$10M to support open-access and open-source research | UdeMNouvelles

“By awarding a $10-million grant to Coalition Publica through the Major Science Initiatives Fund 2023-2029, the Canada Foundation for Innovation is helping to address the ongoing need to operate and maintain research facilities of national importance, enabling Canadian researchers to undertake activities that rival those of their international colleagues.

Coalition Publica is developing an open, non-commercial infrastructure for digital research, dissemination and scholarly publication in the humanities and social sciences. The infrastructure is based on the complementarity of two leading technology solutions dedicated to open access and open science.

The first of those solutions is the erudit.org dissemination platform of the Érudit Consortium of Université de Montréal (UdeM), Université Laval and Université du à Montréal, while the second is the Open Journal Systems editing and publishing software developed by the Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University….”

Canada Foundation for Innovation renews its support for Coalition Publica | 19 August 2022

“Coalition Publica will strengthen its digital services to the Canadian and international scholarly community with continued investment from CFI. The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) is awarding a $10 million grant to Coalition Publica under the Major Science Initiatives Fund 2023-2029. Through this program, CFI contributes to the ongoing operation and maintenance needs of research facilities of national importance in order to enable Canadian researchers to undertake world-class research. Coalition Publica is developing an open, non-commercial infrastructure for digital research, dissemination, and scholarly publishing. It is based on the complementarity between the publishing software Open Journal Systems, developed by the Public Knowledge Project (Simon Fraser University (SFU)), and the erudit.org dissemination platform of the Érudit Consortium (Université de Montréal, Université Laval, Université du Québec à Montréal), two leading technological solutions dedicated to open access and open science. In collaboration with the editorial teams of more than 250 scholarly and cultural journals, Coalition Publica also offers access to the largest corpus of Canadian research results in the humanities and social sciences. More than 220,000 publications are available, and 8,000 new articles are disseminated each year. Rich and diverse, the collections are representative of Canadian and international research and creation: archaeology, economics, history, literary studies, psychology, education… They are consulted each year by nearly 6 million users worldwide….”

Job: Data Scientist (Research Assistant) – Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and the Scholarly Communications Lab (ScholCommLab) at Simon Fraser University are looking for a research assistant to work on the Metadata for everyone: Identifying and measuring metadata quality issues across cultures starting as soon as possible and no later than September 30, 2022. 

Metadata is a vital aspect of academic publishing. It ensures accurate identification and citation of a work. It can improve discoverability, access, dissemination, preservation, and, arguably, research impact. It can help disambiguate similar works. However, despite its importance, little is known about the quality of the metadata that is currently in use, and the impacts of poor metadata have rarely been studied. This project will therefore explore the metadata quality, consistency and completeness from various individual journals and communities. The project will pay special attention to elements that are most likely to vary across cultures, such as names and those that are potentially multi-lingual, with the understanding that metadata issues do not affect nor impact all communities in the same way.

Full details of the project can be found here: https://bit.ly/pkp-scl-metadata. The Research Assistant will assist in “Phase 2” of the project. This phase will build upon the sample analysis in phase 1 and will include big-data analyses to quantify the completeness, inconsistencies, and idiosyncrasies found in publication metadata as well as attempts to automate heuristics to identify and/or resolve these issues.

 

Public Knowledge Project- Community Engagement and Outreach Librarian Burnaby , BC | Job Listing 30088 | June 2022

“The Public Knowledge Project invites applications for a Community Engagement and Outreach Librarian. Reporting to the Associate Director of Strategic Relationships, the incumbent will be responsible for supporting PKP’s mission of increasing the quality and reach of scholarly publishing. This is a full-time (1 FTE) continuing position, supported by external funds. This is a critical role at PKP that will be responsible for building and maintaining relationships with PKP’s international community and partners and coordinating PKP’s community outreach and education programs. This role is intended to grow PKP’s capacity by soliciting and enabling contributions, both financial and in-kind, from PKP’s wide-ranging community, including users of its software and services, software developers, partners working on aligned initiatives and projects, organizations with aligned goals, and funders. The successful candidate will be able to serve as a representative of PKP in a wide range of settings, be adept at engaging with PKP’s diverse community themselves, and capable of developing and overseeing strategies for PKP to engage with the community more broadly….”

