Category Archives: oa.funders

September 2023 Librarian Community Call

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“Rights retention has become an increasing area of focus for many funders, particularly as stronger open research policies are implemented. On September 12th at 12pm ET / 9am PT, the next OpenCon Library Community Call will feature experts on these policies and how they might evolve and be strengthened. Johan Rooryck and Sally Rumsey will provide an overview of cOAlition S’s approach to rights retention, and intellectual property expert Michael Carroll, professor of law at American University, will discuss the ways U.S. federal agencies might approach rights retention in implementing the OSTP Memo….”

Queen’s and the Tri-Agency’s Update to National Open Access Policy | Queen’s University Library

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“As Canada moves to follow the open access example set by Europe and the USA, questions about financial sustainability and equity must be addressed.

On June 4th, 2023, Canada’s federal research granting agencies announced a review of the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications*, with the goal of requiring immediate open and free access to all academic publications generated through Tri-Agency supported research by the end of 2025. At Queen’s, this will mean significant changes to relevant policies and processes, primarily related to navigating the pay-to-publish model currently dominating the publishing landscape in the form of article processing charges (APCs).

APCs are extra fees that authors pay to academic publishers to make their articles openly available rather than barriered behind paywalls. Academic publishers are increasingly embracing this pay-to-publish business model, making the cost of open access publishing prohibitively expensive for many authors. APC fees vary by publisher and journal and can range from less than $1,000 USD to over $11,000 USD. Estimates indicate that Canadian authors spent at least $27.6 million USD on APCs related to Tri-Agency funded work from 2015 to 2018. This is in addition to the millions of dollars spent annually by academic libraries to provide access to paywalled articles, sometimes in the same journals in which the APC-paid open access articles appear. There are ongoing questions and concerns about not only the financial sustainability of academic publishers’ APC-driven business model, but the potential of this model for creating and reinforcing global inequities to the detriment of authors, libraries, and academic institutions.  Ensuring open, accessible, and sustainable scholarly publishing is all the more urgent given Queen’s University’s strongly established commitment to advancing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals including ensuring equal access to university education and strengthening protection and safeguards for the world’s cultural and natural heritage.

While the University does not currently fund individual author APC fees, it does support open access through other means, including publishing agreements with select publishers, support for open infrastructure like Open Journal Systems and QSpace, and membership and participation in provincial, national, and international bodies promoting and supporting sustainable open access….”

Dear Colleague Letter: Innovations in Open Science (IOS) Planning Workshops (nsf23141) | NSF – National Science Foundation

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“The recent memo titled “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” also referred to as the Nelson Memo1, issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), has provided policy guidance to federal agencies on public access requirements for federally funded research. The need for a better, innovative data and research infrastructure that embraces open science principles to serve the interconnected scientific communities has never been as urgent.

Through this Dear Colleague Letter (DCL), the Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences (AGS) in the Directorate for Geosciences (GEO) is calling for workshop proposals2 focused on identifying critical needs for innovations in open science for data infrastructure that can serve the research community at a national-needs level, and have the potential to significantly advance research in atmospheric and geospace sciences, ensuring their research outputs, broadly defined, in compliance with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reproducible) principles. The workshop proposals will provide the AGS community an opportunity to come together to discuss needs, best practices, and resources necessary to build a data infrastructure through which open and equitable research can be achieved….”

CONCORDIA OPEN SCIENCE WORKING GROUP RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FOSTERING OPEN SCIENCE AT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY

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“Concordia should: ? Broaden the university’s senate resolution on open access (dated to 2010) and update it to reflect the current state of open science and the need for widespread departmental and researcher buy-in. ? Continue to support foundational initiatives, like the Open Science @Concordia conference (inaugurally held in May 2022) and the Concordia Open Science Working Group led by Drs. Byers-Heinlein and Alessandroni, alongside library-hosted Open Access Week and Open Education Week events and services, which are crucial milestones along this pathway. These are key to creating awareness of the benefits of adopting open science practices, both broadly and in discipline-specific ways. ? Further the development of copyright support through an institutionally supported rights retention strategy, which can support green open access and diversify how research can be made openly accessible. ? Promote public outreach by creating (and enhancing existing) training programs in popular science writing for faculty and students using local expertise from the Department of Journalism, the Department of Communication Studies, and the Library. ? Strengthen ties with other institutions and organizations to secure long-term funding and resources for the implementation of open science. ? Position principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion at the core of open science practices, including designing, generating, and publishing science. ? Promote open education at Concordia, for example by highlighting in course calendars which courses use open materials, open software, and renewable assignments….”

