Context From June 2020 to February 2021, a consortium of 10 organisations undertook a large-scale study on open access journals across the world that are free for readers and authors, usually referred to as “OA diamond journals”. This study was commissioned by cOAlition S in order to gain a better understanding of the OA diamond landscape. Presentation The study undertook a statistical analysis of several bibliographic databases, surveyed 1,619 journals, collected 7,019 free text submissions and other data from 94 questions, and organised three focus groups with 11 journals and 10 interviews with hosting platforms. It collected 163 references in the academic literature, and inventoried 1048 journals not listed in DOAJ. The results of the study are available in the following outputs: Findings Report - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4558704 Recommendations Report- DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4562790 References Library - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4562816 Journals Inventory - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4562828 Dataset - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4553103 Findings: A wide archipelago of relatively small journals serving diverse communities OA diamond journals are on the road to full compliance with Plan S A mix of scientific strengths and operational challenges An economy that largely depends on volunteers, universities and government

In the past couple of weeks LawArXiv announced they were, no longer able to accept new submissions. Today, we received the following statement from the LawArXiv Steering Committee with some additional details about what happened and plans for the future.

Starting out the year 2021 by looking back at the year 2020 might seem like an exercise in masochism, given the horrific loss of life, the untold economic hardships, the resurgence of white supremacy across the country, and the rampant (and at times utterly incomprehensible) political chaos packed into those 12 months. There were, however, many redeeming aspects of the year, not least of which was a panoply of breathtaking scientific achievements. The development of not just one but several remarkably effective vaccines against COVID-19, a hitherto completely unknown virus, in less than 12 months was unprecedented (and was among the reasons Oxford Languages chose “unprecedented” as one of its choices for “word of the year,” https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/). But even beyond assembling, with astonishing rapidity, the body of knowledge required for successful vaccine development, the scientific community across a broad span of disciplines continued to discover and innovate with inspiring resilience. Like so many other journals, PNAS experienced a surge in manuscript submissions—an increase of about 20% for the year, in fact, resulting in the publication of more than 3,600 research articles this year, compared with ∼3,250 last year.    Fig. 1.  Coronavirus illustration. Image credit: Shutterstock/Lightspring.    It should surprise no one that, of the 30 most highly cited of the 3,600+ published papers, 90% were COVID-related. The 10% of highly cited papers that were unrelated to COVID-19, however, represented major advances on other critical fronts. Two studies (1, 2) addressed climate change, a more slow-moving existential threat to human existence that was clearly not forgotten during the pandemic. Also remaining a high priority was an aspect of racial and economic injustice that strikes at the core of the scientific enterprise, with one paper (3) reporting the results of a study aimed at narrowing achievement gaps in underrepresented minority undergraduates in STEM fields. …

Acknowledgements The future of scholarly communications will be positively impacted by attracting and retaining a pool of highly talented and creative professionals from diverse and/or historically…

This guest post is in response to a recent open post on the OASPA blog and in line with our recent move to use the blog as a platform for open discussions on issues in open access and open research. The views presented in the guest post are the views of Jisc and do not represent the... Read full article >

This guest post is in response to a recent open post on the OASPA blog and in line with our recent move to use the blog as a platform for open discussions on issues in open access and open research. The views presented in the guest post are the views of cOAlition S and do not represent... Read full article >

Governance  Coverage across the research enterprise – it is increasingly clear that research transcends disciplines, geography, institutions and stakeholders. The infrastructure that supports it needs …

A range of private-public partnerships, volunteer and crowdsourced labour, local, national, international and commercial agendas, and competing copyright systems intersect with the important but complicated project of digitization of the world's cultural material. These agendas are sometimes open, social, and collaborative (Edmond 2016; Liu 2016) but are also often closed, profit-driven, or sensitive agendas (Thylstrup 2019). This paper investigates a series of case studies of electronic access to books and cultural heritage, each incorporating some notion of a public-private partnership and some notion of the importance of open access agendas. It explores the metaphors that we use to conceptualize a form of open social scholarship based on an open social digitization agenda, including the HathiTrust’s Digital Library, Google Books, and Microsoft’s partnership with the British Library. The paper asks how the principles of open social scholarship contribute to a better and more nuanced understanding of digitization as a cultural practice and asks how a better understanding of the networks, partnerships, and paperwork (agreements, policies etc) of digitization could inform developments in open social scholarship. The public-private partnerships that surround the digitization of the cultural record assist underfunded cultural organizations to do important digitization work but also introduce complexities and contradictions in open social access to information. In addition, the mix of volunteer and crowdsourced labour operating in collaboration with cultural sector professional staff create intricate chains of value over time, space, and sector. The presence of large-scale corporations inside these arrangements has added another layer of complexity over time, and one that many public stakeholders are still struggling to navigate. The case studies examined here illuminate new facets of the large-scale international agenda of digitization at the social and cultural level and provide insight to help establish a framework for digitization that is open, social, and collaborative. The principles of open scholarship provide a useful first step in unpacking this.

Open access for books and monographs in the humanities is a difficult economic problem to solve. Martin Eve might just have part of the answer.

THE NEXT BIG DEAL I live and work in Winnipeg, in the territories of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Dakota, Dene, Métis, and Oji-Cree Nations. Treaty 1, signed in 1871, took this territory from seven local Anishinaabe First Nations in order to make the land available for settler use and ownership. Winni...

2020-09-30 - By: Tom Gilson  (Associate Editor, Against the Grain)  and Katina Strauch  (Editor, Against the Grain)  Lars Bjørnshauge ATG:  Lars, you founded the -

This is an Open Access Week guest post by Jordan Bunker, prototype engineer and open access advocate.After the world went into lockdown for COVID-19, Makers were suddenly confined to their workshops.

Other rights furnish a foundation for open access or limit access and the application of IPR to reproduction media

Research findings and recommendations for developing a Declaration on Open Access to Cultural Heritage

A longitudinal study of open access levels at 1,207 research institutions worldwide reveals high performing institutions in Latin America, Africa and Asia.