Global use of institutional repositories is on the rise – but the trend is not without its challenges.

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) opened a communitywide consultation into the sharing of research articles. Running from 9th February until 10th April 2015, the consultation aims to start discussion and to gain a better understanding of the current landscape of article sharing through scholarly collaboration networks and sites. Feedback is invited, including input on a draft outline of voluntary principles.

In principle, the benefits of sharing data are undeniable but in practice researchers are often reluctant to make their data available for use by others. Nonetheless, many researchers do share their data, for a variety of reasons. What motivates those who do it?

Rick Anderson, University of Utah, raises questions about authors’ attitudes and rights in the Open Access environment.

Project MUSE, a provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community, has entered into an agreement with Portico, a digital preservation service for e-journals, e-books, and other scholarly e-content. This agreement aims at preserving its complete collection of scholarly electronic journals, which contains titles from more than 120 not-for-profit scholarly publishers worldwide.

Two departments within the Ministry of Science and Technology of India have set up an open access policy on their funded research. The requirements for depositing in repositories are reviewed, as well as copyright and embargo issues.

“The benefits of open research mean that academia is on a course which cannot be altered, or returned to a previous state”, says Mark Hahnel, funder of Figshare. He specifically explains the benefits for all stakeholders involved: academics, librarians, institutions and consumers of academic content.

Running from January 2015 to December 2017, the agreement provides credits for article processing charges (APCs) to universities that license Wiley journal content under the terms of the Jisc journal agreement. This means that universities that pay both subscription charges for publications and fees to make articles open access will receive APC credits based on the total prior year spend.

A new open-access scientific journal hopes that paying better the peer reviewers will help strengthen efforts to make research results freely available to the public.

A new collaboration between Elsevier and data centers encourages researchers to submit data DOIs with their articles so their data will be indexed and easily accessible.