OpenMonographs.org Launches to Flip Funding Model for University Publishing - december 3, 2019

OpenMonographs.org Launches to Flip Funding Model for University Publishing  TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) creates website to build a community of scholars, publishers, librarians, university administrators that increases access to humanities and social sciences scholarship Jessica Aiwuyor  |  202-296-2296  |  jaiwuyor@arl.org  |  December 3, 2019 The Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses) have launched a new website, OpenMonographs.org, in a bold new effort to change the landscape of scholarly book publishing in the humanities and social sciences.   AAU, ARL, and AUPresses established TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) in 2017 as a five-year pilot project. Monographs remain the preeminent form of scholarly publication in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, but the funding model is broken. TOME seeks to address this problem by moving us toward a new, more sustainable system that meets monograph publishing costs with institutionally funded faculty book subsidies. TOME’s new website, https://www.openmonographs.org/, highlights the innovative nature of this initiative. Colleges and universities participating in TOME commit to providing baseline grants of $15,000 to support the publication of average-length open access monographs. (Additional funding may be available for especially long or complex books.) These publication grants make it possible for presses to publish monographs in open access editions, increasing the presence of humanities and social science scholarship on the web and opening up knowledge to a truly global readership. Twenty-eight TOME-funded books have been published to date, with over thirty more in progress. The site draws attention to individual TOME books while providing a wealth of information and resources for authors and publishers who may be interested in publishing a book under the auspices of TOME. There is also information for university administrators and librarians who may be considering TOME for their institutions.  There are 17 institutions participating in TOME and over 60 university presses that have committed to producing digital open access editions of TOME volumes, openly licensing them under Creative Commons licenses, and depositing the files in selected open repositories. The newest institutions to join the initiative are Rice University and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as of fall 2019. “This attractive new website truly conveys to the world what TOME seeks to accomplish,” said Peter Potter, publishing director for the University Libraries at Virginia Tech and ARL visiting program officer. “TOME is about bringing together scholars, universities, libraries, and presses in pursuit of a common goal—to create a more sustainable system for funding monograph publishing while ensuring that, in the future, monographs are fully integrated into the larger web-based network of scientific research. As we also emphasize on the website, we see TOME as part of a growing movement to open up scholarly research to the world and we welcome partners and collaborators committed to fundamental change.” “With more than 15 universities and 60 university presses currently part of the TOME initiative, the presence of humanities and social science scholarship on the web continues to open up such work to more audiences and drive institutional change and acceptance,” said Jessica Sebeok, AAU deputy vice president for federal relations and counsel for policy. “The TOME website is a powerful tool that helps to showcase TOME books, share lessons learned, and better connect the network of academic institutions, publishing partners, and the larger open access community.” “The humanities and social sciences right now face real questions over how the ideals of open access can benefit fields that communicate scholarship through long-form arguments most often published using nonprofit, editorially rigorous, and peer-review-driven processes,” said Peter Berkery, AUPresses executive director. “Experiments with sustainable models are really blossoming throughout our community and we have been proud to partner in an initiative as successful as TOME. Not only has it been an opportunity for all partners to learn, the books so far published and in the pipeline are significant achievements themselves. The new website will help share that scholarship, our lessons, and the opportunity to join in this movement very effectively.” About the Association of American Universities Founded in 1900, the Association of American Universities is composed of America’s leading research universities. AAU’s 65 research universities transform lives through education, research, and innovation. Our member universities earn the majority of competitively awarded federal funding for research that improves public health, seeks to address national challenges, and contributes significantly to our economic strength, while educating and training tomorrow’s visionary leaders and innovators. AAU member universities collectively help shape policy for higher education, science, and innovation; promote best practices in undergraduate and graduate education; and strengthen the contributions of leading research universities to American society. Follow AAU on Twitter, on Facebook, and on LinkedIn. About the Association of Research Libraries The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries in Canada and the US whose mission is to advance research, learning, and scholarly communication. The Association fosters the open exchange of ideas and expertise, promotes equity and diversity, and pursues advocacy and public policy efforts that reflect the values of the library, scholarly, and higher education communities. ARL forges partnerships and catalyzes the collective efforts of research libraries to enable knowledge creation and to achieve enduring and barrier-free access to information. ARL is on the web at ARL.org. About the Association of University Presses The Association of University Presses (AUPresses) is an organization of more than 150 international nonprofit scholarly publishers. Since 1937, the Association of University Presses has advanced the essential role of a global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge. The Association holds integrity, diversity, stewardship, and intellectual freedom as core values. AUPresses members are active across many scholarly disciplines, including the humanities, arts, and sciences, publish significant regional and literary work, and are innovators in the world of digital publishing.

