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March 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.

Photograph courtesy of Stephanie Bradbury

End of an era: Dr. Ginny Barbour steps down as Director of Open Access Australasia

Ginny served as Director of Open Access Australasia from 2015 – 2024, and in that time the organisation has grown from a membership of 10 Australian universities to 32, including all the Aotearoa universities via CONZUL, plus a collection of organisations from beyond the university sector. Her tireless work with national and international partners has made OAA renowned as the premier open access advocate for the region.

“One the best things about working together in the open science space is working with people that share similar values.

Ginny is an example of a person who lives, works and breathes her values. I greatly admire not only Ginny’s contribution to open access regionally and internationally but I admire her as the great and humble leader that she is. Ka nui te mihi ki a Ginny. Thank you Ginny.”

Kim Tairi, Chair, Executive Committee, Open Access Australasia.

From Ginny:

I am very sorry to be leaving Open Access Australasia – it’s been a very important part of my professional life in this region since I moved to Australia. The community here made me welcome and were patient as I learnt my way around the higher education and policy landscape in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Advocacy, especially for long term change such as open access, is hard, important work that has ripples across the years and can only be done collaboratively as part of a community. I’m very proud of helping build that community in this region and that together we have ensured that open access and open science is on the agenda at the highest levels, including of government.

I’m lucky enough to have worked with talented, committed colleagues at Open Access Australasia – Sandra Fry, Sally Murray Walsh and Janet Catterall – who all made the work a lot of fun. I’m very grateful for the support of all the fabulous Executive Committee members and especially the three chairs I have worked with – Judy Stokker, Martin Borchert and Kim Tairi.Thank you too to everyone who has helped organise, plot and participate in the many activities over the years.

I’m leaving as I’ll be focussing my professional work on medical publishing at the Medical Journal of Australia as Editor-in-Chief and on reform of research assessment as co-Chair of DORA. I’ll definitely be continuing to advocate for open access and open science!

I’m very confident that Open Access Australasia will continue to thrive and I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes next.

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

Chief Scientist Dr Cathy Foley describes proposal for open access for Australia

In an article published in The Guardian March 10th, Australia’s chief scientist takes on the journal publishers gatekeeping knowledge, Dr Foley describes 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 has written a Response to the proposal which is available on their website, and called for a public consultation.

Download the Response

Register for Open Access Australasia OA101 online course (members only)

Back by popular demand, OA101 is running for the fifth time. More than 450 people have completed the course so far since 2022. The 4 week online course starts on April 8th and is only available to member institutions of Open Access Australasia. It is suitable for anyone interested in learning about open access or whose role involves them with open access and is a must for those in the scholarly communications space.

This course is open to and suitable for researchers and postgraduate students, and anyone supporting these cohorts. Please share within your member institution.

For more information – or if you would like to be a tutor for the course please email contact@oaaustralasia.org

New Communities of Practice for Repositories and Diamond Journal Publishing

Two new subgroups have formed out of the Australian Scholarly Communications CoP. The Repositories group held their first online meeting on March 21 which was attended by over 60 practitioners. The Diamond Journal Publishing group will meet for the first time on April 18th, immediately followed by its first event, a Train the Trainers workshop with the DOAJ (see below.)

If you would like to join one of these groups please email contact@oaaustralasia.org

Directory of Open Access Journals Train the Trainer workshop

The AuSCCoP Diamond Open Access subgroup presents a DOAJ Train the Trainer workshop on April 18th 2pm AEST. This workshop held via zoom is facilitated by

Joanne Ball, Managing Director, and Ikhwan Arief, Managing Editor and Ambassador for Indonesia. The workshop titled Enhancing the visibility of diamond and institutional journals through indexing in DOAJ: A practical guide will cover DOAJ’s application process and evaluation criteria, showing how to submit a successful application.

Aotearoa OA toolkit the most visited page on Open Access Australasia website

Since going live on February 16th the OA toolkit for Aotearoa Researchers has had 515 views by 280 users, making it the most visited page on the site. Check out the toolkit here

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

Graduate Researchers creating open video collection: Visualise Your Thesis 2024 Programme

Expressions of interest are open for institutions wishing to participate in the 2024 Visualise Your Thesis (VYT) programme, now in its sixth year on the international stage.

