Open Access India Community Call – Google Docs

“Open access to scientific knowledge and research is a critical component of advancing knowledge and promoting scientific progress. The Budapest Open Access Initiative, established in 2002, has been leading the charge in advocating for open access. Now, as the initiative turns 21, it is time for the Open Access community in India and South Asia to join forces and take action to promote open access in the region.

 

During this community call, we will discuss the importance of open access, the challenges, and opportunities in advancing open access in India and South Asia, and concrete steps that the Open Access community can take to lead the charge in the region. Participants will have the opportunity to share their experiences, ask questions, and network with other advocates for open access.

 

Join us for a dynamic and interactive conversation about “Leading the Charge for Open Access: A Community Call for Action”. Let’s work together to make open access a reality for all in India and South Asia….”

[BOAI] Farewell to the BOAI Forum

“Thank you for your interest in the BOAI Forum. This list was launched in 2002 when open access had just been defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Two decades later, as the discussion of open access has evolved, and now largely takes place on other forums and social media, we are closing the Forum.

We would like to thank the University of Southampton for hosting the Forum.

Should you like additional resources on open access, you could check out:

* The BOAI20 Recommendations: New recommendations to mark the 20th anniversary of the BOAI which emphasize that OA is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends, above all, the equity, quality, sustainability, and usability of research.

* Open Access Tracking Project: A crowd-sourced social-tagging project to capture news and comment on OA.”

NI4OS-Europe Regional Event in Budapest – NI4OS- Europe

“NI4OS-Europe is organizing one of the biggest in-person events of the project, the EOSC Regional Event. The event will cover topics such as the European Open Science Cloud, Open Science, the policy aspect of it, as well as the researcher view on services and infrastructure.

Since it is the 20th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, this conference is a great opportunity to draw attention to its importance in the Open Access Movement and to celebrate the anniversary….”

Guest Post: Open Access and the Direction Moving Forward – The Scholarly Kitchen

“Perhaps in recognition of this state of play, the BOIA Steering Committee used their recent 20th Anniversary Recommendations to help clarify the goal of open, stating that “OA is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends, above all,” the document continues, “to the equity, quality, usability, and sustainability of research.” …

After six years of thinking about scholarly communication, I’ve come to think about what needs to happen to improve this system in ways that I believe are compatible with the high-level summary recommendations of BOAI20. What I believe is that:

 

no author should be asked to pay
no reader should be unable to access the record
the idea of “excellence” should be incompatible with exclusivity, artificial scarcity, or any other device not pertaining directly to the soundness of a scholarly activity
authors should be rewarded for behavior such as making usable data available whenever appropriate, for engaging with flourishing modes of experiential reporting or communication, or for exhibiting a history of collegial peer feedback….”

BOAI 20th Anniversary Webcast – Mar 31, 2022 – SPARC

“Twenty years ago the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) offered the first definition of Open Access. To mark the anniversary, in consultation with the community, the BOAI20 Steering Committee has released a new set of recommendations, which are available at budapestopenaccessinitiative.org.

 

Join the BOAI20 Steering Committee for a discussion on the new recommendations and future of Open Access led by Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin, Co-director of the ScholCommLab, Simon Fraser University. Questions for the steering committee that may potentially be included in the webcast discussion can be emailed to boai20anniversary@gmail.com. 

 

The BOAI20 Steering Committee members are: Dominique Babini, Open Science Advisor, CLACSO; Leslie Chan, Director, Knowledge Equity Lab, University of Toronto Scarborough; Melissa Hagemann, Senior Program Officer, Open Society Foundations; Heather Joseph, Executive Director, SPARC; Iryna Kuchma, Open Access Program Director, EIFL; and Peter Suber, Senior Advisor on Open Access, Harvard Library.”

New fully-OA publishing toolkit and stakeholder reflections on 20 years of the BOAI

“In honor of the 20th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, Scholastica announces a new Fully Open Access Journal Publishing Toolkit and blog series where OA leaders share steps stakeholders can take to advance the BOAI principles. Read on for the full details!…”

20th Anniversary of Open Access Marked with Recommendations

“1. Host OA research on open infrastructure. Host and publish OA texts, data, metadata, code, and other digital research outputs on open, community-controlled infrastructure. Use infrastructure that minimizes the risk of future access restrictions or control by commercial organizations. Where open infrastructure is not yet adequate for current needs, develop it further.

2. Reform research assessment and rewards to improve incentives. Adjust research assessment practices for funding decisions and university hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. Eliminate disincentives for OA and create positive new incentives for OA.

3. Favor inclusive publishing and distribution channels that never exclude authors on economic grounds. Take full advantage of OA repositories and no-APC journals (“green” and “diamond” OA). Move away from article processing charges (APCs).

4. When we spend money to publish OA research, remember the goals to which OA is the means. Favor models which benefit all regions of the world, which are controlled by academic-led and nonprofit organizations, which avoid concentrating new OA literature in commercially dominant journals, and which avoid entrenching models in conflict with these goals. Move away from read-and-publish agreements….”

