Please join SPARC and COAPI for a Charleston Preconference

 Campus Open Access Policies:
The Importance of Being Open, Earnestly

Wednesday, November 5, 2014
1:00pm – 4:00pm

These sessions will allow participants to learn about developing and implementing campus-wide open access policies, the impact of such policies, and how participants across the library spectrum can play a role in the success of campus open access policies.

Session A: Open Access Policies and Library/Publisher Collaboration for Mutual Success
This session will explore the importance of campus open access policies and how librarians and publishers are working together to bring more scholarly literature to the world. Delivered in the form of question-led panel discussion, this session will demonstrate ways in which librarians and publishers – open access and traditional -- can work together on mutually agreed-upon goals in a productive manner, while ensuring campus open access policies are able to meet the goals their universities have set for greater access to institutional scholarship.

Panelists include:

• Ellen Duranceau, Program Manager for Scholarly Publishing, Copyright & Licensing, MIT
• Laura Bowering Mullen, Behavioral Sciences Librarian and Co-Chair, Rutgers Open Access Policy Implementation Working Group, Rutgers
• Dave Scherer, Scholarly Repository Specialist, Purdue e-Pubs, Purdue
• Julie Kimbrough, Clinical Assistant Professor of Law and Assistant Director for Collections and Access, UNC Chapel Hill
• Nandita Quaderi, Publishing Director, Open Research, Nature Publishing Group
• Elizabeth Marincola, CEO, PLoS

Moderated by: Andrew Wesolek, Clemson University and Shawn Daugherty, SPARC

Session B: The Library Role in Supporting and Implementing Campus Open Access Policies
This session will offer a brief introduction to Open Access Workflows for Academic Librarians (OAWAL), followed by group participation in contributing to the OAWAL resource.

Speakers include:

• Graham Stone, Information Resources Manager, University of Huddersfield
• Jill Emery, Collection Development Librarian, Portland State University

Moderated by: Jen Waller, Miami University - Ohio

International event informed public on the presence of transparency in academia

Sometimes when you hear people talk about open access in the humanities, they’ll say “open access is completely different in the humanities than in the sciences.” But I think this argument is painting with too broad a stroke. If you talk to scientists, you learn there are very different scholarly communications practices even within the sciences; high energy physicists don’t necessarily publish in the same way as zoologists or computer scientists.  There may be more similarities between some scientific and some humanities disciplines than you might think.

This year’s Generation Open theme for International Open Access Week celebrates these significant contributions that students and early career researchers are already making within the Open Access movement and highlights their importance as future faculty, administrators, publishers, and policymakers. Just as Open Access Week has continued to grow since students partnered with SPARC to found it in 2007, it will be exciting to watch the impact the next generation of scholars and researchers has in making Open Access the new default as they launch their careers, publish their own work openly, and make their voices heard.

SPARC is pleased to join with PLOS and OASPA in announcing the release of an update to the popular HowOpenIsIt? Open Access Spectrum (OAS) guide. The guide, initially released in late 2012, is used by authors, libraries, research funders, and policy makers, among others, to map publisher policies against a grid of Open Access considerations, including – reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights, author posting rights, automatic posting, and machine readability. The HowOpenIsIt? Open Access Spectrum guide lays out, in descriptive fashion, the array of polices a journal can have in the continuum between “Open” and “Closed”.

In the nearly two years since this resource was developed, SPARC, PLOS, and OASPA have solicited feedback from the scholarly communication and publishing communities. In addition, we have tested the HowOpenIsIt? Open Access Spectrum guide against more than 100 distinct journal policies, as publically displayed on publisher websites. Based on the results of these conversations and activities, we have modified a number of elements to better reflect some nuances not captured in the initial version. Among the changes are the following:

• An adjustment to the Reuse Rights category to address journals that allow reuse of some, but not all, articles.
• Substantial revisions to the Copyrights column to focus less on which party owns the copyright and more on what authors are allowed to do with their rights.
• The addition of a time dimension within the Author Posting Rights category to accommodate not just what version an author can post and where, but also when.
• The inclusion of language in the Automatic Posting category that encompasses non-biomedical repositories, as well as an adjustment to address journals that automatically post some, but not all, articles.
• A modification of the Machine Readability category to better reflect what is possible and what is practical in today’s publishing environment.

SPARC is eager for scholars, publishers, funding agencies, and other stakeholders to use the HowOpenIsIt? Open Access Spectrum guide as a practical tool to inform authoring choices, policy development, and compliance checking, among other activities.

“Generation Open” Theme Highlights Students and Early Career Researchers

For Immediate Release
October 17, 2014

Contact: Ranit Schmelzer
Phone:  202.538.1065
Email: [email protected]

Washington, DC – Hundreds of events will take place across the globe to highlight the power that Open Access has to increase the impact of scientific and scholarly research during the seventh annual Open Access Week taking place from October 20-26, 2014.

This year’s theme of “Generation Open” highlights the important role that students and early career researchers play as advocates for change, both in the short-term through institutional and governmental policy, and also as the future of the Academy upon whom the ultimate success of the Open Access movement depends. The theme will also explore how changes in scholarly publishing affect scholars and researchers at different stages of their careers.

