“In response to an increasing focus on open access publishing by research funders, the ASU Open Access Publication Fund has been created to help cover publishing costs for ASU affiliates. The new open access fund is supported by the Office of the University Provost and Knowledge Enterprise, with the University Senate’s Research and Creative Activities committee serving in an advisory role….”
OA and the Academy: Evaluating an OA Fund with Authors’ Input
“The UvA Open Access Fund supports ‘diamond open access’ initiatives: publication platforms and journals that do not charge for publication or reading. This year, it is once again possible for new, emerging or proven UvA diamond open access initiatives to apply for funding. The new round of applications closes on 1 July 2023….”
Abstract: This study investigated Gold Open Access journal publication by science and engineering faculty at the authors’ university from 2013 to 2022. Specifically, did Gold Open Access (OA) by these faculty increase, and did the publication rate vary between disciplines? The authors found that Gold OA publication increased by 176% over the past 10 years, and that an important factor was the Libraries’ creation of an Open Access Publishing Fund in 2017. Disciplinary differences in publication rates were also notable, with life sciences research showing the highest rates of open access publication. An analysis of where our faculty are publishing found that MDPI is the most popular Open Access publisher in STEM fields, but many of the new Gold Open Access journals from traditional STEM publishers are also being chosen.
“The University of Groningen (UG) sees diamond open access as a sustainable, affordable and fair model for scholarly publishing. It is committed to supporting trustworthy diamond open access initiatives. In addition, a stimulus fund to support diamond open access journals or publication platforms that have a strong connection with the UG has been established and will run until August 2023….
The University of Groningen Library provides financial support to various international diamond open access initiatives and open access infrastructures….”
Abstract: Current implementations of Open Access (OA) publishing frequently involve Article Publishing Charges (APCs). Increasing evidence emerges that APCs impede researchers with fewer resources in publishing their research OA. We analysed 1.5 million scientific articles from journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals to assess average APCs and their determinants for a comprehensive set of journal publications, across scientific disciplines, world regions and through time. Levels of APCs were strongly stratified by scientific fields and the institutions’ countries, corroborating previous findings on publishing cultures and the impact of mandates of research funders. After controlling for country and scientific field with a multilevel mixture model, however, we found small to moderate effects of levels of institutional resourcing on the level of APCs. Effects were largest in countries with low GDP, suggesting decreasing marginal effects of institutional resources when general levels of funding are high. Our findings provide further evidence on how APCs stratify OA publishing and highlight the need for alternative publishing models.
The French National Fund for Open Science’s first activity report provides a summary of the work carried out over the 2019-2021 period covered by the first National Plan for Open Science.
The National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) set up in 2019 is one of the first major achievements deriving from the First French Plan for Open Science. It is a scientific interest group managed by the CNRS’s Open Research Data Department. Its governance has been entrusted to a Steering Committee made up of the heads of France’s main higher education and research institutions and chaired by Claire Giry, the Director General of Research and Innovation at the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation.
“The first report on the French National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) activities covers the period 2020-2021.
After reminding us of the organisation and the functioning of the scientific interest group, the origin and the amount of the financial resources, the activity report presents the results of its actions for the period. In order to financially sustain projects and initiatives contributing to the development of open science, the FNSO has set up two key actions: calls for projects, where projects are financed after a selection process, and direct financial support to initiatives structuring the open science landscape. These actions are complemented by dedicated funding.
The activity report concludes with the commitments of the FNSO for the period 2022-2023…”
“Yesterday, the Presidents of the European Parliament, the Council and the European Commission signed the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade. The Declaration — which has been in the works since early 2022 — sets out principles for shaping the European digital space in the years to come. The Declaration calls for “promoting interoperability, transparency, open technologies and standards as a way to further strengthen trust in technology as well as consumers’ ability to make autonomous and informed choices” and seeks to “foster participation in the digital public space.”
To help with achieving these ambitious and much-needed objectives, today we are publishing a public draft of a white paper proposing a European Public Digital Infrastructure Fund aimed at building Digital Public Spaces in Europe. The draft whitepaper builds on our previous work on Digital Public Space which we have undertaken together with our partners in the Shared Digital European Digital Sphere coalition. It is based on the observation that there is increasing momentum for supporting public digital infrastructures and that there is a clear opportunity for consolidating the various efforts on the European level.
We are publishing the whitepaper as a public draft for comments and feedback from all interested stakeholders today. The deadline for comments is 27 January 2023, and we plan to release the final version of the paper shortly thereafter….”
