Category Archives: oa.oa_report

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.”