(21 Oct 2020) The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the already steady transition towards Open Access publishing. However, precisely what this future looks like and how it will be paid for by smaller, independent publishers is less clear. In this post, Danielle Padula outlines key findings from a report into the current state of Open Access…
(15 Oct 2020) PLOS, the nonprofit publisher that in 2003 pioneered the open-access business model of charging authors to publish scientific articles so they are immediately free to all, this week rolled out an alternative model that could herald the end of the author-pays era. One of the new options shifts the cost of publishing open-access…
(12 Oct 2020) Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) recently reached three key milestones in terms of book coverage, unique publishers and future financial sustainability. The number of open access books included in DOAB has grown impressively from just over 10,000 books in 2018 to 31,917 as of today. In terms of publishers, we are…
(7 Oct 2020) IWA Publishing, the wholly owned publishing subsidiary of the International Water Association based in London, UK, has announced a pilot to transform its complete journal portfolio of 10 subscription titles including the flagship journal “Water, Science and Technology” to Open Access (OA) from 2021 onwards. In partnership with Knowledge Unlatched, IWA Publishing…
(30 Sept 2020) SPARC Europe is releasing an anticipated new report: Open Access: An Analysis of Publisher Copyright and Licensing Policies in Europe, 2020. This analysis, which presents the results of a research study that was completed in the summer of 2020, explores copyright and licensing practices amongst prominent journal publishers and OA publishers in DOAJ in Europe. …
(24 Sept 2020) The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) calls on all scholarly publishers to open the abstracts of their publications, and specifically to distribute them through Crossref, in order to facilitate large-scale access and promote discovery of critical research. I4OA – a collaboration between scholarly publishers, academic librarians, researchers, infrastructure providers and other stakeholders – will launch at…
(10 Sept 2020) Open access (OA) books are reaching more countries and have greater usage and higher citation numbers than non-OA books. A new analysis collaboratively produced by Springer Nature and COARD (Collaborative Open Access Research & Development) presents these and other key findings in a new white paper that explores how OA affects the geographical…
(8 Sept 2020) The Research4Life initiative has expanded in scope since 2002 to provide free or very low- cost access to the current research literature in over 10,000 registered institutions in eligible countries, helping address research inequalities from the readership side. Given an increasing focus on UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and a global transition in…
(19 Aug 2020) Ulrich Herb compares Project DEAL’s agreements between Wiley, Springer Nature, and Elsevier: “Christian Gutknecht published an exciting posting on the Swiss EUR 57 million Elsevier deal in which he outlines the transformative Open Access agreement between Elsevier and swissuniversities. Since Germany has been trying for years to reach such a contract with…
(4 Aug 2020) From Scholarly Kitchen: “The COVID pandemic has given us a clear view of the value of open science, yet has also created conditions where implementing open science may not be feasible. We know that the transition to OA was likely to be financially disruptive, even under good market conditions, but now in…