Guest Post by Danielle Padula, Community Development officer for Scholastica, email: ’s no secret that the cost of corporate-run academic journals is skyrocketing. A 2007 study found the average list price of for-profit journals to be four times higher than that of not-for-profit publications. Rising journal subscription prices have increased support among the academic community for publishing scholarship open access (OA), or free to read online. But on its own OA publ...

How to Title an Essay Titling an essay is one of the most challenging tasks in essay writing. Many students will write impeccable essays but fail to come up with appropriate titles for their essays. Whether you are writing a research paper or an academic paper, the title of your essay matters a lot. A title is the first thing that a reader sees the moment they look at your essay. It subtly communicates what is in your essay. While it may not be direct, by simply looking at it, one can be motivat...

How to Start a Narrative Essay Before you start writing an essay, you need to understand the type of essay you are writing. The above is essential because different essays have different requirements and one needs to adhere to the specific requirements of the essay they are writing. A narrative essay seeks or allows you to reach out to your creative side. These essays are often experiential, personal, and also anecdotal. One is usually not limited to what they are required to write, and you can ...

  ABSTRACT: This is the last of a series of posts describing OpenAIRE’s work to find a community-endorsed definition of “open peer review” (OPR), its features and implementations. As described in Parts One and Two, OpenAIRE collected 122 definitions of “open review” or “open peer review” from the scientific literature. Iterative analysis of these definitions resulted in the identification of seven distinct OPR traits at work in various combinations amongst these definitions: Open identities: Aut...

A new working group has been formed to take data-literature linking to a new global scale - and there are great opportunities for OpenAIRE repositories.  This scholarly exchange ink xworking group, which builds on the achievements of the RDA-WDS Data Publishing WG, includes participants from infrastructure providers like CrossRef, DataCite and OpenAIRE; from publishers such as Elsevier and Springer Nature; and from data centres including Pangaea and the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre.  T...

The Library of the University of Latvia and National Open Access Desk - Latvia participated in Open Access Week 2016 by organising several activities:The workshop „Research Data Management and Open Science: Challenges and Opportunities for Latvia” as pre-event, on October 13. The workshop was given by Iryna Kuchma, EIFL-OA Programme Manager. Click HERE to view the recording of this workshop.One of the main events was the conference „Research of the University of Latvia and e-resources”. The...

Last November 16th, 2016, the Argentine government published a law entitled “Creación de Repositorios Digitales Institucionales de Acceso Abierto”.The law establishes that all institutions which are part of the National Science and Technology System that receive funding from the Argentine federal government must create an “institutional digital repository” that provides free and open access to all publications (including technical-scientific works, academic theses, journal articles, etc.) In add...

Following Open Access week, on Tuesday, the 1st of November 2016, OpenAIRE, in partnership with Jisc, held a national workshop for UK universities, which focused on the uptake of the Horizon 2020 open access policy in the UK and how to comply with that policy; how to take part in the open research data pilot; and how to take part in the FP7 post-grant open access pilot.  Speakers included:Marina Angelaki, research associate, e-publishing and SSH unit at the National Documentation Centre (EK...

ABSTRACT: This is part two of a series of posts describing OpenAIRE’s work to find a community-endorsed definition of “open peer review” (OPR), its features and implementations. As described in Part One, OpenAIRE collected 122 definitions of “open review” or “open peer review” from the scientific literature. Iterative analysis of these definitions resulted in the identification of seven distinct OPR traits at work in various combinations amongst these definitions: Open identities: Authors and re...

ABSTRACT: At present there is neither a standardized definition of “open peer review” (OPR) nor an agreed schema of its features and implementations, which is highly problematic for discussion of its potential benefits and drawbacks. This new series of blog posts reports on work to resolve these difficulties by analysing the literature for available definitions of “open peer review” and “open review”. In all, 122 definitions have been collected and codified against a range of independent OPR tra...

The 4th annual Chinese Institutional Repository Conference took place in Chongqing, China on September 21-22, 2016, with the theme of “Rich functions and extended roles for institutional repositories”. The conference was jointly organized by National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and CIRG (Chinese institutional repository implementation group), and Chongqing University Library. It attracted over 330 registered participants, reflecting the growing interest in repositories in ...

Event on Open Science arranged by the Swedish non-profit membership organisation Science & Public (Vetenskap & Allmänhet, VA), October 12th, Stockholm, Sweden The theme for this conference was Open Science, what Open Science means in practice and how we will make Open Science a reality in Sweden. Background for the event was the Competitiveness Council conclusions on the transition towards an Open Science system, adopted by the EU Member States in May 2016. They imply that open science n...

In 2015 The Dutch national website on open access has been completely refreshed with an updated look and more interactive content. Openaccess.nl provides information in both Dutch and English about key open access developments in the Netherlands, including connections with OpenAIRE. Recently a platform with publisher deals was created as part of the website. The dedicated page gives insight into the open access deals arranged between Dutch universities – acting as a consortium –and publishers of...

The Open Access Days (Open-Access-Tage) is the foremost annual Open Access and Open Science conference in the German-speaking area. Its target audience includes OA-experts and advocates, researchers of all disciplines, librarians and representatives from publishing as well as research funders and supporters. This year they were held on October 10th-11th and were hosted by the university library of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. The tenth installment of the Open Access Days with its fo...

Guest post by Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, COAR“The reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated” (to paraphrase Mark Twain)Last week COAR published a response to an article written by Richard Poynder on September 22, 2016. Although some of Richard Poynder’s comments definitely reflect the current reality, he made a number of other somewhat questionable assertions, in particular that institutional repositories (IRs) have failed.Poynder's comments reflect a creeping narrative enter...

As part of its mission to further Open Science and investigate how openness and transparency can improve scientific processes, OpenAIRE has been conducting a range of activities investigating the new models of peer review to literature and beyond that fall under the term "Open Peer Review" (OPR). OPR is an umbrella term for a variety of ways in which the traditional peer review process can be by modifed to make it more inclusive, transparent and/or accountable. Its main aspects are: open identit...

OpenAIRE, ScienceOpen and Digital-science (with their portfolio companies Figshare and Overleaf), have teamed up to organise an OpenCon ‘satellite’ event to be held in Berlin on the 24-26th November.This event will form one of the many international satellite events of the main OpenCon 2016 conference that will take place two weeks earlier in Washington, DC.OpenCon is the student and early career academic professional conference that focuses on Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data. It seek...

NOTE: OpenAIRE would like to know what you think about open peer review! Have your say here until 7th October! Tl;dr - "Post-publication peer review" (PPPR) has gained a lot of traction in recent years. As with much of peer review’s confusing lexicon, however, this term is ambiguous. This ambiguity stems from confusion over what constitutes “publication” in the digital age. PPPR conflates two distinct phenomena, which we would do better to treat separately, namely “open pre-review manuscripts” a...

F1000Research, an open access publisher operating an innovative model of post-publication peer review, was yesterday embroiled in controversy as it emerged that their criteria for accepting manuscripts for submission are based partly on the status of the author or their research institution, rather than simply upon the quality of the science itself.Chealsye Bowley, OA advocate and scholarly communications librarian, revealed on Twitter that she had had a paper rejected by F1000Research. Apparent...

A recent SPARC Innovator award winner, Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) was built around the principles of open research in scholarly communications. Traditionally, a research project ends up with just a few articles published in scholarly journals after many years of work. But why communicate just research articles at the end of a cycle?Research articles are just a small component of the research cycle. What about all the other project outputs - research ideas, grant proposals, methodologies, ...