“We are fortunate in our campus’s commitment to open access publishing. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is the only institution offering such funding in the state. The University of Wisconsin-Madison closed its fund in 2014 after spending its initial $50,000 seed money. For comparison of levels of open access initiatives at other universities, we reviewed 15 UWM peeruniversities and found that only three offer such funds: Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Temple University, and University of Illinois at Chicago. From our survey of their fund coordinators, we learned that only one fund (allocated annually at $20,000) was supported entirely from the library’s budget; and the two other funds included a partial contribution (one at $15,000) from the library’s budget along with money ($50,000-60,000 total per year) collected from schools, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. In writing this report (April 2020) we checked back on the status of OA funds at the three peer institutions and discovered that two were not currently active, either exhausted or being evaluated until the next fiscal year. After our survey of peer institutions in 2018, we added the UWM UOAP to two directories: Open Access Funds in Action hosted by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)1 and Open Access Directory hosted by the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College2 ….”
Category Archives: oad.notice
LPForum20: Make the Open Access Directory Better for All: A Library Publishers Edit-a-thon | Library Publishing Coalition
“One of JeSLIB’s goals is to contribute to the Open Access and Library Publishing communities. There are many open access resources maintained by organizations around the world that are community driven. This means they depend on community input and crowd-sourcing.
The editors planned an interactive workshop, or edit-a-thon, to teach forum participants how to contribute to one of these community-driven platforms, The Open Access Directory (OAD). The OAD was co-founded by Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project. OAD is hosted by the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, maintained by the OA community at large, and supervised by an independent editorial board….”
Campus Encouraged to Share Research and Scholarship | University of Arkansas
“Campus buildings across the country may be closed, but the quest for knowledge continues. Now more than ever, researchers and scholars are relying on access to digital materials. The Office of Scholarly Communications invites everyone, on the University of Arkansas campus and beyond, to submit their research to an open access repository.
The online tool How Can I Share It can help determine if a publishing agreement allows for an article to be posted, and will also suggest a few general repositories. However, publications may be found more readily by fellow researchers in a discipline-specific repository, such as the ones listed by The Open Access Directory. …”
Copyright Considerations for the Harvard Community in Shifting Courses from In-Person to Online During the COVID-19 Crisis – Research Guides at Harvard Library
“Harvard Library staff are working hard to support instructors’ needs for resources and information as they rapidly shift to an online teaching environment. Information presented here is meant to proactively address questions concerning copyright and teaching online.
Many pedagogical and technical issues make the shift from in-person to online teaching challenging, yet copyright is not an additional area of great concern. Many of the legal issues are the same in both contexts.
If it was okay to do in class, it is often okay to do in a fully online classroom environment, especially when your online access is limited to the same enrolled students.
In particular, please always take accessibility needs into account. Copyright law does not preclude creating transcripts or captions for course videos and audio. In fact, it normally allows for it….”
Opening science: The rebirth of a scholarly journal | Quantitative Science Studies | MIT Press Journals
“Journal of Informetrics (JOI) was created in 2006 to serve the dynamic, interdisciplinary, and rapidly growing field of informetrics (Egghe, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2015). Leo Egghe, the founding Editor-in-Chief of JOI, attributed this growth to the increasing attraction of “scientists from fields such as mathematics, physics and computer sciences, thereby considerably increasing the number of researchers engaged in informetrics” (Egghe, 2006b, p. 4) as well as “the vast increase of the ways in which electronic information is created, distributed and used” (Egghe, 2006b, p. 3). Almost fifteen years later, the developments that Egghe observed have transformed not only the field of informetrics, but the entire scholarly dissemination ecosystem.