Project Jasper: the story so far – DOAJ News Service

“The initiative was launched by DOAJ, CLOCKSS, Internet Archive, Keepers Registry and Public Knowledge Project to start addressing the problem of open access journals disappearing from the web. We thought it was time for another update on what has been going on behind the scenes over the last few months.

Initially a scoping exercise, Phase One has subsequently seen the project partners design, implement and test a process for workflow efficiencies, capacity and usability. Articles from a number of journals have been ingested and documentation has been updated. Along the way, knowledge has been gained and valuable lessons have been learned 

The lessons relate to this project and preservation, but some may also apply to other publishing-related needs that smaller journals find challenging so we thought it would be useful to record our learnings and share them….”

OPERAS’ Assembly of the Commons

In classical governance schemes, there is a separation of powers that leads funders and policy-making authorities to discuss and make decisions on their side with no or just indirect consultation of the community. We, at OPERAS, did not want that. The OPERAS AISBL governance scheme traverses the different layers of the organization, such as management, strategy, policy, and support. Furthermore, it establishes the levels of engagement of the different types of stakeholders in the development of the OPERAS Research Infrastructure. 

The Assembly of the Commons (AoC) is one of OPERAS’ governance bodies and it gathers all Ordinary Members of the infrastructure. It is convened at least once a year and the OPERAS’ second Assembly of the Commons took place virtually on May 11th, 2022 from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM CET. It had a double objective of discussing the work completed in the Special Interest Groups over the course of the previous year and electing the two representatives of the OPERAS community: Vanessa Proudman and Mark Huskisson.

You can find more information about the meeting, the vision and the representatives below.

Participants of the Assembly of the Commons (May 11, 2022)

Pierre Mounier, OPERAS’ coordinator, opened the Assembly of the Commons by giving a short overview of the meaning of the AoC and its place in the governance of OPERAS.

As a multi-stakeholder organization, OPERAS is governed through several assemblies that represent the diversity of stakeholders engaged in their development. The Executive Assembly (EA) gathers the core members of OPERAS. These are the organizations that are more committed than others to the development of the infrastructure, and they are responsible for (1) organizing their national communities, (2) leading the Special Interest Groups, and (3) taking the decisions related to OPERAS on a monthly basis. The General Assembly (GA) gathers the national authorities such as the ministries and research communities and the supporting members. It convenes once a year and approves the budget and global strategy of the infrastructure. The Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) advises us on scientific matters. The Coordination Team (OCT) manages the infrastructure on a daily basis.

The Assembly of the Commons (AoC) represents the community in its entirety and gathers all Ordinary Members. At the same time, the AoC is the addition of all the Special Interest Groups and their participants. We named the AoC as such in reference to the theory of Elinor Oström. According to her, goods are better governed collectively by a community than individually as private property. Those goods that are better governed as commons are some material goods such as forests, fisheries, and grazing lands, but also immaterial goods such as knowledge and its infrastructure. Therefore, we see the AoC as the assembly of all those people who take care of the tools, services, and platforms, and have the know-how that enables product sharing and knowledge dissemination.

After this highlight on the importance of the Commons for the infrastructure, the participants of the meeting had the opportunity to choose their delegates. The two candidates, Vanessa Proudman and Mark Huskisson, introduced themselves and engaged in a debate with the participants.

Vanessa Proudman is Director of SPARC Europe with 20 years of program management experience in facilitating access to knowledge in Europe and advocating for change to increase more equitable access to knowledge. 

