Category Archives: oa.oad

Keeping up with Open Access – News – Illinois State

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“As the fall semester begins and we welcome our students and faculty back to classes, we hope you’re excited about scholarly communications and Open Access too. Exciting projects to make scholarship and creative output more accessible for users seem to be announced every day, and it can become difficult to keep track of everything going on in the Open Access world. To help our readers, we’re offering three resources which can be used to track developments and projects that may be of interest.

The first resource is the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP). The OATP is crowd-sourced project that seeks “(1) to create real-time alerts for OA-related news and comment, and (2) to organize knowledge of the field, by tag or subtopic, for easy searching and sharing.” The project maintains a variety of feeds, from the general, comprehensive feed for all Open Access topics and news to feeds related to individual or specific topics or projects. The feed can be followed through an RSS reader, or it has a Twitter account.

The OATP is a part of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP), which can be a valuable resource itself. Although it is no longer grant funded, the project is still active and does free consultations and maintains a webpage of useful resources. These resources cover a variety of topics, including best practices for universities drafting OA policies, books about OA and making work OA, and reference pages on federal legislation.

Finally it may come as no surprise that social media can be a place to learn about OA projects and developments, although the sheer number of results can be daunting and the source should always be considered when reading an announcement. The Open Access Directory maintains a list of social media sites about OA. The list includes links to groups and feeds on major social media platforms and in a variety of languages….”

Regional and international experts come together to discuss open access research in MENA | ZAWYA MENA Edition

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“International research and education leaders will come together today to discuss the accessibility and visibility of research in the MENA region.  

The free symposium Towards a more knowledgeable world: Open Access research in MENAis being held during the annual global Open Access week. It will consist of a series of talks by leading regional stakeholders and global organisations about the implementation and benefits of open research practices.  …”

LPForum20: Make the Open Access Directory Better for All: A Library Publishers Edit-a-thon | Library Publishing Coalition

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“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….”

Open Access Directory – A resource for making sense of the open access landscape | Impact of Social Sciences

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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.

The Writing on the Unpaywall | Library Babel Fish

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“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

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“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

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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.

History of open access – Peter Suber

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“Analogy. Suppose a small town began to grow in a former wilderness. Early in its history it had a newspaper. In time it had a phone book, tax roll, town hall, post office, telegraph office, public library, school, church, cemetery, train station, doctor, surveyor, bartender, and private eye, each accumulating records in its own idiosyncratic, incomplete way. None of these caches of information is a history of the town. All are useful for studying the history of the town. Someone who knew where a good fraction of them were located would do a service by pointing them out. In this sense, I [Peter Suber] haven’t written a history of OA. But I’ve created materials, alone or with others, useful for studying the history of OA. And here I’m pointing them out, with some notes on their scope, preservation, and searchability. Needless to say, the history of OA is still unfolding. The small town didn’t disappear except in the sense that it grew into a large city….”

History of open access – Peter Suber

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“Nobody has yet written a comprehensive history of open access (OA), and I don’t plan to. But many of my writings and projects over the years will help those who want to study or write up parts of that history. Here are some of those pieces and projects….

Analogy. Suppose a small town began to grow in a former wilderness. Early in its history it had a newspaper covering daily events. In time it had a phone book, tax roll, town hall, post office, telegraph office, public library, school, church, cemetery, train station, doctor, surveyor, and private eye, each accumulating records in its own idiosyncratic, incomplete way. None of these caches of information is a history of the town. All are materials useful for studying the history of the town. Someone who knew where a good fraction of them were located would do a service by pointing it out. In this sense, I haven’t written a history of OA. But I’ve created materials, alone or with others, useful for studying the history of OA. And here I’m pointing them out, with some notes their scope and searchability. Needless to say, the history of OA is still unfolding. The small town didn’t disappear except in the sense that it grew into a large city….”

Matching OA projects with programmers

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“Are you an #openaccess project in need of programming help? Are you a programmer or programming team willing to donate time to an OA project? 

Either way, please list yourselves on the new page at the Open Access Directory set up match OA projects with programmers.

http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Matching_OA_projects_with_programmers …”

Part 2: How big was OA Week this year? How comprehensive is the OAD? The Ope…

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“The Open Access Directory (+OAD, @oad) is an #openaccess encyclopedia of open access. Among other things, it tracks OA-related conferences and workshops. For October 2016, it captured 411 events, reflecting the surge of global activity surrounding this year’s OA Week.

http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/2016#October …”

Should the Open Access Directory update or retire the #openaccess speakers bu…

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“Years ago the Open Access Directory (+OAD) launched a list of people willing to speak about OA at conferences, organized by country. 

http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_speakers_bureau

The idea was to help conference organizers identify potential speakers, especially by country or region, and to consider people they night not have thought about. 

It was a good idea, and in the early days it grew to a decent size. But it has barely been revised in years, and today represents only a small fraction of the many good people qualified to speak about OA at conferences.

So the Open Access Directory faced a question. Should we try to expand the list, or retire it?

We’ve decided to try to expand it. If we succeed, it will be useful again. If we don’t succeed, we can always retire it later. We’d rather try first than not try at all.

If you’re not listed and want to be, please add yourself. If you’re already listed but want to update your affiliation or contact info, please do so. And please spread the word to colleagues who ought to be listed….”

Should the Open Access Directory update or retire the #openaccess speakers bu…

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“Years ago the Open Access Directory (+OAD) launched a list of people willing to speak about OA at conferences, organized by country. 

http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_speakers_bureau

The idea was to help conference organizers identify potential speakers, especially by country or region, and to consider people they night not have thought about. 

It was a good idea, and in the early days it grew to a decent size. But it has barely been revised in years, and today represents only a small fraction of the many good people qualified to speak about OA at conferences.

So the Open Access Directory faced a question. Should we try to expand the list, or retire it?

We’ve decided to try to expand it. If we succeed, it will be useful again. If we don’t succeed, we can always retire it later. We’d rather try first than not try at all.

If you’re not listed and want to be, please add yourself. If you’re already listed but want to update your affiliation or contact info, please do so. And please spread the word to colleagues who ought to be listed….”