This study, conducted by Reme Melero, a CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) scholar and member of the Open Access team, together with Mikael Laako and Miguel Navas,  implements the four core variables of the recently published Open Access Spectrum (OAS) (reader rights, reuse rights, copyright, and author posting rights) to measure the level of openness in all 1,728 Spanish scholarly journals listed in the Spanish national DULCINEA database at the end of 2015.

From 12 to 16 June 2017, IFLA’s presence at the World Summit on the Information Society Forum 2017 allowed delegates to hear the library perspective on three aspects of access – open (free for users), public (Internet access in libraries) and meaningful (ensuring that people have the necessary skills to make information useful). Panelists from a range of international organizations – ADB, CERN, ESA, UNESCO, WHO, WIPO and IFLA – spoke about their experiences in developing and implementing Open Access (OA) policies.

The main outcomes can be found on pp. 200-204 on the Forum Track Outcomes.

COAR has just published a new report entitled Asia Open Access Regional Survey.

In terms of research outputs, the Asian continent is already prolific and is growing quickly, with China poised to become the world’s leading country in terms of number of published research articles. This report provides an account of the current state of open access in 16 regions of Asia. It is expected that the survey results will contribute to the wider implementation of open access and help various regions make the case for greater investment in open access, both in terms of policies, as well as national and local infrastructure.

Knowledge Unlatched is a consortium of libraries and publishers working together to grant open access to scholarly books and journals in the humanities and social sciences. Founded by Frances Pinter in 2012, the initiative has unlatched nearly 500 titles to date and is presently launching its fourth round – KU Select 2017 – with 350 monographs, including both frontlist and backlist titles, and more than 20 journals.

KU team is currently reviewing submitted titles and plans to start the pledging in May 2017. Libraries are now invited to view the collection and pledge for titles at: app.knowledgeunlatched.org. Interested librarians and stakeholders can find answers on the KU Select 2017 central information page.

Further to an article on the LSE Impact Blog proposing a European Open Access Platform for research, a discussion is open on how OpenAIRE can contribute further to create a participatory, federated OA platform. A public platform for the dissemination of research will become essential infrastructure to finally fully integrate research publishing and dissemination into the research lifecycle, rather than seeing it as an added-extra to be outsourced.

In 2015 and 2016, Knowledge Exchange hosted two workshops on monitoring of open access publications. These workshops were designed to create some tangible recommendations on monitoring Open Access publications and cost data related to publications. The workshop led to 48 concrete recommendations, in which thematics of standards and data are often evocated. Those recommendations have been published in a workshop report.

The nature and modalities of scientific research publications have undergone many changes during the past 4-5 decades.  Commercial houses gradually became the major players and this led to research publication system transforming into an industry and reduced to a source of earning. The author suggests the necessity  of changing the actual system, making scholarly outcome available to all instead of having authors paying for publication charges which are mechanically making life harder for researchers with low funds.

India may not have a national open access policy in place, but the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) and The University Grants Commission (UGC) have open access policies that clearly mandate researchers to deposit their papers in institutional repositories. “Open access institutional repositories are clearly lagging behind despite the mandate,” says Dr. G. Mahesh from the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR), New Delhi, and one of the authors of this article in Current Science.

Paying to publish is an ethical issue. India is potentially spending about US$ 2.4 million annually on APCs paid to OA journals. The amount would be much more if we add APCs paid to make papers published in hybrid journals open access. It would be prudent for Indian authors to make their work freely available through interoperable repositories, a trend that is growing in Latin America and China, especially when funding is scarce. Scientists are ready to pay APC as long as institutions pay for it, and funding agencies are not ready to insist that grants provided for research should not be used for paying APC.

G. Mahesh, Head of Indian ISSN Centre, in the CSIR-National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR), explains the phenomenal increase in the number of journals seeking ISSNs, why ISSNs are being assigned to questionable journals, and NISCAIR’s endeavour to keep questionable journals at bay.