We are pleased to announce the publication of our report, Open Education in European Libraries of Higher Education: Implementing the UNESCO Recommendation on OER. The report presents the findings of the […]
The post Just released — new insights into OE in European Libraries of Higher Education 2022 appeared first on SPARC Europe.
Submissions for the SSP’s 2023 Annual Meeting are now open. The deadline is November 11, so don’t miss out!
The post SSP 2023 Annual Meeting Submission Deadline is Approaching — Don’t Miss Out! appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
“#ebookSOS is run by three academic librarians, on a voluntary basis, and with no formal resourcing. We all do all of this work on top of our busy day jobs.
We rely on donations to be able to keep advocating for fair access to books for libraries.
In the interest of transparency and to make it easier for organisations and individuals to support us, we have set up an Open Collective account, which can be accessed here https://opencollective.com/ebooksos-campaign
Open Collective facilitates one-off donations or regular contributions and allows supporters to see our financial status and exactly how we spend our funds.
Please consider making a donation or regular payment to enable us to carry on with this important work. Every little bit helps.”
“Open Science encompasses the entire research process and the entire research community. It empowers researchers everywhere to share valuable artifacts from each stage of their investigation and increase visibility and collaboration around their work. Every research community and individual has an opportunity to shape the activities and norms that inspire trust in their work. A commitment to Open Science, therefore, is not a pledge to adopt a few specific behaviors, but to advance openness, transparency and reproducibility in daily life as a researcher.
Together, we can cultivate a more inclusive and trustworthy future for science….”
Abstract: The value of big deals is increasingly unclear. This article briefly discusses factors others have considered in evaluating big deals and covers the four factors that should be considered moving forward: open access, interlibrary loan, post-termination access, and a-la-carte costs. Unsub, a tool for reevaluating big deals created by the nonprofit OurResearch, is introduced. Lessons learned are shared from two years of helping libraries reevaluate big deals to provide insight into the complexities and tradeoffs involved in evaluating big deals across many libraries.
“Now, under different leadership, eLife is changing. Most importantly, eLife leaders are eschewing the traditional binary “accept versus reject” publication decision model in favour of an offer to publish every manuscript that can get past a cursory editorial screen (although there is significant uncertainty about how much initial gatekeeping editors will do). Manuscripts will be posted online alongside reviewer critiques and an editor’s summary of them. A set of standard buzzwords in bold typeface, such as “important”, “solid” and “inadequate”, that effectively amount to a grading system, will be included in the editor’s summary.
Noticeably absent from the list of standard buzzwords are descriptors that come anywhere close to conveying the sentiment “should be rejected”. Authors will decide whether and how they respond to reviewer comments – additional rounds of review can ensue, at the author’s discretion. In essence, eLife will offer to publish manuscripts with an “inadequate” grade, that editors and reviewers would have previously rejected.
It’s an experimental approach to scientific publishing that has some merits and some supporters. However, it is hard for me to see the changes at eLife as anything other than its demise….”
“Is A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures—an interactive, open-access, born-digital monograph developed by Brown University Digital Publications and published in August by MIT Press—the monograph of the future? Asking readers to imagine Islam anew, as a vast web of interconnected traces seen through the prism of time, the book opens with a networked table of contents. Portals lead to different time periods across different parts of the world, inviting readers to explore Islam via a path of their choosing. In designing a one-of-a-kind trajectory that follows their own interests and queries, the reader, effectively, creates their own journey while traversing the world of ideas and evidence that has been curated by the author.
This groundbreaking interface, says author Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities at Brown, “performs, rather than simply states, the book’s argument—namely, that we see pasts and futures as fields of unlimited possibility that come alive through a combination of close observation and ethical positioning.” …
In working together to produce and disseminate essential knowledge for broad audiences, Brown University Library and the MIT Press are also addressing issues of scalability and sustainability. A critical goal of the series is to mobilize knowledge creation and sharing. To this end, On Seeing will comprise a publication suite that includes a multiplicity of forms. The print book, providing a revenue stream to help offset costs, will be offered at a reasonable price and distributed globally in order to reach the widest possible readership. The enhanced, open-access digital publication will be developed using the open-source publishing platform PubPub, which introduces a less bespoke approach to interactive design and development….
We are seeing the payoff from these investments through the expansive reach and impact that this approach to digital publication, together with presses gravitating to open access….”
Why do US road signs look different from those seen in the rest of the world?
