According to Karin Wulf, OA is too often presented and discussed as a unitary philosophy and practice. Whereas the basic issues are the same for OA journals and monographs, cost, use, licensing, distribution, and the varied significance of the form across disciplines and within fields play out very differently.
SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) lauched the Open Access Spectrum (OAS) Evaluation Tool, which provides a concrete, quantifiable mechanism to independently analyze publications’ policies. The OAS Evaluation Tool generates an “Openness” score that is straightforward, easy to understand, and free. It can be used to help determine compliance with funder policies, institutional mandates, and researchers’ individual values.
This paper highlights the challenges and limitations faced by scholarly presses in South Africa, presenting the business and operational changes required (both individually and collectively) to meet overarching political and competitive pressures.
The guidelines contain criteria that will help repositories make decisions about whether or not to adopt the different services being offered by publishers to the repository community. They were developed in consultation with the COAR Executive Board and the Aligning Repository Networks Strategic Committee.
The editors and all editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. As soon as January, when the departing editors’ noncompete contracts expire, they plan to start a new open-access journal to be called Glossa.
The EU and many other research funders now mandate open access to scientific publications resulting from public funding. One of the central implementation issues is the search for sustainable models supporting a transition to open access. The workshop aims to collect information and reflect on each of the models presented.
The platform REDIB, Red Iberoamericana de Innovación y Conocimiento Científico (Ibero-American Network for Innovation and Scientific Knowledge), has launched late September 2015, and is available at https://www.redib.org (check https://www.redib.org/en for the English version).
REDIB is a platform for the aggregation of scientific and academic content in electronic format, produced in the Ibero-American space.
BioMed Central is the first publisher to pilot a new system which shows exactly how each researcher contributed to any given scientific article.
Opinions on the future of journals vary widely. There are those who say it will live forever and others who see the journal as an ugly reminder of the sins of big publishers – exploitative vehicles for dragging a profit from those who can’t afford to pay.
According to the author, it is worth taking a step back and asking ourselves why the journal exists in the first place.
The present guidelines aim to assist in the development of efficient Open Access policies among Research Performing Organisations. They have been prepared by the National Documentation Centre and SPARC Europe as part of the work of the PASTEUR4OA project.They provide the context, the process and a model policy that will enable the institutions to devise and implement their own Open Access policy
