Building Effective Outreach Strategies for Open Access Book Initiatives: Lessons Learned from the Open Book Collective | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Deville, J., Fathallah, J., & Onalee Snyder, L. (2023). Building Effective Outreach Strategies for Open Access Book Initiatives: Lessons Learned from the Open Book Collective . Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.c0d717bc

As Open Access (OA) book publishers, and especially Diamond Open Access publishers, increasingly turn towards membership programs to support their work, effective outreach has become ever more important. For such publishers and for us at the Open Book Collective (OBC) sustainability depends on successfully convincing supporters that our work, and in our case that of the publishers and infrastructure providers that are our members, is relevant to the libraries and other organizations that we are asking for ongoing financial support. In many cases, this also means speaking not just about individual publications, publishers, or publishing service providers, but issues connected to OA publishing more widely. For that reason, a key feature of our outreach has been stimulating conversation and engagement around the OBC, the platform, and the future of OA books. 

In this blog post, we provide an account of how we have responded to the challenge of developing an effective outreach strategy, with the aim of sharing and archiving our experiences so that others may benefit from what we have learned, especially initiatives looking to engage with libraries and other institutional stakeholders. We document the development of the OBC’s outreach strategy and highlight the importance of effective outreach efforts in promoting wider access to scholarship.

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Towards the future of responsible research assessment: Announcing DORA’s new three-year strategic plan | DORA

“Five years after making a decisive shift to become an international campaigning initiative and completing the aims of its first strategic plan, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is pleased to announce a new three-year strategic plan to continue its focus on implementing global research assessment reform.

To meet the goals of our first strategic plan, published in 2018, we have:

Worked to increase awareness through the creation of the resource library, our social media, public events and community calls, and co-hosting the meeting Driving Institutional Change for Research Assessment Reform with HHMI.
Promoted the use of tools and processes to implement reform by partnering with community members to hold workshops and create resources, establishing an international dialogue via the creation of communities of practice for research funders and initiatives working to implement assessment reform, and creating the case study repository and the community engagement grants program.
Extended the disciplinary and geographic scope of DORA by updating our operational structure to do our utmost to distribute power and address structural inequities that limited participation in the Steering Committee….”

Strategic Visioning: HathiTrust in the Future | March 2023 | HathiTrust Digital Library

“The world has changed dramatically in the 15 years since HathiTrust’s creation and even more so in the 5 years since we adopted our 2019-2023 Strategic Directions. Despite the global disruption and changes of recent years — as well as 47% membership growth — we have followed the course laid out in that plan. We are now poised to draw on the strength of our accomplishments and prepare to serve the future needs of our membership. To do so, we are launching an in-depth process of exploration, discovery, and strategic visioning, to begin our next 15 years. Your participation is vital to creating a vision for our future services and programs that will benefit your library and communities, so we encourage you to participate wherever you can.   What We’re Doing We’ve partnered with Athenaeum 21, a long-standing digital strategy and technology planning consultancy and collaborator in the library and cultural heritage community. They will guide the 3-part collaborative visioning process that will take place through the end of 2023. During this process, we will connect with people throughout our member libraries — subject librarians, deans, collection managers, directors — as well as with HathiTrust staff and industry peers….”

Data-Driven Approaches to Design your OA Strategy

“This practical evidence-based webinar is suitable for those within research institutions, funders and academic publishers.

Register today for this webinar to learn and contribute to the discussion.

Open Access (OA) ambitions are continuously being developed, implemented and evaluated by different stakeholders in our ecosystem. There is increased appreciation that transparency and (meta)data are needed to support the broader transformation to OA, and for the design of distinct OA strategies. The required infrastructure and tools exist and continue to advance, and standardised data are increasingly available.

In this webinar our speakers will discuss from their own experiences how they use solid facts and figures to monitor and manage policy and deal compliance, and how we all are getting better at decision-making and strategy-design through quality data….”

Release of the English Version of the Rights Retention Strategy Guide

The Mettre en œuvre la stratégie de non-cession des droits sur les publications scientifiques a tool for researchers is now also available in English : Implementing the rights retention strategy for scientific publications.

The rights retention strategy is part of France’s Second National Plan for Open Science. The strategy’s conclusions on the evaluation of research and the implementation of open science are also supported by the Council of the European Union. Finally, it enables researchers to align with certain funding agencies’ open science policies.

Strategy 2023-2027 – LIBER Europe

“Our strategy for the period 2023-2027 focuses on leading developments to get ahead of radical changes happening in the research landscape.

We have identified top driving factors that will affect research libraries and LIBER, and formulated strategic undertakings to maintain our strong position in enabling world-class research….

