Category Archives: oa.platforms

WHO releases data.who.int

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“For 75 years, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been dedicated to promoting health, keeping the world safe and serving the vulnerable. The use of data as the foundation for evidence-based decision-making has been central to WHO’s mission. Today, there are more opportunities than ever to harness the power of data. Yet progress is uneven, with global disparities in capacity for health data collection, communication and access. The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the urgent need for the public and policymakers to have access to timely, robust and reliable data.

Recognizing these challenges, WHO is proud to announce a transformative digital platform, data.who.int, a one-stop shop for health data. Data.who.int fulfills WHO’s commitment to provide health data as a public good; it is powered by the ambitious technologies of WHO’s World Health Data Hub, delivering an end-to-end solution for WHO data processes. From collection to use, the World Health Data Hub provides a world class experience leveraging innovative technology to address data challenges….”

WEBINAR: DIAMAS with CRAFT-OA and PALOMERA – DIAMAS

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“The three projects work towards an equitable future for scholarly communication, with academic communities at the centre. The webinar will present this vision and introduce each project’s area of focus. The discussion will demonstrate the projects’ common goal for open and equitable scholarly publishing.

While DIAMAS focuses on developing common standards, guidelines and practices for the Diamond publishing sector, CRAFT-OA and PALOMERA have different aims. The former looks at the IT systems behind journal platforms to help them upscale, professionalise, and reach stronger interoperability. The latter, PALOMERA, is developing actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for Open Access books.

In the session, DIAMAS will be placed in a broader context, displaying how we collaborate with other actors in the Open Access space and plan for long-term impact in the advancement of community-led publishing.

Participants will have the chance to engage with the three projects and their vision for community-driven open scholarly publishing.”

Open Access & Open Science: failure is not an option for any party | LERU

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“LERU welcomes the presently developed draft Council Conclusions on “high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing”, to be adopted at the Competitiveness Council meeting of 23 May 2023[1]. They take Open Access to the next stage of implementation across Europe and thus represent a key move in embedding Open Science into the European research landscape. Many LERU papers, on Open Access, Open Data and Open Science have advocated the same causes.

For LERU, it is important that the upcoming Council Conclusions recognize that the increasing costs for scholarly publishing associated with certain business models may cause inequalities in communities and actually prove to be unsustainable for research funders and universities. Many people are now aware of the increase in publishing prices and the spread of transformative agreements, a result of which is a consolidation of the oligopoly in the publishing system.

The essential problem occurs when there are no reductions in price but increases, and where the resulting coverage is low. The threat is what will happen if everything is flipped to Open Access with high APC charges, both individual and under an agreement….”

Brussels plan for rival OA platform ‘naive’ | Times Higher Education (THE)

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“As anger mounts over cost of open access deals, moves to finance diamond journals and expand state-run digital platforms have divided opinion…

Calls to transform the European Union’s research repository into a “collective, non-profit, large-scale publishing service for the public good” that could rival commercial publishers have been described as “naive” and a distraction to the open-access mission by experts….

Amid growing unease over the high cost of several national open-access deals, including Springer Nature’s new three-year agreement with UK universities, the European Council was set to agree a motion that says “immediate and unrestricted open access” without author fees should become the “norm” in scholarly publishing.

The European Commission, which runs the €105 billion (£90 billion) Horizon Europe research funding scheme, should introduce funding policies to support open-access publishers that do not charge author fees, it adds. That might mean Horizon funding being tied to publication in so-called “diamond” journals, which are both free to read and publish in thanks to subsidies from universities, governments or other funders.

The memo, first presented by the Swedish presidency of the EU in February, also suggests a massive scaling-up of the EU’s open-access platform Open Research Europe (ORE), a site launched in 2021 that has fewer than 500 publications so far.

That proposal received a mixed response from the League of European Research Universities (LERU), which noted the scale of the proposed project was “massive” and a “single pan-European system is not likely to work successfully”.

Instead, the umbrella body suggested that what “Europe may really need is the development of an open, inter-connected, publicly owned infrastructure”, and urged the creation of funding calls to support university engagement with this kind of system….”

Ferwerda et. al. (2023) Open Access to Books – the Perspective of a Non-profit Infrastructure Provider | The Journal of Electronic Publishing

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Ferwerda, E. & Snijder, R. & Stern, N., (2023) “Open Access to Books – the Perspective of a Non-profit Infrastructure Provider”, The Journal of Electronic Publishing 26(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3303

Abstract:

This article describes the open access (OA) book platforms OAPEN Library and Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), based on 1.the development and activities of OAPEN in the first ten years; 2. the underlying technical approach behind the platforms; 3. the current role of OAPEN and DOAB and future outlook.

OAPEN started out as a project funded by the European Commission, and become a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2011. It hosts, disseminates and preserves open access books. OA book publishing has been explored in several pilot projects. Its current collection contains over 24,000 documents. DOAB launched in 2012, inspired and supported by DOAJ. It became a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2019, owned by the OAPEN Foundationand OpenEdition. It’s current collection contains close to 60,000 titles.