Participating in Visualise Your Thesis allows graduate researchers to develop digital and information literacy skills that will benefit them not just for this programme, but in broadening their own researcher development and contributing to the scholarly landscape.

More information visit https://sites.research.unimelb.edu.au/visualise-your-thesis

Enquiries: visualise-thesis@unimelb.edu.au

Or read our blog post about the programme written by Eleanor Colla.

What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally

Breaking news! Gates Foundation update to open access policy just announced

The new updates to the policy will:

End the foundation’s payment of individual article publishing fees such as APCs—paving the way for more equitable publishing models.
Require grantees to share preprints of their articles—breaking free from journal constraints while prioritizing access to research and preserving grantee publishing choices

Big implications if other funders adopt.these measures.

Article describing the expanded open access policy

Gates Foundation Open Access Policy.

Read the article

International Open Access Week October 21 – 27 2024

The theme of International Open Access Week for 2024 will continue last year’s focus on “Community over Commercialization.”

“Taking the unprecedented step to build on this theme for a second year highlights the importance of this conversation and presents the opportunity to turn more of these deliberations into collective action.”

Communities are encouraged to add a subtitle that customises the theme to the most pressing issues of their locality.

Read the announcement

Expression of Interest: DOAJ – Community Consultation

Currently, DOAJ indexes more than 20,300 journals. Every entry is checked manually. This survey will seek 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 expected to go live in April 2024. If you are interested in participating please sign up here

Call for Proposals for JLSC Special Issue on Open Access

To mark the 10 year anniversary of the journal’s first special issue on open access, JLSC invites articles and essays from contributors worldwide who can share their distinct experiences and perspectives. The journal is looking for concrete examples and ways forward for OA and ways to navigate hurdles that restrict access to research findings and scholarship. Submit an abstract here Due date April 5th.

See the Call for Proposals

Call for peer reviewers for JLSC Special Issue on Open Access

JLSC is also looking for people interested in contributing to double-blind peer review process for this special issue. If you are interested in this please let us know via the peer review submission form:

News from SCOSS

We thank Martin Borchert and Fiona Bradley (both from UNSW Sydney) for their work as CAUL representatives on the SCOSS Board and the SCOSS Advisory Group. Both Martin and Fiona have stepped down after many years of service.

We are very pleased to announce two new appointments:

Liz Walkley Hall (Flinders University) has been appointed as the CAUL and Open Access Australasia representative on the SCOSS Board for 2024-2025.

Jane Miller (Deakin University / Victoria University) has been appointed as the CAUL representative on the SCOSS Advisory Group 2024-2025.

Congratulations to both Liz and Jane. We look forward to working with you in this capacity and hearing more about open science infrastructure and how SCOSS can help to sustain them.

SCOSS has also launched its fifth pledging round with the announcement it is working with Research Data Alliance (RDA) and Software Heritage to support their sustainability. CAUL continues to manage the SCOSS pledging cycle for ANZ.

News from OASPA

OASPA with COPE, DOAJ and Crossref are joining forces to find out where our communities go to find information about scholarly communications and infrastructure.

We have created a very short poll (held by Crossref) and we would be grateful if you could complete it with your social media preferences.

The poll is anonymous and takes less than 3 minutes to complete. Please only fill in the poll once – you may receive it from more than one of our organisations.

Take the poll

Reports

The Australia Institute issues report into scholarly publishing

On March 20th the Australia Institute made public their report Ending profiteering from publicly-funded research: Tackling the academic publishing oligopoly The report argues that private academic publishers make exorbitant profits from Australia’s public research institutions and that the ways that research grants are awarded needs reform to incentivise open science practices.

Read the report

State of Open Data supplementary report

Published by Digital Science, Figshare and Springer Nature, From theory to practice: Case studies and commentary from libraries, publishers, funders and industry provides real-world insights into how the research community is responding to the challenges of data sharing, including support needed for researchers and the importance of building a stronger collaborative approach to open data and research. Press release

Read the report