Guest Post by Danielle Padula, Community Development officer for Scholastica, email: dpadula@scholasticahq.comIt’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...

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...

In January 2018, Spanish Government published the State Plan for Research, Development and Innovation 2017-2020 that includes important news on open access to scientific publications and research data. The State Plan is the main instrument of the State Government for developing and achieving those objectives set at the Spanish Strategy for Science and Technology and Innovation 2013-2020, and at the Europe 2020 Strategy. The funding priorities included in the National Plan are granted through com...

An exciting recent article on the LSE Impact Blog proposes a European Open Access Platform for research. This idea is very much in line with OpenAIRE’s mission of building a public research publication infrastructure and as such we welcome the authors’ vision. A public platform for the dissemination of research will become essential infrastructure to finally fully integrate research publishing and dissemination into the research lifecycle, rather than seeing it as an added-extra to be outsourced...

On Tuesday 17th May, the scholarly communications community on Twitter erupted at the news that publishing giant Elsevier had acquired the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a pre-print and publishing community focusing on social sciences and law. The acquisition seems designed to continue Elsevier’s move away from a content-driven business strategy towards one oriented on services and the monetisation of data and analytics, building on their purchase of Mendeley. Elsevier’s press release s...

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...

In April of this year University College Cork (UCC) hosted a 2-day training event focusing on Open Access Data in Horizon 2020. The event was sponsored by FOSTER and organized jointly by UCC Boole Library and Repository Network Ireland. Day one was aimed at researchers and others who were interested in developing Horizon 2020 proposals. The speakers on day one were •    Martin Donnelly from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) (Martin was unable to attend on the day so his presentation were taped i...

For a small academic and research community like Croatia it is important to build national collaborative infrastructure at different levels and for different purposes. Institutional repositories are for last twenty years an important strategy for attaining open access, and provide a key infrastructure for the long-term preservation of digital materials. Apart from HRČAK repository of OA journals (with 415 OA journals) and Croatian Scientific Bibliography CROSBI with more than 30.000 deposited fu...

Rich Savage, CC BY 2.0 A group of young researchers, science administrators and librarians of the Open Access Network Austria (OANA), released the first version of The Vienna Principles: A Vision for Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century. The group under the leadership of Peter Kraker discussed the relationship between Open Access and Scholarly Communication intensely and with great passion. After more than a year of research, serious debate and analysis of pro and cons across the subject ...