Knowledge and experience of Zambian teaching faculties with scholarly communication and dissemination practices | Emerald Insight

Abstract:  Purpose

This paper aims to investigate the knowledge and experience of Zambian teaching faculties with scholarly communication and dissemination practices.

Design/methodology/approach

The researchers used a survey to quickly obtain information about a large sample of individuals of interest. The study population consisted of faculties from two Zambian public universities with research and publication experience. The researchers used random sampling techniques. A total of 125 valid responses were received from the selected population.

Findings

The findings show that most respondents agreed that publishing in open-access journals increased visibility and readership, had a more significant impact, facilitated collaboration and interdisciplinary research, was cost-effective and provided accessibility. Google Scholar was the most commonly used platform, followed by ResearchGate and ORCID.

Research limitations/implications

This study’s limitations focus on only two Zambian public universities. This study’s practical implications include improving the universities’ open-access policies and educating faculties on the benefits of open access.

Originality/value

This study’s originality lies in exploring the Zambian teaching faculties’ perceptions of open access and academic social networking sites. The results of this study can help universities and researchers in Zambia to understand the importance of scholarly communication and dissemination practices and help them implement effective policies for promoting open-access publishing, institutional repositories and academic social networking sites.

GW4 Joint Statement Rights Retention in Scholarly Works

“The GW4 Universities—Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, and Exeter—have long-standing commitments to Open Access, underpinning the positive economic and social impact of our research within an inclusive research culture and environment. To this end, our library teams have worked together to develop a shared position and joint statement on Rights Retention. It is a marker of our collaborative commitment and our broader intention to work together to strengthen the UK research environment. Rights Retention is intended to provide academics with greater control over the rights in their own scholarly works. It does this by: • providing routes to open access publishing which are inclusive and contribute to a positive research culture • strengthening sector positions in negotiations with scholarly publishers • mitigating the risks of non-compliance with the terms of grant agreements • minimising workload and bureaucracy for authors.”

GW4 Alliance launches joint statement on rights retention in scholarly works – GW4

“Library teams from across the GW4 Alliance, a consortium of four of the most research-intensive and innovative universities in the UK: Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter, have joined together to publish a collective Rights Retention Statement, advocating for greater measures to support researchers to retain the rights to their work.

Rights Retention is intended to provide academics with greater control over the rights in their own scholarly works, enabling them to disseminate research and scholarship as widely as possible, supporting compliance with funder mandates, whilst also allowing them to publish their works in a journal of their own choice….”

The state of green open access in Canadian universities | The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science

Abstract:  This study investigates the use of institutional repositories for self-archiving peer-reviewed work in the U15 (an association of fifteen Canadian research-intensive universities). It relates usage with university open access (OA) policy types and publisher policy embargoes. We show that of all articles found in OpenAlex attributed to U15 researchers, 45.1 to 56.6% are available as Gold or Green OA, yet only 0.5 to 10.7% (mean 4.2%) of these can be found on their respective U15 IRs. Our investigation shows a lack of OA policies from most institutions, journal policies with embargoes exceeding 12 months, and incomplete policy information.

 

Open Access Week 2023: Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access Policy – Open Access and Digital Scholarship Blog

“After many years of work, the College will soon be able to announce that we are updating our institutional open access policy to allow researchers to make their peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings available on open access under a CC BY licence at the point of publication with no embargo. This will apply to accepted manuscripts, and enable staff and students to retain their right to reuse the content of those outputs in teaching, research and further sharing of their work. …”

The Scholarly Works Policy | Staff | University of Bristol

“To publish our research openly, our authors need to retain their rights to share their work. Traditionally, most publishers have claimed these rights in their standard publishing contracts, but to comply with funder open access policies and future REF assessments we need to hold on to them. To ensure our authors can do so, the University of Bristol has enacted the Scholarly Works Policy….”

Statement from Martha Whitehead Celebrating Open Access Week 2023 | Harvard Library

“This year’s International Open Access Week theme, “Community Over Commercialization,” provides a welcome focus on a version of open access we advocate for at Harvard Library: collaborative scholarly publishing models with no article processing charges (APCs).

Commercialization itself isn’t the issue — in academia we routinely pay fees for commercial services, and commercialization is often a desirable outcome of research and innovation. Our objection is the extractive model of scholarly publishing in which huge APCs of up to $10,000 per article are levied by commercial publishers, while researchers contribute the articles and peer review for free. This model has advanced profit-driven open access, but not equitable open access. Essentially it works against the original ethos of open access, which was to reduce barriers and enable the free flow of ideas and knowledge across the research ecosystem and to the public at large.

This is why rights retention is one of the foundational elements of the equitable open access models we support at Harvard Library. This year we’re celebrating the 15th anniversary of unanimous votes by faculty in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Harvard Law School to give Harvard a nonexclusive, irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly articles for any non-commercial purpose. Other Harvard schools and research centers subsequently voted to establish similar open access policies, and “the Harvard model” has been adopted by nearly 100 institutions and policymakers around the world. As well, we’re delighted to be celebrating the 10th anniversary of our Copyright First Responders program, which helps advance teaching, learning, and scholarship through community engagement with copyright questions, not just at Harvard but in many regions of the country….”

