Support community led open access publishing: Help shape the future of scholarly communications – YouTube

“International Open Access Week is an opportunity for the global research community to learn about and share the benefits of Open Access, and to inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

This year’s theme is ‘Community over Commercialisation’ and with this in mind, Jisc and the Open Institutional Publishing Association have joined forces to discuss how libraries can come together as a community and support open access publishing initiatives. Jisc set up the Open Access Community Framework (OACF) in response to community calls to make it simpler for libraries to support open access publishing – and other similar schemes are beginning to emerge too. In this webinar, we will ask ‘what’s stopping us?’ and we will consider the levers that are at our disposal, as a strong and active community, including library and publisher perspectives.”

Cambridge Open Research Conference 2023: The stage is set – Unlocking Research

“The programme is ready, spaces are nearly full, and we are nearing Cambridge University Libraries’ annual conference on Open Research (OR), taking place at Downing College or online on Friday 17 November 2023. This year’s theme is Open Research for Inclusion: Spotlighting Different Voices in Open Research at Cambridge.

OR is designed to promote equity and inclusion by ensuring that research is accessible to all, regardless of research background, location, or affiliation. The conference will acknowledge that OR can look different in different areas, with the common goal of advancing knowledge and understanding. Giving a voice to OR from diverse perspectives can propel learning, collaboration, and allow us to learn from one another’s approaches to openness….”

Open Access Ethic | Theological Librarianship

“Open [access] should play a significant role in ensuring equity among researchers from developed and developing countries, enabling fair and reciprocal sharing of [academic] inputs and outputs and equal access to […] knowledge to both producers and consumers of knowledge regardless of location, nationality, race, age, gender, income, socio-economic circumstances, career stage, discipline, language, religion, disability, ethnicity or migratory status or any other grounds. (UNESCO 2021) If this principle is agreed upon, the question becomes, who is best placed to implement the ethic of open access mentioned? For the Western world, that ethic goes back to England and its Public Libraries Act of 1850, which allowed many boroughs to finance public libraries (Spartacus Educational 2020). In so doing, access to knowledge was no longer confined only to those who could afford it. So, while librarians’ ethic of access was initially implemented at least 200 years ago, the positive crusading for and implementation of that ethic across global boundaries had to await the advent of the Internet. With that resource now available, it is imperative that librarians, whether working in the smallest public library or the most extensive university research library, arm themselves with their historic open access ethic and step into their role as advocates for global change.”

Perspectives on open access publishing in India: Interview with Sridhar Gutam | Editage Insights

“The landscape of open access in India is evolving, following a global trend. However, what continues to steer scholarly communications in India is the pursuit of a high impact factor or journal prestige. Many open access journals favored by Indian authors impose substantial article-processing charges (APCs), which often prove unaffordable. Meanwhile, subscription-based journals restrict the free sharing of articles. Although ResearchGate has gained popularity as a repository among Indian authors, institutional repositories are not seeing significant contributions of postprints. Notably, IndiaRxiv and AgriXiv (now partnered with Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International [CABI] as agriRxiv) are facing challenges in garnering preprints, whereas bioRxiv, in contrast, is experiencing a surge in contributions from Indian scientists….”

 

Open Access Week 2023: Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access Policy – Open Access and Digital Scholarship Blog

“After many years of work, the College will soon be able to announce that we are updating our institutional open access policy to allow researchers to make their peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings available on open access under a CC BY licence at the point of publication with no embargo. This will apply to accepted manuscripts, and enable staff and students to retain their right to reuse the content of those outputs in teaching, research and further sharing of their work. …”

OABN Community (not a) Survey: what did we learn? – Open Access Books Network

“Over the summer we launched our (not a) survey to find out more about the OABN community: a huge thank you to everyone who shared and responded to it! We promised the survey would be ‘to the point, short, and productive.’ We hope it was certainly the first two, and now it’s our job to make it productive as well. 

The survey closed on 15 September and since then we’ve reviewed the responses and, along with our OPERAS OABN Special Interest Group (SIG), discussed how we can respond.

We set the survey up because over the three years we’ve been running the OABN, our community has grown and we wanted to learn: who are its members today, what do you want to see from the network, and how might you be able to contribute to it? 

