What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally COVID-19: Commentary and Policy
Kiwis boost library funding
The New Zealand Government has announced an extra $58.8 million in funding for New Zealand libraries which will assist the COVID-19 recovery process.The four-year initiative will help fund free internet access in all public libraries and provide other specialist library services.
APO collecting COVID-19 policy
The Analysis & Policy Observatory APO is collating COVID related policy resources.
 Publishers suing Internet Archive
Four US publishers are suing the Internet Archive alleging it has infringed author copyright by offering more than a million scanned works to the public. It follows the organisation’s announcement it established a National Emergency Library in response to the coronavirus outbreak to support “remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation” with free digital materials. Read more.
Will the pandemic permanently alter scientific publishing?
A Nature commentary discusses the huge adoption of preprints and other innovations in publishing during the pandemic Read more
COVID-19: ResourcesCAUL compilation of open resources relevant to COVID-19 is regularly updated.
Research Data Alliance community response to the global COVID-19 pandemic
The response includes RDA COVID-19 Recommendations and Guidelines covering four research areas – clinical data, omics practices, epidemiology and social sciences. Read more.
General News
UNESCO survey
Last chance to provide feedback to UNESCO on open science. Survey here
DORA rethinking research assessment
A new briefing document providing five design principles to help universities and research institutions improve their research assessment policies and practices. Read more.
OASPA collaboration program
The OA Switchboard initiative is a collaboration between funders, institutions and publishers with the aim to facilitate the fulfilment of OA strategies across business models, policies and agreements, whilst providing a better experience for researchers/authors. The project in 2020 will explore how to collaboratively build an operational solution to tackle these problems, determine the technical requirements, and include a subsequent pilot phase.
Dutch deal favours OA
Dutch universities and research & funding organisations have announced a deal with with Elsevier. They claim this will make virtually all publication in Elsevier journals OA (though the Lancet and Cell are excluded – others in these titles are included). This deal allows tracking of researcher activity by Elsevier systems. Read more.
DOAB & MUSE Partnership
A new partnership between the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and Project MUSE will enhance the discoverability of the OA titles on MUSE and increase the number of publishers and OA books listed in DOAB. Project MUSE is a trusted provider of digital humanities and social science content offering more than 60,000 books from over 100 presses including over 2,800 open access books. Publishers wanting their OA MUSE titles to be included in DOAB only need to apply to be listed in DOAB.
Responses to UKRI Review
Earlier this year United Kingdom Research and Innovation began a review into what should be the direction of Open Access in the UK. Many responses have been submitted, including from two publishers, F1000 Research Ltd and Taylor & Francis and from OASPA.
OA in the USA
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy consultation has now closed and the huge list of responses is now available online. The AOASG also responded to this consultation. Science has a round up of what might happen next. Read more.
Global grant IDs now in Europe PubMed Central
A pilot has been running for a while now and the results and future plans are discussed in this blog.
Frontiers announces substantial increases in APC charges
Heather Morrison has blogged extensively on this here. She notes that these increases come at a time when Frontiers is developing national agreements with a number of countries.
First Read and Publish deal for China
Oxford University Press and the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Science have announced a new Read & Publish agreement said to be the first of its kind in mainland China. This is a three-year deal covering 26 of the institutions of the Chinese Academy of Science. Read more.
Canadian OA policy template
Canadian Association of Research Libraries announced the release of its Institutional Open Access Policy Template for Canadian institutions. Read more
Plan SGuidelines released on publisher price transparency
Plan S has released its guidelines on expectation for price transparency for publishers. From July 2022 only publishers who adhere to the newly approved Plan S price transparency frameworks will be eligible to access funds from cOAlition S members. Read more.
CAUL Roadmap
CAUL have published their Final Report on a Roadmap to Plan S for Australia Read more RepositoriesCOAR Recommendations for Repositories and COVID-19
With over 5,000 repositories around the world providing open access to data, articles, pre-prints and other valuable products of research, the international repository network represents critical research infrastructure. A coordinated and interoperability approach across repositories will to ensure that COVID-19 resources are widely available and discoverable COAR is making the recommendations below:
 Read more.
RDA publishes TRUST principle for Repositories
 The TRUST Principles (Transparency, Responsibility, User Focus, Sustainability, Technology) for digital repositories offer guidance for maintaining the trustworthiness of digital repositories, especially those responsible for the stewardship of research data. Read more
Preprints
NIH Preprint Pilot
In the US, the National Library of Medicine is this month launching a pilot project to test the viability of making preprints resulting from NIH-funded research available via PubMed Central. The primary goal is to explore approaches to increasing the discoverability of early NIH research results. The trial will run for 12 months. Read more.
Preprinting a pandemic
A new preprint discusses how preprints have become integral to the publication of research in the COVD-19 pandemic. Read more | 
