April 2024 Newsletter

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April 2024: What’s in this issue

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

For regular news updates, check our X account. Contributions to the newsletter or the blog, especially notice of upcoming events, are welcome. Contact us here. If this newsletter was forwarded to you and you’d like to receive it directly, please sign up.

What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand

Meeting with Chief Scientist Dr Cathy Foley about Open Access Proposal

In an article published in The Guardian March 10th, Dr Foley described a model which would “provide a centralised digital library for all Australians to access research papers free of charge, as long as they had a MyGov account or were in education.” This model is “currently under departmental consideration.”

Open Access Australasia will be meeting with Dr. Foley in early May to find out more about the proposal which is not yet publicly available, and to ask questions based on OAA’s Response to the proposal published last month.

CAUL representatives will also be meeting with the Chief Scientist to discuss her vision for an open access policy in May.

We will keep you posted!

CAUL’s 2024 Agreement Principles

CAUL’s 2024 Agreement Principles for Journal-Based Content have been finalised and are now available via the CAUL website. Agreement Principles for non-journal (and non-OA) content have also been updated.

The updated agreement principles have been developed following an extensive international benchmarking process and have been finalised with input from CAUL Board, CAUL’s Open Access Strategic Enabling Program, and CAUL Content Procurement Committee

Key principles include:

Publishers must demonstrate a clear commitment to a rapid OA transition.
Pricing for all agreements must be affordable, equitable and transparent.
Open access agreements must be uncapped and include all research articles in all publications within a publisher’s portfolio.
The transition to OA must be inclusive.
Agreements must support authors’ retention of copyright. Immediate green OA must be permitted for any non-OA articles.

As CAUL works towards the creation of a fairer, more affordable, and more equitable

scholarly publishing eco-system, these new principles bring CAUL’s starting position for the next round of publisher negotiations in line with the broader global context and other international consortia.

Read the Agreement Principles

Call for Proposals OE Global Conference November 2024

In 2024, the OE Global Conference will be hosted in Australia for the first time; from November 13-15 at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. This is a opportunity to showcase, share, and build upon open educational practices, and open access in our region whilst expanding partnerships globally.

This years’ theme ‘Open is everyone’s business’ captures the notion that openness is not only the domain of higher education, and seeks examples of practice and research from the entire education sector, GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, & Museums), policy makers, citizen science groups, and more. Everyone has a role to play in creating a society where free and open access to knowledge is practised, normalised, and valued.

Submit a proposal

Directory of Open Access Journals Train the Trainer workshop:

Enhancing the visibility of diamond and institutional journals through

indexing in DOAJ: A practical guide

The AuSCCoP Diamond Open Access subgroup presented a DOAJ Train the Trainer workshop on April 18th. The workshop held via zoom was facilitated by

Joanne Ball, Managing Director, and Ikhwan Arief, Managing Editor and Ambassador for Indonesia. The workshop covered DOAJ’s application process and evaluation criteria, showing how to submit a successful application.

View the recording here

Ikhwan Arief also kindly shared this analysis tool to examine journals in the DOAJ

ResBaz 2024 to be held in Aotearoa

ResBaz Aotearoa 2024 is a free, online, digital research skills workshop series designed to encourage the transfer of skills and the exchange of ideas relating to digital methods and tools at the heart of modern research. Over 40 workshops will be on offer—everything from programming in Python to designing better posters—and participants are free to pick the workshops they’re interested in.

Everyone in the Aotearoa research community is invited, including researchers, research students, support staff, research communicators, GLAMers, volunpeers, and citizen scientists. Please sign up now to be notified when registrations open, so you don’t miss out.

Research Bazaar Aotearoa is a collaboration between the University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington, University of Otago, University of Canterbury, and the MBIE Beyond Prediction: Explanatory and Transparent Data Science Programme.

Institutional Repository Days 2024 to be held at Canterbury, Aotearoa NZ

Hosted in 2024 by the University of Canterbury this event is both in person and online. The theme is Institutional Repositories, Gone By Lunchtime. The organisers are calling for contributors, participants and volunteers. This is a community event “made of the people who actually do the work, supporting each other” To get involved please use this form

What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally

The Declaration seeks to further the aims of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science.by calling for open and accessible research information, and calling for a commitment on the part of researchers, funders and those that evaluate research to align with 4 principles:

Make openness the default for the research information we use and produce
Work with services and systems that support and enable open research information
Support the sustainability of infrastructures for open research information
Support collective action to accelerate the transition to openness of research information

Read the Declaration

2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access 8 – 14 December 2024

The 2024 Summit will be held in person in Cape Town, South Africa addressing the theme Centering social justice in scholarly communication to advance research as a public good. It will be held in conjunction with two other events, The Department of Knowledge and Information Stewardship Conference on Advancing Social Justice Through Curriculum Realignment and Open Science in the South 2024

More information

DOAJ – Community Consultation Survey now live

Currently, DOAJ indexes more than 20,300 journals. Every entry is checked manually. This survey seeks feedback from all stakeholders worldwide – researchers, librarians, funders, professional organisations and industry support groups – on how they use the metadata DOAJ collects and displays and how it might be streamlined.

The survey is now live. More information

Take the Survey

Call for EOIs for Reviews Editor and Editors-in-Chief

The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, a diamond open access journal, currently has openings in two editorial tracks:

Reviews Editor – deadline May 12, 2024
Editors-in-Chief (2 openings) – deadline May 12, 2024

This is a great way to get hands on experience of what it is like to run a diamond open access journal.

More information

Reports

Jisc: A Review of Transitional Agreements in the UK

Published last month, the Jisc review found that although TAs have reduced costs in the sector, the rate of transition to OA publishing is slow, and there are unintended consequences, such the impact on the “green” repository path to open access. The longer term sustainability of this model is questioned and it is noted that there is still no transparency around the actual costs to publish incurred by the large commercial publishers. For an overview read the Executive Summary.

You can also watch the recording of the roundtable discussing the results of the review.

Read the full report

What we are reading

The open access coverage of OpenAlex, Scopus and Web of Science

Using OpenAlex and the Directory of Open Access Journals as a benchmark, this paper investigates the coverage of diamond and gold through authorship and journal coverage in the Web of Science and Scopus by field, country, and language.

Read the preprint

Beyond article-based charges working group: an update on progress

April 17, 2024

This working group, formed in September 2023, includes representatives from cOAlition S, Jisc and PLOS, who have been working with a variety of stakeholders.

Read the Update

An introduction to copyright law and practice in education, and the concerns arising in the context of GenerativeAI

March 11, 2024

by John Kelly

Just because we need to keep to keep current with this whole field to be able to anticipate implications for open access.

Read the blog

What we are watching

The impact of Plan S: a discussion on findings so far

Webinar hosted by OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association)

Watch the recording

What we are listening to

Open Science Talk Podcast

April 23, 2024.

The non-profit initiative IOI (Invest in Open Infrastructure) works to increase the investment in, and adoption of, open infrastructure. This podcast episode was recorded in conjunction with the launch of the collaboratively developed, openly available Infra Finder database.

Listen to the podcast