OA Leaders on Advancing the BOAI: Interview with Dr. Johan Rooryck

“In honor of the 20th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), Scholastica reached out to OA leaders to get their take on the progression of the OA movement over the last two decades and recommendations to help advance fully-OA publishing in the years to come.

Kicking off the series, we welcome to the blog Dr. Johan Rooryck, Executive Director of cOAlition S, professor of linguistics at Leiden University, and editor-in-chief of the Diamond OA title Glossa: a journal of general linguistics. In the interview below, Dr. Rooryck shares his take on major OA publishing milestones up to this point and the essential roles all stakeholders have to play in advancing the BOAI principles to realize the founding vision of a future of free and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed research for all curious minds….”

BOAI20 – Budapest Open Access Initiative

“Twenty years ago today the BOAI offered the first definition of open access. To mark the anniversary, in consultation with the community, the BOAI20 Steering Committee will be releasing a new set of recommendations, reflections and resources in the coming weeks and organizing a webinar to discuss the further development of the movement.”

 

India Can Have Its Own Open Access Digital Publishing Platform – The Wire Science

“Non-commercial models to scholarly communication use decentralised electronic publishing platforms, have no APCs, host papers on open-access repositories, and are featured in not-for-profit indexing services.

Second, the African Journals OnLine and Nepal Journals Online publish papers that are open-access. More importantly, they focus on region-specific research and discussions. So as such they are freed of the need to make money by focusing on the more-profitable US- and Europe-centric points of view.

Third, some other publishers, especially F1000Research and eLife, have adopted a review system in which they publish peer-reviewers’ comments along with the paper.

Fourth, open-access preprint repositories like arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, SocArXiv, agriRxiv, etc. are leading the way with online archiving (although there are some “non-fatal” downsides with their lack of peer-review). India’s Departments of Science & Technology and Biotechnology launched an open-access repository of papers funded by them, called ‘Science Central’, some years ago. But because of architectural and operational drawbacks, it has fallen into disuse….

 In particular, and with the European Commission’s ‘Open Research Europe’ as a precedent, it has an opportunity to develop a digital open-access platform with minimal to no APCs.

The Indian government has advanced a potential solution called ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ (ONOS). But it calls for large and recurring investments and wouldn’t address core issues like improving the quality of the research output, developing more practical research metrics, and preventing corporate publishers from monetising publicly funded research….”

Budapest Open Access Initiative: 20 Years On

“Twenty years ago the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) released a statement of strategy and commitment to advocating for and realizing open access infrastructures across diverse institutions around the world.  In this episode we have the opportunity to hear from four individuals who have been part of that journey and work since the beginning: Melissa Hagemann, Senior Program Officer at Open Society Foundations; Peter Suber from Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication; Iryna Kuchma, Manager of the Open Access Program at Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) and Dominique Babini, Open Science Advisor at CLACSO, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences. …”

2021 Miles Conrad Award Lecture: Heather Joseph

This paper is based upon the 2021 Miles Conrad Award Lecture that was given by Heather Joseph at the second annual NISO Plus conference held virtually from February 22–25, 2021. The lecture provided a brief look back at the emergence of the Open Access (OA) movement in scholarly communication beginning with the E-biomed proposal in 1999 that was shortly followed by the Budapest Declaration released on February 14, 2002, through how far it has come in almost two decades.

The author notes that the initial reaction to OA was often just a quick dismissal of it as an idealistic pipe dream and as the idea began to grow in popularity, skepticism changed into hostility. OA was criticized as being too disruptive to the then-existent publishing paradigm. Yet, far from disappearing, the movement towards the open sharing of knowledge steadily advanced. Today conversations about “why” or “whether” to open up the scholarly communication system have evolved into conversations about how best to do it.

The author notes that the Budapest Declaration underscored that the end goal of OA is to empower individuals and communities around the world with the ability to share their knowledge as well as to share in accessing the knowledge of others. She warns that members of the global scholarly communication community must look critically at who currently can participate in the production of knowledge, and whose voices are represented in the “global intellectual conversation” that need to be facilitated. Whose voices are still are left out because structural barriers – be they technical, financial, legal, cultural, or linguistic – prevent them from joining?

BOAI 20th Anniversary: Questions for the OA community | EIFL

“The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) will celebrate its 20th anniversary on 14 February 2022. In preparation, the BOAI steering committee is working on a new set of recommendations, based on BOAI principles, current circumstances, and input from colleagues in all academic fields and regions of the world. 

We’re particularly interested in responses to the questions below. When a question asks about the long-term goals of the open access (OA) movement, please answer in light of your own long-term goals for it. Feel free to focus on just the questions you think are most important. Also feel free to add questions of your own that don’t appear on our list….”

A policy and legal Open Science framework: a proposal

Abstract:  Our proposal of an Open Science definition as a political and legal framework where research outputs are shared and disseminated in order to be rendered visible, accessible, reusable is developed, standing over the concepts enhanced by the Budapest Open Science Initiative (BOAI), and by the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) and Open data movements. We elaborate this proposal through a detailed analysis of some selected EC policies, laws and the role of research evaluation practices.