The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy FAQ on the new open-access policy guidance.
Frequently Asked Questions: 2022 Public Access Policy Guidance | OSTP | The White House
Reply
Category Archives: oa.faqs
Frequently Asked Questions, Open Science Europe
“These pages are updated with the answers to the most frequent questions that have been submitted to the Research Enquiry Service and Participant Validation, IT Helpdesk, eProcurement Helpdesk, Call Coordinators and Horizon Europe NCP correspondents….”
New OSC resource to support book authors interested in open access publishing – Office of Scholarly Communication
The UC Office of Scholarly Communication has created a new resource for faculty who have questions about open access book publishing. Created by a working group that included faculty, librarians, and a representative from UC Press, the newly created OA books FAQ is intended to address some questions that faculty may have about their OA publishing options and provide links to additional resources that will help faculty navigate this landscape.
Framework for Provider Agreements Frequently Asked Questions | UMass Amherst Libraries
“The Framework for Provider Agreements (FPA) is a set of principles to guide the UMass Amherst Libraries when they are working with resource providers (e.g., journal publishers, monograph publishers, data repositories, platforms, infrastructure, etc.).
The FPA also serves as a public declaration relating to the Libraries’ goal of moving towards a more financially sustainable, diverse, accessible, and open system of scholarly communication. We engage in these efforts not only as consumers of intellectual products but also as creators and evaluators.
We also recognize that procedures and expectations can vary among academic disciplines, so the principles are meant to be taken as a guide rather than a rigid set of rules.”
Resources | Open Access Australasia
OpenAccess Australasia new website with FAQs regarding OA.
Elsevier Transformative Open Access Agreement – Office of Scholarly Communication
[This is an FAQ version of the UC-Elsevier deal.]
“After more than two years of negotiations, in March 2021 the University of California announced a transformative open access agreement with Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher. This successful outcome is the result of UC’s faculty, librarians and university leadership coming together to stand firm on the goals of making UC research freely available to all and transforming scholarly communication for the better.
The four-year agreement goes into effect on April 1, 2021, restoring UC’s direct online access to Elsevier journals while accomplishing the university’s two goals for all publisher agreements:
(1) Enabling universal open access to all UC research; and
(2) Containing the excessively high costs associated with licensing journals.
These goals directly support UC’s responsibility as a steward of public funds and its mission as a public university to make its research freely available….”
CAP Model FAQ – PLOS
An FAQ on the PLOS Community Action Publishing (CAP) program.
“In the case of PLOS Medicine and PLOS Biology, the community goal is to cover the costs of the journals (plus a 10% capped margin) by equitably distributing cost, rather than have individual authors pay the high APCs required to cover the cost highly selective publishing. Members of the collective receive the “private benefit” of publishing in both journals with no fees. Authors from non-member institutions are subject to “non-member fees” which increase considerably year-on-year to encourage participation in the collective….”
Preprint info center – ASAPbio
“A preprint is a complete scientific manuscript that is uploaded by the authors to a public server. The preprint contains complete data and methodologies; it is often the same manuscript being submitted to a journal (see FAQ on submitting preprints). After a brief quality-control inspection to ensure that the work is scientific in nature, the author’s manuscript is posted within a day or so on the Web without peer review and can be viewed without charge by anyone in the world. Based upon feedback and/or new data, new versions of your preprint can be submitted; however, prior preprint versions are also retained. Preprint servers allow scientists to directly control the dissemination of their work to the world-wide scientific community. In most cases, the same work posted as preprint also is submitted for peer review at a journal. Thus, preprints (rapid, but not validated through peer-review) and journal publication (slow, but providing validation using peer-review) work in parallel as a communication system for scientific research….”
Responses to common misconceptions about campus open-access policies
“As a growing number of academic institutions gain experience in developing campus openaccess (OA) policies, common misconceptions have surfaced. This document responds to these misconceptions, offering a series of talking points developed to help respond effectively if they surface on your campus.1 Additional resources on developing and implementing a campus open-access policy, including expert consultation, are available from SPARC. See our page on campus policies at http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/campus …”
Rights & licences | Plan S
The Plan S FAQ on rights and licenses.
Open data: Your questions answered | Microsoft On The Issues
“Open data: The name alone can cause some confusion. Then there are some myths and misconceptions associated with it.
Organizations have questions about how and why they should make data freely available, or open.
We talked to Jule Sigall, Associate General Counsel, Open Innovation, in Microsoft Corporate, External and Legal Affairs, to explore this topic. Here are five of the most commonly encountered open data misconceptions, and responses to them….”
MIT and Elsevier | Scholarly Publishing – MIT Libraries
“MIT has long been a leader in sharing its research and scholarship openly with the world. In the face of unprecedented global challenges, equitable and open access to knowledge is more critical than ever.
For several months, the MIT Libraries had been in discussions with Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of scholarly journals in the world, about a new journals contract. Guided by the principles of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts, MIT Libraries sought a contract that would reflect the Institute’s values and needs and preserve our ability to share MIT research openly with the world.
Despite our best efforts, including agreeing to a six-month extension of our current contract to provide Elsevier time to develop an offer for us based on principles we shared with them in August 2019, Elsevier was unable to present a proposal that aligned with the framework. After months of good faith negotiations, it became clear that Elsevier was not able to meet our needs, so we ended negotiations at the conclusion of our six-month extension.
See the FAQ below for more information….”
Frequently Asked Questions about Subscribe to Open
“Subscribe to Open is a subscription that converts gated access journals to open access (OA) using existing library relationships and payments. Institutions subscribe in the normal fashion and, assuming that sufficient revenue is collected, the journal is published OA. This is a subscription model, not a voluntary donation.
The key features of this pilot of Subscribe to Open program are:
An intention to migrate key scholarly resources to OA;
Financial incentives for institutions to participate;
A sustainable long-term plan for OA journal publication; and
A process consistent with institutional procurement policies….”
Controlled Digital Lending Fact Sheet | Controlled Digital Lending by Libraries
“CDL is the digital equivalent of traditional library lending. A library can digitize a book it owns and lend out a secured digital version to one user at a time, in place of the physical item.
CDL has three core principles:
- A library must own a legal copy of the physical book, by purchase or gift.
- The library must maintain an “owned to loaned” ratio, simultaneously lending no more copies than it legally owns.
- The library must use technical measures to ensure that the digital file cannot be copied or redistributed.
Beyond these core principles, libraries may choose to implement CDL in different ways. …”
RCUK Policy on Open Access Frequently Asked Questions (Updated April 2018)
The RCUK update the FAQ on its OA policy April 26, 2018.