Étiquette : open access policies

The UK Scholarly Communication Licence: Attempting to Cut through the Gordian Knot of the Complexities of Funder Mandates, Publisher Embargoes and Researcher Caution in Achieving Open Access

Authors : Julie Baldwin, Stephen Pinfield

Whilst take-up of open access (OA) in the UK is growing rapidly due partly to a number of funder mandates, managing the complexities of balancing compliance with these mandates against restrictive publisher policies and ingrained academic priorities, has resulted in UK higher education institutions (HEIs) often struggling with confused researchers, complex workflows, and rising costs.

In order to try to address this situation, the UK Scholarly Communication Licence (UK-SCL) was formulated to bypass the root causes of many of these challenges by implementing a licensing mechanism for multiple-mandate compliance in one single policy.

This is the first empirical study to focus on the genesis of the UK-SCL and how its implementation has been conceived thus far. A qualitative research method was used, taking the form of 14 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders from the initiative across the UK.

The results indicate that those working within UK HEIs are concerned with the complexity of the current OA policy landscape and are frustrated with the inertia within the current system, which has resulted in higher costs, further publisher restrictions, and has not addressed the underlying tensions in academic culture.

The UK-SCL is seen by its initiators as a way to achieve further transition towards OA and take back some element of control of the content produced at their institutions.

The study concludes by modelling the ways in which the UK-SCL is intended to impact relationships between key stakeholders, and discussing possible implementation futures.

URL : The UK Scholarly Communication Licence: Attempting to Cut through the Gordian Knot of the Complexities of Funder Mandates, Publisher Embargoes and Researcher Caution in Achieving Open Access

Alternative location : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/6/3/31

The End of a Centralized Open Access Project and the Beginning of a Community-Based Sustainable Infrastructure for Latin America: Redalyc.org after Fifteen Years The Open Access ecosystem in Latin America

Authors : Arianna Becerril-García, Eduardo Aguado-López

The Latin American region has an ecosystem where the nature of publication is conceived as the act of making public, of sharing and not as the publishing industry. International, national and institutional contexts have led to a redefinition of a project—Redalyc.org—that begun in 2003 and that has already fulfilled its original mission: give visibility to knowledge generated in Latin America and promote quality of scientific journals.

Nevertheless, it is mandatory to be transformed from a Latin American platform based in Mexico into a community-based regional infrastructure that continues assessing journals quality and providing access to full-text in benefit of journals visibility and free access to knowledge.

A framework that generates technology in favor of the empowerment and professionalization of journal editors, making the editorial task in open access sustainable and that allows Redalyc to sustain itself collectively.

This work describes the first Redalyc’s model, presents the problematic in course and the new business model Redalyc is designing and adopting to operate on.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816693

Open Access Infrastructure in Greece: Current Status, Challenges and Perspectives

Authors : Aspasia Togia, Eleftheria Koseoglou, Sofia Zapounidou, Nikolaos Tsigilis

Open access (OA) is a global movement to make research results widely available by removing price and permission barriers. OA infrastructure is necessary for implementing open access and open science in any country.

The aim of the present paper is twofold: (i) to give a description of the Greek OA infrastructure with emphasis on academic repositories and OA journals, and (ii) to examined the OA availability of publications authored by Greek researchers and published in international journals.

Results indicated that Open access infrastructures in Greece have been steadily improving over the past years, with 28 out of 36 HEIs running their own IR and 116 OA journals being published.

The OA availability of the literature produced by Greek researchers is similar to that found in other studies and falls within the range that has been reported for European countries.

Although numbers seem rather satisfactory, there are a number of challenges that have to be addressed at both the infrastructural and the policy level, the most important being the implementation of national open policies and funders mandates.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816716

Enhancing Institutional Publication Data Using Emergent Open Science Services

Authors : David Walters, Christopher Daley

The UK open access (OA) policy landscape simultaneously preferences Gold publishing models (Finch Report, RCUK, COAF) and Green OA through repository usage (HEFCE), creating the possibility of confusion and duplication of effort for academics and support staff.

Alongside these policy developments, there has been an increase in open science services that aim to provide global data on OA. These services often exist separately to locally managed institutional systems for recording OA engagement and policy compliance.

The aim of this study is to enhance Brunel University London’s local publication data using software which retrieves and processes information from the global open science services of Sherpa REF, CORE, and Unpaywall.

The study draws on two classification schemes; a ‘best location’ hierarchy, which enables us to measure publishing trends and whether open access dissemination has taken place, and a relational ‘all locations’ dataset to examine whether individual publications appear across multiple OA dissemination models.

Sherpa REF data is also used to indicate possible OA locations from serial policies. Our results find that there is an average of 4.767 permissible open access options available to the authors in our sample each time they publish and that Gold OA publications are replicated, on average, in 3 separate locations.

A total of 40% of OA works in the sample are available in both Gold and Green locations. The study considers whether this tendency for duplication is a result of localised manual workflows which are necessarily focused on institutional compliance to meet the Research Excellence Framework 2021 requirements, and suggests that greater interoperability between OA systems and services would facilitate a more efficient transformation to open scholarship.

URL : Enhancing Institutional Publication Data Using Emergent Open Science Services

Alternative location : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/6/2/23

National licence negotiations advancing the open access transition – a view from the UK

Author: Liam Earney

Jisc Collections has had agreements with open access (OA) publishers since the mid-2000s. In 2014, following the UK government’s response to the Finch Report, it started to target hybrid OA via ‘offsetting agreements’ that covered both subscriptions and article processing charges for OA.

This article will provide a status update on OA negotiations in the UK in the context of the UK’s progress towards OA. It will look at some of the concerns about the progress of OA in the UK, how negotiations have evolved in response, and will look at prospects for their future direction.

URL : National licence negotiations advancing the open access transition – a view from the UK

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.413

Supporting Open Access at Kent—New Staff Roles

Authors : Rosalyn Bass, Sarah Slowe

Open Access has been supported at the University of Kent from an early stage with the establishment of the Kent Academic Repository in 2007.

Initially, this work was accommodated within the existing library staff structure, but the pace of change, funder requirements, and a new university plan meant that support for Open Access needed to become explicit.

Therefore, a research support team was established using a matrix working system. This article details this new structure and reflects on the benefits and challenges it brings.

URL : Supporting Open Access at Kent—New Staff Roles

Alternative location : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/6/2/17/htm

Ouverture et partage des résultats de la recherche dans l’économie de la connaissance européenne : Quelle(s) liberté(s) de circulation pour l’IST?

Auteur/Author : Hans Dillaerts

Au cours de ces dix dernières années, il y a un engagement croissant de l’Union européenne en faveur de l’innovation ouverte, le libre accès et la science ouverte. Notre objectif au sein de cet article est de s’interroger sur les origines de ces politiques et d’en retracer les évolutions et les limites.

L’objectif de cette analyse est également de mettre en avant les injonctions contradictoires que subissent aujourd’hui les chercheurs en matière de publication et de diffusion de l’information scientifique et technique à travers entre autres les problématiques et questionnements liés à la brevetabilité des résultats de recherche financés sur des fonds publics.

URL : https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01716543