In 2006, green open access publishing was marginal outside of a few discrete disciplines, such as physics and mathematics, and gold and hybrid journals were still in their infancy (Piwowar et al., 2018). Scholarly publishing was just on the verge of moving from a more distributed, society-based ecosystem to one that was heavily consolidated in a few for-profit publishers (Larivière, Haustein, & Mongeon, 2015); it is no surprise that Elsevier was a natural partner for the establishment of JOI. Major publishers were heralding their ‘big deals’ to libraries and the negative financial and intellectual consequences of these deals had not yet reached a tipping point. By 2019, however, the misalignment in values between the scholarly community and large profit-driven publishers could no longer be ignored. This led to the collective resignation of the editorial board of JOI and the founding of Quantitative Science Studies (QSS).
The financial model of Elsevier has become untenable for the scientific community and, we argue, in violation of the scientific ethos. Its excessive subscription fees have caused journal cancellations across the globe—from California to Germany (SPARC, 2020)—and Elsevier’s article processing charges (APCs) for open access publishing (currently USD 2000 at JOI) do not represent a fair value for the cost. Publishing with Elsevier inevitably places major limits on scholarship: The expense of the subscription model places a restriction on who can be a reader of science, the expense of APCs restricts who can be an author. These restrictions on access are harmful to science and society….”
Open Access Directory – A resource for making sense of the open access landscape | Impact of Social Sciences
The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a wiki of factual lists on the subject of open access. Designed to make sense out of the chaos of different information about open access, in this post Nancy Pontika recounts why the OAD was created and outlines how it forms an important knowledge base for anyone seeking to learn about open access and its development.
bjoern.brembs.blog » The ultimate Open Access timeline
“So this is essentially what happened instead of us sitting down and thinking how we could spend our money in the most technologically savvy way to the benefit of science, scholars and society. A generation later, roughly US$300 billion poorer and none the wiser, it seems….”
The Writing on the Unpaywall | Library Babel Fish
“Since it’s Open Access Week, I finally got around to reading a paper I’d bookmarked a few weeks back, “The Future of OA: A Large-Scale Analysis Projecting Open Access Publication and Readership.” Written by Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem, and Richard Orr, the wizards behind Our Research, a non-profit devoted to developing infrastructure for open research, it makes a measured assessment of how much open access research is being read, what form it takes, and whether being published in an open access form makes a difference in readership and (by extension) in impact. Their analysis is based on the Unpaywall data set and access logs from the handy browser extension that lets you see if there is a legit open access version of a paper. (In other words, it doesn’t include papers publishers want to keep behind a paywall, just papers that are open access from the start, open access after a period of time, or open access because the publisher gave authors the explicit right to post them openly.)
Here’s the tl;dr version: more research will be open in future, and research that is open access is more likely to be read. This should surprise no one, but it’s good to have data to back it up….”
The Writing on the Unpaywall | Library Babel Fish
“Since it’s Open Access Week, I finally got around to reading a paper I’d bookmarked a few weeks back, “The Future of OA: A Large-Scale Analysis Projecting Open Access Publication and Readership.” Written by Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem, and Richard Orr, the wizards behind Our Research, a non-profit devoted to developing infrastructure for open research, it makes a measured assessment of how much open access research is being read, what form it takes, and whether being published in an open access form makes a difference in readership and (by extension) in impact. Their analysis is based on the Unpaywall data set and access logs from the handy browser extension that lets you see if there is a legit open access version of a paper. (In other words, it doesn’t include papers publishers want to keep behind a paywall, just papers that are open access from the start, open access after a period of time, or open access because the publisher gave authors the explicit right to post them openly.)
Here’s the tl;dr version: more research will be open in future, and research that is open access is more likely to be read. This should surprise no one, but it’s good to have data to back it up….”
Revisiting “the 1990s debutante”: Scholar?led publishing and the prehistory of the open access movement – Moore – – Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library
Abstract: The movement for open access publishing (OA) is often said to have its roots in the scientific disciplines, having been popularized by scientific publishers and formalized through a range of top?down policy interventions. But there is an often?neglected prehistory of OA that can be found in the early DIY publishers of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Managed entirely by working academics, these journals published research in the humanities and social sciences and stand out for their unique set of motivations and practices. This article explores this separate lineage in the history of the OA movement through a critical?theoretical analysis of the motivations and practices of the early scholar?led publishers. Alongside showing the involvement of the humanities and social sciences in the formation of OA, the analysis reveals the importance that these journals placed on experimental practices, critique of commercial publishing, and the desire to reach new audiences. Understood in today’s context, this research is significant for adding complexity to the history of OA, which policymakers, advocates, and publishing scholars should keep in mind as OA goes mainstream.
cataloguing the community-controlled open scholarly infrastructure ecosystem (#121) · Issues · Publishing Reform / discussion · GitLab
A discussion thread on how to list or catalog community-controlled open infrastructure initiatives.
