In one of their previous articles, the authors of Predatory Publishing blog asked “Is there a good reason to publish in a predatory journal?“ They concluded that there was not, but they wanted to explore this topic in a little more detail, looking at some of the reasons that scholars gave when asked why they decided to publish in unreliable journals.
cOAlition S endorses several strategies to encourage subscription publishers to transition to full and immediate Open Access (OA). These approaches are referred to as “Transformative Arrangements” and include Transformative Agreements, Transformative Model Agreements and Transformative Journals. A Transformative Journal (TJ) is a subscription/hybrid journal that is actively committed to transitioning to a fully Open Access journal. Some 16 months on from publishing the formal TJ criteria, 14 publishers and some 2275 journals, have enrolled in this programme. This is a summary of the uptake of the programme by publishers and an analysis of the initial data TJ publishers have provided.
Since June 2021, French journals can declare their policies so that they are visible in Sherpa Romeo. The French network Mir@bel has launched a beta version of a new service, designed to make an inventory of open access policies for publications in French journals. This project, funded by the French National Plan for Open Science, aims to increase the visibility of French journals by enriching Sherpa Romeo with these policies (at the end of 2021). The self-archiving policy will thus be available in HAL deposit form. In September, the service will be opened to all journals and publishers.
[Article in French]
In its second national plan for open science, France makes a focus on developing open access to publications. The percentage of open access scientific publications in France has risen from 41% to 56%. The Plan accelerates and amplifies the commitment to open access to publications. The effort already initiated by many research funding agencies such as the National Research Agency will be extended. The aim is to increase the visibility of research results in all disciplines, to democratise access to knowledge and to strengthen the international influence of French research. The Plan will promote the circulation of scientific knowledge through the translation of publications, to make scientific advances more accessible to the public and to increase the international influence of research. This plan responds to the European Union’s ambition to have a national plan for open science in every country.
Open Access agreements between consortia/libraries and smaller independent publishers are used worldwide increasingly since 2020, signalling a potential for further growth, highlights an independent report released in June 2021 by Information Power. The report was commissioned by cOAlition S and the Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) as a follow up on the outcomes of the Society Publishers Accelerating Open access and Plan S (SPA-OPS) project, published in autumn 2019.
The report indicates that during 2020 there was a clear increase in the number of open access (OA) articles published in hybrid journals, which reverses the downward trend between 2016 – 2019, and deems likely a further increase over the next few years, partly driven by new OA agreements.
Much of the recent effort to transition scholarly publishing to open access (OA) has focused on Transformative Agreements that incentivize change among subscription or mixed-model publishers. Supporting such publishers to transition to OA is important to transform the system of scholarly publishing. However, it is equally important to support existing fully OA publishers – who already deliver open content by default in ways that comply with Plan S and fulfill its original principles and spirit – and to recognize the centrality of their role in normalizing OA and bringing it to the mainstream.
This exploratory study of the status of institutional repositories implementation in African countries using the global Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and Transparent Ranking: All Repositories by Google Scholar, reports on the operational status and the performance of repositories. The widespread implementation of institutional repositories is still very slow paced, and the performance of the implemented repositories was below expectation. Suggestions for regaining the intended direction of African institutional repositories are given based on the current status.
The post calls for a greater focus on “Fully OA” publishing agreements and argues that while much time and energy is devoted to Transformative Agreements and transforming subscription models, a balanced approach whereby institutions also partner with fully OA publishers is optimal. It contains a list of the benefits of fully OA agreements and a Call to Action.
Whereas an OASPA webinar, from late March 2021, has concentrated on Australia’s transition to Open Access, it has also indicated a peak in its Open Access output occurring in 2018. This is similar to the degrowth tendencies setting in across some other countries in two recent years. This transition phase certainly derives from a significant contraction in the Green Open Access output and a comparatively slower pace of growth in the Gold Open Access output in this period.
Despite the absence of funding pressures that explicitly mandate a shift to open access (OA), Indonesia is a leader in OA publishing. Indonesia subscribes to a non‐profit model of OA, which differs from that promoted by Plan S. The penetration of bibliometric systems of academic performance assessment is pushing Indonesian scholars away from a local non‐profit model of OA to a model based on high publication charges. This article considers whether Plan S promotes or undermines the ability of Indonesian scholars to develop systems of OA adapted to local resource constraints and research needs.