The Bibsam Consortium and Elsevier to sign new transformative agreement - November 25, 2019

The Bibsam Consortium is signing a Read & Publish agreement with Elsevier, a global information analytics business specializing in science and health. Under the deal, Swedish researchers will gain access to the publisher's 2000 journals once more. In addition, all Swedish research articles will be published open access. The previous agreement with Elsevier was terminated in 2018. A new agreement is now in place that meets Bibsam’s requirements and reflects fair value for both sides.

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Are Berkeley Faculty Onboard with OA? - Taking the Temperature on Open Access Among UC Berkeley Faculty - November 12, 2019

November 12, 2019
Taking the Temperature on Open Access Among UC Berkeley Faculty
Chan Li
Assessment Librarian, University of California Berkeley Library

Are Faculty Onboard with OA?

Recently, UC Berkeley Library signed the OA2020 Expression of Interest, a campaign to push for open access by 2020, and decided to end its Elsevier journal subscriptions. In response, Ithaka S+R conducted a survey to read Berkeley faculty’s attitudes on OA, and whether they are aligned with the library’s choices. Results generally point toward support for OA, though there were some variances in enthusiasm dependent on department and faculty age. The main argument against OA seemed to be the typical one—that subscription-based journals lend prestige and precious grounds for tenure. [Ithaka S+R]

Source:  https://sr.ithaka.org/blog/taking-the-temperature-on-open-access-among-uc-berkeley-faculty/. 

UC Irvine first campus to launch Presidential OA Policy - October 23, 2019

UC Irvine first campus to launch Presidential OA Policy

October 23, 2019 Author: Alainna Therese Wrigley

This week, UC Irvine became the first UC campus to launch the UC Presidential Open Access Policy implementation, enabling UC Irvine Health Science Clinical Professors and Librarians to join their Academic Senate colleagues in using the UC Publication Management System to make their scholarly articles freely available in eScholarship, UC’s open access repository and publishing platform. 

Thanks to increasingly enthusiastic participation in the Academic Senate OA Policy, the global community, both academic and public, now have access to nearly 46,000 articles that would otherwise be locked behind publisher paywalls. Participation in the Presidential OA Policy builds on this momentum by extending UC’s OA policy participation to an additional 210,000 employees, substantially broadening the reach of UC research and scholarship, and granting UC the distinction of having the most extensive institutional OA policy in the country. UC’s OA policies collectively empower all UC employees to make their publications available to the public for free in eScholarship, regardless of where those articles are originally published or how restrictive the publishers’ default use policies might be. 

We spoke with Mitchell Brown (UC Irvine Libraries Scholarly Communications Coordinator and Research Librarian for Chemistry, Earth System Science and Russian Studies) about UC Irvine’s roll-out and their success building interest in open access policy participation. Read more at the Office of Scholarly Communication blog.

UC campuses celebrate Open Access Week 2019

By Katie Fortney / October 21, 2019

 

This year, international Open Access Week is October 21-27. The theme, “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge,” was chosen to deepen conversations about being inclusive by design and to turn those conversations into action, according to Nick Shockey, Director of Programs & Engagement at SPARC. “We find ourselves at a critical moment. The decisions we make now—individually and collectively—will fundamentally shape the future for many years to come. As open becomes the default, all stakeholders must be intentional about designing these new, open systems to ensure that they are inclusive, equitable, and truly serve the needs of a diverse global community.”

The University of California Libraries have a wide variety of workshops, exhibits, and fun activities planned to celebrate – check them out!

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Fact check: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier - August 2, 2019

Fact check: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

By admin / August 2, 2019

The UC Negotiating Team 

Ivy Anderson, (Co-Chair), Associate Executive Director of the California Digital Library; Jeffrey MacKie-Mason (Co-Chair), University Librarian and Professor, School of Information and Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley; Günter Waibel, Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director of the California Digital Library; Richard A. Schneider, Associate Professor, Orthopaedic Surgery, UC San Francisco and Chair, Academic Senate University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication; Dennis J. Ventry, Jr., Professor of Law, UC Davis and Vice Chair, Academic Senate University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication

August 2, 2019

Whether you have received an email directly from Elsevier, or have been reading the news coverage since early July, you may have seen some of Elsevier’s claims regarding the journal contract dispute between the publisher and UC. Here’s a fact check from UC’s negotiating team.

