Meta and Kopernio partner to provide easy access to full-text scientific articles | Research Information

“Millions of full-text scientific articles will soon be available through an easy copyright-compliant one-click process, thanks to a new partnership between Kopernio, part of the Web of Science Group and Meta, a free biomedical discovery tool from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Meta users will have faster, easier access to millions of full-text scientific articles through Kopernio’s free web browser plug-in, giving scientists one-click access to complete versions of the latest relevant research delivered directly in their Meta feed.

Meta users will have the option to install the Kopernio plugin for one-click retrieval of full-text articles that are accessible to them, either by integrating with institutional subscriptions or by offering a copyright-compliant open access alternative. When the version of record is available via institutional subscriptions, librarians and institutions will receive full usage reporting via the original publisher, as Kopernio usage is COUNTER compliant….”

Elsevier signs pilot agreement to serve Hungary | Research Information

“Hungarian Electronic Information Service National Programme (EISZ) and Elsevier have signed a Memorandum of Understanding and Letter of Intent, as they move towards finalising a new innovative pilot agreement for research access and Open Access publishing in Hungary. As a result, EISZ consortium member institutions and their affiliated researchers across Hungary now have immediate access to ScienceDirect, as well as SciVal and Scopus.

Researchers affiliated to EISZ consortium member institutions are able to access 16 million publications from more than 2,500 journals published by Elsevier and its society partners via ScienceDirect. Access to Scopus and SciVal will support Hungarian research in benchmarking performance against more than 10,700 research institutions and their associated researchers from across the world….”

New ALPSP boss: academic publishing ‘could return to non-profit’ | Research Information

“Academic publishing could be about to return to a not-for-profit enterprise.

That is the view of Wayne Sime, new chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), who was interviewed in Research Information this month.

Sime was previously director of library services for the Royal Society of Medicine, and has also worked in the NHS and financial sector. He has been a chartered librarian since 2001 and became a fellow of CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals) in 2009.

When asked what he believes will change in the industry over the next 10 years, Sime predicted an expectation that all scholarly communications will be freely distributed, and that search engines and social communities will be primary sources of useful information.

He continued: ‘We will need to adjust our practice and business model to reflect this new reality. The best way, I believe, to see the future is to expect a rapid drop in all kinds of government backing from the economy and to figure out a publication system that will adapt. 

‘We must remember that when we look back at the history of publishing, it has only been a recent development (mid-20th century onwards) that academic publishing become a profit-making enterprise. History may be about to repeat itself!’ …”

Counting down to CISPC 2019 – Delivering the Open Research Agenda | Research Information

“It’s four months until the next Research Information event – Challenges in the Scholarly Publishing Cycle – and plans are progressing fast.

CISPC 2019 is a one-day event, and will be held on 20 November at the London Art House, in the London Borough of Islington.

With the tagline ‘Delivering the Open Research Agenda’, our 2019 conference will provide librarians and information professionals with an invaluable insight into best practice around this theme.

With funders placing an increasing emphasis on open research, librarians are faced with the challenge of changing entrenched practices among researchers – particularly around the submission stage.

Research Information editor Tim Gillett said: ‘At CISPC 2019, we will be bringing together speakers that have addressed this challenge head-on, and who will share their experiences and expertise with fellow scholarly communication professionals….”

Preprints: Opportunity or Challenge?

“The preprints landscape is evolving fast. After the first preprint servers were launched in the early 1990s, the field remained dormant in most other disciplines until about 2013. From that point onwards, we have seen an unexpected surge in the number of preprint servers available for researchers to post, read and comment on articles in pre-refereed form.”

“Preprints are already broadly accepted and widespread in the physics and mathematics communities.”

“The preprints landscape keeps evolving and is characterised by widespread experimentation.”

The Netherlands leads way with implementation of the new educational exception – International Communia Association

“Just one month after the new Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive went into force, the Dutch government has shared their proposal for its implementation, through an amendment of their existing copyright law. The proposal is currently in a public consultation phase.

We would like to provide here an overview of the Dutch proposal to implement locally the new EU educational exception (article 5 in the final version of the Directive). This is the beginning of our effort to track how countries across Europe will implement, over the coming two years, this mandatory exception to copyright for educational purposes….”

OAPEN and De Gruyter enable retroactive open access for ERC-funded publications

“The OAPEN Foundation and De Gruyter have developed a framework agreement that outlines good practice for retroactive open access to books and chapters resulting from research funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the 7th EU Research Framework Programme (FP7).

Since FP7 did not include a strict open access mandate for publications, publications resulting from these grants are generally not freely accessible. The framework agreement between De Gruyter and the OAPEN Foundation supports authors by establishing compliance with the “best effort” requirement to make publications open access….”

Springer Open: ceased, now hybrid, OA identification challenges | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs

“SpringerNature, owner of Nature Publishing Group, Springer Open, and BioMedCentral, is the world’s largest fully open access journal publisher as measured by number of journals. The purpose of this post is to underscore what appears to be a significant open access attrition rate at SpringerOpen (16% OA attrition in the past few years) and raise questions about challenges to finding and identifying these journals as open access. Ceased journals that were always open access are listed on the SpringerLink (mostly subscriptions) site, not the SpringerOpen website. Subscriptions articles are clearly marked as such; the OA status of an article is not stated on the journal home page. Information provided by a library about License Terms may not mention or resemble a CC license….”

