Research Guides: Open Science and Citizen Science: ↪ Open Access (OA)

Local, Regional and Global - Open Access Initiatives

OKR - The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

The World Bank is the largest single source of development knowledge. The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.

The Open Access Policy and the OKR represent the third major development in the World Bank’s Open Development Agenda, joining these earlier initiatives:

Open Data Initiative (launched in April 2010): a range of reforms enabling free access to thousands of development indicators, as well as a wealth of information on World Bank project and finance, and
Access to Information Policy (launched in July 2010): a groundbreaking change in how the World Bank makes information available to the public.

By extending and improving access to World Bank research, the World Bank aims to encourage innovation and allow anyone in the world to use Bank knowledge to help improve the lives of those living in poverty. The OKR is constantly updated with new content, as well as legacy reports and research.

The OKR is built on DSpace, the open source platform heavily used in the open access community, powering over 2,000 open repositories, and is interoperable with other repositories. It supports optimal discoverability and re- usability of the content by complying with Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) standards. All OKR metadata is exposed through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

Since its launch in 2012, millions of publications have been downloaded from the OKR, and nearly half of its users are in developing countries. The OKR was named one of ALA RUSA’s “Best Free Reference Web Sites of 2013” The World Bank also received the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition (SPARC) “Open Access Innovator” award in 2012 for the OKR.

SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online (Brazil)

SciELO is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countries and provides an efficient way to increase visibility and access to scientific literature. Originally established in Brazil in 1997, today there are 16 countries in the SciELO network and its journal collections: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

SciELO was initially supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) and the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), along with the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (BIREME). SciELO provides a portal that integrates and provides access to all of the SciELO network sites. Users can search across all SciELO collections or limit the search by a single country collection, or browse by subject area, publisher, or journal title.

Redalyc - Scientific Information System Redalyc (Mexico)

Redalyc is an indexing system that contains open access journals of scientific and editorial quality. After 16 years of providing visibility and supporting the consolidation of journals, it now incorporates exclusively those journals, from any part of the world, that share the non-profit publishing model in order to preserve the scholarly and open nature of scientific communication.

DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high-quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed. All data is freely available.

RePEc - Research Papers in Economics

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 102 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related sciences. The heart of the project is a decentralized bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, books chapters, and software components, all maintained by volunteers. The collected data are then used in various services that serve the collected metadata to users or enhance it.

So far, over 2,200 archives from 103 countries have contributed about 3.8 million research items from 3,750 journals and 5,400 working paper series. Over 64,000 authors have registered and 80,000 email subscriptions are served every week. See below on how you can be part of this initiative.

EconStor (Germany)

EconStor is a publication server for scholarly economic literature, provided as a non-commercial public service by the ZBW. The full texts collected here (mostly working papers, but also journal articles, conference proceedings, etc.) are all freely accessible according to the principles of Open Access. Authors and editors can also submit papers to EconStor free of charge.

EconStor is among the largest repositories in its discipline with 226,671 full-texts. More than 500 institutions use it for the digital dissemination of their publications in Open Access. EconStor is also an important input service for RePEc, where it is one of the most highly frequented archives. Moreover we also distribute our titles to search engines like Google, Google Scholar or BASE and to academic databases like WorldCat, OpenAire and EconBiz.

I4OA - The Initiative for Open Abstracts

The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) is a collaboration between scholarly publishers, infrastructure organizations, librarians, researchers and other interested parties to advocate and promote the unrestricted availability of the abstracts of the world's scholarly publications, particularly journal articles and book chapters, in trusted repositories where they are open and machine-accessible. I4OA calls on all scholarly publishers to open the abstracts of their published works, and where possible to submit them to Crossref.

Hindawi (Egypt)

Hindawi is a commercial publisher of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. Founded in 1997, it currently publishes more than 230 peer-reviewed scientific journals as well as a number of scholarly monographs, with an annual output of roughly 20,000 articles each year. In 2021, Hindawi was purchased by John Wiley & Sons.

As of April 2019, 71 (30%) of its journals were indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded, with a further 107 (46%) journals indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index. The company has its headquarters in London, an office in Cairo, and a virtual office address in New York City. Since 2007, all of Hindawi's journals have been open access and published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). It is a founding member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, a participating publisher and supporter of the Initiative for Open Citations, and a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Frontiers (Switzerland)

Our journals are led and peer-reviewed by editorial boards of over 100,000 top researchers. Covering more than 900 academic disciplines, we are one of the largest and highest-cited publishers in the world. To date, our freely accessible research articles have received over 1 billion views and downloads and 1.6 million citations.