Midlands Innovation Rights Retention Statement of Intent

“Midlands Innovation is committed to supporting Open Research and will endeavour, working in collaboration across our Universities, to make our research activity as openly available as possible.

A key enabler of Open Research is author rights retention. This ensures authors keep the rights to their work, and enables their research to be as open as possible and as closed as necessary. Here, authors do not automatically transfer the Intellectual Property Rights in their research publications to publishers and, in parallel with journal or other forms of e- or print publication, can make each research publication3 immediately open access through institutional and subject repositories….

You are strongly encouraged to not, by default, transfer intellectual property rights to publishers and instead use a Rights Retention statement as standard practice. Your university is in the process of putting in place its own Rights Retention policy and we encourage you to refer directly to the relevant guidance available at your university….” 

Research Publications and Copyright Policy | Information Services | Queen’s University Belfast

“Traditionally, when publishing scholarly articles, staff at Queen’s University Belfast have assigned copyright to the publisher via a copyright transfer agreement. As a result, many scholarly articles are under the partial or complete ownership of publishers.  

The purpose of this policy is to: 

Enable staff to retain ownership rights to their scholarly articles 
Help staff make scholarly articles open access so that they are disseminated as widely as possible 
Make it simpler for staff to meet research funder and REF (1) open access policies 
Ensure that staff have the freedom to submit to the publication venue of their choice, and still meet research funder and REF open access policies …”

Promoting Open Access in Research-Performing Organizations: Spheres of Activity, Challenges, and Future Action Areas

Abstract:  Open access (OA) has become a critical issue in science policy and affects a wide range of activities in universities and research labs. Research-performing organizations (RPOs), defined as publicly funded universities and research institutions, face significant challenges in shaping the OA transformation. This article examines the spheres of activity available to RPOs for shaping the OA transformation, using a categorization of 22 spheres of activity related to OA. These spheres of activity include strategy and communication, services and infrastructures, business relationships with publishers, and collaborations. Current challenges and future action areas in promoting OA are also described, providing support for RPOs in handling OA and highlighting key issues. The categorization can serve as a tool for systematically assessing OA activities at RPOs and shows that OA is a cross-cutting issue in these organizations. Collaboration on OA activities, both within and beyond organizations, presents a challenge. To effectively promote OA, it is crucial to strengthen the interaction between funding agencies and RPOs. Libraries are critical stakeholders, playing a vital role in advancing OA at the local, national, and international levels in partnership with RPO management and other partners in faculty, administration, and information technology.

 

CONCORDIA OPEN SCIENCE WORKING GROUP RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FOSTERING OPEN SCIENCE AT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY

“Concordia should: ? Broaden the university’s senate resolution on open access (dated to 2010) and update it to reflect the current state of open science and the need for widespread departmental and researcher buy-in. ? Continue to support foundational initiatives, like the Open Science @Concordia conference (inaugurally held in May 2022) and the Concordia Open Science Working Group led by Drs. Byers-Heinlein and Alessandroni, alongside library-hosted Open Access Week and Open Education Week events and services, which are crucial milestones along this pathway. These are key to creating awareness of the benefits of adopting open science practices, both broadly and in discipline-specific ways. ? Further the development of copyright support through an institutionally supported rights retention strategy, which can support green open access and diversify how research can be made openly accessible. ? Promote public outreach by creating (and enhancing existing) training programs in popular science writing for faculty and students using local expertise from the Department of Journalism, the Department of Communication Studies, and the Library. ? Strengthen ties with other institutions and organizations to secure long-term funding and resources for the implementation of open science. ? Position principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion at the core of open science practices, including designing, generating, and publishing science. ? Promote open education at Concordia, for example by highlighting in course calendars which courses use open materials, open software, and renewable assignments….”

Open Access and University IP Policies in the United States | Authors Alliance

“In practice, however, control over copyrighted works is often more complicated. When it comes to open access scholarly publishing, the story is particularly complicated because the default allocation of rights is often modified by an complex series of employment agreements, institutional open access policies, grant terms, relationships (often not well defined) between co-authors, and of course the publishing agreement between the author and the publisher. Because open access publishing is so dependent on those terms, it’s important to have a clear understanding of who holds what rights and how they can exercise them….

A growing number of universities have policies, enacted at the behest of faculty, that specifically provide rights to make faculty scholarship openly available. The “Harvard model” is probably the most common, or at least the most well known. These types of policies allocate a license to the university, to exercise on behalf of the individual creator, with the specific intent of making the work available free of charge. Often these policies will include special limitations (e.g., the university cannot sell access to the article) or allow for faculty to opt-out (often by seeking a waiver)….

Although the existing, somewhat messy, maze of institutional IP policies, publishing agreements, and OA policies can seem daunting, understanding their terms is important for authors who want to see their works made openly available. I’ll leave for another day to explore whether it’s a good thing that the rights situation is so complex. In many situations, rights thickets like these can be a real detriment to authors and access to their works. In this case the situation is at least nuanced such that authors are able to leverage pre-existing licenses to avoid negotiating away the bundle of rights they need to see their works made available openly.”