ScienceGeist

Around the globe, there are initiatives and organizations devoted to bring "Open Access" to the world, i.e., the public availability of scholarly research works, free of charge. However, the current debate seems to largely miss the point.

This article reports on selected findings from the pilot African Open Science Platform landscape study, conducted by the Academy of Science of South Africa, on request of the SA Department of Science and Technology.

This study analyses OA papers over time. Given existing trends, the authors estimate that by 2025, the declining relevance of closed access articles is likely to change the landscape of scholarly communication in the years to come.

Summary of recent activities around OA monographs.

In September, Ethiopia adopted a national open access policy for higher education institutions. EIFL guest blogger, Dr Solomon Mekonnen Tekle, librarian at Addis Ababa University Library, and EIFL Open Access Coordinator in Ethiopia, celebrates the adoption of the policy.

Robert Harington suggests that despite the critical role of scholarly societies in publishing and academia, the sad reality is it is the big corporate publishers who win.

In this interview, Aileen Fyfe, professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews, shares an abridged history of journal publishing at scholarly societies and her thoughts on how scholarly publishing's past can influence its present.

The MIT Press has received a three-year $850,000 grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, to perform a broad-based monograph publishing cost analysis and to develop and openly disseminate a durable financial framework and business plan for open access (OA) monographs.

To foster open access in Finland, universities have decided to join forces and develop a full service platform for open publishing.

The Science Europe Briefing Paper identifies the key issues at stake in implementing a policy of Open Access to academic books, and outlines recommendations for different stakeholder groups to facilitate and accelerate such a policy.

This is a myth. People think that DOAJ exists to index all open access journals. A journal can only be indexed if it passes all of our criteria. The Directory of Everything Open Access The Director…

A major push by science funding agencies in Europe to make the research they back freely available at the point of publication is the world's best chance of fundamentally altering scientific publishing, says the new coordinator of Plan S, Johan Rooryck.

The Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences SAHS proposes the establishment of a Platinum Open Access Fund. The funding would allow to flip and operate 15-20 scientific journals in the humanities and social sciences that are not depending on article processing charges and that are immediately open for everyone.

The Bibsam Consortium in Sweden signed a new tranformative Read & Publish agreement with academic publisher Springer Nature. It covers rights to publish in over 1,800 hybrid journals at no extra cost for the author as well as reading rights for over 2,100 journals since 1997.

Every five minutes or so, someone tries to come up with a cost-per-article figure for academic publishing. Martin Paul Eve explains why he finds himself wanting to resist the temptation.

Concerns include declining volume, slower publication, and softening citation measures.

The release in September 2018 of Plan S has led many small and society publishers to examine their business models, and in particular ways to transform their journals from hybrids into pure Open Access (OA) titles. This paper explores one means by which a society publisher might transform.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR) announce they are the first of the United Nations agencies to join COAlition S. This commitment will ensure that all WHO and TDS supported health research will be free to read online on the day it is published.

Interim head of MIT Anthropology explains the plan's vision and challenges, plus progress made at an historic MIT workshop.

Co-chairs of the implementation task force of the international research-funder consortium cOAlition S clarify their position with regard to financially supporting the important transition to full open access after 2024.

Springer Nature has reached an open access publishing deal with 700 German research universities, but it faces some pushback.

Agreement will make thousands of German-authored papers freely available worldwide every year.

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.