Category Archives: oa.milestones

Book launch: “We so loved Open Access” | SciELO 25 Years

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Coordinator: Jan Velterop
Editor: Leila Posenato Garcia
Authors: Abel Packer; Peter Suber; Robert Kiley; Rob Terry; Ginny Barbour; Martin Paul Eve; Melissa Hagemann; Subbiah Arunachalam; Bernard Rentier; David Prosser; Hélène Bosc; Susan Veldsman; John Willinsky; Dominique Babini; Jan Velterop
Year: 2023
ISBN: 978-65-993452-6-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21452/abec.2023.isbn.978-65-993452-6-5

 

Synopsis

The SciELO Program was created in the late 1990s when the idea of free access to scholarly content began to gain momentum, even before the term “open access” had been coined. At that time, access to academic publications was limited and costly, restricted to university libraries and the collections they subscribed to. With the emergence of the World Wide Web, electronic access to academic information became practically possible, allowing for wider and faster dissemination of scientific publications. However, the restricted access publishing system still dominated. In this book, the origins and evolution of the open access movement are explored from the perspective of individuals who actively participated. These pioneers of open access shared their experiences, successes, collaborations, and visions for the future on the occasion of SciELO’s 25th anniversary. The book pays tribute to their pioneering efforts and the crucial role played by SciELO in supporting open access and spotlighting regions of the world that were previously underrepresented in global academic communication. This celebration demonstrates how SciELO firmly placed these regions on the map of global academic communication and contributed to strengthening the open access movement throughout its successful journey. 

Table of Contents

Front Matter / Elementos Pré-textuais / Páginas Iniciales

Foreword 

The Journey of SciELO’s 25 years: reality beyond utopia and illusion

Fast and slow at the same time

Supporting Open Access for 20 years: Five issues that have slowed the transition to full and immediate OA

Research is born free but everywhere is in chains…. (apologies to Rousseau)

The power and importance of open access

“The guy who bangs on about open access”

Reflections on the Development of the Open Access Movement

Open Access in India: A long way to go and miles before we sleep 

Liège, a cradle of academic Open Access voluntarism

Publication Equity: a neglected aspect of open access?

My Open Access librarian’s story

Sivulile – “We are Open” – in South Africa

Reflections on twenty-five years of the Public Knowledge Project

The movement towards open access and open science in Latin America: the view from CLACSO

Open Access, an inevitable evolution to fit a fundamentally changed environment

 

Octopus.ac One Year In

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“Octopus.ac launched almost a year ago, slightly quietly because we wanted to add features and smooth out wrinkles with our user groups before we were fully ready for the world. Now we’re coming to crunch point: we need early adopters to start using it. Because every publication in Octopus is linked to another, we ‘pre-seeded’ Octopus with research topics and problems to act as a kind of skeleton on which the living coral reef of publications can grow – but we need researchers’ help now to start publishing ‘real’ work on the platform.

As I talk to researchers about it, I find there are often three main reasons for hesitation. I hope that here I can address each one: …”

Five years of Plan S: a journey towards full and immediate Open Access | Plan S

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“In September 2018, a group of national research funding organizations, with the support of the European Commission, rallied behind an initiative to make research publications openly accessible to all:  Plan S. These visionary organizations came together as cOAlition S, and adopted a set of 10 principles that were intended to function as a catalyst for the accelerated transition to full and immediate Open Access. For most cOAlition S members, the policies and tools that support the implementation of Plan S came into effect in 2021. 

Although the full impact of these policies will still take several years to unfold, it is a good moment to reflect on what has been achieved so far. I joined cOAlition S exactly one year after its inception, as its Executive Director, and have therefore been privileged to participate in the journey that the cOAlition S community – Experts, Leaders, Ambassadors, Supporters, and Office –  have undertaken, and the remarkable progress we have achieved together.

In five years, cOAlition S has grown from a dozen to a network of 28 funders. What is remarkable is that this reach extends beyond Europe, encompassing agencies from the US, Australia and South Africa. This expansion has sparked a ripple effect, with even non-cOAlition S funders developing policies that are largely aligned with Plan S. This is evident in the US with the August 2022 Nelson memo, Canada, India, Germany and elsewhere. Governments in Europe and beyond have also become more vocal about Open Access to research results, as evidenced in the European Council Conclusions and the G7 Science and Technology Ministers declaration of last May. Plan S and cOAlition S have certainly contributed to a consensus among research funding agencies worldwide that Open Access to research results is a priority that requires international alignment.

During those five years, publishers have changed tack as well. They seem to increasingly recognise that it is no longer about whether they should flip to Open Access, but how they should flip to Open Access. Some of them have made changes to their policies to comply with Plan S principles, or they are exploring new models such as Subscribe to Open, Diamond Open Access, and other non-APC models….”