Over the years her focus has been on Open Access, Open Science, Open Culture, and Open Education working with many leading universities and libraries worldwide. Research and knowledge exchange are her vehicles to inform, connect and advocate for change in these areas. Her focus has been to increase Open international, national and regional policy-making and practice in Higher Education in Europe. She has extensive experience in setting policy with a view to put this into action whilst connecting the specificities of policymaking with OS practitioners and vice versa to ensure effective OS implementation. Creating a more level-playing field in Europe to enable more equal opportunities to engage in Open Science and Open Education is also key to her work. By gaining an understanding of the needs of the research and OS support community through research activities and knowledge exchange, Vanessa Proudman will seek to ensure that an evidence-based approach is used to support the SSH community on its road to making open the default. 

Mark Huskisson is responsible for Business Development at the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), the developer and stewards of OJS, OMP, and OPS. PKP develops open-source software systems that manage the complete scholarly publishing workflow for journals, monographs, and preprints, and conducting scholarly communication research on questions of open access and open science.

Having worked in academic and scholarly publishing for thirty years, Mark Huskisson has developed and nurtured a collaborative and supportive network in commercial publishing houses, libraries, learned societies, and the rapidly growing scholarly communication technology ecosystem. Working at the nexus of the huge PKP community gives insight into the challenges and huge opportunities available to the open community if successful collaboration and sustainable pathways can be identified and secured. This new post offers a strategic benefit for learning and knowledge exchange between the OPERAS network and global OJS community.

During the debate, the candidates answered some questions from the community:

How do you see OPERAS in the open access landscape? (Pierre Mounier, OPERAS)

What is really unique about OPERAS is that it is a comprehensive and interconnected infrastructure community for the SSH, which does not exist in such a form for other subject domains. This is a great strength. OPERAS can and needs to inform the broader OA community and its decision-makers about the importance of the SSH domain so that we don’t dance to the tune of STEM and larger commercial publishers. There’s a lot of diversity and innovation in scholarly communications going on in this domain. And OPERAS can concretely demonstrate this to the whole community by presenting the work done by its various Special Interest Groups.

Vanessa Proudman

How do you see the European landscape? (Pierre Mounier, OPERAS)

There are a number of challenges across the continent and one is that there is not a single Europe in terms of access and ability to participate in academic publishing due to a number of barriers that the OPERAS Interest Groups are tackling. With large publishers dictating the narrative toward profit and focusing primarily on the wealthier, more powerful economies, the commercial STM sector has often defined models and development within the community despite the needs and demands – and often to the detriment – of SSH researchers and longform research outputs. So, to identify sustainable pathways in SSH across Europe, we need a more coordinated response to the OA challenge that is specific and tailored to research and publishing in the humanities and social sciences. And whilst there has been a huge development of open access and open science initiatives across the continent, they are often undertaken in national, regional, or commercial contexts. OPERAS offers a way to connect and coalesce the energy and drive of these initiatives, continually informed by the working groups (SIGs) to potential enormous effect.

Mark Huskisson

Regarding the multilingual dimensions of SSH, how might we defend and promote this dimension in OPERAS? (Olivier Bouin, RFIEA)

I have an international background and personally do not value any language over another. I believe that it is important to ensure that we share our knowledge in different languages particularly to embrace and respect the wide cultural and multilingual offering in Europe . In SPARC Europe, we created a tool that was translated into 16 languages by the community. Within OPERAS, perhaps we could create such multilingual resources, too.

Vanessa Proudman

What’s your vision about OA books in the global landscape? (Agata Morka, Sparc Europe)

I spent many years working with monographs in publishing and with leading libraries around the world and – as we transitioned from print to electronic media – the expereinces learned with Journals transitioning more easily and rapidly to digital influenced and determined the conversation around books. Even though the cases and contexts were not entirely analogous. And this has slowed the ability to foster and nurture a succesful and flourishing OA book ecosystem. One core challenge, which OPERAS members are solving and improving, is discovery and it is important for SSH in Europe and beyond that we share learning and solutions for the community and society as a whole. To bring a cohesive solution for different organizations that deal with OA books.