We strive to continuously empower the academic community with innovative solutions that improve how science is published, evaluated, and communicated to researchers, innovators, and the public.

BASE (Germany)

BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.

It is indexing the metadata of all kinds of academically relevant resources – journals, institutional repositories, digital collections etc. – which provide an OAI interface and use OAI-PMH for providing their contents (see our Golden Rules for Repository Managers).

Pluto Journals (United Kingdom)

Pluto Journals, the social sciences publisher based in London, UK, has announced a pilot to transform its complete journal portfolio of 21 titles to Open Access (OA) from 2021 onwards. The project “Pluto Open Journals” will be realised in partnership with Knowledge Unlatched and supported by the conceivers of the ground-breaking Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) model Libraria, a group of anthropologists and other social scientists committed to Open Access. Pluto Journals will be asking those libraries and institutions currently subscribing to any of the journals to renew for 2021 on a S2O basis, thus, contributing to making these journals completely free to readers and authors all over the world. The flip is, furthermore, supported by JSTOR, who will continue to provide the hosting service for the project.

Open Access Review of Climate and Biodiversity Research

Open Climate Campaign

The Open Climate Campaign can help you create, adopt and implement a new or update an existing open access policy.
We offer training on how to add text to your open assets so that others can freely use them, adjust your website, update your terms of service, and advertise your open assets.

In terms of Open Access

This campaign wants to increase open access to climate science and biodiversity research. They work with bibliometric experts to determine the percent of open vs. closed climate science and biodiversity research and publish the results openly.

All you need to know about Open Access

Open Access by Peter Suber
ISBN: 9780262517638
Publication Date: 2012-07-20
A concise introduction to the basics of open access, describing what it is (and isn't) and showing that it is easy, fast, inexpensive, legal, and beneficial.The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work "open access"- digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent, and many authors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creators who depend on royalties are understandably unwilling to give their consent. But for 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journal articles for impact, not for money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue. In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn't, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. Distilling a decade of Suber's influential writing and thinking about open access, this is the indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers.

Plan S
Plan S is an initiative for Open Access publishing that was launched in September 2018. The plan is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations. Plan S requires that, from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms.

Plan S: Annual Review2022. Accelerating Open Access by cOAlition S
Publication Date: February 2023
At cOAlition S, we are committed to accelerating the open-access transition. As an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations, along with the European Commission, we have been rolling out policies and tools since 2018 to achieve the goal of Plan S.
In this annual report, we present an overview of our activities in 2022 and the latest news on our policies, tools, and services. We also outline our support for various publishing models and highlight specific initiatives of cOAlition S funders. In the last section, we preview our plans for 2023 as we look toward the future of scholarly communication.

Declarations

Budapest Open Access Initiative by Open Society Foundations
Publication Date: 2002
The BOAI is a statement of principle, a statement of strategy, and a statement of commitment. The initiative was signed by the Budapest participants and thousands of individuals and organizations from around the world who represent researchers, universities, laboratories, libraries, foundations, journals, publishers, learned societies, and kindred open-access initiatives.
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities by Max Planck Society
Publication Date: 2003
The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access.
We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges of the Internet as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge. Obviously, these developments will be able to significantly modify the nature of scientific publishing as well as the existing system of quality assurance.
In accordance with the spirit of the Declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the ECHO Charter and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, we have drafted the Berlin Declaration to promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base and human reflection and to specify measures which research policymakers, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives, and museums need to consider.
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing by Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Publication Date: 2003
The following statements of principle were drafted during a one-day meeting held on April 11, 2003 at the headquarters of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The purpose of this document is to stimulate discussion within the biomedical research community on how to proceed, as rapidly as possible, to the widely held goal of providing open access to the primary scientific literature. Our goal was to agree on significant, concrete steps that all relevant parties —the organizations that foster and support scientific research, the scientists that generate the research results, the publishers who facilitate the peer-review and distribution of results of the research, and the scientists, librarians and other who depend on access to this knowledge— can take to promote the rapid and efficient transition to open access publishing.
Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization by WIPO
Publication Date: 2004
On October 4, 2004, the General Assembly of the World Intellectual Property Organization agreed to adopt a proposal offered by Argentina and Brazil, the "Proposal for the Establishment of a Development Agenda for WIPO" (sometimes referred to as "Item 12" because of its placement listing on the meeting's agenda). This proposal was strongly supported by developing countries, as well as by a large contingent of civil society. Prior to the General Assembly meeting, hundreds of nonprofits, scientists, academics and other individuals had signed the "Geneva Declaration on the Future of WIPO," which calls on WIPO to focus more on the needs of developing countries, and to view IP as one of many tools for development - not as an end in itself.
Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship by Duke Law School
Publication Date: 2009
The undersigned believe that it will benefit legal education and improve the dissemination of legal scholarly information if law schools commit to making the legal scholarship they publish available in stable, open, digital formats in place of print. To accomplish this end, law schools should commit to making agreed-upon stable, open, digital formats, rather than print, the preferable formats for legal scholarship. If stable, open, digital formats are available, law schools should stop publishing law journals in print and law libraries should stop acquiring print law journals. We believe that, in addition to their other benefits, these changes are particularly timely in light of the financial challenges currently facing many law schools.
San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment by American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB)
Publication Date: 2012
The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. The declaration was developed in 2012 during the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco. It has become a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines and all key stakeholders including funders, publishers, professional societies, institutions, and researchers. We encourage all individuals and organizations who are interested in developing and promoting best practice in the assessment of scholarly research to sign DORA.

