Session 10: A New Paradigm: Open Access and the Diamond Model
Friday 7th July – 9:00 – 10:30
Chair: TBC
10.1: Recalibrating the Scope of Scholarly Publishing
Presenters:
Saurabh Khanna, Stanford University, United States
Mark Huskisson, OPERAS and Public Knowledge Project, United Kingdom
Scholarly communication is more of a global endeavour than is commonly credited. By studying and reporting on journals that employ the open-source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS) from PKP, of the 8.7m articles published in 34,000 journals, about 80% were from the Global South. In addition, 84% of these journals followed the OA diamond model (charging neither reader nor author).
Importantly for developments in the EU and beyond, OJS is freely available, open-source software that enables autonomous research publishing outside of the commercial publishing system. And, importantly, it encourages bibliodiversity in Scholarly Publishing with research published in over 60 languages in more than 146 countries – with over 50% publishing in more than one language. Supporting the community that aligns with the 2019 Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism to create diverse communicative spaces.
But these journals are largely invisible as they are not represented in major bibliographic databases/indexes such as Web of Science and Scopus. This warns us that so much relevant scientific information in the global knowledge base is unheeded if we only concentrate our systematic reviews in WoS or Scopus.
The author suggests, from this data and research, that another world of scholarly communication – more broadly global, diverse, and inclusive – is already unfolding in ways that need now to be counted and studied for the benefit of all.
Building open infrastructure for Open Access is critical: enabling small, autonomous presses and journals to not only survive but thrive – on a truly global scale.
10.2: Back to the future: Modernizing European repositories for the era of Open Science
Presenter: Eloy Rodrigues, University of Minho Libraries, Portugal
Open science is ushering in a new paradigm for research; one in which all researchers have unprecedented access to the full corpus of research for analysis, text and data mining, and other novel research methods. A prerequisite for achieving this vision, in a sustainable, equitable and innovative way, is a strong and well-functioning network of repositories that provides human and machine access to a wide range of valuable research outputs. Repositories also support much needed bibliodiversity in the system as they collect a diverse range of content types, domains and languages, and are fundamental for achieving Europe’s desired changes to research evaluation, whereby “assessment of research, researchers and research organisations recognises the diverse outputs, practices and activities that maximise the quality and impact of research”.
With the exciting new functionalities being introduced through the COAR Notify Project – such as linking repository resources with peer review services – repositories are poised to take on an even more expansive role in the scholarly communications landscape, including being part of the diamond OA publishing ecosystem. Repositories, in particular, can play a key role in an innovative new model of publishing, referred to as “Publish-Review-Curate”, which requires that authors first post a preprint of their article in an open-access repository in order to be considered for peer review and publishing.
Europe has one of the most well-developed networks globally with hundreds of repositories, many of which are hosted by libraries. Indeed, 20 years after their introduction as key open-access infrastructures, institutional repositories have become a standard service offering for academic libraries in Europe, with the aim of making the research outputs created by their faculty widely available. However, there are significant variations across the European repository landscape with differing levels of support and funding; and, while some countries have strong national coordination, others do not. In a practical sense, this means that some repositories have access to the resources they need to provide a well-functioning service, while others find it a challenge to maintain up-to-date software platforms and suitable staffing levels.
In January 2023, OpenAIRE, LIBER, SPARC Europe, and COAR launched a joint strategy aimed at strengthening the European repository network. Through this strategy, the organisations will work together – and with other relevant organisations – to develop and execute an action plan that will reinforce and enhance repositories in Europe, helping them to take on this new and expanded role in the ecosystem.
As a first step, a survey will be undertaken to gain a better understanding of the current repository landscape in Europe and identify priority areas of action. The survey will be disseminated in February 2023 with the aim of having the initial results available in May 2023. This presentation will provide an overview of our future vision for repositories in Europe, present the results of the survey, and discuss the next steps for how we can progress from the current position towards our future vision.
10.3: Open Access Diamond, a French perspective
Presenters:
Jean-François Lutz, University of Lorraine, France
Pierre Mounier, OpenEdition, France
Open and Trusted: the Open Access (OA) Diamond model is well positioned to meet these two challenges, chosen as the main theme for the LIBER 2023 conference.
The extensive study commissioned by cOAlition S, published in spring 2021, was a long-awaited landmark. It made it possible to map the landscape of Diamond journals worldwide and highlighted the challenges associated with this model in terms of quality standards, networking (‘building bridges between the islands of the Diamond archipelago’) and financial sustainability.
France has placed the OA Diamond model at the heart of its strategy to support scientific publishing as reflected in the Jussieu Call for bibliodiversity (2017) and in the two National Plans for Open Science (2018 and 2021). In France, OA Diamond is thus considered as one of the main pillars of open science. This is also the theme of a policy position paper, to be published in spring 2023, which will form the core of the proposed intervention.
This proposed intervention (in the form of a presentation) is made on behalf of the French Committee for Open Science. It aims to show how the French OA Diamond ecosystem has been built up over the last 20 years, highlighting the innovation dynamics (OpenEdition freemium, overlay journals, PCI, journal incubators, etc.) and how the challenges raised by the Diamond study are taken into account. The involvement of French actors in the EU-funded DIAMAS project coordinated by OpenEdition (Aix-Marseille University) will also be detailed.
Particular attention will be paid to the actors of this ecosystem and to their interactions: publishing houses, scientific communities, infrastructure and platform providers and libraries. For research libraries, the way in which OA Diamond allows both to promote an independent and inclusive approach to scientific publishing as well as to connect with scientific communities will be highlighted. In particular, the involvement of French libraries in Diamond publishing is reflected by a strong investment in journal incubators (Univ. Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Nice, etc.) gathered within a national network. Libraries are also involved in financing the transition of the economic model of traditional journals, either individually (Univ. Lorraine) or collectively in the framework of Subscribe to Open agreements (Couperin consortium).
The presentation will also discuss how French private publishers position themselves in relation to the issue of OA Diamond (between favourable reception, incomprehension and outright hostility) and how the Committee for Open Science responds to this.
Finally, the presentation will propose perspectives in the medium and long term on how to make this pillar of open science a sustainable infrastructure at a time when the budgets of higher education institutions are under severe constraints and the needs of journals and publishing houses are growing to develop in quality.
The presentation will be made in two voices, in order to underline the complementarity of the actors of the Diamond model: a librarian and a publisher.