Category Archives: oa.sustainability

Principles of Diamond Open Access Publishing: a draft proposal | Plan S

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“The Action Plan for Diamond Open Access outlines a set of priorities to develop sustainable, community-driven, academic-led and -owned scholarly communication. Its goal is to create a global federation of Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) journals and platforms around shared principles, guidelines, and quality standards while respecting their cultural, multilingual and disciplinary diversity. It proposes a definition of Diamond OA as a scholarly publication model in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers. Diamond OA is community-driven, academic-led and -owned, and serves a wide variety of generally small-scale, multilingual, and multicultural scholarly communities. 

Still, Diamond OA is often seen as a mere business model for scholarly publishing: no fees for authors or readers. However, Diamond OA can be better characterized by a shared set of values and principles that go well beyond the business aspect. These distinguish Diamond OA communities from other approaches to scholarly publishing. It is therefore worthwhile to spell out these values and principles, so they may serve as elements of identification for Diamond OA communities. 

The principles formulated below are intended as a first draft. They are not cast in stone, and meant to inspire discussion and evolve as a living document that will crystallize over the coming months. Many of these principles are not exclusive to Diamond OA communities. Some are borrowed or adapted from the more general 2019 Good Practice Principles for scholarly communication services defined by Sparc and COAR1, or go back to the 2016 Vienna Principles. Others have been carefully worked out in more detail by the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication in a self-assessment format for scholarly communities. Additional references can be added in the discussion.

The formulation of these principles has benefited from many conversations over the years with various members of the Diamond community now working together in the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, cOAlition S, the CRAFT-OA and DIAMAS projects, the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA), Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA), the Open Library of Humanities, OPERAS, SciELO, Science Europe, and Redalyc-Amelica. This document attempts to embed these valuable contributions into principles defining the ethos of Diamond OA publishing….”

Snyder & Fathallah (2023) Sustainable Futures for OA Books: The Open Book Collective | The Journal of Electronic Publishing

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Snyder, L. O. & Fathallah, J., (2023) “Sustainable Futures for OA Books: The Open Book Collective”, The Journal of Electronic Publishing 26(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3372

Abstract:

This article describes and explains the need for the work of the Open Book Collective (OBC). The OBC is a major output of the COPIM project (Community-Led Infrastructures for Open Access Monographs). The collective will bring together diverse small-to-medium open access (OA) publishers, open publishing service providers, libraries, and other research institutions to create a new, mutually supportive, and interdependent community space and platform designed to sustainthe future of OA book publishing. The OBC is founded upon equitable, community-led governance and helping publishers move beyond Book Processing Charges (BPCs). Central to the functioning of the Open Book Collective is an online platform that will make it far quicker and easier for libraries and other potential subscribers to compare, evaluate, and subscribe to different OA publishers and open service providers via membership packages. The OBC supports small-to-medium OA publishers by way of the COPIM (Community-Led Publication Infrastructures for Open Access Books) philosophy of “scaling small.” This allows publishers and other members to operate sustainably and collaboratively whilst retaining their diverse and singular editorial missions, rather than operating from philosophies centered on economic growth, competition, and monopoly.

 

Principles of Diamond Open Access Publishing: a draft proposal – the diamond papers

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Introduction

The Action Plan for Diamond Open Access outlines a set of priorities to develop sustainable, community-driven, academic-led and -owned scholarly communication. Its goal is to create a global federation of Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) journals and platforms around shared principles, guidelines, and quality standards while respecting their cultural, multilingual and disciplinary diversity. It proposes a definition of Diamond OA as a scholarly publication model in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers. Diamond OA is community-driven, academic-led and -owned, and serves a wide variety of generally small-scale, multilingual, and multicultural scholarly communities. 

Still, Diamond OA is often seen as a mere business model for scholarly publishing: no fees for authors or readers. However, Diamond OA can be better characterized by a shared set of values and principles that go well beyond the business aspect. These distinguish Diamond OA communities from other approaches to scholarly publishing. It is therefore worthwhile to spell out these values and principles, so they may serve as elements of identification for Diamond OA communities. 

The principles formulated below are intended as a first draft. They are not cast in stone, and meant to inspire discussion and evolve as a living document that will crystallize over the coming months. Many of these principles are not exclusive to Diamond OA communities. Some are borrowed or adapted from the more general 2019 Good Practice Principles for scholarly communication services defined by Sparc and COAR1, or go back to the 2016 Vienna Principles. Others have been carefully worked out in more detail by the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication in a self-assessment format for scholarly communities. Additional references can be added in the discussion.