[ARTICLE] The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles
Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles. We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigate OA in three populations: (1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, (2) recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and (3) articles viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that lets users find OA articles using oaDOI. We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made freeto-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license. We also examine the citation impact of OA articles, corroborating the so-called open-access citation advantage: accounting for age and discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA. We encourage further research using the free oaDOI service, as a way to inform OA policy and practice.
Gratis and Libre OA
Extends user’s rights to read and also to reuse literature for purposes like automated crawling, archiving, or other purposes. The Libre OA definition is quite similar to the BOAI definition of OA.

Diamond OA Model
Not-for-profit, non-commercial organizations, associations or networks publish material that is made available online in digital format, is free of
charge for readers and authors and does not allow commercial and for-profit re-use.
Gold OA or Corporate OA Model
Articles are published in an ‘‘OA journal,’’ a journal in which all articles are open directly on the journal website. In practice, OA journals are most often defined by their inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
Green OA
Green articles are published in a toll-access journal but self-archived in an OA archive. These ‘‘OA archives’’ are either disciplinary repositories like ArXiv, or ‘‘institutional repositories (IRs) operated by universities, and the archived articles may be either the published versions, or electronic preprints. Most Green OA articles do not meet the BOAI definition of OA since they do not extend reuse rights (making them Gratis OA).

Hybrid OA [Paywall Article - Access via WBL]
Articles are published in a subscription journal but are immediately free to read under an open license, in exchange for an article processing charge (APC) paid by authors.
Bronze OA
Free to read on the publisher page, but without a clearly identifiable license.
Black OA
Articles shared on illegal pirate sites, primarily Sci-Hub and LibGen. Although (Björk, 2017) labels these articles as a subtype of OA, the literature has nearly no support for including Sci-Hub articles in definitions of OA. Given this, we exclude Sci-Hub and LibGen content from our definition of OA.

Source: Based on: Shafee, Thomas (2020). Typical publishing workflow for an academic journal article (preprint, postprint, and published) with open access sharing rights per SHERPA/RoMEO. Own work; adapted from diagram by Ginny Barbour Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0 International)

Preprint - Definition
A preprint is a scholarly work that has not (yet) undergone peer review. The term is sometimes also used to refer to the manuscript version of a work that is submitted for publication to a journal or a publisher.

Preprints: Their Evolving Role in Science Communication by Iratxe Puebla, Jessica Polka and Oya Y. Rieger
ISBN: 9781941269503
Publication Date: 2022
This briefing discusses the history and role of preprints in the biological sciences within the evolving open science landscape. The focus is on the explosive growth of preprints as a publishing model and the associated challenges of maintaining technical infrastructure and establishing sustainable business models. A preprint is a scholarly manuscript posted by the author(s) to a repository or platform to facilitate open and broad sharing of early work without any limitations to access. Currently there are more than 60 preprint servers representing different subject and geographical domains, each one evolving at a different based on adoption patterns and disciplinary ethos. This briefing will offer invaluable help to those who wish to understand this rapidly evolving publishing model.

