What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally General News UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science
The Intergovernmental Special Committee of UNESCO has provisionally adopted text on Open Science. Ginny Barbour, Director, Open Access Australasia provided expert advice at the meeting. The Recommendation hopes to “define shared values and principles for Open Science, and identify concrete measures on Open Access and Open Data, with proposals to bring citizens closer to science and commitments to facilitate the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge around the world”. The draft approved at the intergovernmental meeting will be submitted to Member States in August 2021, with a view to its adoption by the General Conference at its 41st session in November 2021. You can follow the process here
Joint statement to publishers on OA clarity and transparency
CESAER, the European University Association and Science Europe have released a statement supporting the open dissemination of research findings for the greater benefit of research and society and call on all publishers to stop requiring researchers to sign over their rights and to end the use of restrictions and embargoes. Read more.
Clarivate buys ProQuest
Publishing giant Clarivate has announced a definitive agreement to acquire database publisher ProQuest from Cambridge Information Group for $5.3 billion. Much reaction from the Twitter-verse collated nicely here.
 Oldest books go OA
Some of the oldest books in history will soon be available open access in a collaboration between the UC Berkeley Library and China’s Sichuan University. Under the agreement, Berkeley will digitize half a million pages per year for 3 years, (with a possible 3-year extension) The digitization work will capture images in high resolution, meeting or exceeding current standards for digital scholarship collections and long-term digital preservation. Each digitized treasure will be painstakingly enriched with information or metadata and be available via the Library’s Digital Collections portal. Read more. (Photo: scanned image East Asian Library’s pre-1912 Chinese manuscript collection).
10 years, 2 million images OA
Ten years ago the British Library and the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development started exploring possible areas of collaboration and now they have hit the major milestone of 2 million images freely available online via the Qatar Digital Library.
Pandemic highlights crisis in sustainable funding
Founder and chairman of Open Knowledge Maps, Peter Kraker is calling for sustainable infrastructure with the explosion of knowledge from COVID-19. He says huge growth poses big challenges for researchers, many of whom have pivoted to coronavirus research without experience or preparation. Read more.
Digital Library signs with Amazon
The Digital Public Library of America has signed a much-anticipated agreement with Amazon Publishing to make all of the roughly 10,000 Amazon Publishing e-books and digital audiobooks available to libraries, the first time that digital content from Amazon Publishing will be made available in this way. Read more.
OASPA project on a Healthy and Diverse OA Market
OASPA has commissioned Research Consulting to develop an approach to promote diverse systems, business models and policies that support OA publishing and encourage a healthy and diverse market for pure OA publishing in the longer term. Read more
SCOSS campaign
Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) is running a campaign to highlight its support from around the world. Follow the campaign on twitter Plan SCall for academics to take up fight for OAWide support for cOAlition S’ rights retention strategy would allow negotiators to take a harder line with publishers: Alice Gibson writes in the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings blog. Robert Kiley seconded to cOAlition STo help deliver the successful implementation of Plan S, Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research at Wellcome, has been seconded to cOAlition S as Head of Strategy for 6 months, from 1st June 2021. Read more Reports
New direct-to-open prospectus for MIT
Direct to Open (D2O) is a new, collective action model, built to support the open access publication of digital monographs from the MIT Press. D2O seeks to move digital scholarly books—monographs and edited volumes—from a gated purchase model to an open community‐supported approach. Read More.
German Research Foundation briefing paper on Data tracking by academic publishers
The Committee on Scientific Library Services and Information Systems of the German Research Foundation) has released a briefing paper, Data tracking in research: aggregation and use or sale of usage data by academic publishers The paper outlines how academic publishers are becoming data analytics specialists, indicates the consequences for research and its institutions, and identifies the types of data mining that are being used.
Repositories Semantic Scholar withdraws from UnpaywallLate last month one of the largest repositories indexed by Unpaywall, Semantic Scholar, removed most of the articles it had been hosting. That means about 1 million articles on Unpaywall disappeared. Unpaywall Lead Developer, Richard Orr says they are working on finding new locations for as many articles as they can. “The total number of articles removed from Semantic Scholar was about 8 million, but most of them are still OA because we had other locations”. Read more | 
