After the Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (20-21 September 2017) and the Peer Review Week (11-17 September 2017) and before the International Open Access Week (23-29 October 2017), this issue focuses on Open Access seen from the point of view of the different stakeholders: librarians (see section Libraries), publishers (see section Publishing Industry), scholars (see section Scholarly Communication), funders and supporters (see section Open Access).

The International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) is organising its General Assembly & Workshops meeting on 26th October 2017 at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., USA. The full program is online, as well as the preliminary program for both workshops ITOC (Information Trends and Opportunities Committee) and TACC (Technical Activities Coordinating Committee). Registration is still open.

Regina Romano Reynolds, Director of the U.S. ISSN Center at the Library of Congress, standing in for Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre in Paris, will present an overview of the ISSN Network’s strategy to provide enhanced access to ISSN data.

Peter Burnhill, founding Director of EDINA, University of Edinburgh, and Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, gave this joint presentation at a satellite meeting to IFLA 2017 World Library and Information Congress, in Session 80 – Serials and Other Continuing Resources.

They reviewed the different ways in which content issued via the Web becomes Open Access, setting out the range of threats to the continuity and integrity of our published heritage: how ‘Open today’ could tomorrow become ‘closed’ or just ‘ceased to be’. Notably, the role of national and research libraries was highlighted, since the published heritage is a subset of ‘documentary heritage’ that can be monitored via the ISSN and the Keepers Registry.

The first meeting of national consortia from Latin America, the Caribbean and Spain took place in Mexico in early September 2017. It was organized by the Ministries of Science and Technology from Mexico, Chile and Brazil and attended by representatives from ten countries responsible for negotiating with publishers for national access to scientific/research publications. IBICT (Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia) and CONICYT (Comisión nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica) –the hosting institutions of the Brazilian and Chilean ISSN Centres– participated in the meeting. A statement was issued, which expresses the concerns of the participating organizations over the costs of APCs (article publishing charges) and outlines their perspective on international discussions around flipping subscriptions to APC open access. Most notably, the consortia were in agreement that APCs will not help to reduce costs, but rather contribute to the already inflationary situation with the current international scholarly publishing system.

The declaration is online in Spanish and English.

ROAD, the ISSN Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources, reached a milestone surpassing 22,000 resources. This was made possible thanks to the cooperation of the ISSN network.

Launched in December 2013 by the ISSN International Centre and supported by the Communication and Information Sector of UNESCO, ROAD provides a free access to a subset of the ISSN Register. This subset gathers bibliographic records describing and pointing to worldwide, multidisciplinary scholarly resources in open access that have been identified by the ISSN Network. ROAD gathers not only journals, but also conference proceedings, monographic series, academic repositories and blogs. ROAD innovative concept is that ISSN bibliographic records are enhanced with external information aggregated from data sources like indexing and abstracting services, metrics and registries.

Clément Oury, Head of Data, Network & Standards department at ISSN International Centre, participated in the first Bibframe workshop held on 26 and 27 of September 2017 at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He presented a lightning talk about the use of Bibframe for serials and other continuing resources and the choices made by the ISSN International Centre to implement Bibframe for continuing resources in the future ISSN portal.

The workshop was arranged by the Nordic Network Group on bibliographic and infrastructure topics (NNG) and the Organizer Group in close cooperation with the DNB. The goal of this workshop was to take stock on the current situation of Biframe and its use in European institutions.

The presentations and documents are available online.

ISSN identifiers reliably identify serials and other ongoing resources worldwide. The ISSN Register, maintained by the ISSN International Centre, is an authoritative database providing access to 1.9 million ISSN records, and fed by a network of 89 National Centres. This article presents the Data Quality Plan currently implemented by the ISSN International Centre: its objectives, its assumptions and the methodology it follows. It focuses on several projects, ran in collaboration with stakeholders of the serials supply chain or members of the ISSN Network, intended to improve quality in three domains: bibliographic data, coverage of the ISSN Register, processes and workflows.

The International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) will gather for its General Assembly & Workshops meeting to take place on 26th October 2017 at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, USA. The full program is online, as well as the preliminary program for both workshops ITOC (Information Trends and Opportunities Committee) and TACC (Technical Activities Coordinating Committee), and the registration is open.

On this occasion, Regina Romano Reynolds, Director of the U.S. ISSN Center at the Library of Congress, standing in for Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre in Paris, will present an overview of the ISSN Network’s strategy to provide enhanced access to ISSN data. The strategy includes enhancing the ISSN International Centre’s operations, infrastructure, data, products and services, communications, and partnerships.

The principal mission of JATS4R (JATS for Reuse) is to optimize the reusability of scholarly content tagged in JATS XML, by developing XML tagging best practices. JATS4R is an actively growing international and inclusive working group comprising publishers, archivists, persistent-identifier people, and other stakeholders.

The September NASIG newsletter reported on the best sessions held in Indianapolis, IN, USA in June 2017. Notably, Andrew Senior, coordinator for e-resources and serials at McGill University, presented Bringing It All Together: Mapping Continuing Resources Vocabularies for Linked Data Discovery. He spoke about the continuing resources vocabularies that are emerging as primary possibilities for linked data, and some of the challenges the serials community should be aware of regarding the extent to which these vocabularies work together in a linked data environment. He discussed BIBFRAME 2.0, PRESSoo, RDA, and Schema.org.

