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.

DOAJ has had excellent connections and representation throughout Latin America for many years, thanks to previous work by Redalyc, sponsorship from SciElo and DOAJ Latin America Ambassador. DOAJ’s first sponsorship from Mexico, the Tecnológico de Monterrey, is of great importance to both DOAJ and the open access movement throughout Latin America where open access publishing has been a de facto for many years. Collaboration with publishers from Latin America aims at improving best practice, as well as openness for readers and for authors.

Dissemin is a tool encouraging researchers to publish their articles in open access. It allows researchers to measure the accessibility of their publications and put their pre-prints online in a few clicks. The metadata are automatically filled in by Dissemin. This functionality is made possible by harvesting two main sources: BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) and Crossref.

On 12 July 2017, OASPA hosted a Twitter chat with Caroline Sutton (Head of Open Scholarship Development at Taylor & Francis and member of the OASPA Board), Rebecca Kennison (Principal of K|N Consultants and the co-founder of the Open Access Network), Dr Jennifer Edmond (Research Fellow and Director of Strategic Projects for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Trinity College Dublin and co-director of the Trinity Center for Digital Humanities) and Ron Dekker (Director of CESSDA).

A full account of the discussion can be viewed on the Twitter hashtag #OASPAChat, and a summary is posted on Storify. This Twitter Chat extended the webinar held in June 2017 with the same panelists.