Category Archives: oa.arcadia

Open Book Collective now live!

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We are thrilled to announce the launch today of the Open Book Collective! Visit our site to see our members such as Open Book Publishers, the Directory of Open Acccess Books (DOAB), OAPEN, punctum books, mediastudies.press, meson press, Mattering Press, African Minds, and Thoth.

Librarians can see Open Access initiatives, presses & open infrastructure projects, that can be supported via annual memberships that will help these groups to thrive & also contribute to a fund to assist these groups in further developing & bettering their operations.

Supporting members of the OBC contribute to a more durable ecosystem for the long-term sustainability of OA publishers & open infrastructure developers so critical to Bibliodiversity.

Open Book Collective has been developed by the COPIM project and ScholarLed, generously funded by the Research England Development Fund and Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin (grant number 4192).

Visit our website here: http://openbookcollective.org and send any questions or comments to us at: info@openbookcollective.org

 

The Open Syllabus Project

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“Open Syllabus is pleased to announce the receipt of a $1,750,000, 2-year grant from the Arcadia Fund.

The Arcadia grant will enable Open Syllabus to continue to expand the boundaries of open education by developing new ways to understand and navigate the curriculum in higher education.  The grant will support work on course transfer and learning outcomes, as well as a range of new tools designed to make OS data a more powerful resource for students, faculty, and lifelong learners….”

COMMUNIA Receives Eight-Year Grant from Arcadia

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“COMMUNIA has been awarded an eight-year grant of three million euros by Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. This opens a new chapter in the history of the organisation, which was founded in 2011 as an EU thematic network and has been one of the most active civil society organisations on European copyright reform in recent years.

Arcadia’s open access programme supports work that improves access to human knowledge and helps make information free for anyone. With Arcadia’s generous support, COMMUNIA will expand its policy work for copyright reform and initiate strategic litigation, aiming to establish itself as the principal advocacy organisation for the Public Domain in Europe….”

Arcadia supports Redalyc and AmeliCA in its endeavor to advance diamond Open Access

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“The Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEM) awarded $3.6 Million grant from Arcadia – a charitable of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin – for Redalyc and AmeliCA. The project’s purpose is to reinforce, expand and strengthen the current efforts of this initiatives so to advance diamond Open Access within a framework of science as a global public good through the consolidation of an Open Infrastructure for capacity building, visibility, discoverability, quality assurance, technological development and sustainability of diamond OA publishing that yields more equitable and inclusive participation in the communication of science.”

 

Knowledge Rights 21 – 21st Century Access to Culture, Learning & Research

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“The programme Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) is focused on bringing about changes in legislation and practice across Europe that will strengthen the right of all to knowledge. It is built on a conviction that knowledge is essential for education, innovation and cultural participation, and that everyone should have the possibility – in particular through libraries, archives and digitally – to access and use it….

COAR Welcomes Significant Funding for the Notify Project

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We are delighted to announce that COAR has been awarded a US$4 million grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. The 4 year grant will go towards the COAR Notify Project, which is developing and implementing a standard protocol for connecting the content in the distributed repository network with peer reviews and assessments in external services, using linked data notifications.

Massive open index of scholarly papers launches

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“An ambitious free index of more than 200 million scientific documents that catalogues publication sources, author information and research topics, has been launched.

The index, called OpenAlex after the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt, also aims to chart connections between these data points to create a comprehensive, interlinked database of the global research system, say its founders. The database, which launched on 3 January, is a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), a free alternative to subscription-based platforms such as Scopus, Dimensions and Web of Science that was discontinued at the end of 2021.

“It’s just pulling lots of databases together in a clever way,” says Euan Adie, founder of Overton, a London-based firm that tracks the research cited in policy documents. Overton had been getting its data from various sources, including MAG, ORCID, Crossref and directly from publishers, but has now switched to using only OpenAlex, in the hope of making the process easier….”

Welcome! – OpenAlex documentation

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“OpenAlex is a fully open catalog of the global research system. It’s named after the ancient Library of Alexandria.

The OpenAlex dataset describes scholarly entities and how those entities are connected to each other. There are five types of entities:

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Works are papers, books, datasets, etc; they cite other works

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Authors are people who create works

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Venues are journals and repositories that host works

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Institutions are universities and other orgs that are affiliated with works (via authors)

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Concepts tag Works with a topic

Together, these make a huge web (or more technically, heterogeneous directed graph) of of hundreds of millions of entities and over a billion connections between them all….”

OpenAlex: The open catalog to the global research system

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“OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of the world’s scholarly papers, researchers, journals, and institutions — along with all the ways they’re connected to one another.

Using OpenAlex, you can build your own scholarly search engine, recommender service, or knowledge graph. You can help manage research by tracking citation impact, spotting promising new research areas, and identifying and promoting work from underrepresented groups. And you can do research on research itself, in areas like bibliometrics,science and technology studies, and Science of science policy

Because we think all research should be free and open, OpenAlex is free and open itself, and we’re built on a fully Open Source codebase.

We believe the global research system is one of humankind’s most beautiful creations. OpenAlex aims to make that whole beautiful creation available to everyone, everywhere….

Let’s start way back at the beginning, with the ancient Library of Alexandria. Working create a Universal Library, they didn’t just gather knowledge — they made it useful by indexing it in the world’s first library catalog, the Pinakes. That’s what we’re trying to do, too, and so our name is an homage to them!