The data model of both platforms  is optimised for a multilingual collection and supports funding information. Ingesting books has been optimised to support a wide array of publishers and the dissemination of books takes into account search engines; libraries and aggregators and other organisations. The usage has grown in the last years, to 1 million downloads per month.

The future developments entail increased support of research funders with the establishment of a FunderForum and multi-year research into policy development. DOAB will invest more in bibliodiversity, by adding more emphasis on African and Asian countries. Also,DOAB will roll out its Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM).

OAPEN and DOAB will continue to work on developing reliable infrastructures, policy development and quality assurance around open access books.

 

EIFL support energizes Ethiopia OA journals sector | EIFL

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“With support from EIFL, Addis Ababa University Libraries (AAUL) has increased access to and visibility of research from academic institutions across Ethiopia by upgrading the national open access publishing platform, Ethiopian Journals Online (EJOL), and adding 21 new journals from 10 institutions to the platform. 

As part of the ‘Enhancing Ethiopian Journals Online’ project, AAUL has improved the look and feel of EJOL, with customized pages for each journal, including updated journal profiles and useful information for authors and reviewers (editorial policies, author guidelines, reviewer guidelines). 

By configuring editorial workflows, the project has made the platform more efficient, and integration of DOIs has made journals and articles easier to locate. 

The project team also provided training for librarians, journal editors and editorial staff to familiarize them with the upgraded journals platform and its new functionalities. 

In addition, 20 journal editors took part in workshops on the use of the publishing software, Open Journal Systems (OJS), and  the eligibility standards and criteria required for indexing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).  Journal editors also received journal policy templates.”

Common Scholarly Communication Infrastructure Landscape Review – Ithaka S+R

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“Scholarly communication is a complicated sector, with numerous participants and multiple mechanisms for communicating and reviewing materials created in an increasing variety of formats by researchers across the globe.[1] In turn, the researcher who seeks to use the products of this system wishes to discover, access, and use relevant and trustworthy materials as effortlessly as possible. The work of driving efficiency into this complex sector while bringing its multiple strands together seamlessly for the reader (or, increasingly, for a computational user) rests on a foundation of infrastructure, much of it shared across multiple publishers. In this landscape review, we seek to provide a high-level overview of the shared infrastructure that supports scholarly communication. The purpose of this landscape review is to provide scoping for the array of shared infrastructure that we intend to examine in a larger project about the strategic context that has driven and will continue to drive the development of this infrastructure. That project will include a needs analysis on what parts of the shared scholarly communication infrastructure are working well and where they can be improved, culminating in recommendations for where additional or revised collective action and community investment is indicated….”

Omeka – Omeka is Celebrating Its 15th Anniversary and We have New Offerings for You

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“When we released Omeka Classic fifteen years ago, I don’t know that any of us really thought we would still be working hard to provide open source web publishing platforms for stewards of cultural heritage and their communities. But, thankfully, here we are!

As the Omeka Team celebrates its fifteenth birthday, the project is sustainable and continues to provide software alternatives that serve the needs of our users as they endeavour to reach, engage, and collaborate with their communities. In part, this longevity can be attributed to the intelligence and dedication of the more than two dozen designers, developers, and digital humanists who have worked with Omeka over the years. In part, it can be attributed to our early decision to meet our users where they are. This commitment led to the launch of the Omeka.net hosted platform in 2010 to serve the needs of users who for a variety of reasons were unable or disinclined to host their own Omeka Classic sites. Then, in 2017, we launched Omeka S to serve the needs of institutional users and those who had an interest in working with more sophisticated approaches to digital pubishing such as using linked open data and embracing emerging standards such as the International Image Interoperability Framework.

In celebration of this milestone fifteenth year, the Omeka Team is launching a series of service offerings that demonstrate our commitment to continue meeting the needs of our wide range of users….”

Learning from national open access platforms | Royal Irish Academy

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“Publish OA (link is external), co-led by the Royal Irish Academy and Trinity College Dublin, is pleased to announce a webinar that will focus on the founding and evolution of national open access (OA) platforms.

Publish OA was created in response to the Irish government’s target of achieving 100% open access to publicly funded scholarly publications by 2030 and is funded by the National Open Research Forum (NORF). The project will run until November 2024; its key objective is to evaluate the feasibility of establishing a national OA platform for journals and books for Ireland.

Existing national OA platforms have been successful in helping publishers comply with OA requirements and have agreed to share their experiences through this webinar. The presentations will cover the creation of the platforms, principles adhered to, technical requirements, business models used to sustain these platforms and any lessons learnt.

These presentations are open to the public.

Panelists include Antti-Jussi Nygård and Sami Syrjämäki of journal.fi(link is external), and Jan Willem Wijnen from openjournals.nl(link is external). Journal.fi is a journal management and publishing service provided by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. It features 130 Finnish scholarly journals. Openjournals.nl is a diamond open-access platform for scientific journals, which was launched in 2021. It now hosts 24 journals, with a new journal being added almost every month….”

