound: Selected Writings on Open Access, 2002–2011_, MIT Press, 2016.
Open Access (the book)
The book home page for Peter Suber’s _Open Access_ (MIT Press, 2012), including a growing list of updates and supplements.
Briefing paper: Open Access, from PASTEUR4OA
An introduction to OA from PASTEUR4OA.