This week, we thank The Publication Plan for featuring a profile on our open access slide deck and welcome new endorsements of our open access position statement. We also look at the new University of California–Elsevier deal, hear from authors on how they feel their research on open access inequity is being presented in discussions, meet SPARC’s inaugural Community Manager, learn about connecting conference materials with ORCID identifiers, and take a deep dive into the discoverability crisis.
A profile of Open Pharma via The Publication Plan | 2-minute read
The Publication Plan has featured a profile piece on us! The article highlights our open access position statement on open access and our open access advocacy efforts, including the educational slide deck available on figshare. You can endorse our position statement here.
University of California and Elsevier land on a deal via Times Higher Education | 5-minute read
The University of California (UC) System and publishing giant Elsevier have finally entered into a $13 million deal after a 2-year stalemate, in which Elsevier ended the subscriptions of UC System libraries, resulting in faculty stepping down from editorial positions. The new agreement allows UC System academics to read and publish open access in any of Elsevier’s 2600 journals without a subscription, which accounts for 30% of the UC System’s research outputs. This represents a major milestone in the UC–Elsevier negotiations, which many academic librarians and open access advocates have been following closely.
Who’s afraid of addressing inequity? via Academic Analytics | 1-minute read
The authors of a recent publication titled “Who’s writing open access (OA) articles? Characteristics of OA authors at PhD-granting institutions in the United States” address how their findings are being discussed in the scholarly community and clarify their conclusions. Discussions have so far mostly focused on the finding that publishing open access with article processing charges (APCs) is “skewed towards scholars with greater access to resources and job security”, but the authors stress that their research shows that this inequity in publications applies to all open access articles, regardless of APCs.
Introducing the inaugural Community Manager via SPARC | 1-minute read
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has announced the appointment of its inaugural Community Manager for the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG). Erin McKiernan, Professor of Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, will work with the multi-stakeholder ORFG group to explore and develop open access policies that “promote greater dissemination, transparency, replicability and reuse of research”.
Connecting conference materials with ORCID via ORCID | 2-minute read
Conference materials – abstracts, posters, data sets, video presentations and more – are an important source of information within the scientific ecosystem that is rarely available in a lasting record beyond the duration of the event. Morressier is a platform that allows researchers to share their conference materials to improve transparency and accessibility of this type of content. Morressier also integrates ORCID identifiers into their platform to connect researchers’ content to their full scope of work. This is especially useful for early-stage researchers, who can use this approach to build a portfolio in advance of journal article publication.
The discoverability crisis via De Gruyter | 15-minute read
The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on the shortcomings of current scholarly communication approaches, particularly the discoverability of research. The authors of this paper outline the discoverability issues that plague scholarly publishing and restrict innovation. An alternative, sustainable open discovery infrastructure – such as that employed by the Open Library of Humanities, the Directory of Open Access Journals and Open Knowledge Maps – is needed at a much larger scale.
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