ICEDIS held a meeting just ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair on 9 October. The central focus was set on ONIX-PC, covering both its active and increasing use in the supply chain and several enhancements proposed.

ICEDIS members will then meet again at the Charleston Conference on 7 November. This session will update participants on ICEDIS news and also wider developments in a number of areas covered by EDItEUR, notably ONIX for Books, Thema and others. Graham Bell will also speak on behalf of EDItEUR: Are we done solving metadata problems?

The International Agency has registered a further increase in membership over recent months, with three new Registration Agencies being established by Casalini Libri, IDA (the Identification Agency, in Russia) and PCC (the Program for Cooperative Cataloging), whilst Brill Publishers has joined ISNI-IA as a regular Member.

Equally exciting has been continued interest in the possibilities of using ISNI to uniquely identify and disambiguate musical artists and performers and to offer similar facilities to actors, directors and producers in the film industry. As shown by the numerous active enquiries in these areas, the workflow challenges and requirements for unique, machine-usable and interoperable party identification are quite generic and are shared across domains far beyond those originally served by the ISNI standard.

OPERAS is a a distributed research infrastructure project in Europe to support the development of open scholarly communication.

The OPERAS Design Study is the outcome of the OPERAS-D project. The main part of the OPERAS Design Study is comprised of four studies that explore the landscape of OPERAS field of activity, establish the technical mapping of the OPERAS consortium, present a survey on users’ needs concerning scientific communication and academic publishing, and finally foresee the development of the governance scheme and business model of the future infrastructure within the ESFRI framework. The studies’ main finding is the fragmentation of OPERAS field of work. Thus, OPERAS vision and mission is integration.

A recent report from Jisc showcases the upward trend in universities and academics setting up their own presses in an environment increasingly dominated by large commercial publishing houses. Following up on the recommendations arising from this report, authors Janneke Adema and Graham Stone put forward some ideas on how to best support these new initiatives through community and infrastructure-building.

Libraries frequently support their open access (OA) fund using money from their collections budget. Interest in assessment of OA funds is arising. Cost per use is a common method to assess library collections expenditures. This article examines a method and discusses the limitations and implications of using article level metrics to calculate cost per use for OA APCs.

The IFLA Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section sponsored, in collaboration with the IFLA Acquisition and Collection Development Section and the European Solidarity Center, a satellite meeting on Open Access: Action Required, which was held in Gdansk, Poland on 16-17 August, 2017.

The papers presented there, some of which are now in the IFLA Library, are thought-provoking examples not only of what Open Access means today from the librarians’ point of view, but of where it might lead us in the future.

The Library of Congress has launched labs.loc.gov as a new online space designed to empower exploration and discovery in digital collections. Library of Congress Labs will host a changing selection of experiments, projects, events and resources designed to encourage creative use of the Library’s digital collections. Labs will enable users at every level of technical knowledge to engage with the Library’s digital collections. Visitors will have the opportunity to try experimental applications; crowdsourcing programs will allow the public to add their knowledge to the Library’s collections; and tutorials will provide a stepping stone for new computational discovery.

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) is sponsoring a survey of organizations in the United States who are actively involved in or planning to archive content from the web. The survey is the fourth in a longitudinal study  to track the evolution of web archiving programs and activity in the United States, focusing on similarities and differences in programmatic approaches, types of content being archived, tools and services being used, access modes being provided, and emerging best practices and challenges. The results of the survey will be reported to NDSA members and summary results will be shared publicly in 2018. Results from the three previous surveys (2011, 2013, 2016) are available.

Dialog mit Bibliotheken is a specialist journal about the German National Library, its activities and its range of services. In this issue published just before the Frankfurt Book Fair, innovations in subject cataloguing in operation are presented. The expansion of collection activities with regard to open-access publications is also discussed. In addition, two historians describe aspects of their research into the history of the German National Library between 1933 and 1945 and 1945 and 1990. It also provides an insight into the Library’s internal public relations by casting an eye over the work of the Digital Services department.
The journal is also available online as a free download (in German).

Recognising the absence of a consensus view on what open peer review is, this article undertakes a systematic review of definitions of “open peer review”, to create a corpus of 122 definitions. These definitions are then systematically analysed to build a coherent typology of the many different innovations in peer review signified by the term, and hence provide the precise technical definition currently lacking.
Based on this work, Tony Ross-Hellauer proposes a pragmatic definition of open peer review as an umbrella term for a number of overlapping ways that peer review models can be adapted in line with the ethos of Open Science, including making reviewer and author identities open, publishing review reports and enabling greater participation in the peer review process.

The academic reward structure focuses heavily on the publication of novel results in high impact journals. This talk considers the problems this narrow focus is creating in research and its dissemination and how these activities go against some of the basic tenets of science itself. It suggests that Open Research offers a way to improve the veracity of scientific claims and then looks at some of the recent examples of a move away from the status quo over 2016/2017.

