What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally General News
Plan for OA Community Investment Program
The Open Access Community Investment Program has been launched in the US. It’s a community-funded open access publishing project developed by three organisations: LYRASIS; Transitioning Society Publications to Open Access; and Duke University Press with the goal of matching libraries, consortia, and other prospective scholarly publishing funders with non-profit publishers and journal editorial boards that are seeking financial investments to sustain or transition to open access publishing of journals or books. There is a Pilot program prospectus and you can read more about the program here.
Open Access Switchboard gets top support
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Wellcome and Jisc are among the first organisations supporting the Open Access Switchboard. The new body aims to help the research community transition to full and immediate open access and simplify efforts to make open access the predominant model of publication of research. Led by OASPA, the OA Switchboard is a not-for-profit collaboration among funders, institutions, consortia and publishers to provide essential infrastructure, standards and back office services. Read more.
Amazon in talks with DPLA for ebook access
Global ebook giant Amazon has confirmed to publishersweekly.com that it’s in talks with the Digital Public Library of America. At present Amazon don’t make any digital content available to libraries.
Texas Uni Libraries form Coalition for publisher negotiations
Last year the 43 Academic Libraries across Texas created the Texas Library Coalition for United Action, hoping to change current publishing models and the relationships between academic institutions and publishers. The group’s been in negotiations with Elsevier this year and hopes to negotiate an improved and sustainable model for the dissemination of scholarship and to create a more balanced approach to faculty ownership of their scholarly work, as well as reducing costs immediately and ongoing by creating sustainable subscription models. Read more.
Congratulations to SPARC’s Heather Joseph 
In the US, Executive Director of SPARC and AOASG friend Heather Joseph has been named 2021 recipient of the Miles Conrad Award by the National Information Standards Organisation. Heather was our special guest at OA Week here in Oz in 2017. Read more
Funder obligations prompt OA change to Brain Pathology
The journal made the change because of the moves by agencies & governments to make funding contingent on open access publication. It’s notable that APCs are US$3500; even having a letter to the editor published will cost you a hefty US$1750. See more.
 New Open data policy for CERN
The four main Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collaborations (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb) have unanimously endorsed a new open data policy for scientific experiments at the LHC. The policy commits to publicly releasing so-called level 3 scientific data, the type required to make scientific studies, collected by the LHC experiments. Data will start to be released approximately five years after collection, and the aim is for the full dataset to be publicly available by the close of the experiment concerned. Read more.
IReL, the nationally funded e-resource licensing consortium for Ireland, joins SCOAP3
Ireland now becomes the 44th country in the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3), the world’s largest disciplinary open access initiative. SCOAP3 is supported in Australia by seven universities. Read more
Major Physics-Related Professional Societies Support Open Access
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) and 15 other major physics-related professional societies, have released a statement on their commitment to open access for physics research. Read more
Plan S
Dutch Research Council commits to DOAJ
The De Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek has agreed to support the Directory of Open Access Journals for another three years, offering sustainable funding for the organisation. It has also committed to introduce Plan S from January 1 next year. Read more.
New Plan S FAQs
Scholastica has compiled a new blog to answer the most common questions journal users are asking of publishers. Read more.
US looking at changing Copyright Act
The US Senate Judiciary Committee’s Intellectual Property Panel is planning on updating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with the goal of “modernising the legislation to better protect copyrighted content and defending fair use rights.” The Internet Archive responded to a call for feedback by encouraging the committee to keep things as they are. Read more.
Preprints
Preprints in the Public Eye project
ASAPbio, with support from the Open Society Foundations, has launched the Preprints in the Public Eye project which aims to consolidate and expand on existing efforts to set best practice standards for reporting research posted as preprints. Read more.
Repositories
Scopus adds 5.5 million OA records Elsevier’s abstract and citation database, Scopus has new Open Access filters collecting an additional 5.5 million articles. The articles are being sourced from Unpaywall which harvests OA content from publishers and repositories. Read more. New multi-content repository launched by JISCThe new repository is Plan-S compliant and comes as a fully managed ‘software-as-a-service’ provision, hosted on a secure cloud platform. Jisc says it will store and share digital research output, and will allow institutions to meet all Plan-S mandatory requirements and other funder and publisher mandates for OA. It also includes a built in ‘FAIR checker’ Read more. Research AssessmentDOR A has re-launched its website with a refreshed set of resources, including a set of case studies and updated resources. See more
In a interesting move, Elsevier has announced that it has signed DORA – which has prompted discussion on twitter about whether this will actually lead to the publisher moving away from promoting journal level metrics. | 
Unconference session on a National Strategy
