Category Archives: oa.infrastructure

The Beilstein-Institut collaborates with Lens.org

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“Lens.org is a secure and open infrastructure to provide our readers with the most comprehensive and accurate overview of the impact of individual published articles. The discovery and citation tool is owned by Cambia, an independent non-profit social enterprise dedicated to democratizing problem solving using science and technology.

We are looking forward to our collaboration with Lens.org to support free, open and secure patent and scholarly searches while ensuring privacy and confidentiality.”

CRAFT-OA/DIAMAS/Palomera Webinar, June 20, 2023 | CRAFT-OA

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On June 20, 2023, CRAFT-OA will take part in a webinar in collaboration with two other HORIZON Europe-funded projects: DIAMAS and PALOMERA.

June 20, 2023 | 1 p.m CEST

The three projects work towards an equitable future for scholarly communication, with academic communities at the centre. The webinar will present this vision and introduce each project’s area of focus. The discussion will demonstrate the projects’ common goal for open and equitable scholarly publishing.

While CRAFT-OA looks at the IT systems behind journal platforms to help them upscale, professionalise, and reach stronger interoperability, DIAMAS and PALOMERA have different aims. The former focuses on developing common standards, guidelines and practices for the Diamond publishing sector. The latter, PALOMERA, is developing actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for Open Access books.

In the session, DIAMAS will be placed in a broader context, displaying how we collaborate with other actors in the Open Access space and plan for long-term impact in the advancement of community-led publishing.

Participants will have the chance to engage with the three projects and their vision for community-driven open scholarly publishing.

Register for this webinar to be part of this conversation and help us shape the future of Open Access as a community!

REGISTER HERE!

For additional details and registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcqf-morT4jGNa5L7IaZv5TOLGu4Z1Czi4

 

Beyond BPCs: Reimagining and re-infrastructuring the funding of Open Access books | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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Deville, J. (2023). Beyond BPCs: Reimagining and re-infrastructuring the funding of Open Access books. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.bd1b0402

If you have heard any of the Open Book Collective team talk about our work, perhaps in a meeting, perhaps in a talk, then it’s likely that at some point, the issue of ‘BPCs’ will have come up. BPCs, or Book Processing Charges, are to books what APCs (Article Processing Charges) are to journals. BPCs are levied — usually to a university or a funder, but also in principle potentially to the author — as a fee for making an academic book available on an Open Access basis. By Open Access I mean work that can be accessed online without barriers, published using an open license — typically, but not necessarily, a Creative Commons licence.

Within the academic publishing industry, BPCs remain the most common way to fund Open Access books. They are used by publishers small and large, and by not-for-profits and commercial publishers. For small/not-for profit publishers, BPCs are usually used to cover the core production costs associated with book publishing. For large commercial publishers, BPCs can sometimes also be used to offset some of the profit — for example, from books sales or licensing contracts — that is lost when a book is made openly available to all.

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Lyrasis in a Landscape of Radical Interdependence

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“Our support for licensing has been a difference maker for libraries and many consortia. The scale at which we operate helps drive down costs and secure excellent terms for libraries. While this work will continue in earnest, Lyrasis has also been deeply involved with Open Access initiatives for several years and is developing new approaches and models as open resources continue to become a much larger focus for our organizations. We will continue to work on behalf of the community to shape sustainable Open Access initiatives and will support scholarly infrastructure with support for important programs such as ORCiD and integration of persistent IDs in our systems….”

Creating resilient publishing infrastructures | PubPub Community Spotlight

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Adema, J., Deville, J., Steiner, T., & Gulliford (Kearns), S. (2023). Creating resilient publishing infrastructures. PubPub Help. Retrieved from https://help.pubpub.org/pub/n5lqcqb4

In this Spotlight interview, we chat with a few of the folks at COPIM — Janneke Adema, Joe Deville, and Tobias Steiner — about the many work packages and projects that have come out of their organization. This includes, but is not limited to, the Open Book Collective, Experimental Publishing Compendium, Thoth, and their latest project Open Book Futures. Given all these ideas and projects, we talk about what it means to adapt as an organization with shifting funding all the while “scaling small.”

 

What we are working on: 2023-05-26 | Invest in Open Infrastructure

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“…We welcome Sarah Lang and Daechan Kim to the team! As our Business Development and Partnerships Lead, Sarah will be working closely with our Executive Director Kaitlin Thaney to build support for our first fund, set to launch in 2024, as well as to further the development of our fundraising and business partnership strategy. We are also excited to have Daechan, a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, join the team over the summer to research governance models for the open science cloud infrastructure project (see below). Additionally, Jerry Sellanga transitions to the new role of Engagement Coordinator, Networks, and starts full time this month.

