Open Access eXchange (OAeX): an economic model and platform for fundraising open scholarship services

Authors : Jack Hyland, Alexander Kouker, Dmitri Zaitsev

This article describes the Open Access eXchange (OAeX) project, a pragmatic and comprehensive economic model and fundraising platform for open scholarship initiatives.

OAeX connects bidders with funders at scale and right across the open scholarship spectrum through crowdfunding: financial expenditure is regulated by a market of freely competing providers and financial transactions and transparency are assured by a clearing-house entity.

Specifically, OAeX seeks to facilitate open access publishing without the barrier of article processing charges (APCs), as well as contribute to solving challenges of transparency and economic sustainability in open scholarship projects in the broader sense.

URL : Open Access eXchange (OAeX): an economic model and platform for fundraising open scholarship services

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.500

OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship

Authors : Silvio Peroni, David Shotton

OpenCitations is an infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open citation data as Linked Open Data using Semantic Web technologies, thereby providing a disruptive alternative to traditional proprietary citation indexes.

Open citation data are valuable for bibliometric analysis, increasing the reproducibility of large-scale analyses by enabling publication of the source data. Following brief introductions to the development and benefits of open scholarship and to Semantic Web technologies, this paper describes OpenCitations and its data sets, tools, services, and activities.

These include the OpenCitations Data Model; the SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies; OpenCitations’ open software of generic applicability for searching, browsing, and providing REST APIs over resource description framework (RDF) triplestores; Open Citation Identifiers (OCIs) and the OpenCitations OCI Resolution Service; the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC), a database of open downloadable bibliographic and citation data made available in RDF under a Creative Commons public domain dedication; and the OpenCitations Indexes of open citation data, of which the first and largest is COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref Open DOI-to-DOI Citations, which currently contains over 624 million bibliographic citations and is receiving considerable usage by the scholarly community.

URL : OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00023

Open Social Scholarship Annotated Bibliography

Authors: Randa El Khatib, Lindsey Seatter, Tracey El Hajj, Conrad Leibel, Alyssa Arbuckle, Ray Siemens, Caroline Winter, the ETCL and INKE Research Groups

This annotated bibliography responds to and contextualizes the growing “Open” movements and recent institutional reorientation towards social, public-facing scholarship.

The aim of this document is to present a working definition of open social scholarship through the aggregation and summation of critical resources in the field. Our work surveys foundational publications, innovative research projects, and global organizations that enact the theories and practices of open social scholarship.

The bibliography builds on the knowledge creation principles outlined in previous research by broadening the focus beyond traditional academic spaces and reinvigorating central, defining themes with recently published research.

URL : Open Social Scholarship Annotated Bibliography

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.58

Open+: Versioning Open Social Scholarship

Author : Alyssa Arbuckle

Advocates of the Open Access (OA) movement have been fighting for free and unfettered access to research output since the early 1990s. Open access is a crucial element of a fair, efficient scholarly communication system where all are able to find, interpret, and use the results of publicly-funded research.

Universal open access is more possible now than ever before, thanks to networked technologies and the development of open scholarship policies. But what happens after access to research is provided?

In this paper I argue that versioning scholarship across varying modes and formats would move scholarly communication from a straightforward open access system to a more engaging environment for multiple communities.

URL : Open+: Versioning Open Social Scholarship

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.39

Implementing publisher policies that inform, support and encourage authors to share data: two case studies

Authors: Leila Jones, Rebecca Grant, Iain Hrynaszkiewicz

Open research data is one of the key areas in the expanding open scholarship movement. Scholarly journals and publishers find themselves at the heart of the shift towards openness, with recent years seeing an increase in the number of scholarly journals with data-sharing policies aiming to increase transparency and reproducibility of research.

In this article we present two case studies which examine the experiences that two leading academic publishers, Taylor & Francis and Springer Nature, have had in rolling out data-sharing policies.

We illustrate some of the considerations involved in providing consistent policies across journals of many disciplines, reflecting on successes and challenges.

URL : Implementing publisher policies that inform, support and encourage authors to share data: two case studies

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.463

Open Practices in Public Higher Education in Portugal: faculty perspectives

Authors : Paula Cardoso, Lina Morgado, António Teixeira

In recent years, the Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Access (OA) movements have been essential in creating opportunities in all scholarly activities, within the context of higher education.

The main purpose of this research was to understand how perceptions and practices of faculty towards OER are related to their perceptions and practices towards OA. It is an exploratory and descriptive study, with a mixed methods approach, undertaken in Portugal.

Results indicate that, although faculty already show some degree of knowledge and use of OER and OA in their teaching and research practices, there is still a general lack of knowledge in both fields.

However, the convergence of perceptions regarding both fields provide evidence on the possibility of a common approach to both fields in faculty’s educational practices, with the purpose of opening up their educational and scientific resources, thus reinforcing the principles of transparency, collaboration and openness to knowledge.

URL : Open Practices in Public Higher Education in Portugal: faculty perspectives

Alternative location : https://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/823

Open Access Escape Room: the key to OA engagement?

Author: Katrine Sundsbø

Open access (OA) has had, and will continue to have, a significant effect on the scholarly publishing landscape in academia, yet many academic staff publish OA in order to comply with policies, rather than engaging with the value of open scholarship and in debates that ultimately affect them.

Training sessions and workshops are often arranged to increase knowledge and awareness in the academic community, but engagement is often low. On the other hand, some academic staff, who already do engage, will happily attend sessions and workshops to increase their knowledge even further.

The struggle to increase OA engagement overall could be due to the training not being appealing enough, and academics not being aware of benefits until after they have attended workshops.

At the University of Essex, we took a bold, brave and curious approach to increasing engagement during Open Access Week 2018, and created an OA-themed escape room.

This resulted in great engagement from students, academic staff and professional services staff, some of whom reported that they never knew how relevant OA was for them. The Open Access Escape Room was a success, and provided a positive environment for conversations around OA.

URL : Open Access Escape Room: the key to OA engagement?

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.459