ScienceGeist

The long-standing debate over open access to research results has been marked by a geographic divide - but the divide is starting to blur.

Open Access India partners with the Center for Open Science to launch IndiaRxiv on the eve of India’s 73rd Independence Day as the country joins the global march for open science.

Of the 215 active journals published by SpringerOpen, 54% charge APCs. The average APC was 1,212 EUR, an increase of 8% over the 2018 average, 6 times the EU inflation rate for June 2019 of 1.3%.

This article seeks to understand how far the United Kingdom higher education (UK HE) sector has progressed towards open access (OA) availability of the scholarly literature it requires to support courses of study. It uses Google Scholar, Unpaywall and Open Access Button to identify OA copies of a random sample of articles copied under the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) HE Licence to support teaching. The quantitative data analysis is combined with interviews of, and a workshop with, HE practitioners to investigate four research questions. Firstly, what is the nature of the content being used to support courses of study? Secondly, do UK HE establishments regularly incorporate searches for open access availability into their acquisition processes to support teaching? Thirdly, what proportion of content used under the CLA Licence is also available on open access and appropriately licenced? Finally, what percentage of content used by UK HEIs under the CLA Licence is written by academics and thus has the potential for being made open access had there been support in place to enable this? Key findings include the fact that no interviewees incorporated OA searches into their acquisitions processes. Overall, 38% of articles required to support teaching were available as OA in some form but only 7% had a findable re-use licence; just 3% had licences that specifically permitted inclusion in an ‘electronic course-pack’. Eighty-nine percent of journal content was written by academics (34% by UK-based academics). Of these, 58% were written since 2000 and thus could arguably have been made available openly had academics been supported to do so.

Since 2018, open access has also gained momentum with regards to monographs, now that a significant proportion of journal articles is already available in open access.

Open access is often discussed as a process of flipping the existing closed subscription based model of scholarly communication to an open one. However, in Latin America an open access ecosystem for scholarly publishing has been in place for over a decade.

Prominent UC faculty suspend service on editorial boards of Cell Press journals to bring publisher Elsevier back to the bargaining table.

This database puts libraries on a more level playing field with vendors by detailing what thousands of peer institutions have paid for journal subscription packages.

In response to the recent editorial "Open access and academic imperialism", disappointment is expressed at such a narrow and misleading interpretations of the recent attempts to make academic publishing more open.

EMBO's Bernd Pulverer looks at the revised Plan S Implementation Guidelines.

Plan S is a manifesto for full and immediate Open Access set out by a coalition of research funders. It has been discussed a lot recently, but what, exactly, does it involve?

So does Sci-Hub lead libraries to cancel journals, or doesn't it? Maybe the answer isn't a simple yes or no.

A giant data store quietly being built in India could free vast quantities of science for computer analysis - but is it legal?

Elsevier, the world's largest publishers of academic journals, just stepped up its fight with the University of California by cutting off UC's access.

Publisher Elsevier halts UC's access to new articles but UC Berkeley Library can connect readers with what they need. 

The Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) is a community of 60+ not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. One of the aims of the collective is to legitimise scholar-led publishing as an important alternative model for open access.

In this paper the authors argue that the linguistic framing of open access by a variety of stakeholders may inhibit the uptake of open access publishing.

A path forward for open access in the humanities and social sciences.

Coalition S has identified the following priorities for the next few months. 

Explaining the current trends, issues and challenges of open access with special focus on Plan S, Plan U, article processing charges (APC), access issues and predatory publishing practices.

Digital Science launched a report on the state of open access monographs. The report addresses the question of how we integrate and value monographs in the increasingly open digital scholarly network.

Coalition S acknowledges that there is a wide range of work to be done to implement Plan S and identified 9 priorities for the next few months.

The University of California has been out of contract with Elsevier since January. Now, the University of California have reason to believe that Elsevier will shut off direct access to new articles later this week or in early July.

An agreement between publisher Springer Nature and Sweden's Bibsam consortium - made up of institutional libraries and funders - will see the two share the costs of publishing in Springer Nature's Open Access journals.

Plan S will also influence how learned societies, the organisations tasked with representing academics in particular disciplines, operate, as many currently depend on revenues from journal subscriptions to cross-subsidise their activities. 

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is increasingly being used as a benchmark to determine whether a journal is fully OA, most notably as part of both the original and recently revised Plan S guidelines. This month we take a look at the DOAJ and consider how it compares to other sources for evaluating fully OA status.

In its series Open Access News & Views, Delta Think recently published an analysis of the DOAJ. DOAJ very much enjoyed the piece and found it to be one of the most well-informed articles written about them. They now comment on a few of the issues raised in the article.

Will authors exercise their market power to put downward pressure on article processing charges? 

The Open Library of Humanities has demonstrated a model for high-quality open access publishing, without Article Processing Charges. We asked Chief Executive Officer Martin Eve whether the Library could serve as inspiration for Learned Societies in a post-Plan S world.