April 2025: 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

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

Call for EOI: Open Access Week 2025 Planning Committee

The theme for this year’s International Open Access Week is almost upon us! It’s time to start brainstorming ideas for events for everyone’s favourite week of the year!

Joining the OAA Planning Committee is great PD, expands your network, gives your creative juices a chance to flow, and above all is fun and you get to meet awesome people.

Garth Smith, Waikato, 2 times Committee member:

“The committee is about helping to organise, sending emails (to potential panellists, presenters, or speakers), brainstorming topics, asking questions and building networks and contacts. It isn’t about knowing everything, and there will be other committee members there to help with tricky bits.”

Lyndall Holstein, Charles Sturt, 2 times Committee member,  Chair 2024:

“I’ve learnt a lot, always received robust support, and experienced a genuine sense of achievement. I am immensely proud of the sessions we’ve created during my time involved.”

So what are you waiting for? Get in touch now contact@oaasutralasia.org

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

Call for Submissions ALIA’s New Librarians’ Symposium XI

New Librarians’ Symposium XI will be a fully virtual conference held on Saturday 6 September 2025. The Symposium is now seeking submissions for lightning talks, presentations and panels that relate to the theme of connection. This symposium is designed to support and inspire new librarians by fostering connections between people, ideas, technology, and communities. Closing date for submission is May 30 2025.

Show your working: how the ‘open science’ movement tackles scientific misconduct

Danny Kingsley

In this piece for the Conversation, Danny Kingsley explains how the drive towards open science addresses issues of research integrity by making data and methods publicly available, making it harder for misconduct to go undetected and improving the overall rigor and reproducibility of science. Open science is seen as a necessary cultural shift to enhance research quality and public trust in science.

Emerald Publishing and CAUL partner on new OA agreement

This uncapped agreement allows authors to publish in all hybrid and gold journals without limits, ensuring broader access to their work. “We see this new uncapped CAUL agreement with Emerald as a positive step in the evolution

of CAUL’s portfolio of OA agreements, providing simplicity, clarity and value for the sector,” said Hero Macdonald, Chair of the CAUL Content Procurement Committee and University Librarian at Deakin University.

AuSCCoP

Upcoming Special event for the AuSC CoP: ‘A Scholarly Communications landscape scan and update with Danny Kingsley‘ will be held May 22nd at 1pm AEST. Next meeting for the Australian Scholarly Communications Community of Practice (AuSCCoP) will be Thursday May 8th. More information and how to join

AuSCCoP Diamond Open Access Publishing group.

At the last meeting Duncan Loxton from UTS ePress gave a presentation Rusted open: Two decades of open access publishing at UTS ePress. The next meeting  will be on Thursday June 19th. More information about the Diamond Publishing group and how to join

AuSCCoP Repositories group

Welcome to Keely Chapman from RMIT who has taken on the role of co-convener for the group. More information about the Repository group and how to join. Next meeting is scheduled for May 15th.

Aotearoa Scholarly Communications CoP

Information about the Aotearoa groups can now be found on OAA’s website find out more and sign up for meetings

What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally

Reclaiming Academic Publishing: The Launch of the Open Journals Collective

The Open Library of the Humanities has launched a new initiative, the Open Journals Collective (OJC), “an equitable, sustainable, community-led alternative to the big deals and transformative agreements offered by corporate academic publishers.”

Caroline Edwards explains the impetus for the OJC in this LSE blog.

​Launch of A Practical Guide to Implementing Responsible Research Assessment

The DORA team invites you to celebrate DORA’s 12th birthday with the launch of a “A Practical Guide to Implementing Responsible Research Assessment at Research Performing Organizations”. This guide offers practical tools and case studies to help institutions in their reform of research assessment. Such reform is essential in the transition to open scholarship. Three online panel sessions to suit all time zones will be held May 14 – 16 to launch the guide.

Barcelona Declaration – one year highlights

This post highlights some of the developments during this past year, as the topic of open research information has gained attention and awareness, and a growing number of organizations are coming together to make the transition to open research information a reality.

DOAJ announces the ‘Subscribe to Open’ (S2O) Label

DOAJ is adding journal labels to its metadata and the first label going live is for those journals participating in the subscribe to open (S2O) initiative. 61 journals have received the label to date.

Other labels that DOAJ are considering are: Diamond, Flipped journals, Mirror journals, preserved via JASPER. If you have an idea for a label, contact DOAJ

DOAJ and Diamond: our focus for 2025

Throughout 2025, DOAJ will spotlight Diamond open access journals that we index, highlighting our ongoing efforts to enhance the visibility and impact of no-fee community-led journals worldwide.

Announcing the winners of the 2025 Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Library Publishing

Every two years, the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) gives an annual Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Library Publishing to acknowledge impactful contributions to this growing body of work and to encourage its development.

Reports

SCOAP3 publishes first results of the new open science mechanism

In a pioneering move to enhance Open Science practices, SCOAP3 has established a new mechanism for the annual assessment of participants offering financial incentive to improve their Open Science practices.  Individual achievements on predefined Open Science Elements such as implementation of persistent identifiers (i.e. ORCiD, ROR), completeness of metadata, choice of open peer review offered to authors, compliance with accessibility standards, and transparency around values defined by the SCOAP3 community are assessed and scores awarded for performance. Initial results now available

What we are reading:

Tracking the Use of Open Educational Resources Sounds Simple. It Isn’t.

Danny Kingsley, Sarah Brundrett, Kay Steel and Richard White.

“We set out to determine whether open monographs were being used in teaching and learning and fell down a very deep hole. Here is what we learned.”

What Can We Learn from Missed Opportunities in the Transition to Open Access?

Michael Upshall interviews Muthu Madhan, director of libraries at Jindal Global University in India about the latest developments in scholarly publishing in India, including the recently signed One Nation One Subscription deal.

What we are reading: Keeping up with AI

ALIA’s Collection of AI Resources

This collection brings together a curated selection of Australian and international resources to support library staff to understand and engage with AI in their work. Covering foundational knowledge, policies and guidelines, ethics, as well as news articles, videos and podcasts, the collection has something for everyone working in the field.

Using AI to create a ‘conversational archive’ at the National Sound and Film Archive (NSFA)

Keir Winesmith – Chief Digital Officer at the NSFA – talks through the tech infrastructure they are building and sharing with audiences and the sector at large.

What we are watching

Building a Sustainable Future for Open Science: Meet SCOSS’s Latest Endorsed Infrastructures

This webinar introduces SCOSS (Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services), and highlights the coalition’s role in supporting open science infrastructure, showcasing several SCOSS-endorsed infrastructures.

What we are listening to

Open Science Talk: The Lorraine Model

In 2017, the University of Lorraine cancelled its subscription to Springer and in 2023, it cancelled its deal with Wiley. The money saved has been channeled into an Open Science Fund which supports open research infrastructures, training and support programmes for open research, and diamond open access publishing.

Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing

Library Publishing Forum 2025

5 – 8 May 2025 online

COAR Annual Conference: Trends in Policy, Discovery, and Innovation

12-14 May 2025 Tokyo, Japan

CAUL Exhibition Events 2025

16 – 20 June 2025 in person Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne

ResBaz Aotearoa 2025

30 June – 4 July 2025 online

ALIA New Librarians’ Symposium XI

6 September 2025 online