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July 2024: What’s in this issueWhat’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in Australia & Aotearoa New ZealandWhat’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally
Recent writing & resources on OAUpcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing |
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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. ——————————————————————————————— A warm welcome to Open Access Australasia’s new Director Mark Sutherland! |
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Kia ora koutou katoa (hello everyone), I am delighted to announce that Mark Sutherland, former Executive Director of the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) has joined Open Access Australasia as Director. Mark’s most recent experience at CAUL, ranging from negotiating the first transformative scholarly content agreements for Australasia through to representing the sector on the Chief Scientist’s Open Access Stakeholder Advisory Panel, is particularly pertinent to the role of Director of OAA. Over many years, he has had extensive experience in managing research support and related services in university library settings, including setting up institutional repositories and contributing to related policy development. He was involved in AOASG as the forerunner of Open Access Australasia in the mid-2010’s, including as a member of the Executive Committee in 2018-19. For several years Mark worked collaboratively with the former Director of Open Access Australasia and others, developing joint approaches to a range of issues germane to the goals and aims of both Open Access Australasia and CAUL. His work with Open Access Australasia was supplemented by his role as secretariat for the cross-sectoral FAIR Steering Group that was subsequently reconstituted as the Australian Open Science Network. He has been exposed to the wide range of stakeholders across the open access landscape, and the variety of concerns and issues in both the Australian and international contexts. Mark also brings significant leadership and management skills to this role, particularly in relation to operating a not-for-profit organisation with a Board/Executive Committee. His pivotal role in the transformation of the CAUL National Office, led to improvement of governance and business practices for the organisation which will translate well to the OAA context. Mark will be reaching out to members in coming weeks to get to know more about your organisational needs and how OAA can work with you to grow open research nationally. Ngā manaakitanga (best wishes) Kim Tairi Chair OAA Executive Committee |
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What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand |
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AOSN presents: Invest in Open Infrastructure Monday July 29th at 4pm AESTThe Australian Open Science Network presents a webinar by Invest in Open Infrastructure, an organisation that “works to increase the investment in and adoption of open infrastructure to further equitable access to and participation in research… by providing actionable, evidence-based guidance and tools to institutions and funders of open infrastructure.” Jerry Sellanga, Engagement Coordinator, Networks, and Nicky Wako, Business Development & Partnerships, Lead, will talk about the State of Open Infrastructure 2024 Report and introduce their new tool Infra Finder |
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ALIA Library and Information Week starts Monday July 29th! This year’s theme: The Roots of democracy “What is the relationship between a library and democracy? Will it continue unchanged, even in the global context of geopolitical conflict and social unrest? What is it that libraries do that make a tangible difference to living in an open, democratic society?” Watch out for a guest appearance by Open Access Australasia on the panel Democracy in the dark: A discussion on the impact of information control, AI and censorship on Friday August 2nd |
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AI at the National Library of New Zealand: an AI4LAM AU & ANZ chapter webinar Tuesday 20th August, 1pm NZST, 11am AEST, 10:30am ACST, 9:00am AWST We are excited to share some recent experiments and early work with AI and Machine learning at Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, National Library of New Zealand. Emerson Vandy, DigitalNZ Systems Manager, and Yizhe Zhan, Data Specialist, Preservation Research Consultancy, will talk about using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) LLMs on Papers Past data, and on the New Zealand whole of domain web harvest, respectively. This has involved utilising a model in house and training it locally on those datasets, to enhance search and discoverability. Svetlana Koroteeva, Digital Collecting Specialist, and Richard Robertson, Metadata Workflow Specialist, both from the Collection Services group, will present work with auto classification on a music dataset with the aim to enhance records and discoverability. |
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The role of institutional repositories in Plan S: A conversation with Sally Rumsey The Repositories Group of Australian Scholarly Communications Community of Practice is pleased to present this session by Sally Rumsey, cOAlition S ambassador, on the role of institutional repositories in cOAlition S. This is a must watch for anyone interested in the central role that institutional repositories can play in the open science future! |
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Open data – challenges and opportunities for change. Registrations now open. October 3 2024 9.30am. Brisbane. This associated event of the IFLA Information Futures Summit, will explore the current state of open data internationally and in Australia, and the underpinning frameworks and infrastructures. Participants will reflect on international developments, regional challenges, and opportunities for reform, and will delve into practical actions attendees can take in their own libraries and related organisations. The need to influence stakeholders, to identify and overcome barriers to adoption, and the crucial role of libraries in ensuring ongoing access and integrity of data will all be explored. |
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Navigating the Open Science Infrastructure Ecosystem with SCOSS: Spotlight on Research Data Alliance and Software Heritage The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) plays a unique role in assessing essential open infrastructures that need community funding and recommending them to potential supporters. Each year Open Access Australasia holds a webinar to showcase current SCOSS initiatives. This year’s webinar featured the latest members: the Research Data Alliance and Software Heritage. Liz Walkley-Hall, who serves on the SCOSS board as CAUL representative, was joined by Rosalie Lack, SCOSS Coordinator, Morane Gruenpeter (Software Heritage) and Hilary Hanahoe (RDA) |
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What would you like OAA to do for OA Week 2024? Open Access Australasia wants to hear from you! This year’s theme for OA Week is ‘Community over Commercialisation’ again as there is much more to be said on this topic which goes to the heart of open. Events can be tailored to any issue or region within this broad theme. We want to know what OA week event you would like to see this year! |
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Call for EOI for Organising Committee OAA Open Access Week 2024 Open Access Australasia is still seeking individuals with a passion for open access to serve on the organising committee for this year’s OA Week events. If you are interested in being involved in planning the panels and webinars for this year’s theme ‘Community over Commercialisation’ please email contact@oaaustralasia.org To learn more about what Open Access Australasia does for OA week check out our videos from last year |