Improving the Research Culture: COS Celebrates 10 Years

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“Improving the Research Culture: COS Celebrates 10 Years

May 25th, 2023,Center for Open SciencePosted in: Open Science, Culture ChangeBlue background with COS logo and tagline that reads “Science Works Best in the Open”

The Center for Open Science (COS) celebrated its 10th anniversary on Monday, May 8, 2023 at the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, DC. This event featured a day-long symposium with partners and supporters to discuss the progress and future direction of open science.

The anniversary symposium included presentations by COS staff and board members about the progress, strategy, and direction to advance its mission, along with stakeholders and colleagues giving presentations that highlighted particular areas of open science practices, impact, and COS’s Theory of Change.

Recordings from this event are now available….”

The Digital Library of Georgia has made its 3 millionth digitized and full-text-searchable historic newspaper page available freely online.  – the DLG B

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“The Digital Library of Georgia has made its 3 millionth digitized and full-text-searchable historic newspaper page available freely online.

The title page of the first edition of the May 22, 1917, issue of the Atlanta Georgian reports on the destruction caused by the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917 and the city’s effort to control the damage.

This issue marks the 3 millionth page digitized by the Digital Library of Georgia.

The newspaper circulated daily from 1906 to 1939, was the first Hearst-owned newspaper in the South, and is the most prominent example of sensationalist yellow journalism in Georgia. In its first year of publication, the paper infamously printed stories intended to inflame racial tensions that contributed to the start of the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906….”

EIFL celebrations in 2023 | EIFL

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“EIFL has lots to celebrate this year – 2023 is the 20th anniversary of EIFL as an independent organization and also the 20th anniversary of the EIFL Open Access Programme. 

We’ll be celebrating these milestones at the EIFL General Assembly (GA) in Vilnius from 17 to 21 September. This will be our first in-person GA since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. After three years of online GAs, using Zoom, it will be great to connect with our library consortium coordinators and publisher partners in-person again….”

Celebrating 10 years of the Library Publishing Coalition! | Library Publishing Coalition

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“The next in-person Library Publishing Forum will take place May 15 & 16, 2024, at the McNamara Alumni Center on the campus of University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN). As always, the Forum will be welcoming and affordable, but we are working overtime this year to make sure it’s also full of the kinds of experiences you can only have at an in-person event. Join us to learn, to connect, and to celebrate! Save the date for now, and keep an eye out for the call for proposals this fall.”

DOAB celebrates its 10th anniversary! – OAPEN – supporting the transition to open access for academic books

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“This year, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), led by OpenEdition and OAPEN Foundation, celebrates its 10th anniversary. Since its inception, DOAB has evolved from an idea for indexing high quality peer-reviewed open access books and chapters to a globally used and open directory serving not only researchers and the wider scholarly community, but also the public. …”

 

Mid-summer reflections on our five years’ journey…

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“OA Switchboard has been live as operational solution since 1 January 2021 (17 consortia and multi-site participants, 154 institutions, 31 publishers, more than 5,100 ‘organisations’, over half a million ‘messages’), supporting two use cases for journal article publications and a variety of business models, including non-APC based models. It operates a sustainable governance and funding model via Stichting (‘foundation’) OA Switchboard, founded by OASPA in October 2020. Security and privacy is ensured via technology and contracts. All participants in OA Switchboard sign the same Service Agreement that the General Terms & Conditions are an integral part of….”

Blog | Directory of Open Access Books

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“This year, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), led by OpenEdition and OAPEN Foundation, celebrates its 10th anniversary. Since its inception, DOAB has evolved from an idea for indexing high quality peer-reviewed open access books and chapters to a globally used and open directory serving not only researchers and the wider scholarly community, but also the public. …

Sven Fund: 10 Years of Open Access at Knowledge Unlatched

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“That missing link between various institutions, and one of the reasons behind of Knowledge Unlatched’s success, is its unique approach to open access: crowdfunding. Knowledge Unlatched’s crowdfunding model is called KU Select. On an annual basis, Knowledge Unlatched releases a librarian-curated selection of relevant academic books and journals, and libraries then pledge funding that enables this content to be published under open access.

According to information on the Knowledge Unlatched website, “The costs of investing in Knowledge Unlatched collections are less than the costs if all institutions were to purchase the content in traditional forms.” …”

COAR Notify: overview of year one – COAR

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“The COAR Notify Initiative is developing and accelerating community adoption of a standard, interoperable, and decentralised approach to linking research outputs hosted in the distributed network of repositories with resources from external review services. COAR Notify was launched in 2021, and was awarded a significant grant from Arcadia, a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge, in 2022. As of June 30, 2023, we marked the end of the first year of the Arcadia-funded project, which has significantly accelerated our progress on several fronts: …”