This talk is a Keynote Address delivered to the 9th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing held in September 2017.

This presentation was given at the 9th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) in September 2017. As an Associate Professor at Hanken School of Economics, Mikael Laakso has been investigating the changing landscape towards openness in scholarly publishing. In this study whose results are still provisional, he has investigated on how open access journal publishing has developed longitudinally relative to subscription content, including relative share of delayed open access (and hybrid open access). A differentiation has been made between journals that have started as OA from the start and journals that have converted to OA. Comparing inclusion criteria in Scopus, DOAJ and ROAD, the ISSN Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources, he has concluded that the shift towards OA is strong, and the landscape has completely changed for the last five years.

OA analytics provides bibliometric indicators about the development of open access publishing in universities and institutes of major research organizations in Germany. Within the project, a special dataset was built called: ISSN-GOLD-OA, providing a matching list of ISSN for Gold Open Access (OA) journals. The intention was to compile a matching table as complete as possible by using different publicly available sources. The dataset can help to clear various ISSN-related issues in bibliometric studies on Gold OA. For a detailed description of the method, data sources used and the definition of the table fields, please refer to the original documentation: https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/data/2906347

The Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) is the world’s only global, multi-stakeholder effort to improve the flow of information within science and between science, policymakers, funders and the public. This effort, which is nearing its third full year of operation, is the result of a partnership between the National Science Communication Institute (NSCI) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) which started in 2016. There is no other initiative like this, focusing on improving the entire landscape of research communication (from peer review to open access to publish or perish pressures in academia) by working together instead of separately through dozens of individual and often conflicting efforts. The report on the second annual conference of the global Open Scholarlship Initiative has just been released.

INASP (www.inasp.info) and AJOL (www.ajol.info) have launched a comprehensive framework for assessing the quality of the publishing processes of journals in the Global South. The Journal Publishing Practices and Standards (JPPS) framework (www.journalquality.info) provides detailed and internationally accepted assessment criteria for the quality of publishing practices and policies of Southern journals.

JPPS will inform and reassure authors and readers about reputable journals. More uniquely, it will also provide guidance to journal editors on how they should improve their publishing processes. Editors can resubmit their journals for reassessment six months to a year after the initial assessment if they can demonstrate improvement. INASP and AJOL also offer training and support to help journals improve their publishing processes.

In August 2017 – some nine months after the platform was first launched – Wellcome Open Research published its 100th article. To mark this milestone, Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research, Wellcome, and Michael Markie, Publisher, F1000 Platforms, provide an overview of the type of research that has been published since launch including how it has been used; give an analysis of the datasets underlying these publications; and provide information about the speed of publication and volume of peer review activity. They conclude by looking at how the number of publications on this platform compared with other journals used by Wellcome-funded researchers.

The European Commission recently announced plans to create “Open Research Europe” (ORE), an online platform allowing rapid, Open Access (OA) publication of Horizon 2020 related peer reviewed articles and preprints. The platform aims to be a fast, cost-effective high-quality service, with mechanisms for open review and alternative metrics. It will be a free, complimentary service for H2020 beneficiaries. In developing such a service, the EC will join a growing list of funders (e.g., Wellcome Trust, Gates Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) who offer their researchers a direct, low-cost route to OA publication. OpenAIRE would like to take the chance to make public its point of view, recommending that it should be trusted, community led, open and transparent.

This first-of-a-kind report from Knowledge Exchange maps the landscape for Open Access books in the Knowledge Exchange countries; Finland, Netherlands, UK, France, Denmark and Germany, together with Norway and Austria. Are books included in national Open Access policies? What kind of funding streams supporting open access monographs exist? And what variety of publishing models for Open Access monographs can be located? The report creates an overview of both the OA monographs policies, funding streams and publishing models for all eight countries for the first time. This is used to point towards areas of future efforts.

On Wednesday 20th and Thursday 21st September, 2017, close to 180 delegates gathered in Lisbon, Portugal for the 9th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP). With myriad keynotes, panels, and networking opportunities spread out over two days, COASP once again brought together the open access publishing community for vital knowledge sharing and collaborative activity.

The programme is still online, and the recordings, slides, and speaker biographies from COASP 2017 are now available. The slides will be posted later on. Stay tuned. OASPA’s Storify roundup of Day 1 of #COASP9 can be found here; Day 2 can be found here.

The Munin Conference is an annual conference on scholarly publishing and communication, primarily revolving around open access, open data and open science.

Programme

 

Topic: Transforming the Information Community

Please use the online form to submit a proposal by 15 November 2017.

Topic: Changing the Culture: changing the way in which scholarly and scientific information is communicated and shared

The programme will include 8 sessions about Open Access

Topic: More Responsibility for Cultural Heritage

International experts will explore the opportunities and limitations of cooperation when it comes to making cultural heritage accessible in the digital world.

The programme

 

The Open Access Days (JAO) will take place in Paris in January 2018.

13 talks about open access are scheduled at the US annual event about issues in book and serial acquisition will gather .

Topic: What’s Past is Prologue

The schedule