“Open Access Week has blossomed into an event celebrated at hundreds of institutions on every continent across the world,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC, which created Open Access Week, and works to broaden support for Open Access to scholarly research. “It’s an opportunity for the global community to demonstrate the myriad ways that Open Access is amplifying the impact of research. Students are critical to innovation, so it’s fitting that they are a focal point of year’s Open Access Week program.”

The theme “Generation Open” returns International Open Access Week to its foundation. Begun in 2007 as Open Access Day, the event was originally a partnership between SPARC and students who organized local events on a handful of campuses across the United States. Since then, both student involvement in Open Access and Open Access Week itself have grown exponentially.

Open Access – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – is transforming the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. Providing open access to research has the power to directly enable scientific advancements and innovative job growth in a wide range of fields, from health care to energy to agriculture. Open Access Week, a community-driven, week-long global event, provides an opportunity for all stakeholders in the research community to share the successes they’ve had with Open Access, and to help continue building momentum towards greater adoption of Open Access policies and practices.

Below are just a few examples of the kinds of events and announcements happening during Open Access Week. A full list of activities and events occurring around the globe can be found here.

• Open Access Week kicks off on Monday, October 20th at 3:00 pm EDT at the World Bank in Washington, DC with a forum for students and early career researchers. This lively conversation with an expert panel representing research funders, university administrators, and scholarly societies will explore how the transition to Open Access affects scholars and researchers at different stages of their careers. A free webcast and LiveBlog of the panel discussion will be available at http://live.worldbank.org. Additional details can be found here.

• On Tuesday, the student-led Open Access Button will launch its newest release. The Open Access Button has already mapped nearly 10,000 collisions with journal pay walls around the world, and the new release will feature powerful new tools for connecting researchers with freely accessible copies of articles. The live event (at 1:00 pm EDT) will be streamed at www.openaccessbutton.org.

• In Nepal, students are organizing a three-day conference that will bring together students, librarians, faculty, leading government officials, and others to raise awareness about Open Access and related issues and develop a plan for accelerating the Open Access movement in Nepal.

• In France, students are organizing an Open Access Xsprint, a hackathon that will bring together graphic designers, illustrators, Open Access advocates, and researchers to create resources for promoting Open Access.

• On Wednesday, the School of Open Africa is launching with an event in Kenya.

• At the College of the Holy Cross in the US, students are hosting daily events throughout Open Access Week to raise the profile of the issue on campus.

• On Thursday, a group of Open Access advocates including SPARC, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, Fundacion Karisma, and others will participate in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) that will serve as an open forum and live Q&A on all things Open Access. The AMA will start at 1:00 pm EDT and run for 3-4 hours.

• In South Africa, students from the OpenUCT initiative are developing new ideas for engaging their campus community on Open Access, including a debate on Open Access featuring the University of Cape Town SRC Debating Union team and an “Access Challenge” where students compete to answer questions with and without access to their universities’ online resources.

• Throughout Open Access Week, a coalition of organizations led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation will be promoting a petition in support of Open Access that is in response to the legal charges brought against Diego Gomez, a Colombian graduate student who faces up to eight years in prison for sharing research online.  You can find more information on the pledge here.

• In Nigeria, the student-led Open Access Nigeria organization will run awareness raising efforts on 19 university campuses. These efforts include social media campaigns, pop-up information booths, and workshops of more than 200 participants.

To follow the conversation on Twitter use the hashtags #OAweek2014 or #openaccessweek. For more information, please go to http://www.openaccessweek.org/.

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About SPARC

SPARC^®, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. SPARC is a catalyst for change, and its pragmatic focus is to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries. More information can be found at https://sparcopen.org.

On September 29th, California Governor Jerry Brown signed AB609, The California Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act, into law. This first-of-its-kind legislation requires that articles reporting on research funded by the California Department of Public Health be made openly available to the public through online repositories no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

This legislation, while quite narrow in the scope of content it covers, is a step forward for both California, and for Open Access. This is the first time that a U.S. state has required that any subset of articles reporting on their funded research be made openly available to the public. California, a state known for being a legislative pioneer, understands the power that information sharing can have on developing new products and industries, spurring economic growth, and creating jobs. Based on the highly successful national NIH Public Access policy, AB 609 creates an opportunity for other states to see how an Open Access policy might be deployed on a local level, and lays the groundwork for the adoption of even stronger policies.

As with any legislative endeavor, the passage of AB609 took time and effort. Over the past 18 months, a strong California-based coalition of higher education institutions, libraries, for-and-non-profit organizations, researchers, Open Access publishers, and others committed their time and energy to advocating for AB609, meeting with their elected officials and members of relevant committees, signing onto letters of support and activating their local networks. This coalition is reflective of the growing national network of supporters of Open Access, and sends a strong signal that communities can effectively and efficiently organize in support of policy initiatives that help advance the open sharing of the results of publicly funded research.

In 2001 a meeting on scientific publishing held in Budapest by what was then called the Open Society Institute (now the Open Society Foundation) coined the phrase “open access”. The gathering’s official statement asked the world to “share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation”—in other words, to make scientific papers free to users.

The 2014 International Open Access Week Kickoff Event aims to provide a forum for students and early career researchers to have a lively conversation with an expert panel representing research funders, university administrators, and scholarly societies, exploring how the transition to Open Access affects scholars and researchers at different stages of their careers.

Several society journals published in partnership with BioMed Central (BMC) have seen significant increases in their Impact Factors (IFs) since making the transition to open access (OA), reports the publisher.