What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand
What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally
Recent writing & resources on OA
Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing
Our Executive Committee Chair, Kim Tairi, was a keynote speaker at this month’s VALA – Libraries, Technology and the Future conference. Her presentation was entitled Me te toroa i te tau ana i te au: riding the currents in uncertain times. The presentation is available here.
If you didn’t get to our May webinar presented by the good people on the COPIM Project (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs), you can watch the recording.
Inaugural OA101 course The first iteration of our OA101 (members only) course has finished with great feedback from participants. We had more than 120 keen participants and excellent engagement with our course tutors throughout the four-week course. The course will be run again later this year. Read more about the course on our latest blog.
Come work with us!
We are recruiting for a six-month Project Officer role to help with analysis of the OA landscape and support for communities of practice and other activities. The full advertisement is here.
We are recruiting for a six-month Project Officer role to help with analysis of the OA landscape and support for communities of practice and other activities. The full advertisement is here.
For regular news updates, check our Twitter account
What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand
ARDC launch People Research Data Commons
The $15.8 million digital research infrastructure program aims to support health and biomedical researchers solve some of Australia’s biggest health and medical challenges. The People Research Data Commons is one of two pilot Thematic Research Data Commons to be established in the 2022-2023 financial year. The second pilot will focus on the environment and agriculture. Read more. Meanwhile, ACOLA and ARDC have released six reports on Australia’s Data-enabled Research Future OAA Executive Committee member, Dr Danny Kingsley & Director Dr Ginny Barbour were involved in the report from the Australian Academy of Science.
Massive response to NZ green paper on research
The Aotearoa New Zealand of Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment has received more than 900 submissions to its Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways Green Paper which focuses on the future of New Zealand’s research system. You can read the green paper and submissions including the Council of New Zealand University Librarians submission. A summary of the key themes raised by submissions and consultation workshops will be released this month.
Massive digitisation project underway: CSIRO
The Australian National Herbarium is imaging nearly a million plant specimens, creating a digitised replica and providing security for the herbarium’s “irreplaceable physical specimens”. CSIRO’s Pete Thrall, who oversees digital assets at National Research Collections Australia, said digitising the herbarium “is a huge leap forward for sharing specimens for research.” Read more. The full digital collection will be made openly available through the Atlas of Living Australia.
2022 Leiden rankings show University OA outputs
QUT leads the way atop of the rankings (in Oceania) for OA publications (based on the proportion of OA publications) at 65.7%,with University of Melbourne next at 65.2% and ANU third on 63.9%. University of Canterbury is the top Aotearoa New Zealand university in this field with 56.8%. Go to rankings.
CAUL negotiates Annual Reviews agreement for Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand
The agreement, which covers Annual Review’s portfolio of 51 journals, is a pilot program under Subscribe to Open, a model that converts entire volumes of a journal to open access. It comes a year before Annual Reviews makes its entire portfolio available worldwide under the subscribe to open model, This deal makes the content freely available to everyone in Australia and New Zealand.
Wikimedia Australia seeking staffer
Wikimedia Australia is seeking a Project and Communications Coordinator to develop and implement Wikimedia Australia’s communications strategy and manage and coordinate all aspects of annual events, training and workshops program. More information.
Open Access in Parliamentary Library Briefing Book: Key issues for the 47th Parliament
For each new Australian Parliament, the Parliamentary Library produces a Parliamentary Library Briefing Book. The June 2022 version includes a section on Open Access.
Session on making publicly funded research freely available to all
Dr Danny Kingsley will be part of a panel on 14 July which will discuss how too much knowledge is locked behind paywalls – but making it more accessible is immensely complex. More information
What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally
General News
2022 OA Week for Climate Justice
It’s official, the theme for this year’s International Open Access week is “Open for Climate Justice.” We are starting to plan our events and activities for 24-30 October and are thrilled to see some new graphics depicting the impact of Climate Change from International OA Week 2022 organisers. Check out the new website and download the graphics here.
UNESCO’s Working Group key objectives
Last month’s meeting of the Open Science Capacity Building working group has agreed on its key objectives (see below). UNESCO also has a global call out for best practices in open science as part of it implementation phase of the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation. Respond to the survey by 15 July 2022 if you’re involved in an open science initiative that’s a good example of best practice. 
