Dutch universities and research funders move away from the impact factorDutch research institutes and funders have announced the development of
new system of recognition and rewards that will move away from the impact factor. The Recommendation has five objectives: (i) Building capacity of stakeholders to create access, use, adapt and redistribute OER; (ii) Developing supportive policy; (iii) Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER; (iv) Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER; and (v) Facilitating international cooperation. By the end of 2019, all parties involved in this project pledge to have signed
DORA.
Elsevier signs with Swedes, French & Carnegie Elsevier has announced a new
Read & Publish agreement with the Bibsam Consortium which represents Sweden’s National Library, universities and research institutes. It means Swedish researchers will have access to the scientific publisher’s 2000 journals again. The agreements includes the open access publishing of all Swedish research articles. Couperin, the French academic consortium for higher education & research and Elsevier, have
signed a new 4-year national license agreement to provide researchers at universities and research institutions across France with equal access to the publisher’s content provided through ScienceDirect. This deal with Elsevier was felt to be quite
weak, in that it neither complies with Plan S, nor with French legislation on immediate access to research. Pennsylvania’s (and Adelaide’s) Carnegie Mellon University and Elsevier have also
announced a new agreement. The deal means all principal investigators publishing in Elsevier journals will have the option of making their research immediately available to the public, at no additional cost. It’s the first “read-and-publish” deal for a US university and follows 12 months of negotiations. Elsevier struck a similar deal with Norwegian universities earlier this year.
In other Elsevier news, CEO Kumsal Bayazit was the keynote speaker at the November Charleston Library Conference who declared “Elsevier fully supports Open Access”.
Read more.
Traditional publishers launch initiative to “Get Full Text Research”This has been
announced by a small coalition of traditional publishers and appears aimed at taking readers only to publishers’s sites for content. This has raised a number of concerns and led to renewed calls for
community led initiatives.
Wellcome Trust updates OA spend
From Oct 2017 to Sep 2018. the Wellcome Trust paid publication fees for 2,283 articles, with the total expenditure amounting to 6,399,380 € , with an average fee of 2,803 €. See the picture (right) of payment distribution by publisher.
Read more. Invest in Open: Survey This will be a very important survey we would really encourage each institution to fill in. It comes from the
Invest in Open Initiative.
Survey.
WISE Gov Act in USThe Well-Informed, Scientific, and Efficient (WISE) Government Act
has been introduced that will “prohibit non-disclosure clauses in federal agency contracts with journal publishers and provide an avenue for the government to systematically collect—and share—information on how much each agency is paying for subscriptions to these materials.
In another big win for open research in the US is the passage of 7 million in funding for
Open Educational Resources in the huge Appropriations Bill for Fiscal Year 2020.
And in an echo of actions and arguments from many years ago traditional publishers in the US have
reacted with fury to rumours that there might be any discussions on immediate access to research publications.
Danes art collection goes online
National Gallery of Denmark opens up with more than 79,000 images of artworks going online.
Read More.
New CORE extension browserCORE Discovery helps users find freely accessible copies of research papers that might be behind a paywall on the publisher’s website.
Read more. New website for flipping to OA BooksTOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) has been launched to build a community of scholars, publishers, librarians, university administrators that increases access to humanities and social sciences scholarship.
Revamp of Europe PMC websiteThe
site has intuitive search, better access to data, and enriched publications linked to protocols, reviews, and more.
Newly launched Research Organization Registry—ROR.ROR describes itself as “a community-led project to develop an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for every research organization in the world. Read
moreWhich countries are the biggest publishers of OA journals?An analysis of DOAJ shows that fifty percent of the open access journals listed in DOAJ in 2019 are published in Europe, and the United Kingdom is the biggest publisher of OA journals in DOAJ. Read
more 
We can’t believe we’re less than a week away from the summer break. While every year here at the AOASG is packed full of speaking engagements, meetings, workshops and other advocacy activities, this year, with the impact of Plan S becoming clearer, the firing up of institutions over million dollar access contracts, and the revelation to many about just how much public funding fills the big publishers coffers, it’s been a particularly interesting and engaged year. We’ve also grown and have welcomed three new member institutions including our newest member, Western Australia’s Edith Cowan University, to the AOASG.
A study commissioned by the 
The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services 
COAR Strategy 2019-2021 and Work Plan 2020 published
