International Open Access Week 2017
October 23 – 29 was the 10th annual International Open Access Week, with the theme “Open in Order to…” leading to interesting discussions around the many different benefits of making scholarly outputs openly available. Check out #OAWeek on Twitter to catch up with what went on around the world.
The UK Scholarly Communications License
During OA Week the official website for the UK Scholarly Communications Model Open Access Policy and Licence was launched. The UK-SCL is an open access policy mechanism designed to make it easier for researchers to retain the re-use rights for their own work, with benefits including being able to share research findings earlier, and ensuring compliance with REF2021. Originally developed at Imperial College there is now widespread support for the model across UK institutions, although this has not come without criticism from publishers.
The Radical Open Access Collective
Also launched during OA Week was the website of the Radical Open Access Collective. The collective is formed of ‘a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects’, with over 30 members from around the world. This blog post gives an overview of their ethos and aims, including a focus on experimenting with new forms of publishing, promoting diversity within academic publishing, and maintaining an ethical approach.
Introducing ScholarlyHub
The development of a new scholarly social network has been announced, which ‘…aims to become a member-run and owned, non-profit portal for sharing and improving scholarly communications among scholars and between scholars and the public at large.’ ScholarlyHub will provide free access to the content on the site for all, as well as a range of additional services for paying members, and have pledged not to sell users’ data.
Termination of Transfer Tool
Authors Alliance and Creative Commons have launched a new Termination of Transfer Tool, designed to help authors in the U.S. to renegotiate or retrieve copyright and sharing rights for their work. The tool is currently designed for U.S. law, but Creative Commons also plans to develop a database of laws in other countries that enable similar opportunities for authors and creators to reclaim their rights.
Wikipedia OA Bot
Wikipedia have developed a tool called OAbot, which allows their articles to be easily edited by anyone to include links to open access versions of publications, rather than the paywalled version. Find out more here.
Jisc Open Access Button Project
A project to assess the feasibility of developing a service using the Open Access Button for libraries’ discovery and inter-library loans (ILL) workflows has been completed, with Jisc releasing their initial findings. Several different possible integrations of the Open Access Button were considered, with potential benefits being identified such as saving money on ILL, but with the acknowledgement that implementation across different institutions and library systems will be a complex task. Jisc and Open Access Button will now reflect on the results of the project before deciding how to proceed with a potential service.
Ongoing Publisher Action Against ResearchGate
Following last month’s challenge from STM, a group of publishers calling themselves the ‘Coalition for Responsible Sharing‘ has been formed and have identified formal steps they will take against ResearchGate if they fail to control copyright infringements on their site. Despite recent attempts ResearchGate have made to remove certain articles, the Coalition is demanding that further steps are taken, and members have begun to issue takedown notices for the many remaining copyright infringing articles. This article gives some suggestions for how publishers could help authors to avoid such infringements in future.
German Researchers Resign from Elsevier Journals
In their attempt to negotiate a new payment model, five leading German academics have stepped down from their editorial positions at Elsevier journals. The five are part of the Projekt DEAL group, who are pushing for a new ‘publish-and-read’ payment system allowing all papers authored by Germany-based researchers to be made open access upon publication, with Elsevier currently claiming that the proposals are unrealistic. Find more information here.
Special Issue of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication
Submissions are being sought for a special issue of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, on the Role of Scholarly Communication in a Democratic Society. As well as traditional research articles, the journal is looking for commentaries, case studies, theoretical explorations and literature reviews, with the aim of addressing ‘…the role that information and knowledge creation, sharing, and access plays in a democratic society, and what limitations or challenges may impede that role.’ The deadline for submissions is 5 January 2018.