Subject Pre-Print Repositories

Challenges in Developing Countries

[ARTICLE/BLOG] Open access ‘excludes’ developing world scientists
Pay-to-publish models adopted by science journals ‘exacerbate the exclusion of researchers from the global South’.
Open access publishing is excluding many developing world scientists as complex fee waiver systems fall short, say leading researchers.
The models, which make research free to read by charging authors to publish their work, have been promoted by funders as a way to give more people access to scientific research.
[ARTICLE/BLOG] Open Access and Global South: It is More Than a Matter of Inclusion
In the second week of January, the Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) meeting offered one of the first international scholarly publishing events of 2021. A panel discussion, organized by Elsevier in this all-virtual conference, brought in the views of researchers, editors, and publishers from Bangladesh, Cameroon, and Gambia on Open Access (OA).
In the second week of January, the Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) meeting offered one of the first international scholarly publishing events of 2021. A panel discussion, organized by Elsevier in this all-virtual conference, brought in the views of researchers, editors, and publishers from Bangladesh, Cameroon, and Gambia on Open Access (OA).
Last June, the STM Association and the International Center for the Study of Research (ICSR) produced a white paper on how to make an OA transition equitable for the researchers of Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). The study talks about the Global South’s presence in the academic and OA publishing arenas over the last decade or so, reasons behind the seen trends, and possible actions to improve South’s inclusion in the OA system. The APE panel discussion started with a presentation on this white paper to set the scene. While going through this paper, I recognized four issues, which I thought worth sharing in my remarks as an APE panellist from Bangladesh.
[ARTICLE/BLOG] When more is more: A DORA Community Discussion on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication (Part 1)
The globalization of research has led to the simultaneous rise of English as the recognized language of scholarship and the decline of national and local languages in scholarly communication. Yet disseminating research in diverse languages allows geographically and culturally relevant research results to be accessible to regional actors, creating impact and fostering interactions between science and society. In recent years, research evaluation systems, often relying on global bibliometric indices, have evolved to favor outputs in the modern lingua franca, English. Having a lingua franca has benefited academia: it has enabled collaboration, knowledge sharing and international debate across cultures. However, the requirement to communicate in English is also viewed as a form of marginalization, and not fitting to all the purposes of scholarship (such as informing the public and decision makers in all—not just anglophone—countries). In recent years, the global research community has begun to question the robustness of a system that prefers one language over others. This has resulted in numerous calls to action, such as the Helsinki Initiative which draws attention to the importance of multilingualism and ‘bibliodiversity’ in scholarship.
[ARTICLE/BLOG] When more is more: Broad calls for Multilingualism and Evaluation Reform (Part 2)
In recent years, numerous initiatives have highlighted linguistic biases embedded in current evaluation processes and have called for change. The DORA-hosted community discussion on multilingualism in scholarly evaluation (covered in an earlier blog) was inspired by actions others have taken to address these issues. In January 2019, a group of scholars drafted the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication, calling on actors across the research system to “support dissemination of research results for the full benefit of society, to protect national infrastructures for publishing locally relevant research and to promote language diversity in research assessment, evaluation and funding systems.” The founding signatories of the Helsinki Declaration recognize the “significant structural differences in scholarly communication between countries and disciplines.”
[ARTICLE/NEWS] Open-access publishing fees deter researchers in the global south
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Open-access papers have drastically fewer lead authors from low-income regions than do paywalled articles, an analysis of tens of thousands of articles shows. The findings suggest that the fees that journals charge to publish articles open access pose a barrier for authors in low- and middle-income countries — something that scientists had previously suspected but found difficult to demonstrate.
Increasing numbers of scholarly journals — including Nature — have been making their articles open access, driven in part by requirements from funders (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher Springer Nature). Although this shift has been making the scholarly literature more widely accessible, many researchers have noted that the article-processing charges (APCs) typically required to publish research open access can deter authors from using this option.
[ARTICLE] Open Access in low- and middle-income countries: attitudes and experiences of researchers [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations]
Open Access (OA) is often considered as particularly beneficial to researchers in the Global South. However, research into awareness of and attitudes to OA has been largely dominated by voices from the Global North. A survey was conducted of 507 researchers from the developing world and connected to INASP’s AuthorAID project to ascertain experiences and attitudes to OA publishing. The survey revealed problems for the researchers in gaining access to research literature in the first place. There was a very positive attitude to OA research and OA journals, but when selecting a journal in which to publish, OA was seen as a much less important criterion than factors relating to international reputation. Overall, a majority of respondents had published in an OA journal and most of these had paid an article processing charge. Knowledge and use of self-archiving via repositories varied, and only around 20% had deposited their research in an institutional repository. The study also examined attitudes to copyright, revealing most respondents had heard of Creative Commons licences and were positive about the sharing of research for educational use and dissemination, but there was unease about research being used for commercial purposes. Respondents revealed a surprisingly positive stance towards openly sharing research data, although many revealed that they would need further guidance on how to do so. The survey also revealed that the majority had received emails from so called ‘predatory’ publishers and that a small minority had published in them.
Keywords
[ARTICLE/COMMENT] Redesign open science for Asia, Africa and Latin America
Last year, my colleagues and I organized a webinar on open science, with a focus on Indonesia. One participating university experienced blackouts owing to a faulty electricity grid. At another, a generator exploded. At a third, political riots had damaged buildings.

