Arcadia supports Redalyc and AmeliCA in its endeavor to advance diamond Open Access

“The Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEM) awarded $3.6 Million grant from Arcadia – a charitable of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin – for Redalyc and AmeliCA. The project’s purpose is to reinforce, expand and strengthen the current efforts of this initiatives so to advance diamond Open Access within a framework of science as a global public good through the consolidation of an Open Infrastructure for capacity building, visibility, discoverability, quality assurance, technological development and sustainability of diamond OA publishing that yields more equitable and inclusive participation in the communication of science.”

 

Arcadia supports Redalyc and AmeliCA in its endeavor to advance diamond Open Access

The Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEM) awarded $3.6 Million grant from Arcadia – a charitable of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin – for Redalyc and AmeliCA. The project’s purpose is to strengthen and expand the current efforts of these two initiatives on non-commercial Open Access through the consolidation of an Open Infrastructure for capacity building, visibility, discoverability, quality assurance, technological development and sustainability of diamond OA publishing that yields more equitable and inclusive participation in the communication of science.

[…]

 

AmeliCA for Indian Scholarly Societies to Open Scholarship – Open Access India

“In India, most scholarly societies only publish their journals in print. If the journals are online, they still use the printer-set portable document formats because they believe that the only trustworthy and legitimate copies are those that are printed. In many cases, the scholarly societies post their entire journals online on their websites. The new publishing technologies do not seem to entice societies to devote much of their time to them. It seems they are content with the status quo. A dedicated staff and funding are needed to design layouts, publish in multiple formats, share meta-data, and generate metrics for articles. Society membership fees are often the main source of funds for these societies, and making their journals freely available online may undermine their sustainability. Since society cannot eliminate printing altogether, they must spend thousands of rupees on the design and layout of the manuscripts, as well as the printing.

Open access is a challenge for scholarly societies! They are still unsure as to the benefits open access can offer when libraries subscribe to their journals and make them available to readers. There are several Indian journals published by international publishers. The societies want to increase the reputation of the journals by utilising the publisher’s technology and reaching a wider audience. …

AmeliCA XML can be used to create digital publishing formats such as epubs, pdfs, HTML, and so on, and the meta-data can be harvested by the interoperable harvesters to develop global repositories online. Since all the works are available online perpetually, authors can showcase their work and invite collaborations from anywhere in the world.

 

The editors and editorial should be trained on the use of free and open technologies like AmeliCA XML and OJS and the authors and research managers need to be educated about open scholarship and open metrics. Already, the Society of Promotion of Horticulture is experimenting with AmeliCA. Joining AmeliCA infrastructure will definitely help the Indian researchers and the people in having a free-of-cost publication and access as the advisors work on implementing a system which will offer less or no cost for publishing and for accessing the published literature. Major advantages to open scholarship are having access to digital publishing software, indexing in the repository of the global south to increase readership, and working with scholars and publishers who share the same vision of creating the world’s open scholarship ecosystem.”

OA Leaders on Advancing the BOAI: Interview with Dr. Johan Rooryck

“In honor of the 20th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), Scholastica reached out to OA leaders to get their take on the progression of the OA movement over the last two decades and recommendations to help advance fully-OA publishing in the years to come.

Kicking off the series, we welcome to the blog Dr. Johan Rooryck, Executive Director of cOAlition S, professor of linguistics at Leiden University, and editor-in-chief of the Diamond OA title Glossa: a journal of general linguistics. In the interview below, Dr. Rooryck shares his take on major OA publishing milestones up to this point and the essential roles all stakeholders have to play in advancing the BOAI principles to realize the founding vision of a future of free and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed research for all curious minds….”

CANADIAN INSTITUTIONS PLEDGE 268,750 EUROS TO ARXIV, REDALYC/AMELICA AND DSPACE – SCOSS – The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services

“After their generous pledge in 2020, twenty-five members of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), in collaboration with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), have now committed to supporting all three infrastructures currently promoted by SCOSS in its third funding cycle. This is the first library consortium to pledge for the SCOSS third funding cycle infrastructures.