“Layers of open source code underlie the technology that permeates every aspect of life, from hospitals and banking to scientific research and social media. Along with the policies and standards that guide its development, this digital infrastructure is freely shared, developed in public view, and open to participation by all. But much of this infrastructure is under-maintained, and existing modes of support often favor specific corporate and government interests over the broad needs of the public. Our foundations are committed to the creation of an equitable, sustainable and secure digital infrastructure that is solidly grounded in the public interest.
The foundations behind this fund have a variety of strategies and funding priorities. But all of us recognize our missions cannot be achieved without a sound infrastructure that is developed squarely in the public interest. This partnership and fund is guided by the following principles which support our shared interests:
Open Source Digital infrastructure is a distinct area of focus that also sits in intersection with a number of other critical technology ecosystems like cybersecurity, data, and the internet
More research, drawing on diverse disciplinary and methodological traditions, is needed to better understand the development and maintenance of open source digital infrastructure
Research can be more effectively moved to practice via pragmatic interventions like frameworks, prototypes, and policies, as well strategic communications and related initiatives.
Corporate and government actors have an important role to play in the sustainability of open source digital infrastructure, but must be complemented by strong civil society and academic institutions who can advocate for the public interest
Since the creation of infrastructure that works for everyone requires broad participation from a diverse range of communities, identities, cultures and geographies, diversity must be centered in the communities that build, maintain, and access open source and digital infrastructure.
Develop work at the intersections of open source and digital infrastructure with other critical social movements focused on democracy, rights, and justice….”
“KU Leuven promotes a sustainable implementation of Open Access and Open Science, and especially sponsors non-profit and community-led initiatives through the KU Leuven Fund for Fair OA. On the one hand, the fund supports various publishing initiatives and infrastructures. On the other hand, the fund joins collective funding programs in the field of open scholarship. On this page you can find an overview of everything that KU Leuven endorses….”
“Open access (OA) and the broad sharing of research outputs has been empirically shown to accelerate scientific progress and benefit society and individuals at scale through improved health outcomes, socioeconomic mobility, and environmental well-being, to name a few. Academic research libraries, for their part, have made significant investments in opening up research and scholarship—particularly research conducted on their campuses and made available through journal subscriptions. Yet these investments are difficult to collect given their distribution across many budget lines, the lack of standardized reporting categories, and inconsistent data collection practices.
In May–June 2022 the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) surveyed its US-based academic research libraries to better understand OA expenses. The survey asked respondents to categorize expenses into six areas of investment: read-and-publish or transitional agreements, article processing charges (APC) or OA funds, non-APC-based OA publishing models, institutional repository services, OA journal hosting and publishing services, and open monographs. This ARL report provides a summary and analysis of the aggregate data from the survey, provides charts on institutional responses and averages, and discusses some outcomes and next steps….”
Abstract: Library-funded open access publishing support at Iowa State University has been growing and has required finding scalable solutions to processes, incorporating new tools, and developing effective workflows. This article is based on a NC Serials Conference presentation that provided insights into the Library’s approach to managing author participation in open access deals with publishers.
Rowan University has seen rapid expansion in terms of enrollments, undergraduate and graduate programs, and research activity over the last decade and has grown from a state college into Rowan University. It is a unique academic institution in that it is one of only three in the United States with both allopathic and osteopathic medical schools. Its acquisition of the Rowan School of Osteopathic Medicine and establishment of the Cooper Medical School of Rowan University were significant factors in the university’s research-intensive Carnegie classification R3 in 2017 and R2 classification in 2018 respectively.
“The recent launch of the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) has attracted both plaudits (e.g. here and here) and criticism (e. g. here and here).
What is COPE? It is a call to universities and research funding agencies to “recognise the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access [OA] to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents.”
Signatories to COPE are asked to commit to, “the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.”
Specifically, signatories are invited to create Gold OA Funds to assist researchers to pay to publish their papers in OA journals — which instead of charging readers to read (via a subscription), impose an author-side article processing fee (APC). The deal is that by paying a fee an author can ensure that the publisher will make his or her paper freely available on the Web for anyone to read, and thereby increase its impact.
COPE is the brain child of Harvard’s Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science, and director of the university’s Office for Scholarly Communication. Shieber outlined the thinking behind COPE in an article published in August in PLoS Biology. COPE is necessary, he explained, because OA journal publishing is currently “at a systematic disadvantage relative to the traditional [subscription, or Toll Access (TA)] model”.
The implication is that authors would be willing to publish their papers in an OA journal, if someone else was prepared to pay the associated publishing fee.
Universities need to support OA publishing, concluded Shieber, in order for it to become “a sustainable, efficient system”. Only then, he added, can the two journal publishing systems (OA and TA) “compete on a more level playing field.”
To date five universities have signed up to COPE, including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell, University of California at Berkeley, and Dartmouth University. …”