By 2027, in collaboration with researchers, research libraries stimulate, facilitate, co-develop and manage infrastructures and practices designed to take Open Science to the next level….”

Clinical Trial Data-sharing Policies Among Journals, Funding Agencies, Foundations, and Other Professional Organizations: A Scoping Review – Journal of Clinical Epidemiology

Abstract:  Objectives

To identify the similarities and differences in data-sharing policies for clinical trial data that are endorsed by biomedical journals, funding agencies, and other professional organizations. Additionally, to determine the beliefs, and opinions regarding data-sharing policies for clinical trials discussed in articles published in biomedical journals.

 

Study Design

Two searches were conducted, a bibliographic search for published articles that present beliefs, opinions, similarities, and differences regarding policies governing the sharing of clinical trial data. The second search analyzed the gray literature (non-peer-reviewed publications) to identify important data-sharing policies in selected biomedical journals, foundations, funding agencies, and other professional organizations.

 

Results

A total of 471 articles were included after database search and screening, with 45 from the bibliographic search and 426 from the gray literature search. A total of 424 data-sharing policies were included. Fourteen of the 45 published articles from the bibliographic search (31.1%) discussed only advantages specific to data-sharing policies, 27 (27/45; 60%) discussed both advantages and disadvantages, and 4 (4/45; 8.9%) discussed only disadvantages specific. A total of 216 journals (of 270; 80%) specified a data-sharing policy provided by the journal itself. One hundred industry data-sharing policies were included, and 32 (32%) referenced a data-sharing policy on their website. One hundred and thirty-six (42%) organizations (of 327) specified a data-sharing policy.

 

Conclusion

We found many similarities listed as advantages to data-sharing and fewer disadvantages were discussed within the literature. Additionally, we found a wide variety of commonalities and differences — such as the lack of standardization between policies, and inadequately addressed details regarding the accessibility of research data — that exist in data-sharing policies endorsed by biomedical journals, funding agencies, and other professional organizations. Our study may not include information on all data sharing policies and our data is limited to the entities’ descriptions of each policy.

Institutional Strategies for the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy: Infrastructure, Policies, and Services

“In the fall of 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released its new policy for data management and sharing that will go into effect in January 2023. This policy applies to all NIH-funded research and requires investigators to submit data management and sharing (DMS) plans.

As research data sharing has started to become an enforced requirement from funders and publishers, many academic institutions, libraries, and individual researchers have developed services, technology, and workflows to meet this requirement. As institutions gear up to meet what will be a greater demand for support among researchers on their campuses given the upcoming NIH DMS policy, identifying and sharing existing tactics and expected strategic opportunities for academic institutions is critical to meeting this demand.

The Association of Academic Health Science Libraries (AAHSL), the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) conducted a mixed methods research project to identify and share these existing or proposed innovations for other institutions to reuse, build upon, or otherwise leverage to meet this upcoming NIH requirement….”

Set Science Free: OpenAIRE 3 Year Strategy Document 2023-2025

OpenAIRE has been operating as an e-Infrastructure provider for Open Scholarly Communication since 2009 and was established as a non-profit organisation in 2018. This first strategy document is the result of the work put forward by members of the OpenAIRE Standing Committee on Open Science Strategies and brings the collective knowledge and commitments from OpenAIRE members. 

It presents 5 strategic priorities on what the OpenAIRE community wants to tackle, and describes how OpenAIRE infrastructure, both its human network and ICT services, can support or evolve to serve these priorities.

DIAMAS receives grant to develop Diamond Open Access publishing in Europe | Plan S

Aix-Marseille Université, cOAlition S, and Science Europe are pleased to announce that they are participating in a Horizon Europe project called ‘Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication’ (DIAMAS). The 3-year project, launched on the 1st of September 2022, receives funding in the context of the Horizon Europe call on Capacity-building for institutional open access publishing across Europe.

The DIAMAS project, which was awarded a grant of €3m, brings together 23 European organisations that will map out the landscape of Diamond Open Access publishing in the European Research Area and develop common standards, guidelines and practices for the Diamond publishing sector. The project partners will also formulate recommendations for research institutions to coordinate sustainable support for Diamond publishing activities across Europe.

Moreover, the DIAMAS project will interact closely with the global community of the ‘Action Plan for Diamond Open Access’ signatories. While the project will spearhead some of the activities laid out in the Action Plan, it welcomes complementary actions and contributions. As a first step, DIAMAS project partners and members of the Diamond Open Access Plan Community had the chance to meet and discuss collaboration opportunities during the Diamond Open Access Conference (Zadar, Croatia, 19 – 20 September 2022).

