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.

The SciELO 20-years Conference was held in September 2018 in Brazil. It constitutes an important landmark in SciELO’s evolution. The conference addressed the main political, methodological and technological issues in scholarly communication, and the trends and innovations that are shaping the future of the universal openness of scholarly publishing. A major focus was made on the SciELO network, and why it is indispensable. The presentations were added to the programme. The updated priorities and advances to open science are also refered to.

Danny Kingsley, Deputy Director at Cambridge University Library, provides an overview of OASPA conference that took place in mid-September 2018.

Open Access in the European Research Area through Scholarly Communication (OPERAS) is a consortium of 36 partners from all over Europe, that is working to build a future European infrastructure. Their initial study, OPERAS‐D, revealed a variety of models among the partners influenced by national cultures. The partners’ fragmented activities also reflect the ‘bibliodiversity’ in European societies. To address this challenge, a cooperative model is to be found to enable European actors to share expertise, resources, and costs of development.

DOAJ published its strategy and objectives for 2018-2020. Most of the work undertaken during that period will be derived from 3 key focus areas: funding and sustainability, stability and scalability, education & outreach.

This paper examines Open Access (OA) self archiving policies of different Open Access Repositories (OARs) affiliated to COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) as partner institutes. After presenting the methodology for analysing policy documents, key findings have been identified and highlighted. OARs are in a critical situation when policy matters are concerned. Aligning repository networks and mandates is likely to be crucial in determining future repository development. A best practice benchmark has been suggested for popularizing and strengthening OARs as national research systems.

Hybrid journals are playing an important role in the OA process. However, visibility and discoverability of OA content in hybrid journals can be problematic. The solution proposed by the JEMO Project is to include CC license information in journal’s APIs and TOC RSS feeds .

Think. Check. Submit. helps researchers identify trusted journals for their research. The team behind this initiative wants to ensure that this is as useful as possible to researchers, librarians and others around the world. The short survey about your experiences with Think. Check. Submit. will be open until 28 September 2018.