Open Science Essentials: Towards a Skill Set and Showcases at LIBER 2019 – LIBER

“LIBER’s Digital Skills for Library Staff & Researchers Working Group is supporting this transition in two ways: by building a digital skills list with a specific focus on Open Science and by highlighting Open Science training programmes relying on skills identification.

The first results of this combined approach were presented during an Open Science Essentials workshop at LIBER 2019: a follow up to the 2018 LIBER/Foster+ Workshop “Lets’ build the Skills” and complementary to the EOSCpilot & LIBER Webinar “Skills and Training in Open Science and the EOSC Ecosystem”….”

ARL Endorses COAR/SPARC Good Practice Principles for Scholarly Communication Services – Association of Research Libraries

“The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), through its mission to catalyze the collective efforts of research libraries to enable knowledge creation and to achieve enduring and barrier-free access to information, supports the COAR/SPARC Good Practice Principles for Scholarly Communication Services. The landscape of tools and infrastructure to support the research enterprise reflects a complex mix of economic models, both commercial and community-owned, both proprietary and open source. With the growing enthusiasm and support in Canadian and US research libraries for academy-owned, community-governed open scholarly communication, these seven principles serve as excellent guideposts for the community as it builds and coordinates components and services for open scholarship….”

METRO | 599 | Digital Repository Developer – Metropolitan New York Library Council

“METRO is seeking a developer with experience working as a Drupal 8 site builder and theme developer. We have developed an innovative new open source repository architecture called Archipelago, and as the Digital Repository Developer, you will have a chance to contribute to this project in its infancy! Archipelago uses a modified version of Drupal 8 for the public front end and administrative interface. The first software METRO will build using this architecture will be a digital asset management solution meant for libraries, archives, and museums. Reporting to the Lead Developer, the successful candidate will work collaboratively with our team on our base repository solution, contracts building new custom repositories and new features, and they may manage a portfolio of support contracts as well….”

Invisible Shackles: The Monopolization of Public Access Legal Research due to Government Failures

“The creation of a system that relies on past decisions, or precedent, such as case law, without providing an opportunity to meaningfully organize such information has circumvented the principle of public access to the law. In fashioning such a flawed scheme, the government has relinquished responsibility and vested in private parties the power to structure significant portions of the legal system on their own. Now, more than two centuries after the inception of the United States legal system, sophisticated corporations have captured the market for legal research and the government has provided no viable alternative that serves the public interest.

This comment argues that the current paradigm for legal research, particularly for free information such as state and federal case opinions and statutes, federal agency regulations, and many law review or journal articles, is one that inhibits rather than promotes public access to the law. The core problem is that properly organized and intelligible legal data is sealed away behind paid, proprietary software while official government sources remain archaic, unintuitive, and disordered….”

New Opportunities in Libraries: Open Access, Open Content, and Collection: Library & Information Science Book Chapter | IGI Global

Abstract:  The emergence of open access is one of the most significant changes to the world of scholarly publications since the migration from print to digital publishing began. Reports of some authors have demonstrated how libraries across the membership are changing, in response to a need for new services and an increasingly diverse client group. In order to contribute to the existing knowledge in the area of open access movement in libraries, this chapter discusses how the 21st century library provides a service that can open access to knowledge for the growth and development of communities they serve by highlighting the concept of open access and open content, roles of libraries in open access initiative as well as library collection development and open access. This chapter also sheds light on legal and ethical issues in open access and the future of open access in libraries.

Making Academia an Open Book? Bibliodiversity and Open Access Publishing | Global Policy Journal

“Journals vary widely in terms of their size and status within their respective disciplines; Prestigious, high impact ones tend to receive higher levels of citation from academics across the world, while others have smaller readerships and have lower impact factors.They can be accessed via commercial or non-commercial journal-hosting sites, with some combining both methods. Large platforms, who index and provide search abilities for journals and the work published in them, tend to be commercial sites. Based within the Global North, these include well-known brands such as Elsevierand SAGE that charge expensive subscription fees to universities in order for their staff and students to access these journals. This is in contrast to non-commercial sites such as AJOL in South Africa, which is a fully ‘open source’ platform that publishes scientific research without using a paywall.

However, the persistence of digital divides mean that not all Higher Education Institutions, nor their staff or students, can access these journals. Many have limited financial resources and technical  infrastructures (such as computers or an internet connection), while others may not have English (the main language of these journals) as their language of instruction.

This results in the production and distribution of academic knowledge being dominated by the Global North. Those without access are often left behind, exacerbating existing digital divides in the educational sector.

Although academics from poorer countries cannot always access this information, they still have important contributions to make to their respective disciplines. Consequently, academia itself has joined the calls for greater ‘open access’ to research in order to address this divide.

The concept of bibliodiversity hails from Latin America and refers to the need for a culturally diverse and balanced range of published materials for generating knowledge. It is said to be threatened when there is an undue focus (or ‘overproduction’) on a limited number of publications, which are often commercial interests. With journals being increasingly accessed online, advocates suggest that publishing platforms should work collaboratively, increasing access to knowledge. Hence, open source platforms like AJOL have been launched with the intention of promoting these open forms of knowledge, albeit that many have a limited budget….”