CRKN empowers researchers, educators, and society with greater access to the world’s research and Canada’s preserved documentary heritage, now and for future generations. CARL provides leadership on behalf of Canada’s research libraries and enhances capacity to advance research and higher education.Through this CARL-CRKN partnership, Canadian academic library support will total 104,500 Euros to arXiv, 98,250 Euros to Redalyc/AmeliCA, and 66,000 Euros to DSpace, for a combined total of 268,750 Euros over the next three years….”

Exploring collaborative non-commercial publishing models for Open Access: tender results | Plan S

cOAlition S received a total of 11 proposals for the tender for a study to explore collaborative non-commercial Open Access publishing models for Open Access (a.k.a Diamond OA) published in March 2020. We are pleased to announce that the tender was awarded to a consortium coordinated by OPERAS, including Sparc Europe, Utrecht University, DOAJ, UiT The Arctic University of Norway as partners, and LIBER, OASPA, ENRESSH, Redalyc-AmeliCA and CSI as associate partners.

The study will be delivered by the end of 2020, and regular public updates on progress are planned along the way. The study is financially supported by Science Europe.

The commercial model of academic publishing underscoring Plan S weakens the existing open access ecosystem in Latin America | Impact of Social Sciences

Health emergencies such as those we face today reveal the importance of opening scientific knowledge; something that not-for-profit open access publishing has permanently and organically allowed for a long time. The expansion of Plan S, a research funder led initiative to promote a global transition to open access to scholarly research, to Latin America has led to significant debate about how the policy will impact the existing system of non-commercial open access publication in Latin America. Responding to earlier posts on this subject, Eduardo Aguado López and Arianna Becerril García argue that introducing Article Processing Charges, whereby academics or their funders pay to publish open access, will inherently degrade existing non-profit forms of open access publishing that have existed in Latin America for over three decade

Without stronger academic governance, Covid-19 will concentrate the corporate control of academic publishing | Impact of Social Sciences

Whilst the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a short term uptick in open research practices, both in response to the virus and the need for remote access to research and teaching materials. Samuel Moore argues that the long term impact of Covid-19 and its related economic impact will likely increase the corporate control of academic publishing. Citing the need for increased scholar led forms publishing operating outside of market interests, he suggests now is the time to rethink how scholars and research organisations can constructively engage with the governance of scholarly communication.

KNOWLEDGE BASE ON EPIDEMICS FROM AMELICA/REDALYC JOURNALS

“In the face of a global health contingency, the vital role of Open Access is endorsed: to bring knowledge to all corners of the world, to allow science to be quickly and timely accessible so that its contribution is reflected in the improvement of the quality of human life , in saving lives and in the development of a better society for all. Open Access initiatives such as Redalyc have been working towards this goal for 18 years. Today, the AmeliCA/Redalyc alliance reaffirms its commitment to Open Access and continues to develop technology which it is now applied to the semantic dissemination of articles published on topics of interest in epidemiology, pandemics and related topics. This development enable to publish more than 6 thousand articles in Linked Open Data (LOD) format so that they can be processed and interconnected in the LOD knowledge cloud and allow users to browse content and access to full-texts in a thematic discovery service….”
 

AmeliCA/Redalyc1 run an ontology-based algorithm, previously developed called OntoOAI (Becerril-Garci?a & Aguado-Lopez, 2018), on their databases to extract epidemics-related content. The results include: an ontology representation of the knowledge published in 6,557 scientific articles including concepts and relations, as well as their attributes, a directed-graph thematic content browser to access to full-texts and a dataset available at SPARQL endpoint to query the results as part of Linked Open Data….”

 

 

EOI: South Asian Journals Editors for AmeliCA

“Supported by UNESCO, CLACSO & Redalyc, this AmeliCA XML is compliant with JATS standards and helps all the scholarly journals that promote a non-profit publishing model to preserve the scholarly and open nature of scientific communication.

The AmeliCA XML helps to produce HTML, ePUB, PDF etc versions which the scholarly societies can use and make their journals more visible worldwide over internet. And also get their publications preserved and communicate with other platforms.

With this background, I am proposing that lets all join together in building not for profit scholarly publishing ecosystem. The journals in South Asia which are traditional print only are not slowly moving towards online and open access but their native publications are only in PDF formats.

