15th BERLIN OPEN ACCESS CONFERENCE ADAPT AND ADVANCE - Sept.28-Oct.1, 2021 - Plenary Presentations, Posters, Outcome Summaries

 15th BERLIN OPEN ACCESS CONFERENCE

ADAPT AND ADVANCE

September 28 – October 01, 2021
Co-Hosted by the University of California and the Max Planck Society’s Open Access 2020 Initiative

Stakeholders and decision-makers in research and scholarly communication from 46 countries came together at the 15th Berlin Open Access Conference (B15) to reflect on their progress in transforming the current subscription-based system of scholarly journal publishing to a system based on open dissemination of research results for the benefit of science and society. 

In recent years, institutions and national consortia globally have successfully negotiated transformative agreements (TAs) with a range of publishers to (1) empower authors to grant free and universal access to their peer-reviewed research while retaining their copyright, and (2) empower institutions to integrate, rationalize and rein in their financial investments in scholarly publishing. 

Reflecting on insights shared by panelists from Australia, Colombia, Germany, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Nepal, Portugal, South Africa, Sweden, the United States of America and the United Kingdom, the B15 cohort discussed current challenges and highlighted opportunities for further adapting, improving and advancing their transformative negotiation strategies to foster a scholarly publishing system that is open, sustainable and equitable.

Key insights affirmed at B15

Open access to scholarly journals is essential for progress in science and society. 
Open access is advancing thanks to transformative agreements. 
Negotiations with scholarly journal publishers are a pathway to openness and equity. 
Open access publishing must be enabled under equitable economic conditions. 
Increasing transparency of funding flows and reorganizing just a tiny share of investments can have immeasurable impact.
Further open access developments require bold new partnerships. 
Scholarly publishers are embracing open access. 
Mature open access strategies include different synergistic approaches.

The enormous progress made in open access, since the cohort of the last (14th) Berlin Open Access Conference first affirmed transformative agreements as a viable pathway, is the result of the individual and collective efforts of librarians, scholars and scientists, consortium leaders, university rectors/presidents, and research funders who utilized their agency to drive positive change.

Individuals and organizations can find a summary of key insights emerging from B15 and opportunities for action to advance transformative agreements that drive openness, sustainability and equity in scholarly publishing in the B15 Executive Summary.

more

UC Irvine alumnus wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry - October 6, 2021

 

 

UCI alumnus wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry David MacMillan is one of two awarded for work with molecule-building catalysts   David W.C. MacMillan, who earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at UCI has been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in developing better catalysts for converting and building molecules. MacMillan, now the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, shares the prize with Benjamin List from the Max Planck Institute in Mulheim an der Ruhr, Germany. MacMillan was advised through the course of his graduate studies at UCI by Larry Overman, Distinguished Professor emeritus of chemistry. The Nobel Prize winner has another connection to UCI: While at UC Berkeley and later at Caltech, he was Ph.D. advisor to Vy Dong, UCI professor of chemistry. Metallic and enzyme-based catalysts are important tools in chemistry, playing a role in energy production and storage, the treatment of diseases and the removal of harmful molecules from the environment. In 2000, MacMillan and List, working independently from one another, developed a third approach, called asymmetric organocatalysis, which works with small organic molecules that are less environmentally harmful and are inexpensive to produce. “The award of this year’s Chemistry Prize to List and MacMillan will be broadly welcomed by the chemistry community,” Overman said. “The organocatalytic chemical synthesis methods developed by David MacMillan are used every day around the world in the discovery and development of new medicines. What sets Dave apart is his remarkable creativity and vision. These attributes, together with his delightful personality, were apparent early in his graduate studies at UCI.” MacMillan was an inaugural inductee of the UCI School of Physical Sciences Alumni Hall of Fame. If you are wondering what asymmetric organocatalysis is, and why it’s important, read UCI Chemistry's commentary piece.

UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest scientific publisher - March 16, 2021

UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest scientific publisher: UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest scientific publisher

"The University of California today (March 16) announced a pioneering open access agreement with the world’s largest scientific publisher, Elsevier, making significantly more of the University’s research available to people worldwide — immediately and at no cost. The deal will put more UC research into the hands of individuals across the globe at a time when international collaboration to fight COVID-19 has illuminated the value of open access to scientific findings.

The agreement is the largest of its kind in North America to date, bringing together UC, which generates nearly 10 percent of all U.S. research output, and Elsevier, which disseminates about 17 percent of journal articles produced by UC faculty. The deal will double the number of articles made available through UC’s transformative open access agreements.

“This groundbreaking agreement will allow for more open, equitable access to information,” said UC President Michael V. Drake, M.D. “As more universities and research institutions support open access, scientific knowledge will advance at an unparalleled pace.”

...

"Under the four-year deal, all research with a UC lead author published in Elsevier’s extensive portfolio of hybrid and open access journals will be open access by default. It is the first such agreement to include open access publishing in the entire Cell Press and Lancet families of journals, which are considered among the world’s most prestigious scientific and medical titles. University researchers will also be able to read articles published in Elsevier journals."

(read more)

Green, Gold, Diamond, Black – what does it all mean? - Academic publishing - Oct. 22, 2018

 

Green, Gold, Diamond, Black – what does it all mean?

