In the lead-up to the October 2023 Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS, and the French National Research Agency (ANR) have organised two webinars for the community to prepare discussions for the global summit and to take decisive steps towards a stronger Diamond Open Access ecosystem for scholarly communication.

The ‘Action Plan for Diamond Open Access’ was launched in March 2022. It has since been endorsed by 146 organisations and 138 individuals. It is now available in Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, with more translations on the way.

According to the ESAC initiative at Max Planck Digital Library, there is significant market concentration in academic publishing, with just a handful of publishers accounting for the majority of the scholarly articles published globally. ESAC supplies current data on market shares, transformative agreements and a comparison between countries regarding the openness of scholarly articles.

This article aims at providing a comparison of the proportion of OA publishing as represented in two major bibliometric databases, Web of Science (WoS) and Dimensions, and assesses how the choice of database affects the measurement of OA across different countries. They take into account the various categories of OA publishing, i.e. gold, green, bronze, as well as hybrid. They conclude that Dimensions indexes journals published by platforms developed in the South—AJOL (Africa), AmeliCA (Latin America), and SciELO (Brazil)— and thus has the potential to be a more suitable platform for an inclusive measurement of OA uptake, especially of publications by authors from outside North America, Europe, and Central Asia.

Latin America and the Caribbean is a strategic region for the EU and a natural partner for collaboration in the development of research and innovation policy priorities such as open science. This report focuses on open access policies for scientific production in Latin America and the Caribbean and in the European Union. Its general objective is to increase knowledge in order to achieve greater alignment between the policies of open access to scientific results between both regions.

JISC, which undertakes negotiations and licensing for digital content agreements on behalf of UK universities, first signed an agreement with the open access publisher Frontiers in September 2019. This agreement has just been renewed for one year. JISC member universities will benefit from a 10% national discount rate on publication costs. All submitted articles remain subject to Frontiers’ editorial processes, including peer-review, and all accepted articles are published under an open license (CC-BY) that allows authors (or their institutions) to retain copyright.

The report commissioned by CAST, a Chinese non-governmental organization of scientific and technological professionals and STM, the international organization for academic publishers, includes a large amount of data on publishing activity in China. It also references the various policies and initiatives put in place over time to accelerate open science in the country.

Jisc has announced a new agreement with Copernicus Publications, a fully open access, not-for-profit publisher, whose portfolio of journals covers engineering, geosciences, humanities, and life sciences. The agreement helps UK institutions streamline administering open access publication, making it quicker and easier. Copernicus uses simple, fair and reasonable article processing charges (APCs) and created one of the first public and fully transparent peer-review processes for academic journals.

Descubra una infografía sobre los éxitos de Redalyc y Amelica en materia de visibilidad de las revistas, acuerdos de cooperación, transición digital, consolidación del modelo AA Diamante, con muchas estadísticas.

Discover an infographic on Redalyc and Amelica’s successes regarding the visibility of journals, cooperation agreements, digital transition, consolidation of the Diamond model, with lots of statistics.

See also this article in English.

The Akamon Gate at the Hongo campus of the University of Tokyo – Image – Getty iStockphoto: Ranmaru

Springer Nature announced in November 2022 the largest transformative agreement in Japan, comprising the engagement of 10 institutions that will generate the open-access of close to 900 articles in the coming year. The University of Tokyo is among the institutions participating in the accord, and the program will allow researchers open-access publication from those facilities in more than 2,000 Springer Nature journals.

Nine of the participating institutions are members of Japan’s Research University Consortia (RUC), with the Tokyo University of Science participating following an agreement by the executive member of RUC.