Our Research Team is starting interviews with project partners for the open science cloud infrastructure in Latin America and Africa project. In this project, we will be conducting initial research in governance activities and co-designing  and piloting an early-stage governance and sustainability plan. The Engagement team is preparing for our upcoming workshop on building sustainable research infrastructure in Africa through exploring public-private partnerships, taking place alongside Open Repositories 2023 in June, in Somerset West, South Africa….”

WHO releases data.who.int

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“For 75 years, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been dedicated to promoting health, keeping the world safe and serving the vulnerable. The use of data as the foundation for evidence-based decision-making has been central to WHO’s mission. Today, there are more opportunities than ever to harness the power of data. Yet progress is uneven, with global disparities in capacity for health data collection, communication and access. The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the urgent need for the public and policymakers to have access to timely, robust and reliable data.

Recognizing these challenges, WHO is proud to announce a transformative digital platform, data.who.int, a one-stop shop for health data. Data.who.int fulfills WHO’s commitment to provide health data as a public good; it is powered by the ambitious technologies of WHO’s World Health Data Hub, delivering an end-to-end solution for WHO data processes. From collection to use, the World Health Data Hub provides a world class experience leveraging innovative technology to address data challenges….”

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….”

(Why) Are Open Research Practices the Future for the Study of Language Learning? – Marsden – Language Learning – Wiley Online Library

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Abstract:  Open research practices are relevant to all stages of research, from conceptualization through dissemination. Here, we discuss key facets of open research, highlighting its rationales, infrastructures, behaviors, and challenges. Part I conceptualizes open research and its rationales. Part II identifies challenges such as the speed and cost of open research, the usability of open data and materials, the difficulties of conducting replication research, and the economics and sustainability of open access and open research generally. In discussing these challenges, we have sought to provide examples of good practice, describe and evaluate emerging innovations, and envision change. Part III considers ongoing coevolutions of culture, infrastructure, and behaviors and acknowledges the limitations of our review and of open research practices. We argue that open research is indeed a large part of our future, and most—if not all—challenges are surmountable, but doing so requires significant changes for many aspects of the research process.

Knowledge Bites #15 : How to integrate an Open Science service or data-source into the EOSC portal? – EELISA

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“European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) offers researchers, innovators, companies and the general public a federated and open multi-disciplinary environment. Using the e-infrastructure of this environment, users can publish, search and reuse data-sets, various tools and services for research, innovation and education. Data and related services in EOSC are established on FAIR principles.

In this presentation, we will give a short introduction to EOSC and show the process by which the providers – organizations like universities – of services can register themselves and then onboard their respective services. Some of the examples of such services will be shown. We will also present the benefits that the users of the EOSC gain by using the tools and e-infrastructure of the EOSC….”

Books in a bubble. | JLIS.it

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Abstract:  Open access infrastructure for books is becoming more mature, and it is being used by an increasing number of people. The growing importance of open access infrastructure leads to more interest in sustainability, governance and impact assessment. The assessment of the OAPEN Library – containing over 20,000 titles – fits within this trend. How well does the collections meets the needs of its stakeholders: readers, libraries, funders and publishers?

The composition of the collection is measured using subject and language. Both dissemination and the content-related aspects are paired to the number of publications. The average number of downloads per title is relatively similar for all subjects. However, the mean downloads of titles in English is roughly twice as much compared to German and the other languages. Combining subjects and languages shows that the dissemination of books in languages other than English is less predictable. This assessment has illustrated the composition of the collection and how its readers make use of it. The visualisation helped to tell a complicated story in a simple way; a powerful instrument to guide the further development of this open access infrastructure.

Open Access & Open Science: failure is not an option for any party | LERU

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“LERU welcomes the presently developed draft Council Conclusions on “high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing”, to be adopted at the Competitiveness Council meeting of 23 May 2023[1]. They take Open Access to the next stage of implementation across Europe and thus represent a key move in embedding Open Science into the European research landscape. Many LERU papers, on Open Access, Open Data and Open Science have advocated the same causes.

For LERU, it is important that the upcoming Council Conclusions recognize that the increasing costs for scholarly publishing associated with certain business models may cause inequalities in communities and actually prove to be unsustainable for research funders and universities. Many people are now aware of the increase in publishing prices and the spread of transformative agreements, a result of which is a consolidation of the oligopoly in the publishing system.

