Over half a million articles are now available in the Library of Science, the largest open access scientific collection in Poland. An online event was organized to mark this achievement by the Open Science Platform based at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (University of Warsaw), responsible also for the OpenAIRE National Open Access Desk in Poland. The Library of Science is available at: https://bibliotekanauki.pl/ The Library of Science is a critical el...

Over 320 people from Poland and around the world participated in the launch event of the Library of Science organized on June 15, 2021. The new website was inaugurated as part of the 'Platform of Polish Scientific Publications' project by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, University of Warsaw (ICM UW).  The Library of Science - the new version of the platform An introductory speech was given by Marek Michalewicz, director of ICM UW, who presented the...

Scholarly journals published by academic societies have to struggle through the complex publishing landscape in order to maximise their visibility, discoverability and usage. This is due to the fact that these journals are either being hosted on non-robust platforms such as society websites or maintained by commercial publishers with content that is behind pay wall or against costly article processing charges. To support Open Access, the University of Malta (UM) Library has implemented the first...

Workshop Report: Berlin, Germany, 1-2 february 2018. For the third time, the “OJS-de.net” network met for a two-days workshop at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. The event was organized by the head of the expertise network, the Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS), and attended by about 70 participants from German speaking countries and Denmark.“OJS-de.net”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), connects and supports not only universities and research institutes in Germany that us...

​In Bratislava on April 11, 2019 we held a workshop on the future of scholarly journals in Slovakia. This was the second time we organized a workshop dedicated solely to Open Access journals. The main goal was to gather Open Access journal publishers and discuss the problems they are facing in Slovakia. The workshop was carried out in English and Slovak.  The main guest was Guillaume Rivalle from Clarivate Analytics who talked about supporting of publishin...

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...

The identification of Gold Open Access with the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) is a widespread misunderstanding that has often led this alternative route for OA implementation to be dismissed as commercial publisher-friendly and prone to double dipping. However, Gold OA means publishing in any Open Access journal, and it's a well-known fact that over two thirds of the OA journals hosted in the DOAJ charge no APCs to their authors.This is the reason why when discussing the way the f...

The policy guidelines for this new post-grant funding initiative state that "The FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot provides an additional instrument to improve access to research results from FP7 projects, but does not affect authors' choice on how their project publications are made Open Access". Some questions have arrived via the Pilot helpdesk asking whether this actually means that hybrid journals are supported by this funding initiative, which is of course not the case, as specifically ment...

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...

Guest post by Leo Waaijers and Saskia de Vries (QOAM)The FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot is part of the EC OpenAIRE project, giving the Pilot roots in the library world. As a funding initiative for Open Access publications, however, the Pilot has a high stake in a well functioning publishing market with authors as typical customers. This turns this Pilot into a catalyser for library-author interaction.The role of libraries in supporting researchers to make appropriate publication choices in an ...