Learning from national open access platforms | Royal Irish Academy

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“Publish OA (link is external), co-led by the Royal Irish Academy and Trinity College Dublin, is pleased to announce a webinar that will focus on the founding and evolution of national open access (OA) platforms.

Publish OA was created in response to the Irish government’s target of achieving 100% open access to publicly funded scholarly publications by 2030 and is funded by the National Open Research Forum (NORF). The project will run until November 2024; its key objective is to evaluate the feasibility of establishing a national OA platform for journals and books for Ireland.

Existing national OA platforms have been successful in helping publishers comply with OA requirements and have agreed to share their experiences through this webinar. The presentations will cover the creation of the platforms, principles adhered to, technical requirements, business models used to sustain these platforms and any lessons learnt.

These presentations are open to the public.

Panelists include Antti-Jussi Nygård and Sami Syrjämäki of journal.fi(link is external), and Jan Willem Wijnen from openjournals.nl(link is external). Journal.fi is a journal management and publishing service provided by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. It features 130 Finnish scholarly journals. Openjournals.nl is a diamond open-access platform for scientific journals, which was launched in 2021. It now hosts 24 journals, with a new journal being added almost every month….”

Modular Publishing: Making all research work visible

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“Open science brings many changes, yet publishing remains the same. As a result, many improvements in the research and education process can’t fulfill their promises. In order to facilitate a rapidly changing research ecosystem, ResearchEquals allows researchers to publish whatever outputs their work creates, instead of working to create outputs that can be published. Building on open infrastructures, ResearchEquals allows you to publish over 20 different types of research modules, with more being added based on the needs from you (e.g., theory, study materials, data, or software, presentations, abstracts). All of these research steps are linked together, to create a research journey – recognizing that educational materials, research design and analysis are all part of our learning journeys. In this session you will get an introduction to ResearchEquals and how to join to co-create the platform.”

Open Sourcing Reuse | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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Adema, J., Bowie, S., & Kiesewetter, R. (2023). Open Sourcing Reuse. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.6564c3be As part of the documentation for the first book coming out of the Combinatorial Books Pilot Project, we are introducing and discussing the set of modular, open source writing, editing, annotating, and publishing software, tools, and platforms we have used. This is the fifth blogpost in a series documenting the COPIM/OHP Pilot Project Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers. You can find the previous blogposts here, here, here, and here. In the context of the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers Pilot Project one of our aims has been to use, wherever possible, modular and open source writing, editing, annotating, and publishing software, tools, and platforms. We wanted to show how these can be used in the context of reusing and rewriting existing open access books or collections of books. Instead of creating our own custom solutions we have tried to create (technical) workflows that consist of existing open source applications, to enable other authors and publishers to apply or adapt these to their own writing and publishing workflows. At this stage of the Pilot Project we want to share some preliminary insights and reflections in combination with a closer description of the tools and platforms we have used. We will do so in textual form and as part of an audio interview with Simon Bowie, who is working as an open source software developer on the COPIM project. Specifically, we want to share our rationale for using open source applications, and reflect upon how these tools can either be integrated into or require adaptations to classical editorial and publishing workflows, timelines, tasks, and relationalities between those involved in publishing a book (for example those between tool and platform providers, publishers, developers, and editors).    

How to publish in SU Dynamica – YouTube

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“This video is an introduction to the publishing platform SU Dynamica and how to use it, made by PhD Abeni Wickham, founder of Scifree and creator of SU Dynamica.

Read also the article published at Stockholm University Library, which is a summation of a seminar held 14 March, 2023….”

”Öppen vetenskap är det nya normala” – Stockholms universitetsbibliotek

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“As part of the work towards an open scientific system, Stockholm University has been involved in developing a publishing platform together with the company SciFree, where the aim is to offer an alternative way for publishing instead of via the commercial publishers. A lunchtime seminar about the platform was recently held.

– Our mission at the university is to build infrastructures and services to help researchers make the cultural change. That is why we are now testing a platform like Dynamica, says Wilhelm Widmark, head librarian and chancellor’s advisor for open science at Stockholm University.

– We believe that open science is the new normal….”

About Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative (GLIDE)

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“The Oxford-Johns Hopkins Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative (GLIDE) aims to provide a flexible collaborative platform for identifying and analysing ethical issues arising in infectious disease treatment, research, response, and preparedness, through the lens of global health ethics.

Bringing together scholars, trainees and partners from around the world, GLIDE undertakes both responsive research on pressing issues and forward-looking projects with longer timeframes. GLIDE is funded by a Wellcome Humanities and Social Science Award.

The GLIDE Gateway hosts articles about global infectious disease ethics published on Wellcome Open Research by researchers who have received funding from GLIDE or other Wellcome mechanisms….”