Perhaps most people reading this article would find such constraints intolerable, but the reactions were inspiring. People regrouped and found ways to attend the webinar, or to access it later. We advertised through Twitter and by word-of-mouth and expected only a few attendees — but more than 1,000 academics, government workers, students and journalists participated. The message was loud and clear: Indonesia wants to produce good research.
[REPORT] Open Access: challenges and opportunities for Low- and Middle-Income Countries and the potential impact of UK policy
Report of a consultation commissioned by FCDO in collaboration with National Institute for Health Research and UK Research and Innovation.
Open access (OA) aims to make the published outputs of research widely and freely accessible to all, under conditions that allow maximum reuse. OA is central to the UK Government’s ambitions for research and innovation. Public funders the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) which is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) are reviewing their OA policies and working collaboratively to understand how to take forward the Government’s ambitions. INASP was commissioned to undertake a consultation on behalf of the FCDO, in cooperation with the NIHR and UKRI, to understand the challenges and opportunities that OA presents to Low- and Middle-Income country (LMIC) stakeholders. The consultation was commissioned in the context of a significant increase in the UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA)-funded research spending, and a wish to ensure that OA policies and their implementation are successful in promoting OA and supporting the wider research and innovation environment, nationally and internationally. As part of this funders need to understand wider policy implications, positive or negative, and supporting actions they could take to support policy implementation and OA more broadly.

Africa

[BOOK CHAPTER] 1: Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon by Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou
Call Number: Full-text
ISBN: 9780262536240
Publication Date: 2020-10-20
In: Reassembling Scholarly Communications. Martin Paul Eve (Editor); Jonathan Gray (Editor). 2020 25-40 pages.
Twenty years into the twenty- first century, it must regrettably be admitted that open access (OA) has not fulfilled the lofty ambitions set out in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2002. Instead of reducing publication costs, accelerating the dissemination of scientific information, ensuring the visibility of scientific publications, and promoting barrier- free access to scientific information, OA now often seems to reinforce and to create new inequalities.

Asia

[ARTICLE] A review of the open-access scenario in Afghanistan
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Open access movement is getting increased in Asia and the Pacific and has been started in the form of subject gateways, informal collections of articles on web pages and directories. Many Asian countries adopted the transition to Open Access journals and full-text repositories and digital libraries. Open access also helps to underprivilege countries to spread their research output. But third-world Islamic countries are far away from open access and its implementations. The purpose of this paper is to focus on open-access e-resource development in Afghanistan.
[ARTICLE] Open Access E Resources Development in India and China: A Comparative Study
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Open access is gaining popularity in Asian countries. Subject gateways, institutional repositories are rapidly increasing in Asia. Major countries in Asia have adopted information technology for providing information services. As well as internet connectivity is also growing, so many librarians are using ICT technology to build their institutional repository services which is helpful for growth of open access. India and China are strong countries in Asia. China is already leading ahead among all Asian countries in terms of research output, while India is also focusing on major research activities. This Both these countries witnessed the transition to open access journals and full text repositories and digital libraries. This paper study will try to find out open access e e-resources development in India and China.
[ARTICLE] Open Access Initiatives in Western Asia
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This paper highlights open access activities and resources from Western Asia. The development of open access journals from this region is analyzed through regional listings in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and information about the development and implementation of open access repositories is taken from the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) platform. Additional information about OA resources and development projects was found through UNESCO’s Global Open Access Portal. The study’s findings show that, even with support from international groups like EIFL and OpenAIRE, the region’s open access market lags behind that of more developed countries. Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) stand out among Western Asian states, and Cyprus took the important step of instituting a national public open access policy. Awareness projects and workshops will be a vital step in helping the countries of Western Asia to see the value of open access and to build a stronger OA infrastructure.
[REPORT] Asia Open Access Survey: A Report on Publication Accessibility
This report presents the results of a survey of open access activities in Asia undertaken in early 2017. The survey was carried out by Asia OA, a special forum hosted by COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) supporting members of the Asian open access community to share information, meet each other, and foster relationships. The continent of Asia is rapidly increasing in prominence on the world stage, both in terms of R&D as well as scientific production. According to the UNESCO World Science Report (2015), the region encompasses “close to half of global economic output (45%) and expenditure on research and development (R&D,42%) and is home to both some of the world’s most dynamic technological powerhouses”. In terms of research outputs, the Asian continent is already prolific and is growing quickly, with China poised to become the world’s leading country in terms of number of published research articles. 2Aswithothercontinents, open access policies, and practices are being adopted in Asia, although progress varies greatly across the different jurisdictions and locations. This report provides an account of the current state of open access in 16 regions of Asia. It is expected that the survey results will contribute to the adoption of open access and help various regions make the case for greater investment in open access, both in terms of policies, as well as national and local infrastructure.