Mark Huskisson

The election counted with the participation of 23 organizations-member. Each organization voted once and anonymously. They could vote for both candidates, for one of them or for neither. With 83.33% and 54.17% of votes, respectively, Vanessa Proudman and Mark Huskisson became co-chairs of OPERAS’ Assembly of the Commons. Besides chairing the AoC during their 2-year mandate, the representatives shall also participate in the General Assembly once a year to represent the voice of the community. Otherwise, the General Assembly is composed of representatives of national councils and ministries of the European Countries and supporting members.

During the second part of the AoC, the leaders of the different Special Interest Groups presented the work done and some perspectives for the future.

  • Advocacy

Sona Arasteh (MWS), leader of this SIG, explained the meaning of advocacy, focusing on how it is a broader concept than lobbying. This SIG works as a kind of mediator, advocating for other SIGs. Currently, the group is advocating for the Tools and Platforms SIG.

  • Best Practices

The Best Practices SIG, led by Jadranka Stojanovski Zadar University), is currently working on a White Paper that will focus on the following topics: diamond journals, repositories altering scholarly publishing (preprints), research data in SSH, editorial and publishing policies, peer review, metadata quality, rights and licensing, research assessment, accessibility, and usability.

  • Common Standards and FAIR Principles

Iraklis Katsaloulisfocus (EKT), leader of this SIG along with Haris Georgiadis (EKT), explained that focusing on Common Standards & FAIR Principles is important as it offers a framework for collaboration, convergence, and integration towards enabling interoperability in SSH. Regarding future perspectives, this SIG intends to act as a bridge between the technical and procedural aspects of open science.

  • Multilingualism  

Delfim Leão (University of Coimbra), leader of the Multilingualism SIG, focused on some challenges regarding this topic: perceive multilingualism as a strong manifestation of bibliodiversity in SSH; avoid the risk of turning English, broadly used as a lingua franca, into lingua unica in terms of scientific and scholarly communication; enhance balanced multilingualism in innovative solutions. On the horizon, this SIG plans to achieve a full design and feasibility study to support the development of a translation service for OPERAS.

  • Open Access books Network

OABN is a new OPERAS SIG coordinated by Agata Morka (Sparc Europe), Lucy Barnes (Open Book Publishers), and Tom Mosterd (OAPEN/DOAB). The SIG advocates for open access book publishing, collates news, views, and developments specifically relevant to OA books, and connects a global community in the form of blogs, events, workshops, and other activities.

  • Open Access Business Models

 Graham Stones (Jisc) and Frank Manista (Jsic) lead this SIG that is currently working on focusing on collaborative models in OA book publishing. The previous White Paper (2021) presented an initial analysis and early observations of the study. The next step is to produce an in-depth analysis (a new version of the White Paper). Future questions to be explored include a better understanding of the publishers who do not take part in collaborative funding models and identifying the recommendations for OPERAS and other stakeholders.

  • Tools and Platforms

Formerly called Tools Research and Development, this SIG is coordinated by Céline Bartonat (CNRS) and Arnauld Gingold (CNRS). The SIG has focused on defining tools according to their functions, users, and nature. It deals with challenging issues such as a variety of functions and usage, the diversity of contexts and users, and its dynamic and chaotic environment.

Following this presentation, the participants joined breakout sessions for each of the Special Interest Groups.


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PKP Hires Director of Operations | Public Knowledge Project

“The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is thrilled to welcome back Kevin Stranack to the PKP leadership team. Kevin has been appointed the inaugural Director of Operations for the Public Knowledge Project in its recent designation as Simon Fraser University’s newest Core Facility. Kevin comes to this position with 20 years of leadership in academic librarianship and scholarly communication, most recently as the University Librarian at the University of Northern British Columbia. He is no stranger to the PKP family. From 2006 to 2021, he was a member of the  PKP team, working on daily operations, strategic plans, community engagement, the founding of PKP School, and other initiatives….”

