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.

El objetivo que persigue el informe Tendencias Recientes en las Políticas Científicas de Ciencia Abierta y Acceso Abierto en Iberoamérica es analizar el estado de las investigaciones y las políticas científicas en ciencia abierta, datos abiertos de investigación y acceso abierto en Iberoamérica, haciendo hincapié en la incidencia de estos paradigmas en la evaluación científica. Este informe es el primer producto de un convenio de colaboración entre CLACSO y la Fundación Carolina para hacer avanzar la ciencia abierta y la evaluación científica en Iberoamérica.

Knowledge Unlatched (KU), has announced the results of 2020 pledging round, which ended in December 2020. Overall, about 310 books and 34 journals will be published OA in 2021. KU will continue to make the title lists for each collection and unlatching status transparent and update this information regularly, so that librarians can clearly understand which titles are unlatched or will be unlatched soon. Some 630 institutions worldwide have supported KU initiatives to date. By the end of this year, KU’s total impact will number around 2,700 books, and over 50 journals made OA.

Dimensions is a research services portal and citation index alternative to Scopus and Web of Knowledge. Together with the linked, preprint version, the new version of Dimensions gives you the most complete history of an article in one place. Indications of the different routes are available: Green, Bronze, Gold, Hybrid, All OA and Closed. While Bronze and Green OA make up a significant proportion of All OA, the majority of the growth in OA is fuelled by the Gold OA.

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From June 2020 to February 2021, a consortium of 10 organisations led by OPERAS (Open scholarly communication in the European research area for social sciences and humanities)  undertook a large-scale study on open access journals across the world that are free for readers and authors, usually referred to as “OA diamond journals”. This study was commissioned by cOAlition S in order to gain a better understanding of the OA diamond landscape. In the part 1 named Findings, it is observed that ROAD, the ISSN Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources, being more inclusive than DOAJ, “is potentially listing many journals that are diamond and that may have sufficient quality but that have not yet applied for inclusion in DOAJ […] ROAD indirectly helps assess the total number of diamond journals statistically by matching the full database with databases that do have information on fee-charging, and by manually checking a sample of journals.”

Find out more about the study and its recommendations.