Open access publishing: options for reduced or waived publication charges

“Open access publishing: options for reduced or waived publication charges

Lower income country authors wishing to publish Open Access articles can follow the links below for a range of publisher websites and find details of article processing/publishing charge (APC) fee waiver and discount policies or other subsidized publishing options.”

Advancing a publicly owned and not-for-profit scholarly communication ecosystem based on the principles of open science

“Joint response by the European University Association (EUA), Science Europe, Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA), Association of ERC Grantees (AERG), Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc), cOAlition S, OPERAS, and French National Research Agency (ANR). We welcome the adoption by the Council of the European Union (EU) of the conclusions on highquality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing. As key public research and innovation actors in Europe, we are committed to supporting the development of a publicly owned, not-for-profit scholarly communication ecosystem in collaboration with policymakers in Europe and beyond….”

Open Science: stakeholders welcome European efforts towards publicly owned and not-for-profit scholarly communication | Plan S

For European public research and innovation actors, scholarly knowledge is a public good. Publicly funded research and its results should be immediately and openly available to all without barriers such as subscription fees or paywalls. This is essential in driving knowledge forward, promoting innovation and tackling social issues.

Key representative organisations of the public research and innovation sector have welcomed today’s adoption of the ‘Council conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing’.

Council calls for transparent, equitable, and open access to scholarly publications – Consilium

“In its conclusions, the Council calls on the Commission and the member states to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers. Some Member States have introduced secondary publication rights into their national copyright legislation, enabling open access to scholarly publications which involve public funds. The Council encourages national open access policies and guidelines to make scholarly publications immediately openly accessible under open licences. The conclusions acknowledge positive developments in terms of monitoring progress, like within the framework of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and suggest including open science monitoring in the European Research Area monitoring mechanism. The Council conclusions also encourage Member States to support the pilot programme Open Research Europe (to create a large-scale open access research publishing service), the use of open-source software and standards, to recognise and reward peer review activities in the assessment of researchers as well as to support the training of researchers on peer-review skills and on intellectual property rights.”

GOA8: Last report, phase 1 « Walt at Random

“The data’s as gathered as it’s going to be. 18,765 journals; 18,254 fully analyzed.

I’ve firmed up dates and ISSNs (using online ISSNs where available)….

As far as I can tell, of journals in the main sheet, 5,818 have fees and 12,435 don’t–but, as usual, most articles involve fees: 997,913 in 2022, compared to 440,229 without fees. Those figures could change slightly, but probably not by much. And the total is 1.438,142 2022 articles (from 16.984 journals with 2022 articles) and 1,322,021 2021 articles (from 17,344 journals with 2021 articles).”

Open Pharma launches new open access benchmarking tool – Open Pharma – Innovations in medical publishing

“Open Pharma has developed a new, free-to-view, online tool that reports open access (OA) publishing rates, access types and OA licences for peer-reviewed medical publications with authors affiliated to pharma companies and universities.

The Open Pharma OA position statement emphasizes the importance of publishing research OA to ensure that high-quality, peer-reviewed evidence is available to anyone who needs it, anywhere in the world and without charge.

The recognized benefits of OA publishing include improved equity in access to medical knowledge and scientific advances, increased research transparency and the potential to foster greater public trust in scientific research (Figure 1). Emerging data from global publishers Taylor & Francis also suggest that research published OA typically has higher reach and impact than comparable paywalled articles of a similar age….”

Weekly digest: Open Pharma open access dashboard, benchmarking and data sharing – Open Pharma – Innovations in medical publishing

“This week, we are excited to announce that our open access dashboard has gone live! We also highlight our poster about the dashboard that we presented at the 19th Annual Meeting of ISMPP earlier this week. We read about potential social biases in authors’ willingness to share data, about community engagement in relation to data sharing, and about an editor exodus from two leading neuroscience journals. Finally, we highlight the upcoming ISPOR 2023 conference, as well as a virtual session on open science hosted by the UN….”

Journal Observatory – Home

“The scientific community is quickly becoming more transparent in research. Scientific publications are becoming more and more openly accessible but openness should also extend to peer review, preprinting, preregistration, data sharing, metadata availability, and related issues.

Research funders and other stakeholders are putting a significant effort into promoting open science practices in scholarly communication. But there is a lack of high-quality infrastructure that provides information on the openness, policies and procedures of scholarly journals and other publication outlets. Consequently, it can be challenging to answer questions like: how do journals organise quality assurance and peer review? How do journals support open access publishing? How do journals or preprint servers support preregistration, preprinting, and data sharing? How diverse are the editorial teams of journals?…”

French Open Science Monitor 2022 Results

“For the fourth consecutive year, the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research records an increase in the sharing ratio of French research publications. As of December 2022, 67% of the 160,000 scientific publications published in France in 2021 are open. It shows an evolution of researchers’ publication practices and demonstrates the impact of public policies promoting open science.”

