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.

Fall Theses and Dissertations Workshops

Writing a thesis or dissertation takes a lot of work, and the end result is a great academic accomplishment. But even when it is written and defended, there is one last task to be truly finished – the less glamorous but important step of submitting a copy to the library. The library will make sure it is properly preserved as an academic record and will make it available to the world for free, after an embargo period if need be.

To get this process started, we have eTD@BC workshops for graduate students preparing to submit electronic theses and dissertations. This fall, there will be three sessions, one in-person and two virtual, all covering the same material.

Dates:
Tuesday, October 10, noon – 12:45 pm, on Zoom.
Monday, October 16, noon – 12:45 pm, O’Neill Library 307.
Tuesday, October 17, 6:30 – 7:15 pm, on Zoom.

To register, go to https://libcal.bc.edu/calendar/workshops. Upon registration for an online workshop, you will receive a confirmation email with the Zoom link.

Topics to be covered in this workshop include:

  • The submission website, including a walk-through of the submission process
  • Important decisions and issues, such as eScholarship@BC, embargoes, copyright, etc.
  • How to ensure that a published eTD can be discovered and accessed by others
  • Where to get additional help

Graduate students can contact etd-support@bc.edu with any questions about the workshops. There will be additional workshops in the spring.

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

Internet Archive case moves forward

The case in the Southern District of New York between the Internet Archive and a group of major publishers has finally wrapped up.

Last March, the Internet Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program was held to be a violation of copyright, and not an allowable fair use. The Court requested that the parties work together to figure out a procedure for determining a final judgment in the case. This could have included more hearings to determine several questions relating to damages in the case under 17 U.S.C. 504(c)(2), including issues such as the Internet Archive counting as a library, and if it had reasonable grounds to assume the activity was fair use.

After some delay, the parties came to an agreement that did not involve more hearings. They agreed on monetary damages (the amount and how it was determined remains confidential) and on an injunction prohibiting the Internet Archive from distributing any digitized books that any of the plaintiffs sell commercially as an ebook, or scanning books for that purpose. The publishers had wanted the injunction to cover all books, regardless of availability in an electronic format, but as the trial only included works sold as ebooks, the court concluded that its opinion did not address the issue of books not available as ebooks. The court does not say that is fair use, but it has not said it isn’t fair use either. This leaves the door open for Controlled Digital Lending of books that are not available as ebooks, which could be particularly helpful in the case of CDL of orphan works. The Internet Archive is also still allowed to use the books for accessibility purposes, and for services that have already been determined to be fair use, like Google Books use of digitized books to return snippets of text based on searches.

The case in the District Court may be over, but the Internet Archive has announced its intent to appeal the decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In the meantime, they have a new case with record labels about the Great 78 project to worry about.