Author Guidelines – Health and Human Rights Journal
“Health and Human Rights Journal? does not charge authors article processing fees unless authors can utilize an institutional open access publishing grant. Many institutions and research facilities have funding grants available to support publication in open access journals—some are listed in this? OA Directory. If authors cannot access OA grants, article processing fees are waived by HHR. …”
Peter Suber: The largest obstacles to open access are unfamiliarity and misunderstanding of open access itself
“I’ve already complained about the slowness of progress. So I can’t pretend to be patient. Nevertheless, we need patience to avoid mistaking slow progress for lack of progress, and I’m sorry to see some friends and allies make this mistake. We need impatience to accelerate progress, and patience to put slow progress in perspective. The rate of OA growth is fast relative to the obstacles, and slow relative to the opportunities.”
Peter Suber: The largest obstacles to open access are unfamiliarity and misunderstanding of open access itself
“I’ve already complained about the slowness of progress. So I can’t pretend to be patient. Nevertheless, we need patience to avoid mistaking slow progress for lack of progress, and I’m sorry to see some friends and allies make this mistake. We need impatience to accelerate progress, and patience to put slow progress in perspective. The rate of OA growth is fast relative to the obstacles, and slow relative to the opportunities.”
Open and closed – What do reverse flips tell us about the scholarly publishing landscape? | Impact of Social Sciences
“The progress of Open Access (OA) is often measured by the proportion of journals that have transitioned to OA publication models. However, a number of journals have made the opposite choice and moved from open to closed access models. In this post Lisa Matthias, Najko Jahn and Mikael Laakso report on findings from the first study of journals that have made this reverse flip and assess what this phenomenon says about the wider ecosystem of research communication….
One key issue here might be that OA journals that do not charge APCs, or have low APCs, are seen to be ‘low quality’, or even ‘predatory’, in comparison to the more prestigious (higher price) journals associated with larger publishers and societies. It is difficult to project an image of higher quality while giving away your services for free, especially within a culture that is addicted to journal brands and prestige. This factor might partially explain why at least 21 currently hybrid journals operated by a learned society flipped from an APC-free ‘diamond OA’ model to one leveraging APCs in excess of $1,500.
Although launching OA journals seems to be relatively easy, consistent and stable publication over several years is not, especially if financial support is lacking and the journal is largely dependent on the voluntary labor of scholars. Developing and strengthening support mechanisms for the sustainability and growth of existing scholar-led OA journals is essential in this regard.
Moreover, we also found that in some cases, research articles originally published as OA were put behind a paywall when the journal reverse-flipped. This was not the main focus of our study, but we do want to raise the issue of proper content licensing and emphasize its importance to increase the likelihood that materials remain in open circulation and decrease uncertainties regarding their reusability.
We suspect, the OA model is not the root cause of these problems, but rather other problematic aspects of the scholarly publishing system; for example, the prestige-driven evaluation system, and the increasing concentration of journals within a few large commercial entities. However, with initiatives such as Plan S, it is clear that for many scholarly publishers it will no longer be business as usual. As new stakeholder groups, including researchers, policymakers, NGOs, and academic and library consortia become increasingly engaged with scholarly communication, it remains critical that we have a sound, evidence-informed view of how the landscape is changing. Reverse-flip journals represent one small but critical part of this and we encourage others to pool their resources, efforts, and data to help to create a more holistic understanding of the global scholarly publishing ecosystem, and ultimately a more sustainable open scholarly infrastructure….”