Applications for grants from Boston College’s Open Access Publishing Fund will open on June 3rd! Faculty, students and staff are encouraged to apply. Open access can be expensive, so the fund assists authors in making their new work available via open access when they do not have other grant funding. Applications can be submitted before an article is accepted, but the intended journal needs to be listed on the application.
Last fiscal year, the fund awarded more than $30,000 of grants for twenty-one publications, including an open access monograph. While open access may be most prevalent in the natural sciences, many different disciplines have taken advantage of the fund. Please contact Elliott Hibbler if you have any questions.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has received funding from Congress to continue its implementation of the Nelson Memo. This memo requires any federal agency that awards research grants to implement a policy requiring immediate public access to publications resulting from that research, as well as access to data and the use of persistent digital identifiers in article metadata.
During the lengthy Federal appropriations process, the House Appropriations Committee released a bill that specifically defunded any attempt to implement the memo. No individual or lobbying group ever came forward to take any credit for trying to kill the OSTP memo in the budget, nor was there much explanation of why it might have been included.
The final appropriation bill (technically the explanatory statement accompanying the bill) only included a requirement that OSTP produce a financial analysis of the impact of the memo, “including the policy’s anticipated impact on Federal research investments, research integrity, and the peer review process,” within 100 days of the bill passing. In other positive news, this was the only requirement. There is no trigger stopping development of policy depending on what the report says. This likely means that after the report, there would be a round of Congressional hearings before more action is taken. Being an election year, there may not be enough time for a truly adverse legislative action. Overall, this means plans will progress, and there should be some good reading on the state of scholarly publishing sometime in mid-June!
The Scholarly Communications team had a chance to ask some questions to the editors of the Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College! The undergraduate journal is sponsored by the Institute for Liberal Arts here on campus and has been in publication since its first volume in 2015. Recently, the journal has moved its online editions to Boston College Libraries’ Open Journal Systems platform iteration, which ensures that the journal will be preserved and search engine results optimized.
What kinds of pieces are generally solicited? How do you approach your call for submissions?
A variety of pieces! We accept short stories, poems, works of art, photographs, research papers, narratives etc. We usually post on our Facebook page (@BostonCollegeMedicalHumanitiesJournal) when we are accepting submissions with instructions on how to submit!
From what disciplines do most of your submissions come from – where do most of your articles come from?
Our journal is very interdisciplinary so we receive submissions from a variety of disciplines! Although the journal is based on medicine and the humanities field, we receive and publish submissions ranging from Biology and sociology to majors in CSOM.
What was the main motivation for adding your journal to our digital collection on OJS?
With the difficulties of the pandemic and reduced physical interactions, we thought that adding the Journal to a digital collection such as OJS would be more convenient and easily accessible to the public. Additionally, now our journals can be read anywhere and at any time – even on the go!
Is there a reason that Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College has decided to publish Open Access – was it always an OA journal?
We liked the idea of a sort of repository where a bunch of BC Journals lived and wanted to be a part of it! MHJ has always been open access, but we think that this platform will make our Journal easier to find and on an editorial level, easier to manage.
Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College’s most recent issue. Click the cover to navigate to the journal’s home on our Open Journal Systems platform.
