Supporting PsyArXiv: Your Support Matters!

“PsyArXiv, the psychological science preprint server, needs your support to continue serving as a free platform for sharing our work.

Created during SIPS 2016 by SIPS members like you, PsyArXiv is one of the most successful SIPS Products. It is maintained by SIPS and hosted by OSF Preprints, which allows it to seamlessly interface with OSF projects. PsyArXiv currently hosts around 30 thousand preprints with more than 6,000 new manuscripts being added every year, and an average of 9 thousand page views per day!…”

Supporting Ukrainian Editorial Staff: Crowdfunding Campaign

The invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 and the expansion of the war zone across the country have had a significant impact on the country’s scientific activity. Much civilian infrastructure has been destroyed, including higher education and research institutions.

Through a number of programmes, such as Science for Ukraine, support is being provided to Ukrainian researchers, but this support has not been extended to staff working alongside researchers in knowledge generation: the librarians, editors, technicians, and administrative staff at universities, research institutes, and other infrastructures.

Yet preserving the knowledge, expertise, and knowledge-sharing capabilities of these scientific communities is of vital importance.

What can we do to help?

Supporting Ukrainian Editorial Staff (SUES) is an initiative by various European institutions, infrastructures, and organizations (Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences [IBL-PAN], OPERAS, Directory of Open Access Journals [DOAJ], Directory of Open Access Books [DOAB], Electronic Information for Libraries [EIFL], Association of European University Presses [AEUP]), as well as a number of French scientific publishers, aimed at supporting scientific communication in Ukraine and helping scholarly journals and academic publishers to continue their publishing activities.

Did you know that there are more than 1,000 academic journals in Ukraine? Over 700 of these are open access journals published via the URAN platform. The publication of academic books is also extensive, with more than 20 Ukrainian university presses currently distributed via the CEEOL portal. These publications, in fields ranging from physics to literature via history, sociology, and biology, are key vehicles for the communication of knowledge generated by Ukrainian researchers. The editors, reviewers, typesetters, proofreaders, translators, and technical and administrative staff working in the various publishing centres need your support to continue their mission: to share and disseminate knowledge.

A questionnaire is being circulated around Ukrainian journals and publishers to help accurately identify their needs in terms of financial and technical support. The requests received so far relate primarily to remuneration for editorial work, to enable them to continue their work and to publish the next issue of their journal or their next book. The purpose of this campaign is to help 10 journals or publishers to keep publishing. In the long term, the project is also aimed at strengthening relationships and exchanging knowledge to ensure the international presence and visibility of Ukrainian academic publishers. Thanks to your contribution, Ukrainian scholarly journals and scientific publishers will be able to continue sharing knowledge.

A crowdfunding campaign is being run from Wednesday, 4 May to Monday, 6 June 2022, to raise money to help Ukrainian journals who have requested assistance from the coalition. Unique compensation will be offered in return for any financial support offered.

Link to the crowdfunding webpage: https://wemakeit.com/projects/support-to-ukrainian-editors

Contacts

Perrett Laver: Director of Development

“The Center for Open Science (COS) is a non-profit culture change organization founded in 2013 with a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. COS pursues this mission by building communities around open science practices, supporting metascience research, and developing technologies such as OSF (Open Science Framework), a free, open source software tool.

COS is seeking a new Director of Development who will be responsible for identifying, cultivating, soliciting and stewarding philanthropic contributions in support of the mission and activities of COS. The Director of Development works closely with the Executive Director, COO & Managing Director, as well as the rest of the leadership team.  Supervising the Senior Development Manager and Development Coordinator, the Director will establish and implement the strategy and infrastructure needed to increase and diversify annual revenue through the development of individual donors, foundations, corporations, and innovative online giving.

If you are a strategic and entrepreneurial leader with demonstrable experience and success in development and excited by our mission and values, then we look forward to hearing from you.

The Center for Open Science is partnering with the executive search firm Perrett Laver on this search. A complete application will include a letter of interest and a current CV, all correspondence will be held in strict confidence.

The deadline for applications is Friday, February 11….”

Sci-Hub Celebrates 10 Years Of Existence, With A Record 88 Million Papers Available, And A Call For Funds To Help It Add AI And Go Open Source | Techdirt

“To celebrate ten years offering a large proportion of the world’s academic papers for free — against all the odds, and in the face of repeated legal action — Sci-Hub has launched a funding drive:

Sci-Hub is run fully on donations. Instead of charging for access to information, it creates a common pool of knowledge free for anyone to access.

The donations page says that “In the next few years Sci-Hub is going to dramatically improve”, and lists a number of planned developments. These include a better search engine, a mobile app, and the use of neural networks to extract ideas from papers and make inferences and new hypotheses. Perhaps the most interesting idea is for the software behind Sci-Hub to become open source. The move would address in part a problem discussed by Techdirt back in May: the fact that Sci-Hub is a centralized service, with a single point of failure. Open sourcing the code — and sharing the papers database — would allow multiple mirrors to be set up around the world by different groups, increasing its resilience….”

Sci-Hub Pledges Open Source & AI Alongside Crypto Donation Drive * TorrentFreak

“Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has launched a donation drive to ensure the operations and development of the popular academic research platform. For safety reasons, donations can only be made in cryptocurrencies but the pledges include a drive to open source the project and the introduction of artificial intelligence to discover new hypotheses….”

