Journal applications for DOAJ are reaching the milestone of +500 titles assessed by the ‘North Africa & Middle East’ (NAME) editor group at DOAJ. This editor group made a study of the African and Arab journals in the DOAJ. The study concludes that although many Arab journals are online, participation in the DOAJ is very little, and African journals tend to adhere to other databases. Rejection of applications from Arab countries is quite high and that is due to a reluctance towards Open Access, ignorance of the main features of Gold OA, and lack of appliance to principles of transparency and best practice for scholarly publications. Efforts need to be made to encourage publishing in Arabic and national languages, to assist publishers to meet requirements of peer-reviewing, publication ethics, copyright and licensing.

LIBER has won a role in Open Research Europe (ORE): a project which will build a new peer-reviewed Open Access publishing platform so that Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries can publish research openly and free of charge.

Following a public consultation cOAlition S announces updated criteria for Transformative Journals. cOAlition S defines a Transformative Journal as “a subscription/hybrid journal that is committed to transitioning to a fully (OA) journal. In addition, a Transformative Journal must gradually increase the share of Open Access content and offset subscription income from payments for publishing services (to avoid double payments)”. cOAlition S members have made several changes and simplifications to the way they define a Transformative Journal. Publishers who wish to develop a Plan S compliant Transformative Journal should complete the form at https://www.coalition-s.org/tj-forms.

As part of its continued strategy to enhance its metadata offering, DOAJ is constantly looking for ways to improve the quality and recency of the DOAJ article metadata. DOAJ can edit article metadata itself, including the URL, directly in the database. This makes changes immediate and goes a long way to improve the reliability of the DOAJ metadata. This is one of the good reasons why the DOAJ is one of the partnering data sources of the ISSN Portal.

The OA Switchboard aims to facilitate the fulfilment of open access strategies across business models, policies and agreements, and reduce complexity for all relevant stakeholders. After an initial meeting of key stakeholders and subsequent feedback following presentations on the OA Switchboard concept, work has been done to further explore the feasibility of this idea and gauge the level of interest in the community to participate.  OASPA’s role moving forward is monitoring the progress of the project and making sure it is managed as prudently and efficiently as possible.

As interest in Subscribe to Open grows based on the experiences of early innovations, publishers and libraries need to develop an understanding of the various approaches to Subscribe to Open and the benefits and limitations of the model.

Wellcome, UK Research and Innovation, and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers commissioned Information Power Ltd. to undertake a project to support society publishers to accelerate their transition to open access (OA) in alignment with Plan S and the wider move to accelerate immediate OA. A workshop of consortium representatives and society publishers informed the development of an OA transformative agreement toolkit. Society publishers should consider all the business models this project has developed and should not automatically equate OA with article publication charges.

On January 23-24, 2020, COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) convened a meeting to investigate the potential for a common, distributed architecture that would connect peer review with resources in repositories. The aim of the meeting, hosted by Inria in Paris, France, was to share the current workflows of various projects and systems that are managing or developing overlay peer review on a variety of different repository types (institutional, preprint, data, etc.), and assess whether there is sufficient interest in defining a set of common protocols and vocabularies that would allow interoperability across different systems.

Johan Rooryck, Open Access Champion for cOAlition S, explains that concerns about the threat from the Global North to Latin America’s exemplary tradition of open access publishing are understandable, but ultimately misplaced. Renegotiation of subscription agreements and the stipulation that article-processing charges should be covered by funders or institutions are examples of the ways in which Plan S presents new opportunities for the region, even if there is still work to be done.

SPARC Europe has released their Annual Report for 2019 providing a concise look at how they have focused their efforts to help advance Open Access in 2019.

Please download the report.