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.
In October, SPARC Europe convened a meeting with high-level stakeholders from the international funding, research and library communities to discuss how to sustain some of the world’s important OA services. New funding mechanisms are being explored. After extensive essential preparatory work led by Knowledge Exchange, best concluded in the Putting Down Roots report, SPARC Europe now wants to explore the feasibility of the proposal and how to put this into action with leading decision-makers and Open Science advocators worldwide.
From 8th September, DOAJ will accept a short open access statement, but only in combination with a Creative Commons licensing statement on the same page. Likewise, from August 2016, DOAJ no longer accepts journals that require users to register to view the full text.
The Jisc-funded Open Access Good Practice (OAGP) initiative is a community-led support programme which aims to develop and share best practices when implementing open access (OA) workflows, systems and procedures across UK higher education institutions (HEIs). As part of this programme, nine Pathfinder projects were established in 2014. This paper highlights a selection of thoughts and reflections from project members about their experience of participating in the programme.
