Category Archives: oa.ke

SCOSS – SPARC Europe

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“Support for open access to published research and data continues to grow. Also growing are high-level efforts  — from the likes of the EU and funding bodies like the Wellcome Trust — to make the open sharing of research findings conditional to funding.

While such policy directives are essential to advancing open access, so too is an infrastructure that can support a publishing landscape steadily migrating to a state where “Open” is the default.

Many key services that now comprise the existing infrastructure, which has evolved over time, are non-commercial and far from financially secure. Some could even be described as “at risk”.

Being that many of these services are now fundamental to implementing Open Access and Open Science policies and supporting these workflows, securing them has become a growing concern of the broader OA and OS community.

The formation of the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) represents a community-led effort to help maintain, and ultimately secure, vital infrastructure.

This recognition of the cruciality of such infrastructure, and of securing it, is what led to the formation of the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS).

Groundwork for the coalition was laid by the Knowledge Exchange, which presented many of the foundational ideas for it in its 2016 report Putting Down Roots, Securing the Future of Open Access Policies.”

A landscape study on open access and monographs: Policies, funding and publishing in eight European countries

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Knowledge Exchange is continuously active in promoting Open Access by bringing together Open Access experts from all six KE partner countries. This study was initiated by Knowledge Exchange and financed by Knowledge Exchange, FWF, CRIStin and Couperin, and together with the skilled expertise of Eelco Ferwerda, Frances Pinter and Niels Stern, we can now publish the biggest landscape study on the conditions and potentials for Open Access books yet. 

The report builds on i.a. 73 in-depth conversations, conducted across eight different countries (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, Norway and Austria) to understand current developments among three stakeholder groups: publishers, funders and libraries. The importance of author attitudes, scholarly reward and incentive systems is also raised throughout the study by numerous interviewees.

The report creates an overview of the OA monographs policies, funding streams and publishing models for all eight countries for the first time.

Open Scholarship wish list

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“Knowledge Exchange, a European partnership to improve services for higher education and research, recently held a conference on Pathways to Open Scholarship. The conference briefly looked back at the first ten years of KE and its achievements. But the main focus was looking forward. As the conference was held in Helsinki in December, it seemed appropriate, as a starting point for future planning, to write a wish list for Santa Claus on behalf of Open Scholarship. A conference report will be written in the clear light of the new year which will look at who might take what actions to deliver any presents which have not magically appeared under the tree. And also to further identify the many “presents” (services, advice and technologies) which already exist and are just waiting to be opened. Perhaps we need an Open Scholarship version of Dickens’ famous “A Christmas Carol” where gloomy ghosts of the past and the present frighten us with potential disaster but a happy ending is possible if change happens and action is taken. What are the actions and who should take them? Who will fund them? Meanwhile, here is our wish list (with some questions for us all to consider)….”