- Map existing major open science training initiatives and materials (by July 2022)
- Select training materials to include in the UNESCO Capacity Building Platform/Index (by September 2022)
- Identify gaps and develop a fact sheet/technical paper on open science capacity building (by December 2022)
- Fill the gaps and monitor impact (2023)
Milestone for SCOAP3
Congratulations to the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³) for reaching 50,000 research articles published in OA journals. These papers include vital contributions from research organisations and institutions across the world: including the last paper published by Stephen Hawking and colleagues on Black Hole Entropy. Read more about this milestone.
Call for support for BHL
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is calling for donations to help it continue making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.
Commitment to Open from CORE
The world’s largest aggregator of OA research papers from journals and repositories has released its commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure. Read more.
State of Open Data survey
This global survey is open again until 18th July. It aims to find out about global experiences and attitudes towards sharing data, how research data is handled, the challenges researchers and institutions face in regard to data, and its impact on workload and resources.
University & society publishers survey
Scholastica has launched its “State of Journal Production and Access” survey of independent scholarly society and university publishers. The survey explores how these publishers are approaching core aspects of journal production and access. Questions span: article production processes & formats; metadata tagging standards & priorities, OA journal development approaches & funding models, subscription & hybrid access plans.
Open letter on equity from young academy
17 Nobel Laureates are among those who have endorsed an open letter on the impact of APCs on developing countries. Read more.
Repositories
COAR awarded grant for Notify project
The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has been awarded a US$4 million grant from Arcadia for the COAR Notify Project, which is developing and implementing a standard protocol for connecting content in distributed repository networks with peer reviews and assessments in external services, using linked data notifications. Read more.
Call for host for OR2024
The Open Repositories Steering Committee is seeking expressions of Interest from host organisations for the 2024 Open Repositories Annual Conference. All geographic areas will be considered, but preference is for proposals from Europe. Read more.
Reports
COPIM report brings together 7 work packages
The Towards Better Practices for the Community Governance of Open Infrastructures report supports the COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) project. It outlines work this international partnership of researchers, universities librarians, OA book publishers and infrastructure providers will do to enable OA book publishing to flourish.
US OA/OER survey
Library Journal has released its 2022 Open Access/Open Education Resources survey Report which can be downloaded here. The report found 78% of US academic libraries are involved in curating OA/OER collections, and more than 50% of libraries were “not confident” their library’s OA collection was comprehensive.
Plan S
New Journal Comparison Service In a bid to highlight publishing fees and services, cOAlition S has developed a Journal Comparison Service (JCS), a secure, free and long-anticipated digital service, that aims to shed light on publishing fees and services. Read more.
Recent writing & resources on OA
What we’re reading
Whose right is it anyway? Copyright and scholarly publishing – by Jenice Jean Goveas for the International Science Council blog
How to make more than 200 monograph titles available OA annually on a small-ish budget – by Caroline Mackay on the JISC blog.
Should open access lead to closed research? The trends towards paying to perform research – in Scientometrics by Lin Zhang, Yahui Wei, Ying Huang & Gunnar Sivertsen
OA Switchboard 2022 mid-year review: Collaboration drives growth and progress – Blog by Executive director Yvonnec Campfens
July 25-29 Online
FSCI has 13 courses to choose from. This year’s event includes an array of courses, plenary events, and community events in innovative publishing practices, policy implementation, and other aspects of scholarly communication, all delivered virtually.
17-21 October Brisbane
Want more OA news?
We can’t cover everything here! This is a curated list of items that caught our eye and/or which seem especially relevant to OA in this region. For daily updates the best source is the Open Access Tracking Project or if you prefer to be more selective, our Twitter account, which has posts throughout each day.
The newsletter archive provides snapshots of key issues throughout the year. Other ways to keep in touch with discussions at Open Access Australasia include joining our community of practice calls.
The newsletter archive provides snapshots of key issues throughout the year. Other ways to keep in touch with discussions at Open Access Australasia include joining our community of practice calls.