The formulation of these principles has benefited from many conversations over the years with various members of the Diamond community now working together in the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, cOAlition S, the CRAFT-OA and DIAMAS projects, the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA), Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA), the Open Library of Humanities, OPERAS, SciELO, Science Europe, and Redalyc-Amelica. This document attempts to embed these valuable contributions into principles defining the ethos of Diamond OA publishing.

 

Path to Open: Exploring a Sustainable Model in Publishing New Open Access Books

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“The quest for a sustainable model to support open access (OA) academic books continues, especially for literature in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. While there is a proliferation of initiatives, they tend to be publisher-specific or small scale. Achieving sustainability is challenging, particularly for small and medium university presses, but the demand and interest in the content is high. When publishers converted licensed ebooks to open access, they saw usage surge by 5,500% on JSTOR.

How can we meet the scholarly community’s shared goal of increasing equity and access to knowledge while ensuring value for funding libraries, reducing the financial risk for scholarly publishers, and expanding authors’ impact? In this webinar, you will learn how partners spanning the entire community collaborated to develop Path to Open, an innovative model for OA monograph publishing.

Representatives from two university presses, University of Tennessee library, The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), and the nonprofit JSTOR, will explore their new initiative to meet these challenges and address opportunities. You will learn how this program supports bibliodiversity in publishing, provides infrastructure and scale for the publishing and library community, and selects titles that will have high impact for its readers. You will also find out why libraries are participating in this pilot and the factors considered in the decision-making process. And you will hear how you, too, can join us on this promising path to open.”

Europe’s academic publishing system must become sustainable and equitable – The Guild

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“The Guild strongly supports the draft of the Council conclusions on scholarly publishing in its calls to support non-APC-based open-access models, have APC commensurate to publication services provided, and to ensure academic publishing remains aimed at research excellence and integrity. We fully endorse the Council’s recognition of the increasing costs of paywalls for access to scientific publications as well as scholarly publishing. Therefore, The Guild calls for the development of alternative models that do not charge fees to authors or readers.

The Guild also emphasises that the Member States must ensure researchers’ author’s retention rights and secondary publication rights and coordinate to harmonise the legislation across borders. The academic publishing system must prioritise the dissemination of high-quality research while upholding the principles of research integrity and academic freedom.

Finally, The Guild supports the Council’s recognition that researchers play a crucial role in the academic publishing ecosystem and that their contributions to the well-functioning of research communities should be better recognised in research assessment. We strongly encourage the creation of initiatives aiming to improve the quality, transparency, and efficiency of peer review mechanisms.”

Future of Scholarly Communications Committee Promotes Equitable, Sustainable Academic Publications at Faculty Senate Meeting | The Cornell Daily Sun

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“The Ad Hoc Committee: Future of Scholarly Communications presented at the Wednesday, March 8 Faculty Senate meeting in Schwartz Auditorium at Rockefeller Hall to discuss the effects of large corporations on academic publications.

To kick off the meeting, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian Elaine Westbrooks, who serves as the co-chair of the committee, emphasized the significance of Cornell libraries….

Following Westbrooks’s presentation, Prof. K. Max Zhang, engineering, who serves on the University Faculty Library Board, introduced the Ad Hoc Committee: Future of Scholarly Communications. According to Zhang, the committee is made up of roughly 15 members, representing both Cornell’s library system and academic side.

The committee details seven charges towards more accessible scholarly journals. Zhang summarizes these charges into four categories — assessing the current publishing model, evaluating new publishing models, identifying the University’s role in new models and reporting to the faculty about the problems of for-profit publishing….

