The 8^th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) was held in Arlington, Virginia, on the 21st and 22nd September, 2016. Over 160 delegates working in scholarly publishing, librarianship, academia, government, startups, scholarly societies, consultancies and for non-profits, discussed the present and future state of open access.

All of the recordings, slides and posters are available to watch or download via the OASPA website, along with all those from previous years.

The campaign helping researchers navigate the scholarly communication landscape

The new campaign provides clear and simple guidance to help researchers make informed choices about their publications. The resources can also be used by librarians responsible for developing researchers’ knowledge of the scholarly communication landscape or disseminated by industry groups working to support researchers in their publishing.

The 20th Conference on Electronic Publishing (Elpub), held in Göttingen, Germany, in June 2016, explored issues of positioning and power in academic publishing.

You can find the conference proceedings published open access by IOS Press online.

The topics covered in the papers include how to maintain the quality of electronic publications, modeling processes and the increasingly prevalent issue of open access, as well as new systems, database repositories and datasets. Among the papers published, is a presentation about ROAD: the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources to Promote Open Access Worldwide.

The institutional subscription to OpenEdition Fremium allows the UC Berkeley community to participate in an acquisition policy that supports sustainable development of OA. As such, thousands of ebooks and journals are discoverable through the portal or through the Library’s catalogs and bibliographic search tools. The OpenEdition platform is a knowledge dissemination portal whose founder was awarded by the CNRS Innovation Medal in July 2016.

The topic of text and data mining has an importance for researchers, but also for the industry. For the researchers, getting access to the publications of their pairs is a daily necessity, that has its consequences. If we gave access to research data, the gears of data mining certainly would work at full capacity to reveal information that might be surprising. This could go in one direction : more scientific discoveries.  (Article in French)

The problem of low quality open access journals is overemphasized, writes Witold Kieńć, social media specialist at De Gryter, analysing the results of Key Challenges of Research Communication De Gruyter Open Author’s Survey. 67% of the respondents know a high quality open access journal dealing with their research topic.  Authors who published more papers in the last 3 years than their average disciplinary colleagues are more likely to know a top-tier OA venue.

Academic publishing is more ethically complicated than you might think. From plagiarism to fraud and the ‘publish or perish’ culture at universities… Virginia Barbour, Chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics, thinks these are wicked problems with no easy solutions.

but accepting the complexity may at least help to understand what it is that needs to be solved.

The Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science is the key outcome of the two-day conference ‘Open Science – From Vision to Action’ organised by Dutch State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science Sander Dekker as part of the Netherlands EU Presidency. The aim is to provide access to scientific publications in open access, not only for reseachers and students, but also to anyone who need to access the publications. The EU has adopted two main goals: full open access for all publicly funded scientific publications by 2020, and Open Data as the standard for all publicly funded research.