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AuSCCoP The Australian Scholarly Communications Community of Practice (AuSCCoP) next meets on August 8th at 1pm AEST/3pm NZST. If you would like to join the AuSCCoP and/or attend the next meeting please email contact@oaaustralasia.org AuSCCoP Diamond Open Access Publishing group. The next meeting of the diamond group will be held on August 15th at 1pm AEST/3pm NZST. More information about the Diamond Publishing group and how to join AuSCCoP Repositories group The next meeting will be held on September 19th at 1pm AEST/3pm NZST. For more information or to sign up to the group please email contact@oaaustralasia.org |
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What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally |
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Operational Diamond OA Criteria for Journals The DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA projects are happy to present their operational criteria for selecting Diamond OA journals to the community. This set of criteria has been issued to facilitate the identification of Diamond OA journals within the projects’ framework and services. |
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University of Oxford Open Access Publications Policy amended to include rights retention The University of Oxford Open Access Publications Policy, and University Statute XVI which covers intellectual property rights, have now been updated to incorporate rights retention. This re-affirms the University’s preference for the green or self-archiving route to open access. From 14 October 2024, by virtue of their employment and without requiring any action on their part, employees at the University provide the rights to make author accepted manuscript versions of their articles and conference proceedings available under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0) at the point of publication. |
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IFLA joins partners in calling for stronger place for Open Science in the Pact for the Future Compared to the first draft, the latest version of the Pact for the Future – a milestone document for the work of the United Nations this decade – contains unfortunate backward steps on support for open and collaborative science. With partners, IFLA has issued a call on the co-facilitators for this to be corrected. |
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Dimensions of Responsible Research Assessment In support of a better, healthier research culture that promotes rigorous research undertaken to the highest standards, the Global Research Council’s Responsible Research Assessment (RRA) working group has developed a new framework: the Dimensions of Responsible Research Assessment. The set of 11 dimensions have been established to articulate funders’ vision of RRA and to frame future discussions. This can be used by funding agencies to understand how to embed principles of responsible research assessment and assessment reform. |
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First Nations Peoples’ Experiences Using and Editing Wikipedia: Focus Groups Report Released “Wikimedia Australia is pleased to present this first-of-its-kind report, providing insights into the interactions between First Nations peoples and the digital encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. This study, undertaken by Distinguished Professor Bronwyn Carlson and Lotus Rana from Macquarie University, provides an evidence-based account of the experiences, challenges, and perspectives of First Nations individuals in navigating and contributing to Wikipedia.” |
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Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023 by Stefanie Haustein, Eric Schares, Juan Pablo Alperin, Madelaine Hare, Leigh-Ann Butler and Nina Schönfelder “This study presents estimates of the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023…There is currently no way to systematically track institutional, national or global expenses for open access publishing due to a lack of transparency in APC prices, what articles they are paid for, or who pays them. We therefore curated and used an open dataset of annual APC list prices from Elsevier, Frontiers, MDPI, PLOS, Springer Nature, and Wiley in combination with the number of open access articles from these publishers indexed by OpenAlex to estimate that, globally, a total of $8.349 billion ($8.968 billion in 2023 US dollars) were spent on APCs between 2019 and 2023.” |
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A DOI is not enough – Can practice research be captured by libraries and archives? by Holly Ranger, Jenny Evans and Adam Vials Moore “The recording and indexing of research plays a vital role in how it can be found and used, but what happens when the output from a research project is not a written document, but a performance, series of events or an artistic work? Holly Ranger, Jenny Evans and Adam Vials Moore discuss findings from a series of projects exploring how these forms of practice research can be better documented and made more accessible to researchers and research users.” |
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The history of peer review Is more interesting than you think by Matthew Wills “The term “peer review” was coined in the 1970s, but the referee principle is usually assumed to be as old as the scientific enterprise itself. (It isn’t.)” |
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What we are reading: Keeping up with AI |
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Identifying and extracting authors’ Rights Retention Statements from full text academic articles by Matteo Cancellieri, Anton Zhuk, Valerii Budko, Eka Chxaidze Viktoriia Pavlenko and Petr Knoth “Many research performing institutes are adopting Rights Retention strategies to help their authors maintain copyright ownership of their work, whilst also enabling broader access and compliance with funder mandates such as Plan S. However, the manual incorporation of appropriate rights retention statements into article metadata is labour-intensive and time-consuming. To address this challenge, CORE has co-designed, with repository managers, a machine learning module to automatically identify and extract rights retention statements from full-text articles, streamlining the encoding of this information within article metadata.” |
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What we are watchingImplementing for Impact: Measuring Open Science for the SDGs The UN Open Science Conference, convened biennially by the Dag Hammarskjöld Library and its partners, has repeatedly heard calls for academic institutions to move their focus away from metrics and instead return to their role as agents of social change, with research agendas driven by “global relevance rather than journal visibility.” How do policies, established to globally advance open science and the SDGs, impact local evaluation frameworks for research institutions? How do they impact individual researchers and their work? Do they help or hinder achievement of the SDGs? |
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What we are listening toThe end of libraries as we know them? with Brewster Kahle and Kyle Courtney. Chris Hayes speaks with Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and Library Futures co-founder Kyle Courtney about why megapublishers are suing to redefine e-books. as legally different from paper books. |
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Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing |
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