I am sure and confident that the journals when adopt and use the AmeliCA XML, the journal articles will be better formatted and are available for interoperable and sharing.

The journal of Horticultural Sciences (JHS) ISSN 0973-354X https://jhs.iihr.res.in/index.php/jhs/about from India had recently joined AmeliCA and is now in the process of publishing its articles using AmeliCA XML markup language.

Similarly, if the journal editors from South Asia are willing to use AmeliCA XML may please express their interest by filling the form at http://bit.ly/S4Amelica. We may get offline or online meeting/workshop and capacity building for the same.”

EOI: South Asian Journals Editors for AmeliCA

“Supported by UNESCO, CLACSO & Redalyc, this AmeliCA XML is compliant with JATS standards and helps all the scholarly journals that promote a non-profit publishing model to preserve the scholarly and open nature of scientific communication.

The AmeliCA XML helps to produce HTML, ePUB, PDF etc versions which the scholarly societies can use and make their journals more visible worldwide over internet. And also get their publications preserved and communicate with other platforms.

With this background, I am proposing that lets all join together in building not for profit scholarly publishing ecosystem. The journals in South Asia which are traditional print only are not slowly moving towards online and open access but their native publications are only in PDF formats.

I am sure and confident that the journals when adopt and use the AmeliCA XML, the journal articles will be better formatted and are available for interoperable and sharing.

The journal of Horticultural Sciences (JHS) ISSN 0973-354X https://jhs.iihr.res.in/index.php/jhs/about from India had recently joined AmeliCA and is now in the process of publishing its articles using AmeliCA XML markup language.

Similarly, if the journal editors from South Asia are willing to use AmeliCA XML may please express their interest by filling the form at http://bit.ly/S4Amelica. We may get offline or online meeting/workshop and capacity building for the same.”

Co-creating Open Infrastructure to Support Diversity and Equity

“To reframe our priorities in this way requires collective will and coordination across regions and institutions to build new kinds of support for resource reallocation. It further requires institutional courage and political will to declare that open, autonomous, and equitable systems are preferred over “prestigious” Euro-centric research systems that continue to undermine other epistemic communities from around the world. It requires that disciplines and societies prioritize who they have been centering in their research, whose voices they’ve been amplifying, and whose they have been silencing. Supporting the status quo while leaving initiatives that reflect epistemic diversity and knowledge equity as second-tier priorities will result in continued entrenchment of status quo inequities and the marginalization of truly innovative, equitable systems….”

Latin America’s longstanding Open Access ecosystem could be undermined by proposals from the Global North | LSE Latin America and Caribbean

“Open access is often seen as a process of switching from the existing closed-subscription model of scholarly communication to an open one. But Latin America has had an open access ecosystem for scholarly publishing for over a decade, and the recent AmeliCA initiative seeks to develop cooperative scientific communication further still. These efforts, however, could yet be undermined by recent open access proposals from the cOAlition S consortium of research funders in the Global North, write Eduardo Aguado López and Arianna Becerril García (both Redalyc, AmeliCA, and Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México)….”

North vs South – Are open access models in conflict?

“One particular challenge for researchers in the Global South is the potential for a shift from a ‘pay to read’ model of scholarly communication to a ‘pay to publish’ model in which researchers do not have the resources necessary to publish their research.

Plan S has stated that it is not focused on delivering only one business model for scholarly communication. However, Article Processing Charges (APCs) have been the only model clearly identified for financing.

If Plan S is proposing to pursue a global flip to open access, we believe that this will require the recognition and support of diverse business models and a clearer definition of the resources these organisations will need to implement these policies, much in the same way the coalition has provided guidance to commercial publishers to secure funding for APC payments.

For a system that publicly subsidises scholarly communication through academic institutions, as in Latin America, implementing charges to authors heightens the risk of breaking a structure that has been designed to support researchers and keep public money within a publicly managed ecosystem.

As Leslie Chan notes, when opening access is decontextualised from its historical and political roots, it has the potential to become as exploitative and oppressive as the system it is seeking to replace….”