(4 May 2026) Increasing consolidation and commercial control over all aspects of knowledge comes at a cost. This year’s theme challenges us to consider the financial, human, and environmental costs of creating, sharing, and sustaining knowledge—particularly when these costs are driven by private rather than public interests. Last year’s theme of “Who owns our knowledge?” reflected…
(22 Apr 2026) In December 2025, the South African government approved a National Open Science Policy requiring that all research outputs arising from public funding be made available through open access. The Department of Science, Technology and Innovation published details of the policy in March 2026. The policy emphasizes that faster and less costly access to scientific…
(1 Apr 2026) “…for a long time, the predominant publishing model has not aligned with what scientists want and need from dissemination of their work. As early as 1991, pre-print servers began to show how open access (OA) could work. Then came organisations like the Public Library of Science (PLOS) that offered an open-access model that…
(1 Apr 2026) Cancer Research UK (CRUK) has announced it will cease funding open access (OA) publishing costs, arguing that the current model is failing to deliver a fair and efficient system for disseminating research. The world’s largest independent cancer research charity said the decision will save £5.2 million over the next three years and…
In Japan, open access policy emerged in a unique economic context and evolved separately from the broader movement. The result? Turmoil. (11 Mar 2026) Globally, the open access (OA) movement has long sought to liberate scholarly communication from commercial publishers. But Japan pursues open access and open science from a unique context; that approach…
(11 Mar 2026) “The question of R&P agreements asks whether the ends justify the means. On one hand, R&P agreements and the APC model upon which they are based have significantly increased the overall market share of OA publications over the past 10 years, now up to around 50% of all journal articles published annually (although that trajectory has plateaued over…
(2 Mar 2026) “The Optimized Library: Solving the Puzzles of Modern Library Management” is a new video series from LibTech Insights, brought to you by Sam Suber, the Electronic Resources Coordinator at Moraine Valley Community College Library. Over the past several months, Sam has offered practical tutorials for using Microsoft Excel’s Solver add-in to address many problems…
(27 Feb 2026) The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) looks set to bar paying the highest fees for its researchers to publish in high-profile journals. These include around 30 journals such as Nature Communications, Cell Reports and Science Advances, according to a report in Science. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US is also considering setting limits on journal charges…
(Feb 2026) “Transformative agreements (TAs) are a relatively new type of journal package that typically includes both access to the publisher’s paywalled content and coverage of the open access (OA) publishing fees for an institution’s authors. As many libraries have entered into these agreements in recent years, analyses of their “value” are increasingly being presented…
(17 Feb 2026) As librarians, we aim to strategically invest our collection funds to support open access publishing as much as possible. For journals, these models include read and publish agreements, diamond open access, and more recently, Subscribe to Open (S2O). Read and publish models can often be unaffordable for libraries, especially if they include a large…