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.

This first-of-a-kind report from Knowledge Exchange maps the landscape for Open Access books in the Knowledge Exchange countries; Finland, Netherlands, UK, France, Denmark and Germany, together with Norway and Austria. Are books included in national Open Access policies? What kind of funding streams supporting open access monographs exist? And what variety of publishing models for Open Access monographs can be located? The report creates an overview of both the OA monographs policies, funding streams and publishing models for all eight countries for the first time. This is used to point towards areas of future efforts.

On Wednesday 20th and Thursday 21st September, 2017, close to 180 delegates gathered in Lisbon, Portugal for the 9th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP). With myriad keynotes, panels, and networking opportunities spread out over two days, COASP once again brought together the open access publishing community for vital knowledge sharing and collaborative activity.

The programme is still online, and the recordings, slides, and speaker biographies from COASP 2017 are now available. The slides will be posted later on. Stay tuned. OASPA’s Storify roundup of Day 1 of #COASP9 can be found here; Day 2 can be found here.

Latin American representation in the OpenCon community has been growing since 2014, specifically at OpenCon 2016. The outcome of that session was the formation of an international organizing committee dedicated to establishing a regional satellite meeting – OpenCon Latin America (OpenCon LatAm). The aim is to forge new connections between organizations in each country to coordinate global advocacy efforts. In addition, this event should lead to cross-border collaborations that will benefit the science and technology sectors of each country, and raise the visibility of Latin American research.

LIBER, Europe’s leading association of research libraries, presents Five Principles for libraries to use when conducting Open Access negotiations with publishers. The principles are based on the experiences of LIBER libraries in the past two years, and aim to guide libraries and consortia as they shift from a reader-pays model (subscription licensing) to an author-pays model based on Article Processing Charges (APC).

Providing an analysis of Open Data and Open Science policies across Europe, SPARC released a new report. Produced in collaboration with the Digital Curation Center (DCC), it follows on the heels of a previous work that listed national research data policies.

This latest companion piece takes that work several steps further, analysing the types of policies in place, their processes of creation, and some of their details. Included in the study are the 28 EU member states, as well as countries from the European Research Area, including Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland.

Much of the rhetoric around the future of scholarly communication hinges on the “open” label. In light of Elsevier’s recent acquisition of Bepress and the announcement that, owing to high fees, an established mathematics journal’s editorial team will split from its publisher to start an open access alternative, Jefferson Pooley (Associate Professor of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania) argues that the scholarly communication ecosystem should aim not only to be open but non-profit too. The profit motive is fundamentally misaligned with core values of academic life. Despite the obstacles to forging a non-profit alternative, this goal is worthy and within reach.