Category Archives: oa.funding

Citation differences across research funding and access modalities – ScienceDirect

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Abstract:  This research provides insight into the complex relationship between open access, funding, and citation advantage. It presents an analysis of research articles and their citations in the Scopus database across 40 subject categories. The sample includes 12 categories from Health Sciences, 7 from Life Sciences, 10 from Physical Sciences & Engineering, and 11 from Social Sciences & Humanities. Specifically, the analysis focuses on articles published in 2016 and the citations they received from 2016 to 2020. Our findings show that open access articles published in hybrid journals receive considerably more citations than those published in gold open access journals. Articles under the hybrid gold modality are cited on average twice as much as those in the gold modality, regardless of funding. Furthermore, we found that funded articles generally obtain 50 % more citations than unfunded ones within the same publication modality. Open access repositories significantly increase citations, particularly for articles without funding. Thus, articles in open access repositories receive 50 % more citations than paywalled ones.

 

Birkbeck plays leading role in project set to increase access of valuable research to the general public — Birkbeck, University of London

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“Open Book Futures (OBF) is a new project working to increase access to valuable research through developing and supporting organisations, tools and practices that will enable both academics and the wider public to make more and better use of books published on an Open Access basis. In particular, the project aims to achieve a step change in how community-owned Open Access book publishing is delivered. 

Funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund, the project marks a shift in the ambition, scope and impact of community-owned Open Access book publishing. It will significantly increase and improve the quantity, discoverability, preservation and accessibility of academic content freely and easily available to all.  

This will be done by building the infrastructures, business models, networks and resources that are needed to deliver a future for Open Access books, led not by large commercial operations but by communities of scholars, small-to-medium-sized publishers, not-for-profit infrastructure providers, and scholarly libraries.  

This includes expanding the work of the recently launched Open Book Collective, which makes it easier for academic libraries to provide direct financial support to Open Access publishing initiatives, as well as the Thoth metadata management platform; the Opening the Future revenue model, piloted with Central European University Press and Liverpool University Press; and the forthcoming Experimental Publishing Compendium….”

OU Researchers Win Prestigious NEH Grant to Develop Indigenous Media Portal | University of Oklahoma Libraries

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“Researchers working with the University of Oklahoma Libraries and the Native Nations Center won a prestigious grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop an Indigenous Media Portal at OU.  

The award is one of only three from NEH given to Oklahoma researchers this year. All three grants were given to OU researchers….

Tribal partners and project leaders will choose materials appropriate for sharing in a publicly accessible platform and present them in ways that support community interests and broader public understanding. The Indigenous Media Portal will prioritize the self-representation of Oklahoma Tribal communities through their own voices, music, and audiovisual media.  …”

Webinar – Funding Open Access after the Transformation | 23 May 2023 | OASPA

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“At its launch in 2018, cOAlition S announced that its members would, for a “transition period,” fund open access fees for journals covered by “transformative” agreements. …As cOAlition S recently communicated, the transition period is ending; beginning in 2025, funders adhering to Plan S will no longer support the agreements. What is more, a growing chorus of stakeholders, including the Ivy Plus librarians in the US and a coalition of UK-based researchers, are calling for an alternative, collective funding model for OA. At the same time, collective funding experiments as well as conditional open models (such as Subscribe to Open)—in which neither authors nor readers pay—are reporting promising results around the globe.  This webinar features perspectives on the emerging landscape of collective and conditional open models from publishers and will be followed this year by a second webinar focusing on the perspective of funders. The webinar will be chaired by Raym Crow of SPARC and Chain Bridge Group.  Panellists: Vivian Berghahn of Berghahn Books, Evgeniya Lupova-Henry of Quartz OA and Judith Fathallah of Lancaster University. With thanks also to Demmy Verbeke of Leuven University for organising this webinar. …”

Convocatoria para la presentación de propuestas: Fondo de Infraestructura Abierta | fecha límite: 31 de julio de 2023 | Invest in Open Infrastructure

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English translation: “Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is excited to announce our upcoming funding call for the Open Infrastructure Fund, which marks the next step in our Collective Funding Pilot. This call will provide funding to projects that support the development of open research infrastructure services, with the aim of strengthening sustainability and resilience and increasing the adoption of open infrastructure that underpins research and knowledge creation. Open Infrastructure Fund (pilot) at a glance:

