Open Science News

Palomera Survey in Open Access Book Policies

Academic books continue to play an important role in scholarly production, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. Nevertheless, academic books have not been a focal point for open access policy-makers so far. PALOMERA is an EU-funded project that addresses this challenge. (More information: https://operas-eu.org/projects/palomera/)

This survey is a contribution to an extensive collection of data on the needs, obstacles and challenges of policy-making for open access books. Based on the evidence given by the survey results, PALOMERA will provide actionable recommendations for the development of open access book policies on the European, national and institutional level. By taking part in this survey, you are making a contribution to the research needed to speed up the transformation of the book market to open access.

Read more

The Council of the European Union has called for transparent, equitable and open access to scholarly publications

The Council of the European Union has adopted conclusions calling for scientific publishing to be transparent and of high quality, with immediate and unrestricted open access for all.

It also stresses that scientific publishing supports the essential principles of academic freedom and scientific integrity. It particularly ensures maximum accessibility to research results and contributes to their potential re-use. This is why the Council clearly states that open access must become the norm in communicating results from research receiving public funding and concludes that any publication costs should not be paid by individual researchers.

To achieve this, the Council calls on the Commission and the EU Member States to support policies in favour of non-profit, multi-format, open-access scientific publishing models which are free of cost for authors and readers alike.

The Council’s conclusions have received the public support of higher education and research stakeholders – the European University Association (EUA), Science Europe, Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA), Association of ERC Grantees (AERG), Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc), cOAlition S, etc.

Read more 

Open Science: stakeholders welcome European efforts towards publicly owned and not-for-profit scholarly communication

For European public research and innovation actors, scholarly knowledge is a public good. Publicly funded research and its results should be immediately and openly available to all without barriers such as subscription fees or paywalls. This is essential in driving knowledge forward, promoting innovation and tackling social issues.

Key representative organisations of the public research and innovation sector have welcomed today’s adoption of the ‘Council conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing’.

Read more

Fast-growing open-access journals stripped of coveted impact factors

Web of Science delists some 50 journals, including one of the world’s largest

Author: Jeffrey Brainard

Nearly two dozen journals from two of the fastest growing open-access publishers, including one of the world’s largest journals by volume, will no longer receive a key scholarly imprimatur. On 20 March, the Web of Science database said it delisted the journals along with dozens of others, stripping them of an impact factor, the citation-based measure of quality that, although controversial, carries weight with authors and institutions. The move highlights continuing debate about a business model marked by high volumes of articles, ostensibly chosen for scientific soundness rather than novelty, and the practice by some open-access publishers of recruiting large numbers of articles for guest-edited special issues.

Read more 

ERC study identifies repositories that allow researchers to comply with EU open science rules

A new study identifies repositories for data and publications that could help ERC grantees, as well as beneficiaries of other Horizon Europe grants, comply with EU open science requirements when they share the results of their EU funded projects. The authors of the study analysed 220 repositories and assessed their features.

Experts found more than 90% of “trusted” repositories* to be in line with basic open science requirements. However, only three repositories fulfilled all the mandatory requirements for metadata, and none met both the mandatory and the recommended metadata requirements set out in the Horizon Europe grant agreements.

The study shows that repositories support the open science principles in diverse ways, and that information on repository characteristics is not always publicly available. Moreover, it highlights that it generally takes a high level of technical expertise to assess all requirements and corresponding features of repositories. Guidance in this respect is very much needed.

The study is available for download here

Study on the readiness of research data and literature repositories to facilitate compliance with the Open Science Horizon Europe MGA requirements

ERC News

FWF Open-Access Block Grant Starting in 2024

Since 2019, the FWF has been gradually switching the administration of its funding programs to the new PROFI mode. Starting in 2024, the FWF will be providing a new instrument to support open-access publishing: the FWF open-access block grant.

More information can be found on the FWF website.