Fast forward a few millenia: OpenAlex had been a dream at our little nonprofit for a long time, but two doors opened simultaneously in May 2021. First, we received a generous, $4.5M grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Second, Microsoft announced it would shutter Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), which much of the community has come to rely upon as our best index of scholarly communication. So, we had the means and the opportunity, and we ran with it!

Our first beta data dump release was in in mid-November, 2021. OpenAlex will remain in beta until our official launch on January 3, 2022 — just in time to take up the mantle from MAG, which closes up shop December 31st….”

Knowledge Rights 21 – 21st Century Access to Culture, Learning and Research in Europe – IFLA

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“Stichting IFLA Foundation is delighted to receive a €3m Arcadia grant to launch the new Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) programme to promote access to knowledge for study, research and cultural life in Europe….

KR21 will be advocating for a 21st century copyright environment across Europe that is friendly to the modern delivery and use of education and research materials as well as the spread of culture and heritage in the digital age.

With a focus on evidence and capacity building, our goal is to achieve and implement reforms to copyright law and practice that enable knowledge institutions to provide unhindered access to copyright works for education and research purposes….”

IUCN To Boost Open Access To Conservation Knowledge | Scoop News

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“Thanks to a 3-year grant from the Arcadia Fund – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin – the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) will be able to promote and improve researchers’ open access to high-quality conservation knowledge.

The grant will support IUCN in advancing and promoting principles of open access through scholarly communications amongst IUCN’s membership and expert network. It will also allow IUCN to digitize its back catalogue of publications and to develop an open access policy….”

Authors Alliance Partner Program (A2P2) Resources Now Openly Available | Authors Alliance

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“Authors Alliance is thrilled to announce the open release of our Authors Alliance Partner Program (A2P2) resources. For the past two years, we have been collaborating with library partners to develop a suite of resources that scholarly communications and library professionals can deploy to help faculty, researchers, and students understand and manage their rights throughout their careers. Starting today, A2P2 materials—including workshops in a box, webinars, and issue briefs—are available for everyone to freely use, adapt, and share under Creative Commons licenses. …”

DORA receives $1.2M grant from Arcadia to accelerate research assessment reform | DORA

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“Research assessment reform is part of the open research movement in academia that asks the question: Who and what is research for? The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), an initiative that operates under the sponsorship of the American Society for Cell Biology, has been awarded a 3-year, $1.2M grant from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. The generous funding will support Tools to Advance Research Assessment (TARA), a project to facilitate the development of new policies and practices for academic career assessment. Project TARA is a collaboration with Sarah de Rijcke, Professor in Science and Evaluation Studies and director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, and Ruth Schmidt, Associate Professor at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The grant for Project TARA will help DORA to identify, understand, and make visible the criteria and standards universities use to make hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. This information will be used to create resources and practical guidance on the reform of research assessment for academic and scholarly institutions. The grant provides DORA with crucial support to create the following outputs:

An interactive online dashboard that tracks criteria and standards academic institutions use for hiring, review, promotion, and tenure.
A survey of U.S. academic institutions to gain a broad understanding of institutional attitudes and approaches to research assessment reform.
A toolkit of resources informed by the academic community to support academic institutions working to improve policy and practice….”

Open Future

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“Numerous organisations and initiatives have been launched with a belief in openness and free knowledge. Their proponents placed their bets on the combined power of networked information services and new governance models for the production and sharing of content and data. We – as members of this broad movement – were among those who believed it possible to leverage this combination of power and opportunity to build a more democratic society, unleashing the power of the internet to create universal access to knowledge and culture. For us, such openness meant not only freedom, but also presented a path to justice and equality….

The open revolution that we imagined did not, however, happen. At least not on the scale that we and many other proponents of free culture expected.

Nevertheless, the growing Open movement demonstrated the viability of our ideas. As proof we have Wikipedia, Open Government data initiatives, the ascent of Open Access publishing, the role of free software in powering the infrastructure of the internet and the gradual opening of the collections of many cultural heritage institutions….

Over time, we have observed the significant evolution of our movement’s normative basis – away from a justification based on the voluntary exercise of rights by individual creators and towards a justification based on the production of social goods….

Over the last decade, we have witnessed a wholesale transformation of the networked information ecosystem. The web moved away from the ideals and the open design of the early internet and turned into an environment that is dominated by a small number of platforms….

The concentration of power in the hands of a small number of information intermediaries negates one of the core assumptions of the Open movement….”

Know your rights: the key to eBook access – CILIP: the library and information association

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“Maintaining the status quo for public libraries – to build collections, preserve and lend them – is now seen as a radical and frightening mission, according Ben White, PhD researcher at the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management, Bournemouth University and co-founder of KnowledgeRights21. Here he speaks to Rob Mackinlay about why not challenging the methods used by publishers to protect their content will damage not only libraries, but also threatens research and innovation.

“Publishers can’t refuse to sell paper books to libraries, but they can and do refuse to sell them eBooks. And all we want to do is to be allowed to do what we’ve always done, to keep the status quo, to be allowed to build collections, preserve and lend, so it is strange that the solution sounds a bit frightening and radical,” says Ben White who has been immersed in the legal minutiae of intellectual property across Europe for decades….”