Areas: capacity building, strengthening community governance, critical shared infrastructure
Where you are based: anywhere in the world; 60% of these funds are reserved for individuals and organizations in Low and Middle Income Economies (LMIEs) and/or services that are widely adopted by communities in LMIEs.
Level of funding: 5,000-25,000 USD
Duration of award: projects of any duration up to 2 years, starting between November 1 and December 31, 2023.
Deadline for applications: July 31, 2023…”

Call for proposals: Open Infrastructure Fund ($5,000-25,000 USD) | Deadline for applications: July 31, 2023

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“Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is excited to announce our upcoming funding call for the Open Infrastructure Fund, which marks the next step in our Collective Funding Pilot. This call will provide funding to projects that support the development of open research infrastructure services, with the aim of strengthening sustainability and resilience and increasing the adoption of open infrastructure that underpins research and knowledge creation. Open Infrastructure Fund (pilot) at a glance:

Areas: capacity building, strengthening community governance, critical shared infrastructure
Where you are based: anywhere in the world; 60% of these funds are reserved for individuals and organizations in Low and Middle Income Economies (LMIEs) and/or services that are widely adopted by communities in LMIEs.
Level of funding: 5,000-25,000 USD
Duration of award: projects of any duration up to 2 years, starting between November 1 and December 31, 2023.
Deadline for applications: July 31, 2023…”

Increasing access to open access books: SPARC Europe joins Open Book Futures (OBF) project | STM Publishing News

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We are pleased to announce our participation in the recently launched Open Book Futures (OBF) project, funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund.

Open Access (OA) publishing has transformed how scholars and the wider public access academic content. However, despite the many benefits of OA, the number of OA books published each year is still relatively low compared to OA journal articles. In response to this challenge, the OBF project was launched with the intention of significantly increasing and improving the quantity, discoverability, and accessibility of academic content, ensuring it is freely and easily available to not only scholars but also the general public. The intention is to build on the pioneering work conducted within the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project. 

SPARC Europe’s role in OBF

SPARC Europe will contribute to the OBF project in various ways: 

We bring our experience establishing and running The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) and our connections to Invest in Open Infrastructure to advise the project. The Open Book Collective Development Fund’s grant allocation work will address a gap in the funding landscape by offering financial support to smaller and newer OA book initiatives, and we look forward to supporting this effort.
We will contribute directly to the outreach work being conducted by Work Package 2, on behalf of the Open Book Collective, and Work Package 3, on behalf of the Opening the Future revenue model. 
Specifically, we will raise awareness of this important initiative and explore new opportunities for OA books to build a more sustainable infrastructure for OA books.

We are excited about the challenges that lie ahead for OBF. Our contribution will help initiate a step change in the ambition, scope, and impact of community-led OA book publishing. Together, we will improve the quantity, discoverability, and accessibility of long-form publications ensuring they are freely and easily available to scholars and the wider public. 

You can read more about the project here and stay informed by regularly checking our news page.

 

PhiloBiblon 2023 n. 3 (May): NEH support for PhiloBiblon and the Wikiworld – UC Berkeley Library Update

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“We are delighted to announce that PhiloBiblon has received a two-year implementation grant from the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program of the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete the mapping of PhiloBiblon from its almost forty-year-old relational database technology to the Wikibase technology that underlies Wikipedia and Wikidata. The project will start on the first of July and, Dios mediante, will finish successfully by the end of June 2025….”

The MIT Press receives $10 million endowment gift for open access to knowledge | May 8, 2023

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“The MIT Press today announced that it has received a $10 million gift from Arcadia—a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage, and promote open access to knowledge—to establish the Arcadia Open Access Fund. The new fund will support the MIT Press’s ground-breaking efforts to publish open access books and journals in fields ranging from science and technology to the social sciences, arts, and humanities. It will also help the MIT Press continue to develop tools, models, and resources that make scholarship more accessible to researchers and other readers around the world. “We are incredibly grateful to Arcadia for this generous gift,” said Amy Brand, Director and Publisher of the MIT Press. “The new endowment makes it possible for the MIT Press to build on and sustain its influential publishing programs. With this enduring support for open books and journals, we can use our power as an academic publisher to expand public understanding of scholarship and science and to democratize participation in research.” Arcadia is providing an outright endowment gift of $5 million, as well as a $5 million “challenge” gift to incentivize other funders by matching their support of MIT’s open publishing activities….”

