The Joint Declaration LATINDEX–REDALYC–CLACSO–IBICT in support of the Latin American non-commercial Open Access Ecosystem was adopted on Dec. 15th, 2017 in Mexico. This declaration recommends the use of CC-BY-NC-SA license to guarantee the protection of the academic and scientific output in Open Access, and aims to create, share, maintain and preserve knowledge produced in the region.

The declaration is published in Spanish, English, Portuguese and German.

DOAJ has launched the DOAJ Best Practice Guide. It is a web resource that provides selection criteria, resources and tools for the identification of reputable open access journals to support researchers, publishers and librarians in their search of best practice and transparency standards. The Guide complements the work of the DOAJ Ambassadors as well as academics, librarians and publishers worldwide. It is based on the information provided on the For Publishers page on the DOAJ website and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.

The European Commission will fund an Open Research Publishing Platform whose aim is to offer Horizon 2020 beneficiaries a free and fast publication possibility for peer reviewed articles as well as pre-prints resulting from Horizon 2020 funding. The platform will complement the current policy in Horizon 2020 in order to balance obligations with incentives. The platform will explore many features like open peer review, next generation metrics, and access to preprints.

The attached note contains more information about this action which is foreseen to be launched in early 2018 through a public procurement process.

The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) aims to allow free access to scholarly citation data and to build analytical services on those raw data. The initiative was launched in April 2017 and resulted in the creation of a repository called the Open Citations Corpus (OCC). David Shotton, co-Director of OCC and co-founder of I4OC, explains the milestones of the project, the results achieved so far and the barriers. He argues that publishers should ensure that all citations are included in reference lists, and should make this bibliometric data openly available in a searchable format. He calls on all stakeholders to campaign for this initiative.

The Criteria, policy and procedures for the admission and permanence of journals in the SciELO Brazil Collection were updated and become valid from January 2018. The new version contemplates advances in editorial policies related to the alignment of the SciELO Program with good practices of open science research communication. The perspective is to reinforce the contribution of SciELO journals in the social and scientific qualification of Brazilian research. The criteria aim to increase transparency, completeness, celerity and interoperability of research communication.

This article describes how a society-owned philosophy journal, Nordic Wittgenstein Review, evaluated various publishing models and made an informed decision on how best to adopt open access publishing for the journal, and implement measures to evaluate the chosen model.

The DOAJ’s re-applications project, which started in January 2015, is officially complete. All the journals which are now listed in the database have been reviewed under DOAJ’s stricter criteria. In total, over 40% of the journals were culled from the database. DOAJ will work with its technical partners, Cottage Labs, to develop a system whereby publishers can submit updates to their journal records.

Both ResearchGate and Sci-Hub make it easy to obtain articles by sharing in a social network (ResearchGate) or simply by making direct downloads available of PDFs obtained via institutional proxies (Sci-Hub). This widespread usage reveals a lack of universal access. Whilst a minority of papers is fully open access (freely accessible and re-usable), 47% of the new articles viewed by unpaywall users are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid, but rather an under-discussed category called ‘Bronze’: articles made free-to-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license. But all the “legacy” articles behind paywalls remain closed off.

Jan Velterop, a science publisher and an active advocate of BOAI-compliant open access, suggests that all paywalled journal articles should be given an open access licence after a period of no more than 12 months of the date of publication.

Gold open access publishing is a cause for concern because it drives a redistribution of valuable research money to support open access papers in ‘mega-journals’ with more permissive acceptance criteria. A data-driven evaluation of the financial ramifications of gold OAP is presented and evidence is provided that gold OAP in mega-journals is biased toward Western industrialized countries. The global inequity of the cross-subsidizing APC model was demonstrated across five different mega-journals, showing that the issue is a common problem. Stringent and fair criteria need to be developed to address the global financial implications of OAP, as publication fees should reflect the real cost of publishing and be transparent for authors.