Recommendations for Fostering Open Science at Concordia University – Spectrum: Concordia University Research Repository

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Abstract:  Open science—and open scholarship more broadly—is revolutionizing how research is conducted by democratizing access to knowledge and bringing inclusion and transparency to the forefront. By making research processes and products open and accessible to all, open science promotes fairness, efficiency, and accountability in the scholarly enterprise and ensures that the benefits of scientific and humanistic progress are shared with all segments of society.

In Canada, fostering the practical implementation of open science practices (e.g., open access, open educational resources, open data, open labs, open notebooks, open evaluation, open hardware, open-source software, and citizen science) is rapidly becoming a top priority. The Government of Canada’s Roadmap for Open Science envisions a complete transition to an “open by design and by default” model by 2025. This transition is underway, with policies being promoted by federal and provincial funding agencies. For example, the federal funding agencies, also known as the Tri-Council, have enacted an open-access policy requiring grant recipients to ensure that publications funded by the agencies are freely accessible within 12 months of publication. This can be achieved by depositing peer-reviewed manuscripts in institutional or disciplinary repositories or publishing them in open-access journals. Departing from the Tri-Agency model and aligning with Plan S, the Fonds de Recherche du Québec (FRQ) updated its Open-Access Policy in 2022, requiring that articles and theses be made freely available under an open license upon publication or institutional deposit. The fast-approaching date of 2025, in combination with new mandates and policies, will require institutional support and advocacy to achieve effective solutions.

On May 27, 2022, Concordia University took a decisive step towards advancing open science by hosting the Open Science @Concordia conference, which brought together a diverse group of open science advocates and stakeholders from Concordia University and other institutions. The conference included keynote talks by national and international speakers, interdisciplinary lightning-talk sessions, and roundtables. Ten national and international speakers presented on topics like open access, open data, open infrastructures, open educational resources, and citizen science. Jessica Polka (ASAPbio, USA) delivered a powerful keynote on the pressures of publishing with preprints, and Malvika Sharan (The Turing Way, UK) presented on fostering open communities.

Building upon the momentum generated from the conference, we established the Concordia Open Science Working Group, whose first workshop was held on September 30, 2022. During this half-day session, more than 20 faculty members, trainees, and students from 8 different academic units, including Psychology, Computer Science and Software Engineering, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Biology, Mechanical, Industrial, and Aerospace Engineering, Education, Communication Studies, and the Library, gathered at the Loyola Campus to explore the challenges and possibilities of promoting open science at Concordia. This report presents the key insights derived from this workshop, as well as a comprehensive examination of the methodologies used and a full account of the results.

ARL Comments on NASA Public Access Plan: Increasing Access to the Results of Scientific Research – Association of Research Libraries

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“On March 28, 2023, the US Department of Transportation (DOT) released a request for information on “NASA’S Public Access Plan: Increasing Access to the Results of Scientific Research.” The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is pleased to offer the following comments in response to this request….”

Statement of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) on European Council Conclusions on “High-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing”

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“In particular, the DFG underpins the propositions that scholarly publication channels ? should continue to evolve as high-quality, openly accessible, sustainably funded digital infrastructures for research; ? should be organised in such a way that they protect the principles of the freedom of research, contribute to research integrity and quality, and ensure the highest possible accessibility and re-usability of research results; ? must apply the highest standards to the quality assurance of publications, the trustworthiness of processes and the reliability and reproducibility of content; ? should make even more effective use of the innovative possibilities of digital publishing…”

DFG, German Research Foundation – DFG welcomes EU Council Conclusions on Scholarly Publishing

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“The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) welcomes the Council Conclusions on scholarly publishing adopted today, Tuesday 23 May 2023, by the Com-petitiveness Council of the European Union.

