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.
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.
The report is a product of a collaboration between STM Association and the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) focused on the bilateral sharing of ideas and best practices in OA publishing. China has become an important part of the global open access publishing ecosystem. However, China still has great potential, especially for its considerable number of scientific journals in Chinese languages. Therefore, CAST will actively develop domestic open access policies, standards, and infrastructure, and make effort on the establishment of an open access publishing system suitable for China.
Between August and November 2022, almost 80 individuals from across the research and publishing landscape contributed to a study delivered on behalf of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), to support the development of a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework for their Open Access (OA) policy. UKRI’s Open Access policy was updated in December 2022. The framework will help UKRI and the sector assess open access progress, levels of compliance with the policy and its effectiveness.
This blog post covers five key principles identified from discussions with the research and publishing communities, as well as considering the implications for UKRI’s future M&E efforts.
In their editorial “Public access is not equal access”, the authors explain how the open access model can compound inequities by charging unaffordable article processing fees. They also acknowledge the perverse incentives of a business model based on volume of articles published, which has led to the proliferation of open access journals, many of which are predatory, and risks diluting the scientific literature. However, the unintended consequence of open access policies is the erosion of trust in scientific publishing standards by institutions. This is the case for Chinese institutions whose lack of confidence in the quality of open access articles risk to weaken the viability of legitimate open access journals and in turn hinder scientific research.
Consortia and publishers invest a lot of time and expertise in the negotiation process. A well-drafted read and publish contract is, however, not enough to guarantee an optimal open access publishing service. Based on lessons learned from the Association of Dutch University Libraries, the Royal Library, and the Library of the Royal Academy of Sciences (The Netherlands) aka UKB consortium, five ways to optimize open access after a signed contract are addressed here in which tooling plays a key role.
