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.

This paper makes the case for stronger engagement of libraries and consortia when it comes to negotiating and drafting offsetting agreements. Two workshops have shown a clear need for an improvement of the current workflows between academic institutions and publishers in terms of author identification, metadata exchange and invoicing. Publishers need to invest in their editorial systems, while institutions need to get a clearer understanding of the strategic goal of offsetting.

To this purpose, strategic and practical elements will be introduced. Firstly, the Joint Understanding of Offsetting, launched in 2016, will be discussed. Secondly, this paper proposes a set of recommendations for article workflows and services between institutions and publishers, These recommendations should be seen as a minimum set of practical and formal requirements for offsetting agreements and are necessary to make any publication-based open access business model work.

Seen from French-speaking sub-saharan Africa, the struggle for open access takes on a meaning different from that which prevails in the countries of the global North. This article aims at uncovering issues such as the mechanisms of exclusion set up by the world-system of scientific publication, dominated by the Anglo-Saxon mercantile model. How a concept of open access, when it is limited to the legal and technical questions of the accessibility of science, can become a source of epistemic alienation and neo-colonialism in the global South. On the other hand, It is also demosntarated that open access can become a tool of cognitive justice in service to the construction of an inclusive universalism associated to fair open science.

[This articlel in French makes part of a special issue dedicated to Open Access and Open Science]