In the opinion of the largest research funding organisation and central self-governing body of the research community in Germany, the conclusions adopted under the title “On high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing” contain a series of trend-setting recommendations. These are commented on in detail in a statement issued simultane-ously by the DFG.

The DFG underlines that the academic publication system should continue to develop based on high-quality, openly accessible, sustainably funded digital infrastructures for research. It must be organised in such a way that the principles of the freedom of research are protected, scien-tific integrity and quality are guaranteed and the accessibility and re-usability of research re-sults are enabled….”

Public access to published science is under threat in the US | InPublishing

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Eight science publishers have signed a letter to the House Appropriations subcommittee to raise the dangers of the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill’s draft language.

Frontiers says The US House Appropriations Committee has released its 2024 Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill. It proposes new spending of $58 billion and seeks to “rein in the Washington bureaucracy by right-sizing agencies and programs.”

A group of eight science publishers have signed a letter to the House Appropriations subcommittee to raise the dangers of the bill’s draft language. If enacted, it would block federally funded research from being freely available to American taxpayers without delay on publication.

Individual Americans would be prevented from seeing the full benefits of the more than $90 billion in scientific research they fund each year via taxes. Science for the few who can access it – as opposed to the many who pay for it – is inefficient as scientific or democratic governmental policy.

 

 

RE: NASA Public Access Plan for Increasing Access to the Results of NASA-Supported Research

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“We appreciate the benefits that collaborations with external partners, such as CHORUS, may provide. Because third-party vendors operate under terms that are subject to change, they should serve as a supplement to support compliance, rather than a proxy to indicate compliance. This approach ensures that NASA remains in a strong position to leverage external partners where it benefits the agency and its grantees while retaining flexibility to adapt its approach should the terms change under which services such as CHORUS are offered—without the burden of revising policy.

We further recommend that NASA explicitly emphasize the availability of compliance options that do not present financial barriers. NASA’s plan and associated policies and guidance should clearly describe how authors can fully comply with its public access policy at no cost by depositing the author’s accepted manuscript into NASA’s PubSpace or any other agency-approved repository.

Because authors may be encouraged to pay added Open Access fees in circumstances when they are unnecessary for compliance, NASA should clarify that any charges from publishers are publication charges—not compliance charges. It is critical that authors do not conflate compliance with article processing charges (APCs), which create significant barriers for less-well-resourced authors and institutions to make their research available. It is important for researchers to understand that the option to post their final peer-reviewed manuscript into an agency-designated repository is an affordable and equitable full compliance mechanism that is available to them.

Institutional repositories run by libraries and other research institutions generally do not charge authors to deposit articles or manuscripts. These can play an important role in easing compliance burdens on authors, improving discoverability of research outputs, and providing long-term preservation support. Therefore, we strongly recommend that NASA allow for the deposit of publications into other repositories beyond PubSpace, and suggest that NASA utilize the guidance set out in the U.S. Repository Network’s Desirable Characteristics of Digital Publications Repositories….”

[ALA action alert on bill to block implementation of Nelson memo]

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“Unfortunately, a new House appropriations bill includes a provision that would block a Biden Administration order that ensures public access to unclassified research.

We must remind Congress why access to information is vital for libraries and the users we serve….”

The Corporate Capture of Open-Access Publishing

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“As the heads of progressive university presses on two sides of the North Atlantic, we support open and equitable access to knowledge. If history is any guide, however, the new policies may unintentionally contribute to greater consolidation in academic publishing — and encourage commercial publishers to value quantity over quality and platforms over people. Unless the new open-access policies are accompanied by direct investment from funders, governments, and universities in nonprofit publishers and publishing infrastructure, they could pose a threat to smaller scholarly and scientific societies and university presses, and ultimately to trust in published knowledge….

Without meaning to, many putatively open-access policies could further privatize the results of academic research….

