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]

The Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) is the world’s only global, multi-stakeholder effort to improve the flow of information within science and between science, policymakers, funders and the public. This effort, which is nearing its third full year of operation, is the result of a partnership between the National Science Communication Institute (NSCI) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) which started in 2016. There is no other initiative like this, focusing on improving the entire landscape of research communication (from peer review to open access to publish or perish pressures in academia) by working together instead of separately through dozens of individual and often conflicting efforts. The report on the second annual conference of the global Open Scholarlship Initiative has just been released.

INASP (www.inasp.info) and AJOL (www.ajol.info) have launched a comprehensive framework for assessing the quality of the publishing processes of journals in the Global South. The Journal Publishing Practices and Standards (JPPS) framework (www.journalquality.info) provides detailed and internationally accepted assessment criteria for the quality of publishing practices and policies of Southern journals.

JPPS will inform and reassure authors and readers about reputable journals. More uniquely, it will also provide guidance to journal editors on how they should improve their publishing processes. Editors can resubmit their journals for reassessment six months to a year after the initial assessment if they can demonstrate improvement. INASP and AJOL also offer training and support to help journals improve their publishing processes.

In August 2017 – some nine months after the platform was first launched – Wellcome Open Research published its 100th article. To mark this milestone, Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research, Wellcome, and Michael Markie, Publisher, F1000 Platforms, provide an overview of the type of research that has been published since launch including how it has been used; give an analysis of the datasets underlying these publications; and provide information about the speed of publication and volume of peer review activity. They conclude by looking at how the number of publications on this platform compared with other journals used by Wellcome-funded researchers.

The European Commission recently announced plans to create “Open Research Europe” (ORE), an online platform allowing rapid, Open Access (OA) publication of Horizon 2020 related peer reviewed articles and preprints. The platform aims to be a fast, cost-effective high-quality service, with mechanisms for open review and alternative metrics. It will be a free, complimentary service for H2020 beneficiaries. In developing such a service, the EC will join a growing list of funders (e.g., Wellcome Trust, Gates Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) who offer their researchers a direct, low-cost route to OA publication. OpenAIRE would like to take the chance to make public its point of view, recommending that it should be trusted, community led, open and transparent.