“I want to be clear that I do not believe that publishers are inherently evil, or bad,” Westbrooks said. “What I really want to bring home is the fact that this is not good for science, it’s not good for scholarship and it’s not good for innovation to have a small set of multinational companies, that we call an oligopoly, control all the academic publishing in the world.” …”

Lack of sustainability plans for preprint services risks their potential to improve science | Naomi Penfold, March 2nd, 2023 | Impact of Social Sciences

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“…it is critical we explore how to sustain a viable and vibrant ecosystem of preprints infrastructure that is independent of commercial publishers – this is not yet assured. This infrastructure includes servers through which preprints are shared online, as well as tools and services that support the use of preprints. arXiv is a preprint server that is considered essential in several communities in physics, computer science and other quantitative disciplines. Despite successfully building a revenue model that shares the burden between Cornell University, the Simons Foundation and several members and supporters, arXiv’s “funding is still outpaced by [their] growth” – the server hosts over 2 million preprints already and is growing by 10% each year. And while arXiv has been supporting more and more scholars to share and discover preprints, the team behind it has been through significant changes in leadership and is dealing with the urgent need to modernize their 30-year-old technology. As a former Executive Director of arXiv noted, “[arXiv’s success] may not last forever”. Similarly, the recent news that Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has renewed its financial support for the leading preprint servers in biology and medicine, bioRxiv and medRxiv is welcome relief, but this support is temporary, and the team must find a way to continue in the long run. Unfortunately, without greater transparency in the governance of bioRxiv and medRxiv, we do not know if there is anything stopping them from being acquired by a commercial publisher….”

Lack of sustainability plans for preprint services risks their potential to improve science | Naomi Penfold, March 2nd, 2023 | Impact of Social Sciences

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“…it is critical we explore how to sustain a viable and vibrant ecosystem of preprints infrastructure that is independent of commercial publishers – this is not yet assured. This infrastructure includes servers through which preprints are shared online, as well as tools and services that support the use of preprints. arXiv is a preprint server that is considered essential in several communities in physics, computer science and other quantitative disciplines. Despite successfully building a revenue model that shares the burden between Cornell University, the Simons Foundation and several members and supporters, arXiv’s “funding is still outpaced by [their] growth” – the server hosts over 2 million preprints already and is growing by 10% each year. And while arXiv has been supporting more and more scholars to share and discover preprints, the team behind it has been through significant changes in leadership and is dealing with the urgent need to modernize their 30-year-old technology. As a former Executive Director of arXiv noted, “[arXiv’s success] may not last forever”. Similarly, the recent news that Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has renewed its financial support for the leading preprint servers in biology and medicine, bioRxiv and medRxiv is welcome relief, but this support is temporary, and the team must find a way to continue in the long run. Unfortunately, without greater transparency in the governance of bioRxiv and medRxiv, we do not know if there is anything stopping them from being acquired by a commercial publisher….”

Lack of sustainability plans for preprint services risks their potential to improve science | Naomi Penfold, March 2nd, 2023 | Impact of Social Sciences

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“…it is critical we explore how to sustain a viable and vibrant ecosystem of preprints infrastructure that is independent of commercial publishers – this is not yet assured. This infrastructure includes servers through which preprints are shared online, as well as tools and services that support the use of preprints. arXiv is a preprint server that is considered essential in several communities in physics, computer science and other quantitative disciplines. Despite successfully building a revenue model that shares the burden between Cornell University, the Simons Foundation and several members and supporters, arXiv’s “funding is still outpaced by [their] growth” – the server hosts over 2 million preprints already and is growing by 10% each year. And while arXiv has been supporting more and more scholars to share and discover preprints, the team behind it has been through significant changes in leadership and is dealing with the urgent need to modernize their 30-year-old technology. As a former Executive Director of arXiv noted, “[arXiv’s success] may not last forever”. Similarly, the recent news that Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has renewed its financial support for the leading preprint servers in biology and medicine, bioRxiv and medRxiv is welcome relief, but this support is temporary, and the team must find a way to continue in the long run. Unfortunately, without greater transparency in the governance of bioRxiv and medRxiv, we do not know if there is anything stopping them from being acquired by a commercial publisher….”

Supporting Shared Infrastructure for Scholarly Communication – Ithaka S+R, March 1, 2023

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“Developing, maintaining, and sustaining fit-for-purpose community infrastructure is a challenge in the higher education and research sectors, particularly when the technology and policy environments are in flux. Ithaka S+R has conducted a variety of projects and studies touching on these issues over several years. Today, I’m pleased to share that we are launching a new study focusing on shared infrastructure in support of scholarly communication, with support from STM Solutions. The Project For some time, shared infrastructure has been a key enabler for delivering the services that authors and readers need from scholarly communication. Services like reference linking, repositories, identifiers, single sign-on, and digital preservation have supported the digital transformation of scholarly publishing, enabling new and improved services and achieving real efficiencies for all stakeholder communities. Looking ahead, it is necessary to sustain and in some cases improve existing shared infrastructure, even as next generation shared infrastructure must be developed to support the research community…. As part of this project, we will be conducting interviews this spring with individuals from major stakeholder groups, including infrastructure providers, researchers, open science community members, publishers, and librarians, among others. This spring, we will publish a landscape overview of shared infrastructure for scholarly communication. Over the summer, we will issue a draft report of our findings to allow for broad input. We expect to publish the final report in the fall….