The open-access movement has its roots in the practice of self-archiving (also called “Green” open access), wherein scholars deposit prepublication versions of their work in university repositories or community-owned preprint servers that function (to the extent possible) outside the economic strictures of formal publishing. Publishers effectively co-opted the movement by promoting instead models in which authors or their institutions pay publishers for the privilege of openness (also called “Gold” open access). As a result, open-access policies that enforce openness at any cost, under any model, have paradoxically, and against the intentions of policymakers, furthered the commodification of knowledge….

With paid open access, the academy is being asked, in effect, to subsidize the commercial sector’s use of university-research outputs with no reciprocal financial contribution….

Questions about academic freedom, widening inequality, the impact on smaller publishers, and the applicability of science-based policy for the arts, social sciences, and humanities have long been overlooked in conversations about open access….

The answers, we propose, lie somewhere in that overlooked, undervalued middle ground of nonprofit or fair-profit university-press publishing, mission-aligned with the academy. Many of those presses have been leaders in findings ways to meet the goals of providing both equitable access to knowledge and equitable participation in the creation of new knowledge. These are the publishers that universities should protect, invest in, and make deals with. Perhaps an international network of university-based publishers, libraries, and other public-knowledge providers could work together, balancing paid-for and open research content in a way that is sustainable rather than extractive, and that still values the research itself. Such a network could face down the likes of academia.edu….”

Public access to published science “under threat in the US” | Research Information

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“A group of eight scientific publishers has written collectively to the US government warning that a proposed bill is putting public access to published science under threat.

The US House Appropriations Committee’s 2024 Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill proposes new spending of $58 billion and reportedly seeks to “rein in the Washington bureaucracy by right-sizing agencies and programs.”

The eight publishers ­– eLife, Frontiers, JMIR Publications, MDPI, the Open Library of Humanities, PeerJ, PLOS and Ubiquity Press – have signed a letter to ‘raise the dangers of the bill’s draft language’, warning that, if enacted, it would block federally funded research from being freely available to American taxpayers without delay on publication.

The letter states: “If enacted, the current Appropriations Bill will prevent American taxpayers from seeing the societal benefits of the more than $90 billion in scientific research that the U.S. government funds each year, as most of the research remains locked behind publishing paywalls. And it will remove the current requirement for commercial publishers to adapt their business models to make public access to science fair….”

SPARC response to NIST RFI

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“SPARC strongly supports the OSTP Memorandum’s emphasis on ensuring equity in contributing to, accessing, and benefitting from the results of federally funded research, and we appreciate NIST’s specific attention on how to ensure equity in publication opportunities for its funded authors. To ensure equity in publication opportunities, NIST should provide authors with compliance options that do not present financial barriers. To this end, NIST’s plan and associated policies and guidance should clearly state that authors can fully comply with its public access policy at no cost by depositing their author’s accepted manuscripts into PubMed Central (PMC) or any other agency-approved repository.

Further, NIST should clarify that any fee that authors may be asked to pay is a publication fee, and not a fee required by NIST for compliance. It is critical that authors do not conflate compliance with article processing charges (APCs), which create significant barriers for less-well-resourced authors and institutions to make their research available….

NIST should highlight the diversity of publication models available to authors who may face financial barriers in paying for APCs—including Subscribe to Open (S2O) and Diamond Open Access. Additionally, institutional repositories run by libraries and other research institutions generally do not charge authors to deposit articles or manuscripts, and can play an important role in easing compliance burdens on authors, improving discoverability of research outputs, and providing long-term preservation support. Therefore, we strongly recommend that NIST allow for the deposit of publications into other repositories beyond PMC, and suggest that NIST utilize the guidance set out in the U.S. Repository Network’s Desirable Characteristics of Digital Publications Repositories….” 

NIST RFI: Plan for Providing Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research – SPARC

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“On June 30, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued a request for input on the agency’s draft public access plan.

SPARC submitted comments outlining the need for NIST to clarify the language in their plan to ensure research funded by NIST is made immediately available, with no embargo, to the public as required by the Nelson Memo.

Read SPARC’s Comments: Response to NIST RFI on Draft Plan for Providing Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research.”