Going for Gold, Deep in the Red | Library Journal

“Athletes with their eyes on a gold medal know it can take years of hard work, patience, and a little bit of luck to achieve. Often, the gold is tantalizingly close but just out of reach. For many in scholarly communications, the same could be said of the path to open access (OA), where flipping a publication to gold OA remains the ultimate victory.

Having survived the budget uncertainties following the Great Recession and during the COVID-19 pandemic, libraries are no strangers to the hard work, patience, and luck needed when it comes to budget planning and pushing publishers toward OA. But will libraries ever achieve the ultimate feat of bagging gold OA for all titles in all disciplines? Open access comes at a price; a gold sweep may not be possible as many institutions continue to struggle financially with the after-effects of the pandemic and lower enrollment figures. Libraries at institutions that have recovered financially, or where enrollment numbers continue to remain strong, are still nervously monitoring an economy that has, for the last two years, continuously threatened to slip into recession. And as more publishers successfully transition their revenue streams from annual or multiyear subscriptions to transformative OA agreements, some librarians wonder if academia will remain locked in a “different lipstick, same pig” model that does nothing to fundamentally change the way scholarly communications is dominated by a few large publishers….

Librarians and researchers are finally seeing the goals of OA mandates come to fruition en masse as transformative agreements become commonplace. Commercial publishers will undoubtedly continue to pivot sales and pricing strategies to what so far remains a profitable publishing model; market-research company Simba Information predicts that revenue from OA journals will represent 22 percent of all journal revenue by 2026. Still, as big deals become nostalgia and publishers focus their efforts on transformative agreements, many librarians remain frustrated with opaque pricing structures. cOAlition S’s newly launched Journal Comparison Service, where publishers can register and deposit price and service data, may appease those whose main argument against high profits in scholarly communications is the lack of transparency surrounding the actual publishing costs. (Two of the biggest publishers, Elsevier and Springer Nature, have so far declined to participate, and it’s unclear if pricing transparency will have any effect on where researchers choose to publish.)

The big question is what effect the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) August 2022 announcement, which recommended that federal agencies make the results of taxpayer-supported research publicly accessible by 2026, will have on the OA business model generally. Unlike cOAlition S’s 2018 Plan S initiative, the OSTP memo does not prescribe any particular business model, so the most profitable path will probably drive how public access is made available. For large publishers, gold OA seems to offer a source of sustainable revenue. Smaller publishers may also determine that they need to shift to gold OA to survive, even though many journals are not currently sustainable under APC models. Institutions that publish may feel further squeezed if gold OA becomes the dominant model, and may eventually need to scale back what they are willing to pay for….”

Indicators of Open Research: UKRN call for priorities

“Today UKRN is launching a call for members of the research community to help us prioritise which aspects of open research are most important for us to monitor. Our particular focus is on helping institutions to monitor those aspects of openness and transparency in research that are most relevant to their development as organisations, rather than to assess individual researchers or research teams (although there may not be a clear line between those two purposes in practice). The relevant aspects of openness and transparency will be different for different kinds of research and for different kinds of institution. Our aim is to develop a palette of potential indicators that can be the basis for working with a group of UKRN institutions and a group of solutions providers, so that we can plan pilots (where that is feasible) and explore longer term options (where pilots are not yet feasible).

You can read the call for priorities here, and respond here. Responses are particularly sought from staff and research students at UK institutions, and are welcome before the end of April….”

PhD candidate Monitoring Open Science Policies and Practices – Leiden University

“The Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences is looking for a

PhD candidate Monitoring Open Science Policies and Practices (1,0FTE)
Vacancy number 13576

Leiden University takes the transition towards Open Science seriously. In the first stages, this transition will aim at further opening of the scholarly communication and publication processes, further improvement of FAIR data management and open data and software practices, and further strengthening of the relationship between the university and society at large through citizen science.

Are you interested in studying this transition and its impact? And do you want to contribute to this important cultural and behavioural change by informing daily research practices with robust scientific evidence? Then we are looking forward to meeting you! We have a job opening for a PhD candidate with good qualitative and/or quantitative research skills to work in the research program Monitoring Open Science Policies and Practices….”

IOI receives $1M from the Mellon Foundation to scale the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) | Apr 4, 2023

“Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) has received a generous grant of USD 1 million from the Mellon Foundation to catalyze investment in and adoption of open infrastructure in research. IOI is a fiscally sponsored project of Code for Science & Society. This grant will support the further development and productization of the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) and the testing of critical models and strategies to widen the pool of investors in open infrastructure. COIs is designed as a resource for funders, users, and other interested stakeholders looking to make informed decisions about the open infrastructure services for research and scholarship. … With this grant, we will be able to further develop the utility, usability, and value of COIs into a fully functional web application … In addition, the grant will support our exploration of strategies to engage for-profit and non-profit companies serving the scholarly communications and research sector in reinvesting revenue derived from open knowledge and open research activities back into the underlying open infrastructure and services that underpin knowledge production. This targeted engagement and analysis approach to explore further diversification of funding sources is a critical next step to finding viable solutions towards creating a vibrant, viable, and sustainable ecosystem of open infrastructure services….”