The essential problem occurs when there are no reductions in price but increases, and where the resulting coverage is low. The threat is what will happen if everything is flipped to Open Access with high APC charges, both individual and under an agreement….”

Brussels plan for rival OA platform ‘naive’ | Times Higher Education (THE)

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“As anger mounts over cost of open access deals, moves to finance diamond journals and expand state-run digital platforms have divided opinion…

Calls to transform the European Union’s research repository into a “collective, non-profit, large-scale publishing service for the public good” that could rival commercial publishers have been described as “naive” and a distraction to the open-access mission by experts….

Amid growing unease over the high cost of several national open-access deals, including Springer Nature’s new three-year agreement with UK universities, the European Council was set to agree a motion that says “immediate and unrestricted open access” without author fees should become the “norm” in scholarly publishing.

The European Commission, which runs the €105 billion (£90 billion) Horizon Europe research funding scheme, should introduce funding policies to support open-access publishers that do not charge author fees, it adds. That might mean Horizon funding being tied to publication in so-called “diamond” journals, which are both free to read and publish in thanks to subsidies from universities, governments or other funders.

The memo, first presented by the Swedish presidency of the EU in February, also suggests a massive scaling-up of the EU’s open-access platform Open Research Europe (ORE), a site launched in 2021 that has fewer than 500 publications so far.

That proposal received a mixed response from the League of European Research Universities (LERU), which noted the scale of the proposed project was “massive” and a “single pan-European system is not likely to work successfully”.

Instead, the umbrella body suggested that what “Europe may really need is the development of an open, inter-connected, publicly owned infrastructure”, and urged the creation of funding calls to support university engagement with this kind of system….”

New Jisc research infrastructure assets report will drive collaboration – Jisc

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“For the first time, UKRI-funded report brings together views of 15 major stakeholders from across the UK research community.

To gain an unprecedented insight into the UK’s academic research infrastructure assets, Jisc has collected the views of leading bodies from across the sector.

The new report, Optimising the UK’s university research infrastructure assets, aims to help identify more opportunities for collaboration, attracting investment, developing skills and reducing bureaucracy.

The UK’s university research infrastructure assets include equipment, facilities and the laboratories commissioned for research use across all disciplines.

The report outlines a range of perspectives from interviews with leaders and experts at 15 groups and stakeholder organisations from the UK’s higher education, research and innovation sector.

It highlights opportunities for new collaborative approaches to optimise the use, sharing, efficiency and sustainability of research infrastructure assets, and was funded by UK Research and Innovation.

The report identifies four key areas of opportunity for the research sector, which it recommends should receive extra investment to promote knowledge exchange and the commercialisation of research and development: …”

G7 Science and Technology Ministers’ Communique

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“We share a growing concern that some actors may attempt to unfairly exploit or distort the open research environment and misappropriate research results for economic, strategic, geopolitical, or military purposes. This undermines the principles and values that underpin open, transparent, reciprocal, and accountable international research cooperation and the integrity of research and may pose security risks….

The G7 will collaborate in expanding open science with equitable dissemination of scientific knowledge and publicly funded research outputs including research data and scholarly publications in line with the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles. This is so that researchers and people throughout the world can benefit from them as well as contribute to the creation of new knowledge, stimulation of innovation, democratization of access to knowledge by society and the development of solutions for global challenges. This will also help to build more reproducible and trusted research results.

We recognize openness, freedom, and inclusiveness should be enhanced globally for the sound development of scientific research. When making decisions about openness, the respect for universal human rights and the protection of national security are essential, and principles and rules related to academic freedom, research integrity, privacy, and protection of intellectual property rights should be applied and upheld.

We acknowledge that open science platforms can allow the rapid sharing of pathogen samples and pathogen genetic sequence data on a global scale. They should also enable early development and more rapid, effective, and equitable access to MCMs for the prevention and control of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. Robust multilateral data sharing is needed to ensure continued societal resilience to the global issues of today and the future….

The G7 also supports immediate open and public access to government-funded scholarly publications and scientific data, and supports the endeavors of the scientific community to address challenges in scholarly publishing for broader sharing of appropriate scientific outputs. To this end, we support the efforts of the G7 Open Science Working Group in promoting the interoperability and sustainability of infrastructure for research outputs, supporting research assessment approaches that incentivize and reward open science practices, and encouraging “research on research”, aimed at helping to shape a more effective evidence-based research policy…. ”