Category Archives: Open Access

Accelarete transiton to open access

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It is the time of the year to pay special attention to open access issues. One of the consequences of the interrupted negotiations between BIBSAM and Elsevier has been that a number of Swedish universities have instituted an OA fund. University of Borås is one of them. The aim is to accelerate transition to open access.

Research funders have also taken initiative to accelerate transition to open access though Plan S. 13 research financiers from 12 countries have signaled their commitment to implement 10 principles of Plan S in a coordinated way. The main principle is “By 2020 scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants provided by participating national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.”

More information about cOALition S.

Text: Pieta Eklund

Library Breakfast on open access and locked articles

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During the International Open Access Week, we invite researchers and students at the University to a Library Breakfast on the theme of open access. This year, a lot has happened in the area of open access in Sweden. During this breakfast, research librarian Signe Wulund will, tell us about what happened to the publisher Elsevier, and present alternative routes to locked research publications. If you want to participate, you need to register before October 22nd using this form.

The breakfast consists of coffee / tea / juice, sandwich and fruit and are open to students and staff at the University of Borås. However, there are only 25 seats, and registration is mandatory in order to participate.

Text: Katharina Nordling
Photo: Mostphotos

Project aims to increase access to university research

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The library has started a project aiming to increase the number of papers in full text in DiVA.

When you publish your research open and accessible, you increase the visibility and spread of it. Therefor the library has launched a project in which we check your already registered papers/ posts in DiVA, in order to know if it is possible to upload them in full text. The work is done by Manar Deeb and Signe Wulund.

For each researcher who has registered something in DiVA, a search is made for all papers that don’t have a full text uploaded today. The next step is to verify which possibility are available for publishing, and then comes the contact with the researcher by e-mail. The e-mail will contain a list of articles that could be published in full text in DiVA.

In this project work we use the SHERPA/ ROMEO database, which is a database that gathers publisher’s copyright and parallel publishing policies. Parallel publishing means to spread your research findings openly through other channels in the same time they are published by a journal which is available only for subscribers.

When it comes to parallel publishing, publishers often put up guidelines which must be followed. For example that the article cannot be parallel published until a certain time has elapsed (ie embargo time). Another common rule is that it may not be the publisher’s version (layout) of the article that’s parallel pubshed, instead the version of the article accepted by the publisher for printing, ie the one that has been subjected to a referee review, may be published. The content is the same but the parallel publishing version has different format from the publisher official PDF version.

There is a total of 2,545 publishers in SHERPA/ RoMEO, and 81 % of them allow some form of parallel publishing.

If you are interested and you want to know clearly which papers you have the right to publish in full text in DiVA, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Send an e-mail to manar.deeb@hb.se, to notify that you want us to check your publications as soon as possible. Otherwise, we will contact you when we have reached your name on the alphabetical list we are using to find all researchers in DiVA.

Text & photo: Katharina Nordling
Illustration: Screenshot from SHERPA/RoMEO

Bibsam takes a stand for open access – cancels Elsevier deal

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As we wrote earlier this week, the pressure is mounting on the world’s largest scientific publisher Elseviers. Countries that have set goals for open access to scientific papers see Elsevier as an obstacle, as the publisher won’t allow agree to terms for increased open access. Now the Swedish Bibsam consortium is taking the step to cancel their deal with Elsevier, as the publisher would not agree to the following terms:

  • Immediate open access to all articles published in Elsevier journals by researchers affiliated to participating organisations
  • Reading access for participating organisations to all articles in Elsevier’s 1,900 journals
  • A sustainable price model that enables a transition to open access

The reason that Bibsam has taken this line is that it has become incredibly expensive for higher education institutions to access scientific information generated by tax funded research. At the same time big publishers like Elsevier are making huge profits. Now the aim is to change the scientific communication model, and make more research accessible to a greater number of people at a lower cost rather than subsidize big publishers’ profits. (Elsevier’s profit margin was 36% in 2010, which was higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year. In 2017 their parent company presented an operating profit of 31.1%.)

 “We need to monitor the total cost of publication as we see a tendency towards a rapid increase of costs for both reading and publishing. The current system for scholarly communication must change and our only option is to cancel deals when they don’t meet our demands for a sustainable transition to open access.”

– Astrid Söderbergh Widding, President of Stockholm University & Chairman of the Bibsam consortium steering committee 

Other countries including Germany have already cancelled their deals with Elsevier. The current Swedish deal will be cancelled effective June 30th 2018. After that everyone who was part of the deal will still have access to all papers published between January 1st 1995 and July 1st 2018. Access to material published from July 1st 2018 onwards might however be restricted by Elsevier. It is worth noting that they still have not stopped access to new publications in Germany, despite the German deal being cancelled at the beginning of the year. It might still be worth leaving a brief guide to alternative routes of finding scientific papers here.

Sources and further reading:

Text: Signe Wulund