Given that this is OA Week and the theme is ‘Community over commercialisation’, we thought it was the perfect time to share what we’ve learned from our community. In two posts, we’ll explore: 

a) what we found out (in this post), and 
b) how we’re responding to it (in the next post). …”

Libraries and open access discovery

“The Open Access Discovery project is investigating how Dutch libraries integrate OA publications into their users’ discovery workflows. We hope the research will provide valuable evidence for libraries wanting to make their own discovery practices surrounding OA publications more effective. We interviewed library staff at seven universities and universities of applied sciences. We asked them about:

Exposing metadata for OA publications produced at their institution
Selecting and adding OA publications to their library collections
Helping their campus community discover OA publications
Collaborating with others to improve OA discoverability

The interviews were followed with a survey of their user communities. Users were asked about their experience searching for scholarly peer-reviewed publications, the barriers they encountered during access, and their experience with open access. Our data analysis is well underway, and we’re excited to begin sharing our findings….”

Celebrate International Open Access Week with Milner Library – News – Illinois State

“International Open Access Week is upon us, and Milner Library has some ideas to help you celebrate. Defined by Peter Suber as, “Digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions,” Open Access expands access to publications, increases the impact of scholarship (by number of citations, for example), ?speeds up the rate of research, ?promotes one’s profile as a public scholar?, is altruistic, contributes to materials that can be used in classrooms, and ensures compliance with funder mandates. As a partner in university research and creative activities, Milner Library is committed to supporting Open Access initiatives.

Despite the long list of benefits associated with Open Access, obstacles to adoption persist. Most notably, publishers often charge fees to publish open access, and many scholars don’t have the funding to pay sometimes exorbitant fees. Another concern is that Open Access publishers can be associated with predatory practices or less rigorous peer-review processes. Scholars need to publish their work in venues where it will reach the intended audience. Milner Library facilitates connecting researchers to their readers in two significant ways:

The first is by hosting an institutional repository (ISU ReD) that preserves the scholarly and creative outputs of University authors and artists. ISU ReD currently hosts four peer-reviewed, Open Access journals, conference proceedings, student and faculty research, and University documents.
The second is by negotiating Open Access agreements with scholarly publishers that cover the cost of Open Access publishing for University authors. Milner Library entered into its first Open Access agreement with Cambridge University Press in 2021 and has since added agreements with Annual Reviews, Company of Biologists, IGI Global, and Taylor & Francis. Upcoming agreements, set to be effective January 2024 include Association for Computing Machinery, American Chemical Society, Institute of Physics, and Sage Publications. Recent University scholarship that has benefited from these agreements is available in ISU ReD’s Open Access Publishing Support collection.

Beginning Monday, October 23, Milner librarians will be reaching out to Illinois State authors who have published their work open access with the offer to deposit it in ISU ReD. Research shows that more (copies of) publicly available full-text means more opportunities for access and impact. For example, a recent study found that “making OA copies of manuscripts available in self-archiving or ‘green’ repositories results in a positive citation effect.” ”

IOI — International Open Access Week

““Looking at the theme of community over commercialization, if we’re going to be looking at supporting an ecosystem of community owned infrastructure, we recognize that funding for the infrastructure alone is not sufficient. It’s important, but we also need to think about what barriers are keeping communities from adopting en masse or making the switch, and where resourcing can help.”

Replacing academic journals: Björn Brembs on a future beyond traditional journals | Karolinska Institutet University Library

“In October 2023 Karolinska Institutet University Library met with Björn Brembs, researcher and Professor of Neurogenetics, Institute of Zoology, Universität Regensburg in Germany. The interview is on the subject a future beyond traditional journals – replacing academic journals where Björn Brembs openly talks about his view on publishing and open access….”

 

Expanding the reach of research with open access | UDaily

“Over the past year, the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press has increased its efforts to support initiatives around open access publishing. Open access, the practice of making articles, books and other original research freely and digitally accessible for anyone to read and reuse, has been a key focus in the commitment to expand access to cutting-edge research from the UD community and beyond….

In 2015, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution allowing the Library to make UD faculty research publications publicly available via UDSpace. To support researchers throughout the UD community in these efforts, digital publishing specialist Jessica Deshaies connects with faculty, students and staff to track, catalog and clean their research for deposit into UDSpace. As a result, 437 open access articles were added to UDSpace during the 2022-23 academic year — a 51% increase over the previous year….”

Getting to Open – ChronosHub

“Open access is a common end goal for many stakeholders in scholarly communications. But how will we get there? In this webinar, we’ll hear about different approaches on how to get to open, from a library, publisher, funder and researcher perspective. In the end, we’ll have a discussion about how we can get there together, as a community….”