Category Archives: oa.osi

Findings from OSI’s global survey of researchers | OSI Global

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“Research is a profession, subject to the same types of incentives and pressures as any other profession. It should therefore come as no surprise that what researchers want most from research communication reforms are solutions that prioritize their individual career needs. These needs include paying less for publishing, having the freedom to publish where they choose (because choosing the best available journal is important for recognition and advancement), ensuring that the work they conduct and publish is of high quality, collaborating more effectively with their peers, being able to read other research work more easily, and having their institutions better support them. Our current global research communication reform efforts, such as open access (OA) and open science, have yet to effectively address these concerns, focusing instead on implementing policies like replacing the subscription model and requiring CC-BY licensing.

The Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) conducted two global surveys of researchers in the spring and summer of 2022 to determine how this audience felt about open access policies. While the number of researchers who participated in these surveys was too small to reach any statistically significant conclusions, the responses we received were consistent with previous researcher surveys and suggest that most researchers are not being adequately served by OA policies and that these policies should focus instead on higher research communication priorities. More research is recommended….”

Conisering Evidence-Based Open-Access Policies

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“As policymakers around the globe move forward with the challenge of making research more accessible, it is crucial that these efforts be based on solid, democratic, fact-based foundations. Particularly, policymakers should pay close attention to what researchers need, what information sharing solutions are already working in the research world (including solutions that do not fit common definitions of open), and the negative unintended consequences of our current open policies….”

Common ground in the global quest for open research

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Abstract:  It’s hard to envision a system more global and more integrated than research. Many stakeholders affect and are affected by changes in the research ecosystem; the ecosystem differs in significant ways across the globe and between researchers, institutions and fields of study; and there are many questions that exclusive action can’t address. There are also broad ecosystem-level questions that need answering. For these reasons alone, global approaches to reform are needed.

The first step in this exploration isn’t to start looking for “solutions,” but to develop a better understanding of how our needs and interests overlap. By identifying the broad contours of common ground in this conversation, we can build the guardrails and mileposts for our collaborative efforts and then allow the finer-grained details of community-developed plans more flexibility and guidance to evolve over time.

What are these overlapping interests? First, the people in this community share a common motive—idealism—to make research better able to serve the public good. We also share a common desire to unleash the power of open to improve research and accelerate discovery; we are all willing to fix issues now instead of waiting for market forces or government intervention to do this for us; and we want to ensure that everyone everywhere has equitable access to knowledge.

There is also very broad agreement in this community about which specific problems in scholarly communication need to be fixed and why, and well as many overlapping beliefs in this community. OSI participants have concluded that four such beliefs best define our common ground: (1) Research and society will benefit from open done right; (2) Successful solutions will require broad collaboration; (3) Connected issues need to be addressed, and (4) Open isn’t a single outcome, but a spectrum.

OSI has been observing and debating the activity in scholarly communication since late 2014 with regard to understanding possible global approaches and solutions for improving the future of open research. While the COVID-19 pandemic has made the importance of open science abundantly clear, the struggle to achieve this goal (not just for science but for all research) has been mired in a lack of clarity and urgency for over 20 years now, mostly stalling on the tension between wanting more openness but lacking realistic solutions for making this happen on a large scale with so many different stakeholders, needs and perspectives involved.

Underlying this tension is a fundamental difference in philosophy: whether the entire scholarly communication marketplace, driven by the needs and desires of researchers, should determine what kind of open it wants and needs; or whether this marketplace should be compelled to adopt open reform measures developed primarily by the scholarly communication system’s main billpayers—funders and libraries. There is no widespread difference of opinion in the community whether open is worth pursuing. The debate is mostly over what specific open solutions are best, and at what pace open reforms should occur.

OSI has proposed a plan of action for working together to rebuild the future of scholarly communication on strong, common ground foundation. This plan—which we’re referring to as Plan A—calls for joint action on studies, scholarly communication infrastructure improvement, and open outreach/education. Plan A also calls for working together with UNESCO to develop a unified global roadmap for the future of open, and for striving to ensure the community’s work in this space is researcher-focused, collaborative, connected (addressing connected issues like peer review), diverse and flexible (no one-size-fits-all solutions), and beneficial to research. UNESCO’s goal is to finish its roadmap proposal by early 2022.

For a full discussion of OSI’s common ground recommendations, please see the Plan A website at http://plan-a.world.

Plan A launch – OSI’s Plan A

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“OSI announced the launch of Plan A today, an international, multi-stakeholder effort to reform the future of scholarly communication.

Plan A is the 2020-25 action plan of the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI). The goals and outputs of this plan are designed to inform and align with UNESCO’s efforts to craft a global recommendation for open science in late 2021.”

OSI’s Plan A – A common ground foundation for the global future of scholarly communication

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“Plan A synthesizes the significant themes and recommendations that have emerged via these OSI activities. Plan A recommends that the international scholarly communication community begin immediate and significant action to:

DISCOVER critical missing pieces of the open scholarship puzzle so we can design open reforms more effectively;
DESIGN, build and deploy an array of much need open infrastructure tools to help accelerate the spread and adoption of open scholarship practices;
WORK TOGETHER on finding common ground solutions that address key issues and concerns (see OSI’s “Common Ground” policy paper for more detail); and
REDOUBLE OUR COLLECTIVE EFFORTS to educate and listen to the research community about open solutions, and, in doing so, design solutions that better meet the needs of research….”

Looking back at 20 years of EIFL | EIFL

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” “In an unprecedented initiative called ‘Electronic Information for Libraries’ (EIFL Direct), libraries in 39 countries will have access to a wealth of electronic full-text scholarly journals.” This announcement, by press release, marked the birth of EIFL 20 years ago, on 5 October 1999. 

At that time I was working at the Open Society Institute, part of the Soros foundations network. We were receiving applications from ex-Soviet Union university libraries requesting grants to subscribe to print journals. There was a dilemma: the subscriptions were not cheap, and they only lasted for one year. So these grants were not sustainable in the long term, and we knew that there were thousands of libraries in other developing countries that also needed, and wanted, to have access to the latest scholarly information. A few years later, the shift from print to digital in the publishing industry began and we saw an opportunity to solve the problem. The Open Society Institute negotiated with EBSCO, a large content aggregator, for a 99% discount to online journals for all libraries in countries where Soros foundations existed, as well as free delivery of the content on DVD-ROM to those libraries with poor internet connectivity. At last we were able to provide access to more than 3,500 full-text journals. …”

New white paper asks, “How can we reform promotion and tenure practices to promote open access?” – Digital Science

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“George Mason University Press and the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) have just published the OSI 2017 Promotion & Tenure Reform Workgroup Report, which explores how professional advancement scenarios–promotion and tenure, grant applications, and so on–might be reimagined to better incentivize open access, open data, and other “open” scholarly practices. My coauthors and I explored current systemic barriers to change, and propose concrete steps that OSI organizers can take to further study those challenges and find solutions.”