Every six months, the Council of the European Union rotates its presidency among the European Union member states. From January to June 2016, the Netherlands presided over the Council. In this post, OASPA reviews the impact of the steps taken by the Dutch presidency to open up access to research, and the continued work by the Council of the European Union achieved so far to meet its goals towards openness.
Jeffrey Beall, scholarly communications librarian at the University of Colorado, decided to shut down his website on the beginning of January 2017. His website was known to host several controversial lists of “predatory” journals and publishers. Beall did not inform the community nor did he provide explanations for this decision.
Over a million records of open access publications from Latin America are now discoverable through the OpenAIRE platform. In December 2016, OpenAIRE began harvesting records from LA Referencia, the large regional repository network that aggregates metadata of open access publications. LA Referencia contains over 1.2 million records of open access content from nine countries in Latin America. The records provide access to peer-reviewed journal articles, theses and dissertations across all research disciplines. This effort will significantly raise the visibility of Latin American publications outside the region.
Publications such as Nature and Science have policies that clash with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation open-access mandate. The discussions could result in influential journals making special arrangements with the Gates Foundation to permit OA publishing. If that happens, it would be the first time that journals such as Nature and Science have allowed a group of scientists an open-access publishing route based on their funding source.
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
