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.
The OA Switchboard initiative (www.oaswitchboard.org) is a not-for-profit collaboration between funders, institutions and publishers to provide essential infrastructure to facilitate open access strategies across business models, policies and agreements. Throughout 2020, a project (overseen by OASPA, funded through sponsorship) is being run to prepare for the OA Switchboard to go live as an operational solution. When the OA Switchboard moves to an operational stage, following a successful 2020 project, a sustainable governance structure and funding model will be in place.
Since May 2020, Unpaywall Journals is now called: Unsub! That’s the only change–all the functionality is still the same, and of course it’s still the same Our Research team behind it. This new name reflects two changes: first, data has been added beyond Unpaywall ; second, Unpaywall Journals evolved into an increasingly focused tool, built to help libraries unsubscribe from Big Deals with confidence. The result: Unsub! A tool to help librarians forecast, explore, and optimize their alternatives to the Big Deal.
Megajournals have been at the heart of the Open Access (OA) publishing model, spearheading its growth over the last 15 years. Titles such as PLOS ONE (ISSN: 1932-6203) and Scientific Reports (ISSN: 2045-2322) have been enormously influential and commercially successful. Nonetheless, the commercial success of megajournals is not guaranteed and their long-term performance has been occasionally unreliable, introducing uncertainty in an industry that has been particularly attractive to investors for its ability to generate low but sustainable growth.
Transparent pricing is a cornerstone of the Plan S principles: When Open Access publication fees are applied, they must be commensurate with the publication services delivered and the structure of such fees must be transparent. [Principle 5]
To deliver on this commitment, cOAlition S has:
1. Endorsed two Price Transparency Frameworks; the one developed by Information Power and the one developed by the FAIR Open Access Alliance.
2. Determined that from 1st July 2022, only those publishers which adhere to at least one of the approved Frameworks will be eligible to receive funds from cOAlition S members.
