Category Archives: Open Access

Making the Most of Open Data

As part of Open Access Week, we want to recognize the critical role of open data on research and innovation. While the importance of sharing data is well-acknowledged, reusing open data and incorporating it into your research can be equally critical.

Why reuse data?

1. Efficiency and Time-Saving – Open data can accelerate the research process

2. Replicability and Validation – Reusing open data enables the replication of studies and validation research findings, which helps foster transparency and trust in scholarly work.

3. Ethics and Reducing Oversampling Burden – Certain populations, particularly marginalized and vulnerable populations, are sometimes overly sampled in research and reusing open data allows us to reduce the burden of oversampling. 

4. Cross-Disciplinary Insights – Researchers can blend data from different disciplines, encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration.

How to approach data reuse?

1. Assess Quality & Compatibility – Check for completeness, biases, representation. Consider if the scope, variables, and collection methods align with your research objectives (e.g. if you were going to collect your own data, would you be doing it in the same way?)

2. Review Documentation – Part of quality assessment is reviewing metadata and understanding the collection methods and any cleaning processes that the data underwent. Need to examine licensing and ethical concerns around privacy and consent.  

3. Data Integration – Open data might not always be the best fit, but it can be thought of as supplementary or contextual data that will make your primary research data more robust.

OASPA Conference

The Open Access Scholarly Publication Association recently held a conference inviting Scholarly Communications librarians from all over the world to come together virtually and discuss the current trends and new ideas in Open Access.

Articles Processing Charges (APCs)

While the movement for broader Open Access publishing, and knowledge and interest continues to increase among faculty and scholars in all disciplines, not all Open Access is equally free. Transformative journals may provide some of their content open access – but still require a subscription for all of it. Additionally, the increasing popularity of “Read and Publish” agreements – while generally beneficial for universities and libraries, providing a wide breadth of access for scholars at a given institution or set of institutions, do have some drawbacks for the scholarly ecosystem as a whole.

A good deal of the poster sessions therefore focused on models of Open Access publication that do not require Article Processing Charges at the point of submission – this is known, generally, as Diamond Open Access. In order to be considered Diamond Open Access, publication schedules cannot contain embargoes and the cost of submission and of accessing the content must be zero. These funding models are generally sponsored by universities, research institutions, and libraries themselves – as more and more institutions of higher education are recognizing that investing in consortial open access projects help budgets in the longer run, as they continue to support the free access and publication of research, which in turn lowers – or outright eliminates – subscription and APC fees.

Open Access Community Investment Program

“The LYRASIS Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP) provides a community-driven framework that enables multiple stakeholders – including academic and public libraries, academic departments, institutions, museums, and funding agencies – to evaluate and collectively fund Diamond Open Access (OA) journals.” – taken from the OACIP website

Lyrasis presented a relatively new program at OASPA; OACIP. Projects like these can provide the framework and model for Diamond OA so that institutions do not need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to figuring out their own equitable processes for publication. Additionally, having a large consortia of libraries participating and contributing to the discourse, credibility, and viability of Diamond OA projects make them all the more tenable in the eyes of researchers and faculty members trying to balance the pressures of publishing equitably.

Scottish University Open Access Press

Another example of a consortial approach to Diamond OA is the Scottish University Open Access Press. The goal of this project is to create a press managed and published by and for member university libraries. While the initial investments and staff times may demand higher education professionals working on projects that might not benefit their university in the short term in terms of semester to semester collections, growth of projects like these promises to significantly reduce the dependence on high-cost subscriptions – as an Open Access Press would ensure must more affordable access to materials that are already being generated by those same universities to begin with.

Consecuencias Accepted into the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) International Bibliography

For the past four years, Consecuencias has been publishing issues and articles covering different aspects of Spain’s cultural production via Boston College Libraries’ Open Access Journal portfolio. Articles in English and Spanish come together to create an interdisciplinary study of Spanish cultural artifacts, historical movements, and thought leaders. In the past year, since the beginning of the 2022 fall academic term, the relatively new journal has been downloaded 2,581 times in 68 different countries across the world in over 300 cities.

Recently, Consecuencias is also celebrating indexation in the Modern Language Association’s International Bibliography – a renowned database for scholars in the humanities, which all but assures that more researchers, authors, and students will be able to access Consecuencias publications. Not only does indexation in MLA’s International Bibliography signify that it will be reachable by those who use that database to conduct searches, indexation is also an excellent way to increase a journal’s performance around search engine optimization, as well as providing prestige and implicit accreditation, as scholars considering submitting work to an (especially open access) journal will often check where it is indexed to get a sense of its legitimacy and reach in a given discipline.

For more insights on readership statistics, click on the image below to view a data visualization.

OA Week this October

Open Access Week is October 23 -29th. Details are still being worked out, but expect to see library displays, blog content, and an on-campus event that week. Keep an eye out for announcements!

International Open Access Week is organized by SPARC and an Open Access Week Advisory Committee. For this year, they are focusing on the theme “Community over Commercialization.” The theme casts a light on some of the tensions between publishing using commercial publishers, which benefits specific private businesses, and publishing Open Access to benefit the public interest.

An image promoting Open Access week, from October twenty-third to twenty-ninth, with the hashtag #OAWeek

Image credit: https://www.openaccessweek.org/attributions

MIT Direct to Open 

In 2021, MIT Press established the Direct to Open (D2O) model as a sustainable framework that engages libraries as a way to circumvent the profit motive for academic publishing. As publishers continue to raise the prices of APCs – to the point of driving some of their own editorial staffs away – universities and libraries are trying to find more sustainable, cost efficient ways to access scholarly materials so that collection budgets are not consistently weighed down by yearly subscription, or one time purchases of articles. Under the D2O model, if enough libraries agree to purchase a package of books published that year at a certain price, all of the books in the package will be published Open Access. As the count of member libraries increases, the price for each library in turn drops. Direct to Open is also committed to equity, as the fees for participation are determined based on the library size, type, and collection budget. Boston College Libraries, as part of its support of sustainable Open Access Publishing, has participated in the program since its inception.

The increased participation of libraries in Direct to Open allows for MIT Press’ full list of scholarly monographs to be published directly to the MIT Press Direct platform. As the participation has increased, the international scale of D2O continues to grow, as the Press reached agreements with the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the Konsortium der sächsischen Hochschulbibliotheken, the Council of Australian University Libraries, Jisc, SCELC, Lyrasis, and more. 

The list of books which will be opened is available on the MIT Press website. While libraries participating can know their payment goes to making what would have been paywalled content open, there is also a direct benefit, as participating libraries have term access to backlist or archives materials, discounts on high-quality works that are also available for print purchase, and opens access to new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections.