Trio of OA agreements in Asia mark a first for IOP Publishing – IOP Publishing

“The three-year read and publish agreements with the University of Hong Kong (HKU), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) will deliver a range of benefits, including:  

No article publication charges for authors publishing in all IOPP journals and almost all partner journals 
Publications in both hybrid and gold OA journals are covered 
Publishing under an open licence (CC-BY), allowing authors to retain copyright 
Reading access to all IOPP research published over the last 10 years…”

Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table – Antonia Seymour – The Scholarly Kitchen

“Our products and services must develop and evolve to ultimately help researchers maximize their contribution to the world’s scientific understanding. The move to open science reinforces our core purpose as a learned society, which is the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and education.

Conducting science more openly can accelerate scientific discovery…

The sector-wide shift towards open access is a huge opportunity for us at IOP Publishing, but it doesn’t come without its challenges. We share the ambitions of policymakers and funders, and we know that the support from researchers for an open future is there. A global study that we carried out with other society publishers found that over half of physical science researchers want to publish open access. Yet 62% of respondents also told us that a lack of monies from funding agencies prevents them from doing so….

There are a range of models being deployed to recoup the investments that publishers make into the management of peer review and ensuring quality research outputs. Gold open access to the Version of Record delivered through institutional agreements is emerging as the most prominent model, and for good reason. It’s financially sustainable at scale; it empowers authors because they don’t need to find the funding themselves; it delivers universal access to authoritative and credible research; and it provides the exposure that researchers crave — with articles published on an open access basis at IOP Publishing downloaded 80% more and cited 30% more than articles behind paywalls.

As we all set our sights on a fully open world and the benefits it undoubtedly brings, the concern remains that researchers from less wealthy countries and institutions or those working in less well funded disciplines could find themselves locked out of being able to publish open access. It’s going to take a concerted effort to put in place broader global financial support for open access above and beyond the article publishing charge discounts and waivers that publishers have already put in place….”

Optica Publishing Group announces the launch of Optica Open | News Releases | Optica

“Optica Publishing Group (formerly OSA) launched Optica Open today, a new preprint server dedicated to advancing optics and photonics around the globe. Preprints are publicly available, preliminary scholarly articles posted ahead of formal peer review and publication in a journal. Authors can conveniently transmit their Optica Open preprint submissions to an Optica Publishing Group journal or their journal submissions to the preprint server, a first for the optics and photonics community. The Optica Open site is now open for submissions.

Harnessing Figshare’s preprint server capabilities, Optica Open helps authors achieve their open science goals and establish priority of their latest research results. All posted preprints will receive a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), are citable and will be indexed by Google Scholar and Crossref. As with other preprint servers, articles posted to Optica Open are not peer reviewed, although authors may benefit from receiving feedback from their peers. Submissions are screened by subject-matter experts to ensure general relevance to optics and photonics and compliance with the basic submission requirements, including a plagiarism check with iThenticate….”

Guest Post – “We are ready to move forward”: A Professional Society’s Route to Open Access – The Scholarly Kitchen

“Some publishers have been quoted as saying it is too soon to tell if this mandate will impact their journals. My colleagues and I at the ANS have known for some time that our journals would be impacted by the wider movement toward open research publishing. In many ways, the OSTP’s latest public access guidance is a big win for federally funded researchers and the entire nuclear community. ANS has recently published numerous OA supplements alongside some national US labs and the benefit to authors and researchers is far-reaching. The Nelson Memo only reaffirms that we as publishers must continue to be proactive in finding sustainable solutions that work for authors, the publishers of those journals and for society. We are ready to move forward.

But it is not an all-or-nothing approach. The ANS has long taken a progressive stance to ensure that we stay at the fore of the evolution of scholarly publishing, whilst ensuring that we continue to meet the needs of our members and our wider research community….”

 

Making universal access to research a reality | Research Information

“Transformative agreements make OA publication by authors in participating institutions as simple as possible. They are contracts between publishers and universities that fold the cost of publishing (article publication charges (APCs)) into subscription contracts and comply with various OA funder mandates. In short, they enable researchers to publish their research OA at no cost to them as the fees and admin are covered by their institutions. 

According to figures from the ESAC initiative, there has been a 60% year on year increase in TAs since 2014 when they first started recording the deals. They have been gaining momentum in Europe for several years and are now appearing in the US, Latin America, Canada, Australia and spreading across other countries around the world. 

IOP Publishing now has transformative agreements with over 300 institutions in 17 countries. The agreements come in a variety of forms, no two are exactly the same as member institutions are diverse with different sets of requirements. The number of years the agreement is in place can vary from one to three years, the types of journals included can differ, some have limits on the number of OA articles, others are uncapped. Our starting principle is to offer unlimited agreements to stimulate the greatest uptake. We see them as the most effective shift to a more open future at scale….”