Supporting diamond open access journals. Interest and feasibility of direct funding mechanisms | bioRxiv

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More and more academics and governements consider that the open access model based on Article Processing Charges (APC) is problematic, not only due to the inequalities it generates and reinforces, but also because it has become unsustainable and even opposed to open access values. They consider that scientific publishing based on a model where both authors and readers do not pay, the so-called Diamond, or non-APC model, should be developed and supported. However, beyond the display of such a support on an international scale, the landscape of Diamond journals is rather in the form of loosely connected archipelagos, and not systematically funded. This article explores the practical conditions to implement a direct funding mechanism to such journals, that is reccurent money provided by a funder to support the publication process. Following several recommendations from institutional actors in the open access world, we consider the hypothesis that such a funding would be fostered by research funding organizations (RFOs), which have been essential to the expansion of the APC model, and now show interest in supporting other models. Based on a questionnaire survey sent to more thant 1000 Diamond Open Access journals, this article analyzes their financial needs, as well as their capacity to interact with funders. It is structured around four issues regarding the implementation of a direct funding model: do Diamond journals really make use of money, and to what end? Do they need additional money? Are they able to engage monetary transactions? Are they able to meet RFOs visibility requirements? We show that a majority of OA Diamond journals could make use of a direct funding mechanism with certain adjustments. We conclude on the challenges that such a financial stream would spur.

IOI receives $1M from the Mellon Foundation to scale the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) | APR 7, 2023

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“CS&S is proud to cross-post the announcement that Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) has received a generous grant of USD 1 million from the Mellon Foundation to catalyze investment in and adoption of open infrastructure in research. This grant will support the further development and productization of the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) and the testing of critical models and strategies to widen the pool of investors in open infrastructure….”

Collaboratively Exploring Solutions to the Funding Challenge for Open Infrastructure in Africa | Apr 22, 2023 | Invest in Open Infrastructure

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“…We partnered with the West and Central Africa Research and Education Network (WACREN) last month to host a workshop in Accra, Ghana on March 15, 2023. The theme was “charting common pathways for collective action in advancing open infrastructure in Africa”. The workshop was a prelude to the annual WACREN Conference – an annual gathering that brings together researchers, librarians, open infrastructure funders, government officials, and National Research and Education Network (NREN) leaders and other stakeholders to chart common pathways to promote innovation, investment in infrastructure and service development to boost the capacity of the evolving African digital education and research landscape. Our goal for this workshop was to facilitate a conversation between participating research funders, NREN leadership, government officials, and other key stakeholders, for them to share their understanding of the importance of open research infrastructure and the challenges and opportunities they face in their work to develop, maintain, and adopt shared infrastructure. The workshop was also a chance for the IOI team to listen to and learn from open infrastructure practitioners in Africa. This listening process is critical to ensure that our work and engagements in the long term are additive to what the African open science community is building and responsive to the dynamics of the continent….”

Plan E for Education: open access to educational materials created in publicly funded universities – Insights

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Abstract:  Plan E for Education is my proposal that a proportion of the educational resources generated in publicly funded universities be made freely available for sharing and use by others. Thus, high quality education, produced through public funding, could be made available to other universities and individual autodidacts and for the development of innovative educational delivery methods. This would be the educational equivalent of initiatives that require publicly funded research to be published in open access journals or platforms. Available educational resources would involve whole or sections of courses including assessments, not just isolated resources.

Plan E would require the establishment and curation of open repositories and might consider a peer review system for educational materials to mirror that already used for research publications. Academic credit could then flow to those who publish and review educational resources and extend to other academic input such as updating the work and creating instructional materials.

There is considerable expertise and enthusiasm for, as well as successful examples of, open access education globally, but this is unevenly spread, and its adoption is hindered by factors at institutional and individual educator levels. Most university-generated educational material is still kept behind institutional paywalls. If we accept the need for change so that, as for research outputs, educational resources become open to access, Plan E might provide the global impetus for such change and make a contribution to reducing inequality in access to higher education.