UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) held a series of roundtable meetings with various stakeholder groups at the end of 2018 to kick off their open access policy review. Participants gathered  views on current open access policy and its effectiveness and discussed about how organisations and communities could work with UKRI to help achieve its objectives. The new OA policy should be published later this year.

There is growing concern about the increasing concentration of control of research communication functions in the hands of a small number of players, whose objectives do not reflect the interests of scholarship. In September 2017, COAR and SPARC published a joint statement related to this issue and pledged to collaborate with others on actions that will ensure research communication services are better aligned with the aims of research. Accordingly, COAR and SPARC have developed seven good practice principles for scholarly communication services. The aim is to ensure that services are transparent, open, and support the aims of scholarship.

Open Access publishing is more widespread in Latin America than in any other region of the world, and continues to grow. An interview with Dominique Babini, CLACSO’s Open Access Advisor, explains why Open Access is such a success in Latin America.

The Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S has been taken very seriously by the global scholarly communication and publishing communities. Further to the huge volume of response to cOAlitionS’ call for feedback on the Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is sharing some of the themes that she has observed emerging across the feedback documents.

On December 6^th, 2018, a group of stakeholders representing research funding organizations, academic libraries, scholarly publishers and open infrastructure providers, met in London to discuss a proposal for addressing the growing set of challenges in the implementation of institutional and funder policies supporting open access publication. The result of this meeting was broad support for this initiative, tentatively titled The OA Switchboard. Read the overview from Paul Peters and learn more about the key challenges that the OA Switchboard aims to address.

At the same time when  COAlition S was launched in Europe, AmeliCA was brewing the extension of REDALYC’s philosophy, knowledge and technology to the Global South. AmeliCA is a multi-institutional community-driven initiative supported by UNESCO, which seeks a collaborative, sustainable, protected and non-commercial solution for Open Knowledge in Latin America and the Global South. Both initiatives have a common goal: to make Open Access a reality. However, Plan S and AmeliCA imply two very different visions and two conceptualizations on the circulation of scientific knowledge. What is the main difference between them? How is it possible that some of their proposed strategies are counterposed?

This article looks at whether there is evidence to support two prevailing assumptions about open access (OA). These assumptions are: (1) fully OA journals are inherently of poorer quality than journals supported by other business models and (2) the OA business model is more ‘competitive’ than the subscription journal access business model. By combining citation‐based impact scores with data from publishers’ price lists, the authors were able to look for relationships between business model, price, and ‘quality’ across several thousands of journals. They found no evidence suggesting that OA journals suffer significant quality issues compared with non‐OA journals. Furthermore, authors do not appear to ‘shop around’ based on OA price.

Mikael Laakso, as a member of the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 expert group on the Future of Scholarly Publishing and scholarly Communication, explains the necessity of building up a public infrastructure for open access, its benefits and the obstacles on the way.

cOAlition S is a group of national research funding organizations and charitable foundations who have agreed to implement the 10 principles of Plan S in a coordinated way. cOAlition S has solicited public feedback on its guidance for implementation. Harvard Library and the MIT Libraries have jointly issued their recommendations in response.

Many of the discussions surrounding Open Access (OA) revolve around how it affects publishing practices across different academic disciplines. Recent large-scale bibliometric studies show that the uptake of OA differs substantially across disciplines. This study investigates the underlying mechanisms that cause disciplines to vary in their OA publishing practices. How do different disciplines adopt and shape OA publishing practices? What discipline-specific barriers to and potentials for OA can be identified?