Quartz OA is an ecosystem that facilitates exchanges of resources and funding among the open access community. It is a new cooperative economy and a new channel to fund and support independent open access publishing. The authors seek to create an ecosystem that would help retain the value in the hands of the academic community and re-distribute the flows of funding fairly and transparently among its members.
What should a good quality journal include in its make-up: rigorous research, a well-regarded editorial board, plenty of citations? But what if we challenge these assumptions and demand commitment to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals as well? There are solutions to this challenge. Simon Linacre introduces the first SDG Impact Intensity(TM) rating from Cabells and Saint Joseph’s University. This pilot study seeks to highlight the differences between business and management journals regarded as leaders in their disciplines, and those which have focused on sustainability and related issues.
Jisc’s OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) has launched a self-assessment feature for repository staff that allows them to check whether their repository meets the six Plan S requirements for repositories.
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.