SciELO Preprints server completes two years of operation, contributing to the advancement of Open Science | SciELO in Perspective

The positioning of the SciELO Program as an open science program, provided for the creation of a preprints’ server, announced in 2017. In September 2018, during the SciELO 20 Years Week, the partnership between SciELO and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) was launched with the objective of developing an open source preprints server based on the already consolidated Open Journal Systems (OJS).

The Public Knowledge Project’s Open Monograph Press

While much progress has been made by academic libraries, societies, and groups of scholars in supporting the publication of independent journals, giving rise to the Open Access Diamond Journal phenomenon (no charge for authors or readers), the same is not true of books.1  Scholarly books would appear to require a publishing house to produce such works.  Well, in that regard, Open Monograph Press (OMP) offers a publishing house in a box.  Only there is no box.  And the house is virtual, but within it one can see the scholarly book through to publication.

IndiaRxiv Relaunched – IndiaRxiv

“During the Foundation Day celebrations of the Society for Promotion of Horticulture (SPH), IndiaRxiv (India Archive), preprints repository server for India was relaunched on the SPH’s webserver using Public Knowledge Project’s free & open source software, Open Preprints Systems. Previously, the Centre for Open Science was hosting the repository using Open Science Framework. Preprints are versions of articles that have not yet been submitted to a journal for peer review….”

It’s Time to Upgrade OJS | Public Knowledge Project

“We encourage users to upgrade to the current release series OJS 3.3.x!

More than 25,000 active journals around the world use Open Journal Systems (OJS). However, the PKP Technical Committee recently learned that many of those journals are relying on considerably older  versions of OJS. As we are regularly releasing upgrades of the software, given changes to the web, staying with older versions may pose problems for a journal’s stability and security . For example, more than 8,000 journals are using OJS 2.4 – a version that PKP has now retired. …”

 

PKP Enables Diamond Open Access: The OA Diamond Journals Study | Public Knowledge Project

by John Willinsky & Juan Pablo Alperin, May 2021

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP), has been, by design and since its inception
over two decades ago, developing software that enables scholars from around
the world to professionally peer-review and publish their colleagues’ work without
charging them or the public to read this work. By creating open source (free)
software that distributes the power to participate in scholarly publishing by
organizing and supporting academic journal editing – including the management
of peer review and and production processes – thousands of scholars, many
operating in low-resource environments, have been able to produce professional-
quality academic journals that are free to both authors and readers. As such, PKP
has long been aware of its essential role in supporting OA diamond journals (Open
Access journals without an Article Processing Charges), but The OA Diamond
Journals Study1 published on March 9, 2021, with 971 OJS users among those
surveyed, offers us a rare level of insight into our community, and a clearer sense
of the extent to which PKP has made OA diamond possible for thousands of
journals around the world.

The OA Diamond Journal Study, sponsored by Science Europe and cOAlition S, was
able to survey 1,619 journals in 2020, finding that 60% (971) of these journals use
OJS. OA diamond journals are said to represent “a wide archipelago of relatively
small journals serving diverse communities” (p. 7) that are collectively estimated
to make up “at least 17,000, but likely up to 29,000, OA diamond journals” (p. 47)
from four regions of world (45% in Europe, 25% in Latin America, 16% in Asia, 5%
in the US/Canada) and from across the disciplines (60% HSS, 22% science, 17%
medicine). If the respondents of the survey are seen to be representative of the
estimated minimum 17,000 diamond journals, then the 60 percent use level for OJS
roughly corresponds to PKP’s own count of more than 10,000 active OJS journals.
The study points, as well, to the type and location of the publishers: “Most OA
diamond journals are the sole journal of their publisher or are with a publisher
having just a few journals. Most of these publishers are university-based” (p. 48).
These are the characteristics of PKP’s principal community of users and further
highlight the close relationship between OA diamond journals and journals using
OJS.

