In The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, Heather Morrison, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Information Studies, is drawing up an annual review of key data illustrating the growth of open access, with additional comments and analysis for each platform. She highlights the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, which surpassed two major milestones in 2016: over 100 million documents (about 60% open access) and 5,000 content providers.
On October 7th, 2016, the French Law for a Digital Republic (LOI n° 2016-1321 du 7 octobre 2016 pour une République numérique) came into force, following a one-year open review process during which the draft law could be improved by citizens. This law introduces new provisions to regulate the digital economy, online cooperative economy, data protection and access to the internet. Two articles are of specific concern for scholarly communication, as they relate directly to open access/open data and text & data-mining (TDM).
In a detailed study, redacted by Madhan Muthu and coworkers on the effect of article processing charges (APC) on open access publishing in India, assessing the financial burden of publication fees on science dissemination in India, the proposal aroused for the creation of a decentralized national platform of Open Access (OA) journals, such as SciELO, to reduce costs, increase efficiency and facilitate sharing of metadata among repositories.
Xin Bi (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University/DOAJ), Ina Smith (Academy of Science of South Africa), and Abel Packer (SciELO) recently joined OASPA for a webinar to discuss Open Access Publishing in the Global South. Lars Bjørnshauge (DOAJ) chaired the discussion. The Copyright Clearance Center hosted the webinar. Leyla Williams, Events and Communications Coordinator at OASPA, reflects on the discussion.
Eight highly-visible organizations today announced the launch of the Open Research Funders Group, a partnership designed to increase access to research outputs. The group arose out of a forum of open access stakeholders convened by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and SPARC in late 2015. All of these organizations are committed to using their positions to foster open sharing of research articles and data. One of their main goals is to develop practical solutions for monitoring open access and open data policy compliance and tracking impact.
As of 1 January 2017, Knowledge Exchange will count six partners with French CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/ National Centre for Scientific Research) joining the initiative. The other partners are: DFG (Germany), Jisc (UK), Surf (The Netherlands), Deff (Denmark), CSC (Finland). Renaud Fabre, Director of CNRS Scientific and Technical Information Department, stated that this is “a natural consequence of the fruitful exchanges and cooperation which already exist between KE and CNRS”. Among the activities to be shared is the monitoring of KE’s OA publications and OA policies.
Press release in English: http://knowledge-exchange.info/news and Knowledge-Exchange newsletter
The first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 11 open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) is presented, focusing on four key modes of analysis: journal outputs ; OAMJ author characteristics; subject areas; and citation profiles. Actually, there is no “typical” mega-journal, and additional research should be carried out to better understand the current and future role of OAMJs in scholarly communication.
OpenAIRE works to find a community-endorsed definition of “open peer review” (OPR). OpenAIRE collected 122 definitions of “open review” or “open peer review” from the scientific literature. Iterative analysis of these definitions resulted in the identification of seven distinct OPR traits at work in various combinations amongst these definitions. In this post will be described each of these OPR traits and their proposed advantages and disadvantages, with reference to evidence of their efficacy where available.
INRA, French National Institute for Agricultural Research, has spent the last years promoting the accessibility of its scientific resources in many ways. The institution formalized its open-access policy in 2016 which involves seven main principles with a two-fold goal. INRA’s commitment to open science goes beyond just providing access to its publications. Its broad policy, which now targets manuscripts and datasets, has two main goals.
The 2016 Jisc and CNI one-day conference brought together leaders from the UK and the US academic and research communities concerned with scholarly communications. A briefing paper and report on the proceedings of the event is available separately but this report is designed to bring together into seven themes the key points from the conference. Further discussions are also reflected in this report about 2 themes: sustaining and using the scholarly record; improving the ability to re-use the scholarly record.