Academic Publishing•Oct 22, 2018

 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0089

Lucy Barnes  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1425-6985

There’s a lot of jargon surrounding Open Access publication, and as with all jargon it can confuse and obfuscate. Here is a simple glossary:

Diamond / Platinum	Immediate Open Access publication by the journal or book publisher without payment of a fee. Copyright may be retained by the author and permission barriers to share or reuse are generally removed. OBP fits this description: our authors retain their copyright, and we recommend this as best practice. We recommend a CC BY licence for all our books, unless an author chooses a more restrictive licence.
Gold	Immediate Open Access publication by the journal or book publisher. In some cases, a fee is charged. Copyright may be retained by the author and permission barriers to share or reuse are generally removed.
Bronze	The content is free to read and/or download on the publisher’s website, but it is not published under an open licence that permits sharing or reuse. The publisher is able to withdraw access at any time. This form of so-called ‘Open’ Access is often used to make content free to read for only a brief period, perhaps immediately after publication or in response to a catastrophic event such as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, since there is no open license it is not, in fact, Open Access at all.
Green	A version of the publication is archived online, e.g. in a repository. It does not include any of the work typically carried out by the publisher, such as e.g. copyediting, proofreading, typesetting, indexing, metadata tagging, marketing or distribution. It is usually not listed on the publisher’s website. It can be freely accessed but sometimes only after an embargo period, and there can be barriers to reuse. The author usually does not retain the copyright.
Black	A publication that is not openly licensed, or for which reuse rights have not been granted, which is shared online illegally (e.g. via Sci-Hub).
Hybrid	‘Hybrid’ is usually applied to journals. A hybrid journal is a subscription journal in which some articles are made Open Access on payment of a fee. This model has attracted particular criticism for its expense and its vulnerability to abuses such as ‘double dipping. Some book publishers offer chapter-level Open Access, particularly for collected and edited volumes. These are sometimes referred to as ‘hybrid books’.
Gratis	Open Access that is free to read, but there are barriers to reuse.
Libre	Open Access is free to read and permission barriers are generally removed. Source:   https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/green-gold-diamond-black-what-does-it-all-mean/

OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings - March 9, 2021

 

OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings

 Bosman, Jeroen;  Frantsvåg, Jan Erik;  Kramer, Bianca;  Langlais, Pierre-Carl;  Proudman, Vanessa

Project manager(s)

 Mounier, Pierre

Project member(s)

 Becerril, Arianna; Bjørnshauge, Lars;  Redhead, Claire;  Torny, Didier

Context
From June 2020 to February 2021, a consortium of 10 organisations undertook a large-scale study on open access journals across the world that are free for readers and authors, usually referred to as “OA diamond journals”. This study was commissioned by cOAlition S in order to gain a better understanding of the OA diamond landscape.

Presentation
The study undertook a statistical analysis of several bibliographic databases, surveyed 1,619 journals, collected 7,019 free text submissions and other data from 94 questions, and organised three focus groups with 11 journals and 10 interviews with hosting platforms. It collected 163 references in the academic literature, and inventoried 1048 journals not listed in DOAJ.

The results of the study are available in the following outputs:

• References Library - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4562816
• Journals Inventory - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4562828
• Dataset - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4553103
• Findings Report - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4558704
• Recommendations Report- DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4562790

Findings:

• A wide archipelago of relatively small journals serving diverse communities
• OA diamond journals are on the road to full compliance with Plan S
• A mix of scientific strengths and operational challenges
• An economy that largely depends on volunteers, universities and government

Source;  https://zenodo.org/record/4558704#.YEfWjGhKhaQ

Related identifiers:

Supplementary material

• 10.5281/zenodo.4562790 (Report)
• 10.5281/zenodo.4553103 (Dataset)
• 10.5281/zenodo.4562816 (Other)
• 10.5281/zenodo.4562828 (Other)

Springer Nature Transformative Open Access Agreement - Dec. 17, 2020

 In June 2020, the University of California (UC) and Springer Nature announced that they have entered into a groundbreaking transformative open access agreement, the first such agreement Springer Nature has established in the United States, and the largest transformative open access agreement in North America to date.  The agreement will enable UC authors who publish with Springer Nature to make their research freely available to the world to read, and will also expand UC’s access to Springer Nature’s subscription journals. Through the agreement, the UC libraries are providing funding to support open access publishing fees for UC authors who publish with Springer Nature journals (including fully covering those fees for authors who do not have research funds available for this purpose) by redirecting funds previously devoted to subscription fees. In addition, the agreement adds reading access to more than 1,000 journals in Springer Nature’s portfolio, along with perpetual access rights to all journals for which there is read access. 

Agreement Basics

This four-year agreement runs from 2020 through 2023, and incorporates open access publishing in support of UC’s mission. In addition, it expands UC’s reading access to 1,000 more Springer titles, and upholds the university’s goal to manage its costs for academic journal subscriptions responsibly.  

I have a paper that was published with Springer in 2020.  Will that be covered by the agreement?

Unfortunately, we are unable to apply this agreement retroactively to papers accepted for publication in 2020. Before articles could be included under the agreement, we needed to formalize the workflow and contract details. 

The publishing aspects of the agreement will be implemented in two phases. 

Phase I: to begin in January 2021 —  Open access with UC libraries contribution to open access publishing fees 

Phase II starts in 2022 and involves the integration of Nature branded journals into the open access publishing part of the agreement

(more)

Open Library of Humanities - September 17, 2020

Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a sustainable scholar-led consortial funding model for Gold Open Access in the humanities without publication fees.

"It is a charitable organization dedicated to publishing world-leading open-access humanities scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges. Launched in 2015, its free-to-read, free-to-publish model was set up to revolutionize the field of open access publishing. Five years on, the sustainable business model has attracted nearly 300 supporting institutions, with further revenue generated through hosting on our in-house open source publishing platform Janeway, enabling it to establish a thriving platform of 28 peer-reviewed open access journals. Its mission is to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities - for free, for everyone, forever."