Category Archives: oa.oa_works

Emerging Tools for Supporting OA Policy Compliance with OA.Works | April 11th, 2023 | OpenCon Librarian Community Call

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“As more funder open access policies are launched—and more researchers are covered by one or more requirements—there is an increasing need to support authors in fulfilling the varied terms of these policies. With a mission to build tools so that open access is easy and equitable, OA.Works has focused on providing support to faculty, funders, and libraries to make compliance as easy as possible. Join the next OpenCon Library Community Call on Tuesday, April 11th, at 12pm ET / 9am PT for a conversation with Joe McArthur, director of OA.Works, about emerging tools to support compliance and what kinds of future support would be most helpful for libraries….”

Confused by open-access policies? These tools can help

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“Funding-agency policies mandating that scientific papers and data are made publicly available have helped to drive the adoption of preprints, open-access publishing and data repositories. But agencies often struggle to measure how closely grant recipients comply with the funding policies. Awardees, and the institutes that employ them, can struggle to ensure they are following the rules. Now, digital tools are cropping up to help both sides of the funding equation stick to the regulations.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, has invested US$1.8 million to support the development of OA.Report, a tool that helps funders to track awardee compliance with foundation open-access policies. Developed by OA.Works in London, OA.Report uses text-mining techniques to match articles with the funder that supported the work, by sifting through academic papers and open-access metadata. The software also tracks article-processing charges, as well as the subsequent reports that summarize the outcomes of grants….”

In the works at OA.Works in 2022

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“In 2022, our focus was on building OA.Report (a blog on that coming soon! Join our mailing list to be notified). But, as 2022 becomes 2023, we wanted to take the chance to celebrate the other work we did to help make Open Access easy & equitable. So, without further ado:

Our governance got an update as we joined Code for Science & Society (a US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit), and our new advisory committee got to work….
Our new transparency page helped the community learn more about our operations….
OA.Support, our new Open Access helpdesk, facilitated self-archiving through 430 follow-up emails, answering 100 questions and capturing dozens of researcher quotes for policy development. The Gates foundation is the first to deploy the service fully, and we’re both encouraged by these results….
At a United Nations library event, we launched a new collaboration with the  Open Climate Campaign to help unlock climate change research….
We enhanced the cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool by providing new data on what type of Open Access a journal supports (e.g., Diamond, Transformative, Hybrid, Gold), as well as fast updates to ShareYourPaper Permissions data.
Our team met in-person for the first time to bond, scheme, and build!
We stopped using Google Analytics to protect our users’ privacy. A small step to align ourselves with our values.
We celebrated our first anniversary as OA.Works after our rebrand in 2021! We’ve been so pleased with the communities response….
RSCVD has now facilitated more than 22,000 requests for access by libraries impacted by COVID-19, with more than 14,000 fulfilled requests.
ShareYourPaper unpaywalled more than 350 articles!
We updated ShareYourPaper and InstantILL to improve their performance and maintainability and squash bugs.
We continued to learn! We attended conferences on user experience in Libraries, courses on Critical Management Studies & Critical Concepts in Library and Information Sciences, and mastered new systems like Cloudflare Workers.
We started helping run the Open Access Tracking Project mailing list to help the OA movement stay in the know –– just one of many times we tried to lend a hand to other valuable projects.”

OA.Works joins Code for Science & Society | Oct 18, 2022

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“We’re thrilled to announce OA.Works has joined Code for Science and Society (CS&S), a US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit empowering communities to build technology for the public good. “Joining CS&S marks a new phase of maturity for OA.Works, and their expertise in providing fiscal sponsorship to open source tech projects will allow us to capitalize on the many years of growth we enjoyed while being incubated at SPARC,” said Joe McArthur, Director of OA.Works. “Critically, this evolution reaffirms and continues to strengthen our commitment, and ability, to build free, open-source tools as a not-for-profit project.” … OA.Works will join CS&S as a fiscally sponsored project, a common arrangement for small nonprofit projects that enables us to focus on our mission while benefiting from the support of experts for operational and financial services. “We’ve been following OA.Works for years, and are thrilled to work with the team in their next phase of growth,“ said Danielle Robinson, Executive Director of CS&S. “We’ve been consistently impressed by OA.Works’ products to make open access easy. Beyond their products, OA.Works’ commitment to community engagement, transparency, and governance sets them up for sustainable impact.” Added Robinson, “At CS&S, our mission is advancing the power of data to improve the lives of all people through education, research, and technology. OA.Works’ open source software for open access improves public access to information, making them an ideal partner for fiscal sponsorship.” OA.Works joins others at CS&S, including Invest in Open Infrastructure, OpenRefine, and PREreview. You can learn more about CS&S’s work at codeforsociety.org….”

OAreport: Put OA policies into practice in minutes, not months.

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“We discover papers and data using open scholarly metadata, targeted text and data mining, and an institution’s internal data sources….

We transparently analyse those papers against all the terms of the institution’s current policy, or custom criteria, to provide detailed statistics and key insights….

We help libraries and funders unlock individual papers as they’re published by making outreach a one-click process, and help build evidence for systemic changes….”

OA.Works: Powerfully simple open access tools

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“OA.Works is a non-profit building tools so that open access is easy and equitable. They’re free, open source, and co-designed with advocates for a just world….

We build tools like ShareYourPaper.org that make it simple to freely and legally unlock papers from behind paywalls. We helped create a global network of libraries sharing knowledge freely during COVID through RSCVD. Our tools like InstantILL and Open Access Button support accessing research without a steep price tag. In the past decade, our products have been used millions of times, across the world….”