Pablo de Castro, Open Access Advocacy Librarian, University of Strathclyde

Show me the data!

Gates has been one of a handful of funders pushing for open access to published research. In 2017, it’s walking the walk, with grantees now unable to publish in some top journals with restrictive policies.

Nature writer Richard Van Noorden recently asked us for our thoughts about Sci-Hub, since in many ways it’s quite similar to our newest project, oaDOI. We love the idea of comparing the two, and thought he had (as usual) good questions. His recent piece on Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan quotes some of our responses to him; we’re sharing […]

It’s not enough to do groundbreaking research if the results are kept from the public. So CERN is making its results available to everyone via open access, showing how science should be done.

The tongue-in-cheek editorial we wrote for a science journal has been removed after the publisher realized it had posted an editorial sharply criticizing its…

As I’ve written before, Learned Societies are one of the biggest barriers to open access. They derive revenue from publishing that they then use to pay for disciplinary goods (scholarships, prizes, public engagement etc.) Fear of new economic models for scholarly communications sometimes, although not always, drives them away from open access.

From January this year, I am a member of the Universities UK Open Access Monographs Working Group. The aims of the group, in preparation for the mandate for the anticipated Third Research Excellence Framework in the mid-2020s, are to monitor progress towards the practical implementation of open access monographs; to promote and accelerate cultural change towards OA publishing within academia and among traditional publishers; to advise on technical barriers to OA publishing and make recommendations for further work and investment; to promote innovation and diversity in business models for OA book publishing; to advise on how best to overcome perceived and actual policy and legal barriers to OA.

This summer, Ottawa Citizen reporter Tom Spears was sitting by a lake on vacation when he opened a spam email from a publisher. Amused to see the sender was a journal focused on bioethics, he got a…

The most frequent question that is asked in scholarly communication circles about gold open access is whether a business model is sustainable and/or scalable.

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Nice history recap.

As a result of a discussion today, I thought it worth writing out some of my observations/thoughts on a few of the arguments, counter-arguments, and political alignments for and against open access. What, in other words, is the scope of OA? Should it be for work for which authors cannot reasonably expect to make a remuneration by direct sales alone? Or should it be for all educational resources, since education is too valuable to have a price tag?

SPARC is a global organization committed to making Open the default mode for all research and education, empowering people to solve big problems and make new discoveries through the adoption of Open Access, Open Data, and Open Education.

VSNU blinked.

Quebec's first open-access press will allow many more peer-reviewed titles and books to be published. And they will all be free online.