And, with respect to shared infrastructure, we have just launched a project with the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and other partners to design and prototype a shared community infrastructure that will support collections and collecting, with our work focused on governance and sustainability issues for this collaboration….”

Characteristics of European Universities That Participate in Library Crowdfunding Initiatives for Open Access Monographs

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he aim of the study was to identify the traits of 100 European universities across 26 countries that did or did not support one particular library crowdfunding initiative for open access (OA) monographs over the past few years. By relying on the rankings of four sources, including THE, ARWU, QS, and Leiden, the study identifies some of the traits of the universities that have shown strong interest in the model by already taking part in an established library crowdfunding initiative, as well as those that may play a vital role in its sustainability. The study’s results show that the institutions that are likely to participate in library crowdfunding initiatives for OA monographs may be defined as highly ranked and produce research in quantity, quantity, relevance, and timeliness. The study’s key revelation is the high academic standing of the institutions that rarely participate in one crowdfunding initiative. These institutions may not be as “international” in their outlooks, but they stand out for their high-quality and significant research output. As such, they may accelerate the model’s adoption with more consistent participation in library crowdfunding.

MIT Press wants to flip subscription journal to open access • The Register

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“Academic publisher the MIT Press has announced a new initiative to move from subscription-funded journals to open-access papers that are free of charge.

The project, dubbed Shift+OPEN, is now accepting applications from English-language journals without geographic restrictions, but it’s only funding a single publication for now, MIT Press Director of Journals and Open Access Nick Lindsay told The Register.

That lucky journal will have “the expenses of transitioning a journal to an open access model” covered for three years, access to the MIT Press’s “full suite of publishing services,” and support to “develop a sustainable funding model” once the three years of funding ends….

The MIT Press is looking for a partner to examine how to balance costs and quality in relation to continued diamond open access funding, and Lindsay said that he’s confident the program can lead to a sustainable model “if all sides are willing to work toward that goal.” 

As to what that funding model could look like, Lindsay said it’s going to depend largely on the journal chosen for Shift+OPEN funds. He told us the model will likely be a mixed-funding design similar to how arXiv is funded (e.g. by Cornell University, the Simons Foundation, institutional members and donors), though again that will depend on the journal; “if there’s a society behind the title then we’ve probably got a broader set of options than if it’s not.” …”

Opinion: Why we’re becoming a Digital Public Good — and why we aren’t | Devex

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“A few months ago, Medtronic LABS made the decision to open source our digital health platform SPICE, and pursue certification as a Digital Public Good. DPGs are defined by the Digital Public Good Alliance as: “Open-source software, open data, open AI models, open standards, and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm by design, and help attain the Sustainable Development Goals.” The growing momentum around DPGs in global health is relatively new, coinciding with the launch of the U.N. Secretary General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation in 2020. The movement aims to put governments in the driver’s seat, promote better collaboration among development partners, and reduce barriers to the digitization of health systems.”

Empirical validation of IR sustainability model: leveraging on a PLS-SEM approach | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose This study aims to validate a proposed conceptual model for the implementation of sustainable institutional repositories (IRs) in Nigeria.

Design/methodology/approach

A quantitative approach shaped the survey research design. This study used structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis to evaluate the proposed model. The population of the study comprises 117 librarians, information technology staff and researchers knowledgeable about IR implementation status across 14 public universities in Nigeria. The data was collected using an online survey. The Smart-PLS v3.3 software was used to facilitate the analysis.

Findings

The findings indicate that the nine identified factors of the IR sustainability model have a significant influence on the implementation of sustainable IRs. This signified that the model has adequately depicted the relationship between the implementation of sustainable IRs and the identified factors.

Originality/value

This study provides an integrated synthesis of factors that influence the implementation of sustainable IRs. This study also presents the first-ever empirically validated model for sustainable IRs. The findings of this study addressed the challenge of implementing sustainable IRs and institutionalized the idea of IRs’ sustainability assessment.