LAC

[PRE-PRINT] Decolonizing Scholarly Communications through Bibliodiversity
Diversity is an important characteristic of any healthy ecosystem. In the field of scholarly communications, diversity in services and platforms, funding mechanisms and evaluation measures will allow the ecosystem to accommodate the different workflows, languages, publication outputs and research topics that support the needs of different research communities. Diversity also reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, which leads to monopolization and high prices. Yet this ‘bibliodiversity’ is undermined by the fact that researchers around the world are evaluated according to journal-based citation measures, which have become the major currency of academic research. Journals seek to maximize their bibliometric measures by adopting editorial policies that increase citation counts, resulting in the predominance of Northern/Western research priorities and perspectives in the literature, and an increasing marginalization of research topics of more narrow or local nature. This contribution examines the distinctive, non-commercial approach to open access (OA) found in Latin America and reflects on how greater diversity in OA infrastructures helps to address inequalities in global knowledge production as well as knowledge access. The authors argue that bibliodiversity, rather than adoption of standardized models of OA, is central to the development of a more equitable system of knowledge production.

[BOOK CHAPTER] 20: Toward Linked Open Data for Latin America by Arianna Becerril-Garcia and Eduardo Aguado-López
Call Number: Full-text
ISBN: 9780262536240
Publication Date: 2020-10-20
In: Reassembling Scholarly Communications. Martin Paul Eve (Editor); Jonathan Gray (Editor). 2020 285-296 pages.
Scholarly communication is perhaps the phase in the research life cycle that has most seized the opportunity to broaden inclusion through the use of information technologies. Open access has promoted free and unrestricted access to scientific content, especially, driven by mandates, when it has been publicly funded. OA holds out the promise of a global scientific dialogue that would allow for a more inclusive, global research ecosystem. Globalization has indeed become the ultimate goal in scientific practice, in which the circulation of knowledge generated in all regions is expected to have worldwide visibility. Often, this goal of global visibility has been equated with journals’ presences in “mainstream” databases such as Web of Science (WoS) or Scopus. Those outside the Global North are encouraged to publish in journals indexed by these databases if their contributions are to have international visibility (although this is not guaranteed), but also so that these publications are viewed as high quality.

Europe

[REPORT] Progress on open science: Towards a shared research knowledge system : final report of the open science policy platform
This final report of the EU Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP) provides a brief overview of its four-year mandate from 2016 to 2020, followed by an update on progress by each stakeholder group over the past two years since the publication of the OSPP’s recommendations across the European Commission’s eight ambitions on Open Science, (OSPP-REC). This summary of Practical Commitments for Implementation with specific examples of progress by each stakeholder community across Europe) is followed by a perspective from each group on the major outstanding blockers to progress and possible next steps. The group of 25 key stakeholder representatives have then come together to propose a vision for moving beyond Open Science to create a shared research knowledge system by 2030.

[BOOK] Implementing Responsible Research and Innovation Organisational and National Conditions by Christian WittrockEllen-Marie ForsbergAuke PolsPhilip MacnaghtenDavid Ludwig
Call Number: Full-text
ISBN: 9783030578503
Publication Date: 2021
Written by important researchers in the field who have been brought together in one of the most important RRI projects in Horizon Europe? The only book to provide a comprehensive assessment of the organizational mechanisms and contexts that influence how RRI can be implemented in organizations. Provides the most comprehensive study of how to achieve institutional change in the research system.

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