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.

An independent report published in January 2020 by Information Power aims to improve the transparency of Open Access (OA) prices and services. The report is the outcome of a project funded by Wellcome and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) on behalf of cOAlition S to inform the development of Plan S. During the project, libraries, funders, publishers, and universities worked together to inform the development of a framework intended to provide information about OA services and prices in a transparent, practical, and insightful way.

A study reveals that research scientists in Ghana may have more awareness of predatory journals than expected, but they may lack the training or tools necessary for deciding whether or not a journal is legitimate.

Springer Nature appealed to cOAlition S in an open letter not to lose the opportunity Transformative Journals offer to speed up the transition to OA. Unless changes are made to the conditions being proposed the publisher believes it would be unable to commit to its journals participating. Springer Nature proposed an alternative timeframe and workable set of metrics in place of the cOAlition S requirements. This is cOAlition S’ reponse.

SciELO publishing serves as a framework for the implementation of national public policies for the development of peer-reviewed journals under national conditions while at the same time being part of an international network following the state of art in scientific communication. Moreover, the SciELO Network embodies a program of international cooperation for the progress of research and its open communication with a view towards an inclusive global flow of scientific information that considers the diversity of geographies, thematic areas, cultures, multilingualism and the resulting richness of asymmetries.