 

Sharing our strategic and research roadmaps

“…Today, we share two roadmaps as living, breathing documents: Our Strategic Roadmap for the Fiscal Year (FY) 2022-23 builds off our 2021-2024 Strategic Plan. This roadmap seeks to actualize the Strategic Plan with a set of desired outcomes for the five goals laid out in the Strategic Plan, helping bring the strategic planning work of IOI down from the broad goals and closer to the day-to-day work of the organization. This Strategic Roadmap is intended to be both practical and aspirational, defining both a destination and a rough outline of how we plan to get there. As with any map, this exists to guide our staff and partners as well as inform our stakeholders and the broader community of those invested in building a vital ecosystem of open science and scholarly communication practices, tools, and services with both where we are and where we’re going. Our Research Roadmap brings our strategy even closer to the day-to-day work of IOI by linking the elements in the Strategic Roadmap to key research questions. We also track status (in development, being scoped, etc) and related deliverables, linking both to the tangible research outputs of IOI as well as to the Strategic Roadmap and the Strategic Plan. This is intended to outline our research objectives and key activities on a quarterly basis….”

Plenary: Recombinant Scholarly Publishing: Challenges, Trends, and Emerging Strategies | Science Editor

If you’re a member of CSE, you may be familiar with The Scholarly Kitchen, the official blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, which has established itself as a rich repository of information and an open forum for dynamic discourse that promotes collaborative, educational encounters among scholarly publishing professionals. Among the Scholarly Kitchen’s many designated “chefs” (i.e., regular writers) are Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe and Roger Schonfeld, both of whom possess a uniquely comprehensive, global perspective spanning the fields of scholarly publishing, scientific research, communication, academic libraries, and higher education. As joint plenary speakers at the 2022 CSE Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, Hinchliffe and Schonfeld shared their insights and observations about several recent trends and trajectories they’ve identified in the scholarly publishing industry.

 

Successful Implementation of Open Access Strategies at Universities of Science & Technology – Strathprints

Abstract:  While the CWTS Leiden ranking has been available since 2011/2012, it is only in 2019 that a first attempt was made at ranking institutions by Open Access-related indicators. This was due to the arrival of Unpaywall as a tool to measure openly available institutional research outputs – either via the Green or the Gold OA routes – for a specific institution. The CWTS Leiden ranking by percentage of the institutional research output published Open Access effectively meant the first opportunity for institutions worldwide to be ranked by the depth of their Open Access implementation strategies brushing aside aspects like their size. This provided an interesting way to map the progress of CESAER Member institutions that were part of the Task Force Open Science 2020-2021 Open Access Working Group (OAWG) towards the objective stated by Plan S of achieving 100% Open Access of research outputs. The OAWG then set out to map the situation of the Member institutions represented in it on this Open Access ranking and to track their evolution on subsequent editions of this ranking. The idea behind this analysis was not so much to introduce an element of competition across institutions but to explore whether progress was taking place in the percentage of openly available institutional research outputs year on year. The results of this analysis – shown in figures within this paper for the 2019, 2020 and 2021 editions – show strong differences across Member institutions that are part of the OAWG. From internal discussions within the group, it became evident that these differences could be explained through a number of factors that contributed to a successful Open Access implementation at an institutional level. This provided the basis for this work. The document identifies four key factors that contribute to a successful OA implementation at institutions, and hence to achieving a good position on the CWTS Leiden ranking for Open Access.

 

Open-Access-Strategie – Open Access Blog Berlin

“Open Access (OA) is developing in an area of tension between institutional and funder policies, the economics of publishing and last but not least the communication practices of research disciplines. In a comparison across European countries, very dynamic and diverse approaches and developments can be observed. Furthermore, this international and comparative perspective helps us to assess the state of open access and open science (OA and OS) in Germany. In this series of Open4DE project blog posts, we will summarize what we have learned in our in-depth conversations with experts on developing and implementing nationwide Open Access strategies.

After starting this series with an article about Lithuania and Sweden, we now continue our journey around the Baltic Sea. Our next stop is Finland:

In a comparison of European Openness strategies, Finland stands out for its sophisticated system of coordinated policy measures. While other countries have a strategy that bundles different aspects of the Openness culture into one central policy, the Finnish model impresses with unity in diversity. The website of the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, which was set up specifically to provide information on Open Science (OS), lists four national policies on OS and research in Finland. In addition to a policy for data and methods, a policy on open access to scholary publications and a policy on open education and educational ressources document activity at a high level. The openness culture in Finland targets all stages of scientific communication but also teaching and learning. In addition, a national information portal provides orientation on publication venues, projects and publicly funded technical infrastructures. It is an exemplary tool to get an overview of the constantly growing Open Access (OA) and OS ecosystem and its numerous products and projects….”