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What’s in this issueWhat’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in Australia & Aotearoa New ZealandWhat’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globallyRecent writing & resources on OAUpcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing |
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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 |
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Happy Holiday Wishes from Open Access Australasia!2024 has been another big year for us at Open Access Australasia. We ran another two iterations of our OA101 course taking us to over 700 participants since May 2022. We trialled a self-paced version of the course where participants moved through the modules in their own time and had access to the materials for an extended period. The response has been very positive. The OA201 working group met regularly through 2024 and have assembled learning outcomes and resources for the advanced online course which will debut next year. Many thanks to the working group for their commitment and creativity. We hosted another successful program of insightful events for Open Access Week. In between we have run a number of webinars and made submissions to numerous inquiries within the research sector. We also have great pleasure in announcing that the RMIT has joined us as a new member. Without the commitment of our membership we would not be able to do what we do, and we thank all members for their continued support. Our Director of 9 years, Dr Ginny Barbour, stepped down after the AGM in March to focus on her role as Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Journal of Australia. After a period of recruitment, Mark Sutherland briefly took up the role of Director but stepped down in October to return to full-time retirement. Discussion about further recruitment will commence in the New Year. In the meantime, Janet Catterall, Senior Project Officer will continue to be the primary contact for OAA. In our region, 2024 has seen the release of the Australia’s Chief Scientist’s Advice on open access models to which OAA and CAUL responded, recommending diversity in definitions and models and a greater attention to issues of equity. The Open Access Toolkit for Researchers, co-created by universities in Aotearoa New Zealand and hosted on OAA’s website, went live and has remained the most used resource on the website after the homepage throughout the year. Two new communities of practice commenced, allowing diamond publishing and repository practitioners to share challenges and resources. Finally, we wish you all happy and safe holidays and look forward to supporting all our members in the new year. Open Access Australasia Executive Committee & staff |
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What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand |
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2024 Institutional Repositories and Open Access Community Days For those of you who missed the Community Days hosted by the University of Canterbury Library all the recordings are now available |
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Cake02_Reed © 2017 Michelle Reed CC BY SA 2.0 A 10-year old OER: what happened to it? (And can we even tell??) by Richard White When you put an open educational resource (OER) out into the world, you’re making a leap of faith. Your name is on it, but you’re also saying to the reader, take it, adapt it, make it work for you. In one sense the faith you’re placing in your reader is that they’ll continue to attribute you (the legal aspects of the open licence) but you’re also surrendering control of something you put hours and hours into making. |
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Diamond Journal Publishing – Gems from Australia Guest post by AuSCCoP Diamond Group’s own Tracy Creagh. Tracy describes the formation and development of the Diamond Journal Publishing subgroup, an outcome of the 2023 OA Week panel on diamond publishing run by Open Access Australasia as a satellite event of the first Global Summit on Diamond Open Access. |
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Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative launches the COKI Open Access Dataset December 8 The COKI Open Access Dataset measures open access performance for 225 countries and 50,000 institutions and is available in JSON Lines format. The data is visualised at the COKI Open Access Dashboard: https://open.coki.ac/. The COKI Open Access Dataset is created with the COKI Academic Observatory data collection pipeline, which fetches data about research publications from multiple sources, synthesises the datasets and creates the open access calculations for each country and institution. |
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AuSCCoP The Australian Scholarly Communications Community of Practice (AuSCCoP) first meeting in 2025 will be on January 9th at 1pm AEST/4pm NZDT. The results of the member survey will be discussed as a foundation to plan activities for the CoP in 2025. If you have not yet filled out the survey it would be greatly appreciated if you could do so. 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 group welcomes Caitlin Savage as co-convener for 2025 and thanks outgoing convener for 2024 Lauren Halcombe-Smith. Dates and schedule for 2025 to be confirmed early in 2025 and a CoP survey will be circulated to help inform planning for the year. More information about the Diamond Publishing group and how to join AuSCCoP Repositories group The group thanks outgoing co-convener Paula Callan for her work in 2024. There is currently a convener position vacant for the group and a call for EOIs will be circulated early in the new year. If you are a member – and have not already done so – please fill out this survey so the group can plan for next year. The first meeting for 2025 is tentatively scheduled for January 16th at 1pm AEST/4pm NZDT. More information about the Repository group and how to join |
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What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally |
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WE’RE OPEN FOR PLEDGES: SCOSS Launches Round 6 December 5 Now in its sixth year, SCOSS is excited to announce the four new Open Science infrastructure partners that will join the SCOSS Family. After careful evaluation, SCOSS has selected the African Journals Online (AJOL), Episciences, Make Data Count, and SciPost for this sixth funding cycle. These organisations are seeking help in both creating and maintaining sustainable futures. |
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PLOS receives $3.3M grant to support Open Access publishing & business model transformation December 10 PLOS has been awarded a $3.3million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, underscoring its commitment to pioneer a shift away from traditional publishing models. The 3-year funding package from the Gates Foundation will support PLOS’ transition towards APC-free publishing by enabling authors, funded by the foundation, to publish with PLOS without facing APC barriers, and to contribute to open access publishing options for authors who do not have access to funding. |
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Web of Science and Scopus reject eLife’s alternative publishing model eLife has been pioneering an open model of publishing which invites authors to submit preprints for immediate posting – the “no-reject” model- alongside a eLife assessment and expert commentary which are then subject to open review by the public. After putting the journal on hold in October, in November WoS (operated by Clarivate) announced it would no longer list eLife in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). This is the commercial index that produces the Journal Impact Factor. eLife and DORA published initial responses to the decision. Responding to author feedback, eLife has now decided to provide a partial feed of eLife versions of record to WoS with assessments of ‘solid’ or above in order to maintain authors’ coverage in the index. See their rationale here. This will not result in eLife being ascribed a Journal Impact Factor, but eLife regards the JIF as a highly problematic indicator. Scopus has gone further and removed eLife content from its journals collection completely citing the lack of traditional peer review. eLife content will now be available in the Scopus preprint collection. Why is this important for open access? Progress towards full and equitable open access depends on innovation and the emergence of new models of publishing and a shift in academic culture away from reliance on metrics like JIF. The shutting down of such innovation by commercial entities works against this progress. |
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India approves One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) November 25 “The Union Cabinet approved the One Nation One Subscription scheme to provide country-wide access to international high impact scholarly research articles and journal publications to students, faculty and researchers of all Higher Education Institutions managed by the central government and state governments and Research & Development Institutions of the central government…A total of 30 major international journal publishers have been included in One Nation One Subscription. All of the nearly 13,000 e-journals published by these publishers will now be accessible to more than 6,300 government Higher Education Institutions and central government R&D institutions. Access to journals will be provided through a national subscription coordinated by the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET)” |
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Reflections on OASPA 2024 by the Open Book Collective by Judith Fathallah, Joe Deville, and Nonhlanhla Dube The OBC reflects on the panel they hosted and the key themes arising at the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association Conference (OASPA) 2024. Full recordings from the OASPA conference are available to watch here |
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2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access Centering social justice in scholarly communication to advance research as a public good. The conference took place 8 – 14 December 2024 in Cape Town, South Africa and online. A statement was written with participation from attendees during the conference, the Toluca Cape Town Declaration on Diamond Open Access. So far the statement has only been shared at the conference and on social media. |
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IOI’s 2024 Impact Report by Emmy Tsang & Jerry Sellanga A reflection on IOI’s 2024 programs and partnerships designed to increase investment and adoption of open infrastructure. “From fostering open infrastructure adoption to address the computational needs of Latin American and African biomedical researchers to strengthening critical platforms like arXiv, bioRxiv and medRxiv, our efforts this year have brought us closer to our vision of open infrastructure being the default in research and scholarship.” |
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OpenAlex, a big step towards Open Science? interview with Jeroen Bosman What options has OpenAlex to offer? Exactly how open are the publications? And will this database replace expensive subscriptions in the near future? |
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What’s Wrong With How We Talk About Preprints? by Hilda Bastian “When you see the term ‘preprint’ in a scientific news article, what do you interpret it to mean?” That’s the key question Alice Fleerackers and colleagues posed to their study participants. |
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What we are reading: Keeping up with AI |
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Releasing the largest multilingual open pretraining dataset Many have claimed that training large language models requires copyrighted data, making truly open AI development impossible. Today, Pleias is proving otherwise with the release of Common Corpus (part of the AI Alliance Open Trusted Data Initiative)—the largest fully open multilingual dataset for training LLMs, containing over 2 trillion tokens of permissibly licensed content with provenance information (2,003,039,184,047 tokens). |
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What we are watchingRussell J. Stanford, Open Access, and the enshittification of scholarly publication by Anton Angelo. This show stopping presentation from the recent Aotearoa 2024 OA and IR community days, has a real twist! The rest of the program is also available to view |
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“Data Cartels & Commercial Obstacles to Open Access” with Sarah Lamdan. In celebration of Open Access Week 2024, the Penn State University Libraries were pleased to host Sarah Lamdan of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. If you are not familiar with Sarah’s work this is a MUST! |
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Beyond the Shelves, a podcast from IATUL- SIG A podcast brought to you by IATUL (the International Association of University Libraries). Join us as we dive into cutting edge research and practice of librarians worldwide, exploring trends, discovering groundbreaking approaches and sharing innovative practice. Available on spotify. |
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Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing |
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Open Access Australasia Planning Meeting and AGM Feb/March TBA 2025 Online |
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