International Repository Networks want to expand and strengthen their collaboration
There have been numerous ongoing efforts to bring open access repository networks from around the world closer. This also includes major efforts to align ever expanding repository networks. Recently Confederation of Open access Repositories (COAR), taking the lead, has organized a meeting which was held on April 16, 2015. The meeting was held in Port, Portugal. This meeting was held for the second time in a row. Representatives from all corners of the world attended the meeting. The meeting’s main area of focus was on finding sustainable ways of implementing open access and research infrastructure.
Research is an output of strong collaboration. There is also increasing international dimension in it. Repositories are intended to facilitate and speed up research output’s dissemination and consumption. This makes the need to align repository networks imperative. Repositories can collaborate around major issues such as open access polices, standards and services.
Participants of the meeting shared about their experiences and local networks. What had been made clear, out of the meeting, was that repositories have progressed over the years. And now they are in a better position to enter deep international collaboration. Meeting participants reviewed the progress has been made since their previous meeting. They looked into details as what has been changed, particularly, in the areas of open access elements and metadata harmonization and improving repository networks global visibility.
Out of the meeting came a resolution to further align repository networks. In order to realize these objectives different kinds of activities will be carried out. Those activities, by in large, include enhancing collaboration around developing tools and guidelines. To improve global visibility of repositories more work will be done with policy makers and other stakeholders.
Sorce: COAR
Asian Development Bank Embraces Open Access
Since it was founded in 1966, the Asian Development Bank has been the leading organization fighting poverty in the Asian and Pacific region. The organisation set its goal to enhance economic collaboration by investing in regional projects. Currently, the Asian Development Bank has 67 members. All of them are countries funding the projects.
The Asian development bank uses scientific research to optimise the use of available funds. Since February, all of their publications are collected in the Open Access Repository (OAR). Together with the launch of their new repository, the ADB stated in their news article they decided to switch to an open access mindset. They also adopted more liberal terms of use for their published content, argumenting that publicly funded research should be accessible to all without requiring any form of payment. The underlying idea is when access to information is restricted for some, this will slow down further scientific research, which is disadvantageous for all parties involved.
Currently the Open Access repository holds more than 3000 research items from the Asian Development Bank. In the near future the repository will grow until it holds over 5000 items including research dating back to ADB’s early days. Even non digitized content or content that’s currently not archived will eventually be added to the repository.
Sorce: Duraspace
There is good news for researchers and analysts looking for research papers produced or sponsored by the government. The National Institute for Standards and Technology will be establishing a “free-to-read” repository of academic articles.
NIST’s public access plan is aimed to comply with policy directives from the White House regarding open access to the results of research funded by the federal government. The agency will partner with the National Institutes of Health to use the existing PubMed Central as the repository of full-text peer-reviewed scholarly publications for NIST, leveraging the search, archival and dissemination features of PMC.
Articles with research and reporting funded by NIST will be archived for free on an NIST server beginning in October 2016. However, access to archived journal articles will begin only after a 12-month embargo from the date of the paper’s publication.
NIST’s plan for providing public access to data consists of three components:
Data management plans providing documentation of plans for storage, archival and accessibility for NIST’s multiple types of data.
An enterprise data inventory, which is a catalog of the datasets that are generated via NIST-sponsored research that will let researchers link those datasets to the scientific literature and other datasets.
A common access platform that will deliver a production-level infrastructure populated with persistent identifiers and metadata for all publicly available NIST data, and will provide for interoperability within NIST and potentially with other federal agencies.
The Department of Energy signed an agreement with CHORUS, the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States, to provide indexing and public access to research articles that acknowledge DOE funding. CHORUS will supply an ongoing feed of DOE-affiliated journal article metadata and links to full-text articles on publisher websites. “Formalizing this collaboration can only propel our acquisition process leading to more comprehensive coverage of the landscape of articles,” Jeffrey Salmon, of the Department of Energy Office of Science, wrote in a related blog post.
NASA and the Department of Defense are also adapting online databases to host unclassified research articles.
Sorce: GCN
After a decade of often fierce debate over whether the public should have free access to the scientific papers produced by their tax dollars, advocates for so-called open access celebrated a notable victory last month: The National Science Foundation (NSF) unveiled a plan to require its grantees to make their research freely available. NSF’s move meant that the federal agencies that provide the bulk of the nation’s basic and applied research funding have now complied with a 2013 White House order to make the peer-reviewed papers they fund freely available within 12 months of publication. The order, which applies to federal agencies that spend more than $100 million a year on research and development, will ultimately make hundreds of thousands of scientific papers once hidden behind paywalls available to anyone with an Internet connection. For the typical U.S. scientist with a federal research grant, the new public access mandate means they will need to follow the example of researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Since 2008, NIH grantees have been required to send their accepted manuscripts or final published paper to the agency’s PubMed Central full-text archive. Researchers may deposit the paper themselves through a special Web portal, or the journal may do it for them. At most agencies, those who ignore the mandate will not get credit for their papers during reviews of funding proposals or job performance. The details of how the public will get access to the full-text papers vary by agency. Some, including NASA, will share papers through a full-text archive similar to PubMed Central, which has grown to hold more than 3 million full-text papers. Open-access advocates prefer this model because they say it allows for simpler text and data mining across an entire corpus of articles. But two agencies, NSF and the Department of Energy, have heeded concerns from publishers that full-text archives will divert eyeballs from their sites and cut into advertising revenue. They are building portals that provide only a paper’s abstract and other metadata; links will take users to the full-text article on the publisher’s website.
Sorce: Science
EUA this week launched the ‘Open Access checklist for universities: A practical guide on implementation’, a concise document to support universities in developing institutional policies on Open Access to research publications.
The Open Access checklist is addressed to higher education and research institutions that are developing, or planning to develop, a policy on Open Access to research publications. It is intended as a general guide in the development of institutional policies on Open Access and can be useful for different stakeholders, including the leadership, administration, librarians and researchers.
The checklist contains key information on Open Access, such as benefits, challenges and ways of implementing it, as well as strategic, practical and economic aspects that should be considered when developing Open Access policy. It also includes links to resources and highlights some of the main findings of the EUA survey on Open Access conducted in 2014.
The checklist complements and extends previous EUA work in this field. Specifically, in the context of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between EUA and the European Commission in 2012, EUA committed to encourage universities to implement Open Access policies at the institutional level and created a taskforce composed of experts representing three National Rectors’ Conferences (France, CPU; Netherlands, VSNU; and the French Community of Belgium, CRef) to monitor developments.
In September 2014, EUA published a briefing paper on Open Access to research publications, focusing on European policy developments, and later that year a survey addressed to EUA universities was conducted on the implementation of Open Access policies. The survey results highlighted a need for practical guidelines on Open Access implementation and the checklist was developed to address that concern.
Looking ahead, EUA’s work in this area will include a re-launch of the Open Access survey, foreseen for autumn 2015, in order to gather a longitudinal perspective on the development and implementation of Open Access policies in European universities. In addition, and building on the work of the taskforce, a new expert group with a broader remit is being established. The new group will focus on topics such as the ‘Science 2.0′ movement, open data and text and data mining, and will provide support to EUA in the EU-level dialogue on Open Access.
Sorce: European University Association