The Core Competencies for Scholarly Communication Librarians were developed out of research and discussion conducted by the NASIG Scholarly Communication Core Competencies Task Force. The specific duties of the scholarly communication librarian (SCL), though, may be broad and amorphous. The task force proposes the Core Competencies as a tool box consisting of four themes and five areas of emphasis.

Recognising the absence of a consensus view on what open peer review is, this article undertakes a systematic review of definitions of “open peer review”, to create a corpus of 122 definitions. These definitions are then systematically analysed to build a coherent typology of the many different innovations in peer review signified by the term, and hence provide the precise technical definition currently lacking.
Based on this work, Tony Ross-Hellauer proposes a pragmatic definition of open peer review as an umbrella term for a number of overlapping ways that peer review models can be adapted in line with the ethos of Open Science, including making reviewer and author identities open, publishing review reports and enabling greater participation in the peer review process.

The academic reward structure focuses heavily on the publication of novel results in high impact journals. This talk considers the problems this narrow focus is creating in research and its dissemination and how these activities go against some of the basic tenets of science itself. It suggests that Open Research offers a way to improve the veracity of scientific claims and then looks at some of the recent examples of a move away from the status quo over 2016/2017.

This talk is a Keynote Address delivered to the 9th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing held in September 2017.

This presentation was given at the 9th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) in September 2017. As an Associate Professor at Hanken School of Economics, Mikael Laakso has been investigating the changing landscape towards openness in scholarly publishing. In this study whose results are still provisional, he has investigated on how open access journal publishing has developed longitudinally relative to subscription content, including relative share of delayed open access (and hybrid open access). A differentiation has been made between journals that have started as OA from the start and journals that have converted to OA. Comparing inclusion criteria in Scopus, DOAJ and ROAD, the ISSN Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources, he has concluded that the shift towards OA is strong, and the landscape has completely changed for the last five years.

OA analytics provides bibliometric indicators about the development of open access publishing in universities and institutes of major research organizations in Germany. Within the project, a special dataset was built called: ISSN-GOLD-OA, providing a matching list of ISSN for Gold Open Access (OA) journals. The intention was to compile a matching table as complete as possible by using different publicly available sources. The dataset can help to clear various ISSN-related issues in bibliometric studies on Gold OA. For a detailed description of the method, data sources used and the definition of the table fields, please refer to the original documentation: https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/data/2906347

A new metadata collaboration, Metadata 2020, has been formed with the goal of rallying and supporting the community around the critical issue of sharing richer metadata for research communications.  Metadata 2020 is a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable, open metadata for all research outputs, which will advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society.

Elsevier’s acquisition of Bepress’s institutional repository platform is heralded as a smart move for the publisher, but not all of Bepress’s customers are impressed.

The current format of pre-publication peer review offers little or no incentive for the selfless behavior of peer reviewers and provides little guarantee of efficiency and transparency in the process. This observation is in line with numerous other studies that share the notion that a thorough review of the current format of peer review is necessary to restore credibility, efficiency and transparency, while providing scholarly communication the desired celerity.

See also the article in Spanish and Portuguese.

COPE’s European Seminar 2017 held in May 2017, in London was the opportunity to celebrate 20 years of COPE, with a special programme reflecting on past challenges and future outlook for research and publication ethics.

The seminar included invited talks from international speakers, as well as a panel discussion on how new technolgies and new models might help in the future.

The presentations are online.

The ISSN International Centre and its network are updating their services which will include a new interface to request ISSN assignment and a new web portal to access ISSN data more easily.