The post Standards for Road Signs and Why Signs in the US Are So Different from the Rest of the World appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
“A Fiji-based academic challenged the Pacific region’s media and policymakers today over climate crisis coverage, asking whether the discriminatory style of reporting was a case of climate injustice.
Associate Professor Shailendra Singh, head of the journalism programme at the University of the South Pacific, said climate press conferences and meetings were too focused on providing coverage of “privileged elite viewpoints”.
“Elites have their say, but communities facing the brunt of climate change have their voices muted,” he told the Look at the Evidence: Climate Journalism and Open Science webinar panel exploring the role of journalism in raising climate awareness in the week-long Open Access Australasia virtual conference….”
“This year, International Open Access Week takes place between 24 and 30 October. During this week all kinds of activities are organised to make open access a new norm in scholarship and research. An excellent opportunity to ask Jan de Boer a number of questions. Jan is a member of the Utrecht University Library Publishing Support team, and in this role he is a source of information related to questions in the field of open access and open science. He also works as a subject librarian for the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences….”
“Following a year of research and community engagement funded by a planning grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge Program, Project MUSE is preparing a Subscribe to Open (S2O) offer across multiple journal titles and participating publishers that will begin with the 2025 calendar year subscription term.
With more than 700 current journals in the humanities and social sciences on its platform, from close to 200 non-profit publishers, Project MUSE is uniquely positioned to develop and deploy a Subscribe to Open business model at scale. The collective support of an S2O offer by MUSE’s community of thousands of libraries worldwide has the potential to equitably open a wealth of vital scholarship, in disciplines frequently not well served by other open access (OA) models.
S2O is an equitable alternative to “author-pays” OA models, expanding both author and reader access. The S2O model works by converting traditional gated subscriptions into annual payments that make open journals sustainable. Eliminating financial barriers for authors and readers is a major step forward and a foundational imperative to achieving an equitable, just, and inclusive world….”
“On 12 October, UKRI convened several hundred Future Leaders Fellows in Birmingham. The UKRI open research team and the UK Reproducibility Network brought together some of those Fellows in two special interest session s to discuss open and transparent research . H ere we summarise the perspectives a nd ideas that we heard from the Fellows, who work in a range of disciplines and have engaged with open research in a variety of ways . Where we are aware of related work, we note this [in square brackets]….”
“On 12 October, UK Research and Innovation convened several hundred Future Leaders Fellows in Birmingham for their annual conference.
These research fellowships aim to develop the next wave of world-class research and innovation leaders in academia and business, so the UK Reproducibility Network were delighted to host events for Fellows to discuss open and transparent research.
In two special interest sessions, co-hosted by UKRN and the UKRI open research team, future research leaders discussed the benefits and challenges of topics such as sharing open and FAIR data, research software code and open access publishing.
Participants noted that transparency in research data is important, but not easy. They agreed that data should be open where possible, with documentation and related code. Community norms will accelerate this, as will journal and funder policies moving beyond ‘the data behind the publication’.
A full report of the discussions can be found here : Future Leadership Fellows discuss open reasearch …”
“In an effort to take stock of the wide range of innovative practices and system-changing interventions that characterize a growing body of digital scholarly publications, Brown University and Emory University co-hosted a summit in spring 2021. The intention from the start was to call attention to the faculty-led experimentation that was taking place across a number of libraries and humanities centers, some of which already involved university presses. Shifting the focus away from tools and technology, as important as those discussions remain to the larger scholarly communications ecosystem, the summit emphasized author and audience needs and opportunities. As such, it highlighted the importance of investing in a people-centric, content-driven infrastructure.
Case studies of eight recently published or in-development OA works provided the basis for in-depth, evidence-based discussions among scholars, academic staff experts, and representatives from university presses: What models for publishing enhanced and interactive scholarly projects are emerging? What are the common challenges that remain and how do we address them? How can we encourage a shared vocabulary for these reimagined forms of humanities scholarship among the wider scholarly communications community? …”
“On Oct. 24, open access advocate and researcher Micah Vandegrift provided a keynote speech that focused on climate justice and open knowledge, hosted by the University of Massachusetts.
SPARC, a non-profit education and research advocacy group, organized the virtual address in partnership with the Open Access Week Advisory Committee.
The event commemorated International Open Access Week (Oct. 24-30). The organizers explained that Open Access Week is an “opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship a new norm in scholarship and research.” …”