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ORCiD will be required for NIH Funder Grants (K Awards - Training) starting October 2019.

NIH is requiring ORCiD for applicants to K Training Grants starting in October 2019 and all applications in January 2020.  The eRA system will flag to the absence of ORCiD and stop the application process.  

3. Moving Toward Requiring ORCID IDs for Trainees, Fellows and K Awardees and Appointees

Facilitators: Laurie Roman, Jennifer Sutton and Anastasiya Hardison

ORCID ID will be required for appointees to institutional training grants and other awards that make appointments through xTrain, beginning in October 2019.

Applicants for fellowships and individual K awards will be required to have ORCID IDs beginning with applications for due dates on and after January 25, 2020. eRA systems will validate that the ORCID ID is present in the personal profile of the PD/PI Commons ID included in the Credential field of the application. An error will be given if the ORCID ID is not present and the error must be cleared in order to successfully submit. To help raise awareness of this change, a warning will be given starting this fall and will be switched to an error in early January.    

Comments to consider…

• Could the ORCID ID be included in the Person Module web service so S2S development could include data calls for it? (Yes)
• Could the ORCID ID be included as a search variable and as part of the data returned when searching for a user via the Account Management System (AMS)? (Yes)
• Need to caution users from accidently creating additional instances of ORCID IDs. ORCID folks are aware of this potential issue and are looking at ways to reduce the ability of users to create multiple IDs.
• Since the ID is designed to be a unique identifier, there is some discussion starting about adding new data to the Person Profile. Something along the line of:
• Aliases
• Preferred Name(s)
• Previous Name(s)
• There is no target date yet set to require the ID for other types of applications, but it is general agreed that that is the direction the process is going.

Source:  eRA Commons Working Group (CWG) Meeting Notes Notes 05-21-19

University of California Irvine joins OA2020 - June 21, 2019

June 21, 2019

The University of California Irvine has joined  OA2020 as part of the growing community of institutions and research organizations around the world that are taking steps to drive the transformation of today’s scholarly journals to open access.

About OA2020

Excerpt from the Statement of Interest for OA2020:

Expression Of Interest In The Large-Scale Implementation Of Open Access To Scholarly Journals

"Building on the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities and on the progress that has been achieved so far, we are pursuing the large-scale implementation of free online access to, and largely unrestricted use and re-use of scholarly research articles."

"To gain the full benefits of OA and enable a smooth, swift and scholarly oriented transition, the existing corpus of scholarly journals should be converted from subscription to open access. Recent developments and studies indicate that this transition process can be realized within the framework of currently available resources.

With this statement, we express our interest in establishing an international initiative for the OA transformation of scholarly journals, and we agree upon the following key aspects:

• We aim to transform a majority of today’s scholarly journals from subscription to OA publishing in accordance with community-specific publication preferences. At the same time, we continue to support new and improved forms of OA publishing.
• We will pursue this transformation process by converting resources currently spent on journal subscriptions into funds to support sustainable OA business models. Accordingly, we intend to re-organize the underlying cash flows, to establish transparency with regard to costs and potential savings, and to adopt mechanisms to avoid undue publication barriers.
• We invite all parties involved in scholarly publishing, in particular universities, research institutions, funders, libraries, and publishers to collaborate on a swift and efficient transition for the benefit of scholarship and society at large."

Norway and Elsevier agreement - April 23, 2019

In Norway, New Model for Elsevier Agreement - Inside Higher Ed

www.insidehighered.com

Elsevier is expected to announce today a deal with Norway's universities under which all the research they publish will be freely available to all, The Financial Times reported. Under the deal the consortium of Norwegian universities will pay Elsevier for the articles their faculty members publish instead of for subscriptions. The deal comes amid growing opposition -- most notably from the University of California system -- to high journal subscription prices.

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Ithaka S+R Publishes 2018 Faculty Survey Results - April 20, 2019

Ithaka S+R Publishes 2018 Faculty Survey Results

At last week’s ACRL 2019 conference in Cleveland, Ithaka S+R published the results from its latest annual survey, which traces shifts in higher education faculty research, teaching, and publishing practices over time. Among this year’s findings: there is a growing gap between faculty attitudes regarding open access publishing and their practices. An increasing number of faculty report that they would be happy to see an open access model replace the traditional subscription models. Still, traditional incentives (circulation, impact factors) continue to rank above open access in researchers’ decisions about where to publish—particularly for early-career faculty. The full survey is available here

Announcement - April 12, 2019  

Blog: The Research, Teaching, and Publishing Practices of Faculty

US Faculty Survey 2018