How to help – Free Journal Network

“The Free Journal Network advocates Fair Open Access. Here is how you can help us with our mission.

Donations

The Free Journal Network currently receives no public funds or government grants of any kind. We depend exclusively on the financial support of like-minded individuals as well as universities, libraries, and other organizations who support our mission. If you represent a university, library, or other organization that would like to support our mission financially, please e-mail info@freejournals.org.

Volunteer

If you are interested in supporting our mission by volunteering your time and expertise, and possibly becoming a board member in future, please email us at info@freejournals.org.

If you know of a good candidate journal, please let us know….”

arXiv’s Giving Week is May 2 – 8, 2021

“arXiv is free to read and submit research, so why are we asking for donations?

arXiv is not free to operate, and, as a nonprofit, we depend on the generosity of foundations, members, donors, volunteers, and individuals like you to survive and thrive. If arXiv matters to you and you have the means to contribute, we humbly ask you to join arXiv’s global community of supporters with a donation during arXiv’s Giving Week, May 2 – 8, 2021.

Less than one percent of the five million visitors to arXiv this month will donate. If everyone contributed just $1 each, we would be able to meet our annual operating budget and save for future financial stability.

Would you like to know more about our operations and how arXiv’s funds are spent? Check out our annual report for more information….”

New nonprofit boosts Research4Life’s mission to build research capacity in lower- and middle-income countries

“Friends of Research4Life, a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in the United States, was launched to support the critical mission of the Research4Life partnership to enable full participation in the global information environment. Organizations and individuals can now make contributions that directly benefit Research4Life programs….”

Open Access Community Investment Program Pilot

“How do libraries, consortia, and other scholarly publishing stakeholders decide what open access (OA) content to invest in when divesting from paywalled content? In the emerging OA publishing market, stakeholders must consider thousands of OA publications, while often lacking sufficient data relevant to their own values or the pros and cons of each opportunity. This one-off nature of OA investment is not conducive to easy administration or participation. Vetting and procurement processes become onerous as programs increase. While the scholarly publishing community has a great willingness to work together to support OA efforts, we need a stronger, more effective connection infrastructure to sustainably transition to OA. 

 
LYRASIS, TSPOA, and Duke University Press have developed this Open Access Community Investment Program Pilot (“Pilot Project”) to test the viability, scalability, and sustainability of infrastructure, a criteria-based vetting mechanism, and outreach to help match funding entities or potential investors with publishers or journals seeking funding to publish open access. These potential investors encompass the range of scholarly publishing stakeholders, including for example: libraries, consortia, and funders, academic centers/departments, and cultural institutions. The term “stakeholders” as used throughout this document references this range of potential investors. While the initial set of open access initiatives or programs will be U.S. based, the community of investing stakeholders is expected to be global….”

 

Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP)

“The LYRASIS Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP) is a community-driven framework that enables multiple stakeholders (including funders, institutions, libraries, authors, and editors) to efficiently and strategically evaluate and collectively fund open access content initiatives. The program is designed to:

Facilitate an experimental incubation space for emerging open access funding and business models;

Centralize the administration and funding of open access initiatives or programs at multiple scales and make transparent to the community at large who is participating in each investment community.

Provide a funding hub for more bespoke programs, output from smaller publishers, and niche scholarly output to maintain diversity of scholarship.

Enable investors to make principled, data-driven spending or reinvestment decisions and strategically fund individual programs or distribute funds to multiple programs that align with their missions all in one place, increasing efficiencies and convenience….”

Announcing the Open Access Community Investment Program – Transitioning Society Publications to OA

“We are thrilled to launch the Open Access Community Investment Program, a community-funded open access publishing project developed by LYRASIS, Transitioning Society Publications to Open Access (TSPOA), and Duke University Press.

Our goal is to help match libraries, consortia, and other prospective scholarly publishing funders with non-profit publishers and journal editorial boards that are seeking financial investments to sustain or transition to open access publishing of journals or books. We mean prospective funders broadly, to encompass the range of scholarly publishing stakeholders, including for example: libraries, consortia, and funders, academic centers or departments, and cultural institutions. …”

Humanities Commons | Giving to Michigan State University

“Humanities Commons is an open-source, open-access network serving scholars and practitioners across humanities disciplines and around the world. More than 23,000 registered users have created profiles and are collaborating and sharing their work with their colleagues and with the public. Our users are faculty members, graduate students, librarians, teachers, writers, researchers, and more. Humanities Commons gives all of them the means to help their work change the world….

Contributions to this campaign will help Humanities Commons reach more scholars and scholarly organizations around the world, strengthening their collaborations and enabling them to make more of their work public. Expanding the network will also make it possible for teachers and students everywhere to find and use cutting-edge research in the humanities….”

 

SCOSS meets major milestones: DOAJ reaches funding goal – SCOSS – The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services

“SCOSS has met a major milestone. The Directory of Open Access Journals, one of two Open infrastructure services recommended during our pilot funding cycle, has met its funding goal of 1,370 000 Euros. The drive kicked off in late 2018; over the course of the past two years, more than 216 institutions from 19 countries contributed to DOAJ….”