While those who know PKP and the OJS community may have been aware of this
connection, the close to one thousand survey responses from OJS users along
with the report’s unbiased analysis of the context in which they operate has made
three things abundantly clear:

 

With 60% of the journals using OJS, PKP has been instrumental in making OA
diamond journals a reality.
No other platform or tool, with the exception of email in some contexts, is as widely used as OJS by OA diamond journals for their operations, especially as they grow in size.
No other system has contributed as much to supporting the linguistic or geographic diversity of scholarly publishing as OJS.
As OA diamond journals are APC-free, they can be trusted not to include the so-called predatory journals.

That is, given this role as a key enabler of OA diamond journals, and given other
study findings about the characteristics of this group of journals, the report makes
it clear, in our reading, how PKP, with its multilingual OJS, is contributing to the
healthy intellectual enterprise of OA diamond journals and, as direct consequence,
to greater global participation in research.

In analyzing some of the characteristics of OA diamond journals, the report
indirectly highlights some of the strengths of PKP and OJS that have led to its
popularity among this community, as well as some of the areas where there are
opportunities for PKP to improve its offerings, or to otherwise better communicate
their value to the community. The remainder of this response will therefore focus
on summarizing and responding to various indicators of PKP’s success found in
the study, and subsequently to engaging with the misconceptions and missed
opportunities that we will seek t

What Those Responsible for Open Infrastructure in Scholarly Communication Can Do about Possibly Predatory Practices | SciELO Preprints

Abstract:  This chapter presents a three-phase analysis of 521 journals that use the open source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS) while appearing on Beall’s list of predatory publishers and journals and/or in Cabells Predatory Reports, both which purport to identify journals that charge authors article processing fees (APC) to publish in the pretense of a peer-reviewed journal. In 2020, 25,671 journals were actively using OJS, with 81.3 percent in the Global South, representing a great growth in global research activities. As members of the Public Knowledge Project, which develops this freely available publishing platform, the authors feel a responsibility to explore what platform developers can do to address both the real problem of duplicitous journals and the over-ascription of the “predatory” label to publishers and journals. represented by the authors of this chapter, Drawing on data from the beacon is a part of OJS, the chapter represents an assessment and intervention In the first phase, the researchers reached out to 50 publishers and 51 journals that use OJS and appear on Beall’s list offering to assist in improving their journal quality. The response from 14 publishers (28.0 percent) among publishers and two journals (3.9 percent) among standalone journals demonstrated a likely misanalysis as “predatory” along multiple dimensions from financial model to peer-review evidence. The second phase, devoted to assessing the degree to which journals using OJS are implicated in this issue, revealed that 2.0 percent of the journals using OJS are on one or both lists. The two phases point to how the identification issue is not that of Beall or Cabells International, but results from a journal tradition of asking readers to take on trust the adherence to scholarly standards. Amid the increase in research and open access to it, the third phase of this study introduces PKP’s new technical strategy for verifying and communicating standards adherence to the public. Work has begun on systems involving trade organizations, such ORCiD and Crossref, for authenticating journal practices (including editorial oversight, peer review, research funding, and data management), while communication strategies include adapting and testing with students and professionals the familiar Nutrition Facts label used with packaged foods. The goal is to provide a publicly accessible industry standard for more reliably assessing journal quality.

PKP Publishing Services Welcomes OPS Hosted Client: Engineering Archive | Public Knowledge Project

“PKP Publishing Services (PKP|PS) is happy to welcome our first Open Preprint Systems (OPS) hosted client, Engineering Archive (engrXiv).

Open Engineering Inc launched engrXiv in 2016 with the mission of openly disseminating engineering knowledge and is now migrating from OSF Preprints, the Centre for Open Science’s preprint service, to OPS, an open-source system developed by PKP in partnership with SciELO, for managing and posting preprints online. The move will provide engrXiv with greater operational control and the support of a strong open source community. …”