In 2018, the SciELO Program will celebrate 20 years of operation, in full alignment with the advances of open science.

The SciELO Program has consolidated itself as one of the most important programs for international cooperation in support of Open Access Scholarly Communication. The SciELO Network, a cooperative network under the SciELO Program and which spans 15 countries, indexes and publishes close to one thousand peer reviewed open access journals as national collections. This anniversary constitutes an important landmark in SciELO’s evolution, and an exceptional moment to promote the advancement of an inclusive, global approach to scholarly communication and to the open access movement. Check the programme.

OASPA Board Members are appointed via an annual election process and serve for a term of three years, playing a vital role in OASPA’s work to support and represent the interests of Open Access journal and book publishers globally. In the third of a series of posts highlighting the important contributions of the Board, OASPA’s Leyla Williams talked to Lars Bjørnshauge, Managing Director of the DOAJ. The other two posts in the series were an interview with eLife’s Mark Patterson, and with PeerJ’s Pete Binfield.

Joe McArthur (Director of Open Access Button) shows how tools like Open Access Button and Unpaywall work, and how open access (OA) resources can be used in inter-library loan (ILL) systems, link resolvers and library searches. The tools are open source – free and  community-owned.

On June 7^th , 2018, Sciences Po Paris, the French Institute of Political Studies, organised a one-day workshop on OA repositories for university and research institutions. Speakers elaborated on the roles of OA repositories within the organisation and the development and challenges of OA repositories.

The program and the presentations are online.

The findings of this report are based on data provided by Member States regarding their progress in implementing the 2012 Recommendation on Open Access to and preservation of scientific information. The situation has improved regarding e-infrastructures,  national policies and initiatives for interoperability and common standards. Further efforts are required regarding copyright legislation, training, tools to monitor open access publications and preservation of information.

This report is based on presentations delivered during a conference about open access in the humanities that took place in May 2018 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. This event was targeted to researchers in the humanities and social sciences, as well as to editors of peer-reviewed journals from these scientific areas. More than 80 participants listened to presentations on a collectively funded humanities megajournal (Open Library of Humanities /OLH), on infrastructures for open scholarly communication (OPERAS and HIRMEOS), and on data and openness in the arts and humanities. Good Slovenian practices were presented.

The objective of this study is to investigate how Open Science values and practices have influenced open access (OA) journal publishers in Latin American and the Caribbean (LA&C) countries. The key research question is: to what extent are these practices being adopted by LA&C journals? A survey was conducted with a sample of LA&C journals listed on the DOAJ database. The results reveal that if many journals are aware of or informed about most of Open Science practices, only a few have already successfully adopted those practices.

Wellcome is currently conducting a review of its open access policy. As part of this, they are running a short open consultation to solicit stakeholder views on the policy and its future. Submissions from individuals and organisations are welcome.

The consultation questions can be viewed and responses submitted via this online form. The deadline for responses to the consultation is 21 May 2018.

Richard Poynder interviewed two OA advocates, one from the global North and one from the global South, along with their responses to each other’s Q&A. Jeffrey MacKie-Mason is a University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer at UC Berkeley. Mahmoud Khalifa is a librarian at the Library of Congress Cairo Office and DOAJ Ambassador for the Middle East and Persian Gulf.

The Indian University Grants Commission (UGC) has removed 4,305 questionable or poor-quality journals from its approved list of journals. The UGC was forced to act following complaints by researchers and the media about inclusion of predatory and questionable journals in its white list. Consequently, the Standing Committee on Notification of Journals re-evaluated every journal title recommended by universities as well as those indexed by Indian Citation Index. Eventually, the Committee found 4,305 journals to be either low quality or questionable. The criteria for selection as a UGC approved journal are explained. Among these criteria, the ISSN plays a central role.