Fermilab/CERN recommendation for Linux distribution

“CERN and Fermilab jointly plan to provide AlmaLinux as the standard distribution for experiments at our facilities, reflecting recent experience and discussions with experiments and other stakeholders. AlmaLinux has recently been gaining traction among the community due to its long life cycle for each major version, extended architecture support, rapid release cycle, upstream community contributions, and support for security advisory metadata. In testing, it has demonstrated to be perfectly compatible with the other rebuilds and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

CERN and, to a lesser extent, Fermilab, will also use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for some services and applications within the respective laboratories. Scientific Linux 7, at Fermilab, and CERN CentOS 7, at CERN, will continue to be supported for their remaining life, until June 2024….”

CERN and Fermilab Opt for AlmaLinux as Standard for Big Science

“CERN and Fermilab will make AlmaLinux the standard distribution for experiments at their facilities based on feedback from stakeholders.

Following CentOS’s withdrawal from the enterprise server distribution market, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux have emerged as the two best RHEL-based derivatives in this segment. As a result, it is not surprising that when looking for a free alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the choice frequently comes down to one of the two.

Probably two of the world’s leading scientific laboratories, the Swiss-based CERN and the US-based Fermilab, faced a similar dilemma….

 

Unfortunately, CERN and Fermilab do not disclose any additional details about the nature of the tests or the alternatives that led to the final choice to adopt AlmaLinux exclusively….”

Large Hadron Collider Beauty releases first set of data to the public

“While all scientific results from the LHCb collaboration are already publicly available through open access papers, the data used by the researchers to produce these results is now accessible to anyone in the world through the CERN open data portal. The data release is made in the context of CERN’s Open Science Policy….”

Institute of Physics Publishing strikes unlimited publishing deal with Big Ten Academic Alliance – IOP Publishing

“Strengthening the commitment to opening research, IOP Publishing (IOPP) has agreed to a three-year unlimited open publishing agreement with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) consortium in the United States (US). Beginning January 2023, the agreement enables affiliated researchers to publish unlimited Open Access (OA) papers at no cost to them.

This open publishing agreement is a contract negotiated between IOPP and the Big Ten Academic Alliance, which has led the negotiations on behalf of its member institutions. The agreement assists in moving the academic publishing business model toward “open” by combining reading access to journals with open access publication of research by authors from Big Ten universities.

During the agreement, authors affiliated with Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions will be able to make their research openly accessible to the global community immediately after publication while retaining their copyright. In addition, BTAA institutions continue their existing access to the IOPscience extra collection….”

SCOAP3 launches open books program – SCOAP3

“The world’s largest disciplinary open access initiative, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³), has officially launched a new initiative to make books in particle physics and related domains fully open access, under the SCOAP³ for Books program.

Since the launch of SCOAP³ in 2014, the transition to open access for scientific articles in particle physics has progressed rapidly. Over 90% of the annually published scientific articles in High-Energy physics have been made free for both readers and authors worldwide. The SCOAP³ for Books program is the latest effort of the global collaboration to expand the content made openly available to include academic books in particle physics and neighboring disciplines (including accelerator physics, instrumentation, etc). 

Funded through the generous support of hundreds of institutions from within the collaboration, SCOAP³ has secured partnerships with leading academic publishers (including Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and World Scientific) to make over 100 textbooks and monographs fully open access as part of the SCOAP³ for Books pilot. This new collaboration includes a partnership with OAPEN, a leading open access books library and publication platform that supports SCOAP³ for Books by providing services in the areas of hosting, dissemination, digital preservation, and analytics….”

IOP Publishing is largest physics publisher to strike open access agreement with the Council of Australian University Librarians   – IOP Publishing

IOP Publishing (IOPP) and the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) have agreed a three-year transformative agreement (TA) for unlimited open access publishing and access to IOPP’s journals.

CERN opens new era in knowledge sharing – CERN Courier

“In September, CERN approved a new policy for open science, with immediate effect. Developed by the Open Science Strategy Working Group (OSWG), which includes members from CERN departments and experiments, the policy aims to make all CERN research fully accessible, reproducible, inclusive, democratic and transparent for both researchers and wider society. …”

Institutional Open Access Agreements

“Optica Publishing Group has agreements with various institutions to cover open access Article Processing Charges (APCs) for their authors. Find out if your institution will cover your APC below.

In addition, authors from qualifying low- and middle-income countries may be eligible for a discount or waiver.

The corresponding author must have an accurate mailing address and/or eligible institution in our database for the system to apply any waiver. This is the person who submits the manuscript and will handle correspondence throughout the peer review and publication process. They will have the authority to act on behalf of all authors and the responsibility for keeping all co-authors informed as to the status of the submission, as well as being noted on the article as the primary contact for any inquiries after the paper is published. The corresponding author designation does not indicate the contribution made to the article. Contributor statements and contact information for other authors can be provided separately….”