cOAlition S announced the release of the Journal Checker Tool (JCT) in beta. The JCT is a web-based tool which provides clear advice to researchers on how they can comply with their funder’s Plan S-aligned Open Access policy when seeking to publish in their chosen journal. The JCT is searchable by ISSN, notably. During this open testing phase, the community will have the opportunity to get acquainted with the JCT and provide feedback, so that the tool increases its readiness ahead of the implementation of Plan S in January 2021.

The recordings from the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) Online Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing 2020 are now available on YouTube. The OASPA 2020 Conference took place online on the 22 – 24 September 2020.  Slides can be found on the conference program page.

Details about next year’s conference will be available in the coming months from oaspa.org/conference.

INASP (International Network for Advancing Science and Policy) was commissioned to undertake a consultation to understand the challenges and opportunities that OA presents to Low- and Middle-Income country (LMIC) stakeholders. The implementation of and transition to OA modes of publishing involve a complex set of issues. This report provides a “read out” of the key issues for LMICs, based on consultations with 335 stakeholders, as a series of principles and building blocks to underpin UK OA policy, and to make recommendations to funders.

SPARC Europe is releasing an anticipated new report: Open Access: An Analysis of Publisher Copyright and Licensing Policies in Europe, 2020. It presents the results of a research study that was completed in the summer of 2020 and explores copyright and licensing practices amongst prominent journal publishers and OA publishers in DOAJ in Europe. Download the report.

Openness and innovation have been at the heart of Springer Nature’s business. They have been opening up research for more than 20 years – today, they publish the world’s most significant OA portfolio, with around 600 fully OA journals and the option to publish OA in 2,200 hybrid journals.

The value of open and interoperable metadata of scientific articles is increasingly being recognized, as demonstrated by the work of organizations such as Crossref, DataCite, and OpenCitations and by initiatives such as Metadata 2020 and the Initiative for Open Citations. At the same time, scientific articles are increasingly being made openly accessible, stimulated for instance by Plan S, AmeliCA, and recent developments in the US, and also by the need for open access to coronavirus literature.

In this post, the many ways in which abstracts can be used are explored, as well as the limited availability of abstracts.

On 10 September 2020, the Digital Collection of Academic Journals AmeliCA – Central America, was officially launched. Redalyc-AmeliCA and the University of Panama have worked since 2018 to build a communication system that gives visibility, positions and improve editorial quality of Central American journals. In 2019, a collaborative agreement was signed between the two institutions in order to lay the foundation for the creation of a portal for Central American journals, define the terms for technology transfer from Redalyc-AmeliCA, and determine the strategies for training to editors and technical staff of the journals of the University of Panama, in the use of the XML Markup System and other areas, to support the editorial management of their journals.

In July 2020, Redalyc, together with Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (UAEMex) launched the Collection of Ancestral knowledge accessible on Redalyc portal with support of a Shuttleworth Foundation flash grant. More than 24,000 articles from 1,300 journals and 26 countries are analyzed with SPARQL. This is an ontology-based dataset that aims to integrate the scientific content published in the Open Access journals indexed by Redalyc on topics such as: indigenous knowledge, indigenous peoples and cultures, native languages, ancestral agriculture, among others. The resulting data set is transformed through a process to extract the meaning of the different data that make up a scientific article and is then stored in the form of triplets in a knowledge base linked to Linked Open Data.

Publishers commonly require authors to sign exclusive publishing agreements which restrict what authors can do with their research findings, including making articles Open Access in line with their funders’ requirements. To address this problem, cOAlition S has developed a Rights Retention Strategy, which will empower their funded researchers to publish in their journal of choice, including subscription journals, and provide Open Access in compliance with Plan S.

OPERAS (open access in the European research area through scholarly communication) is pleased to announce that they have been awarded the tender for a study to explore collaborative non-commercial Open Access publishing models for Open Access (a.k.a. Diamond OA) announced by cOAlition S in March 2020. To perform the study, OPERAS will coordinate a consortium of 10 participating organizations. The study will be delivered by the end of 2020, and regular public updates on progress are planned along the way. The study is financially supported by Science Europe. All data collected will be shared under a CC0 license.