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.

Much has been written about ‘predatory publishing’ over the past decade. In this discussion document, COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) will describe the basic phenomenon, identify the key issues, describe the impact on the various stakeholders involved, analyse proposed interventions and solutions, and present COPE’s perspective on addressing the problem going forward. This discussion will synonymously refer to predatory publishing and predatory journals/publications as fake scholarly publishing and fake scholarly journals/publications, respectively, and will elaborate on the issues with terminology. While the focus of this discussion paper is primarily journals, there are also predatory conferences and predatory proceedings of those conferences. COPE welcomes feedback and comments from publishers, journal editors, reviewers, researchers, institutions, librarians, funders, and other stakeholders on this subject.

It is now possible to upload article metadata containing ORCIDs to DOAJ. ORCIDs are displayed on article pages in accordance with the ORCID display guidelines. Changes have been made to the search interface and API to allow search and retrieval of ORCIDs. Also, the code lists for countries, currencies and languages have been updated through a service called Pycountry.