This study reviews content from five library and information science journals published by Taylor & Francis over a five-year period from 2012–2016, to investigate the green deposit rate. The review looks at research articles and standing columns to see if any articles were retrieved using the OA Button or through institutional repositories. Results indicate that less than a quarter of writers have chosen to make a green deposit of their articles in local or subject repositories. The discussion outlines some best practices to be undertaken by librarians, editors and Taylor & Francis to make this program more successful.

OASPA has seen an exciting recent blossoming of inter-membership collaborations, partnerships, and instances of members working alongside each other in support of common goals. In line with the October 2018 Open Access Week, OASPA is highlighting these inspiring instances of collaborative efforts of OASPA members in their work to find new solutions to making research openly accessible for all.

Two of the world’s largest biomedical research funders have backed a plan to make all papers resulting from work they fund open access on publication by 2020. Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced they were both endorsing ‘Plan S’, adding their weight to an initiative already backed by 13 research funders across Europe since its launch in September.

SPARC Europe, a division of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is sharing a document with the library community that suggests ways in which the Plan S Implementation Task Force can benefit from academic and national libraries when planning the implementation of the 10 Plan S principles. This was developed as part of an implementation guide for the Task Force delivered in October 2018.

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As European science funders promote a radical new open-access (OA) publishing mandate (known as Plan S), the Trump administration is considering changes to a five-year-old directive governing the public release of research literature sponsored by federal agencies. In early October, a delegation led by Robert-Jan Smits, the European Commission’s special envoy on OA, met with officials of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and other federal agencies, as part of an effort to gain broad support for the new European policy.

In October 20-15, the League of European Research Universities (LERU) told the world that Christmas is Over. Its statement Moving Forwards on Open Access formed an important challenge to the 2016 Dutch Presidency of the EU, emphasising that things had to change in the academic publishing world. Plan S, a cooperation of Science Europe and Robert-Jan Smits (Open Access Envoy of the European Commission), is an adventurous attempt to take the debate further.

In an appeal signed by several European scientists protesting against Plan S, Lynn Kamerlin and her coauthors worry that Plan S will deprive them of quality journal venues and of international collaborative opportunities, while disadvantaging scientists whose research budgets preclude paying and playing in this OA league. They offer instead their own suggestions on how to implement Open Science.

Steven Inchcoombe, Chief Publishing Officer at Springer Nature, gives his views on Plan S. A range of publishing options, hybrid as well as highly selective subscription journals, are needed in order to meet the communication needs of researchers.

Toby Green, Head of Publishing at OECD Publishing (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), suggests that preprint repositories are a more intelligent approach to ensuring a fully-open playing field. If all articles were first published as preprints, and only those that succeeded in attracting the attention of journal editors were submitted for formal publishing, the average cost of publishing a paper would fall significantly. In clinging onto traditional journals to advance the careers of the few (authors), OA is delayed for the many (readers): rebuilding the reputation economy to accept preprints could be the catalyst to deliver OA, solve the serials crisis and drive out predatory journals.

 Open Access at MIT and Beyond: A White Paper of the MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research examines efforts to make research and scholarship openly and freely available. It provides an overview of the open access landscape at MIT, in the U.S.A., and in Europe to help inform discussions at the Institute over the next year.