open access

The 10 Principles of Plan S

The welcome announcement last week from Marc Schiltz‘s Science Europe about cOAlition S and the publication of The 10 Principles of Plan S was well received at DOAJ Headquarters. The key principle of Plan S is:

“After 1 January 2020 scientific publications on the results from research funded by public grants provided by national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.”

The document continues to outline important factors surrounding the desired model of open access and this model sometimes follows closely DOAJ’s preferred model for open access:

  1. Authors will retain copyright.
  2. Content will be published under an open license which fulfils the requirements defined by the Berlin Declaration.
  3. All scientists should be able to publish Open Access even if they have limited means.
  4. Publications fees should be standardised or capped.
  5. The hybrid model of publishing is not compliant with the principles.

DOAJ is pleased to see these principles so in line with the DOAJ criteria.

Lars Bjørnshauge, DOAJ Founder and Managing Director, said: ‘While we should remember that these principles only cover Europe and focus on science and that they may not be applicable on all continents or to the humanities, they will hopefully have a positive impact. Their announcement is timely and they are a welcome move in the right direction. DOAJ is proud to support their implementation.’

Silver Sponsor Hindawi Answers our Questions on Open Access Publishing and DOAJ

Paul Tavner, Head of Institutional Outreach at Hindawi, answers our questions.

Artboard 1– Your organisation has been supporting DOAJ for some years now. Why is it important for Hindawi to support DOAJ?

DOAJ is a crucial tool for authors when assessing open access journals. Its use is taught by librarians around the world as part of Open Access 101. Hindawi strongly believes in supporting the development of tools that the community can rely on to make informed decisions about their publishing activities.

Importantly, DOAJ was designed as an ‘open first’ service – unlike legacy systems that are gradually retrofitted to support open practices. Developing and supporting new services dedicated to serving the open movement – such as DOAJ –  is a key priority for us.

– What benefits does being indexed in DOAJ bring to your journals?

The way that people think about and assess journals is changing. Prestige will always be an important factor when considering publishing venues, but open access – and open science more widely – adds new considerations to this decision-making process.

In a world of evolving practices and priorities, DOAJ encourages authors to think carefully about the most fundamentally important qualities a journal offers. A journal listed in DOAJ provides reassurance to authors that essential standards are met and that they can expect a certain level of service when submitting.

The fact that many librarians train authors to use DOAJ as a discoverability platform – as well as a tool for assessing journals – also means that more authors are finding and submitting to Hindawi’s journals for the first time via DOAJ.

– What is Hindawi doing to support that development? Do you have any exciting projects underway?

Hindawi’s current priorities are around the development of a truly open infrastructure for scholarly publishing. Although we’re actively developing our own solutions in-house, we strongly believe that collaborative community-led projects are where real progress will be made in this space. We’re therefore contributing significantly to initiatives including Crossref, the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (CoKo).

Our CEO, Paul Peters, wrote a detailed blog post on this subject at the end of last year, which you can read here.

– What are your personal views on the future of Open Access publishing?

The Open Access genie is out of the bottle. It’s no longer a questions of ‘if’ Open Access will become the dominant paradigm, it’s just a question of ‘when’. As more and more digital natives become practicing researchers and take over from predecessors, the mental contortions needed to justify the old-fashioned practices of legacy business models become increasingly difficult to sustain.

That said, OA has a lot of problems that need to be resolved. APCs are a clever solution in many ways, but much more needs to be done to explore how they can be more rationally deployed. We need to do more to support researchers in countries with poorer access to funding. OA also has a huge problem with jargon – specifically around the varieties (gold, green etc.).

– What do you think that the scholarly community could do to better support the continued development of the Open Access movement in the near future?

My main wish is that as many people as possible could critically assess what they think they know about open access. Conflations of gold OA with APCs; slurs about ‘pay to publish’; general suspicion about publishing operations from non-Western countries. These are all examples of dogmatic prejudice that could all be addressed with a little simple research.

We all have a responsibility to ask questions about why things are done in a particular way. Challenging convention is key to improving our systems and processes. This applies just as much to publishers as it does to researchers and librarians. Every person who challenges the status quo helps to encourage change and development.

– Much has been said recently about whether open access is succeeding or failing, particularly in terms of the original vision laid out by the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002. Do you think that open access has fallen short of this vision, or has it surpassed expectations?

More people have greater access to scholarly content than ever before in human history. We’re succeeding by some metrics, but lagging behind by others.

The BOAI has had a huge impact on the landscape of the scholarly communications, but it was the result of a specific set of challenges and opportunities at a particular point in time. Rather than concentrating on its vision then, we should be looking more at the challenges and opportunities available to us now.

Russian scientific journals in the era of open access to knowledge: problems of adaptation

Our DOAJ Ambassador Dr. Natalia Gennadievna Popova has recently published a paper (in Russian) “Russian scientific journals in the era of open access to knowledge: problems of adaptation” or Российский научный журнал в эпоху открытого доступа к знаниям: проблемы адаптации. We are sharing this work with the wider DOAJ community, as we know that there is still lots to do in Russia in the open access arena (as our Ambassadors’ programme has shown) and this is covered in the paper.

Here is the paper’s abstract in English:

The advancement of open access to scientific knowledge has become a determining strategy in the sphere of scientific communication. Open access implies, along with a free access to full-text information online, the creation of a legal basis for the results of research to be used fairly by all interested bodies. The Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ, as well as other similar institutions, carries the mission of providing and guaranteeing the quality of open access. Russian journals are increasingly become part of this project, which is considered to be a positive trend. Currently, about 163 Russian titles are listed in DOAJ. However, some journals face difficulties in bringing their publication standards in compliance with the DOAJ quality criteria, which has become a reason for suspending 15 Russian titles from this esteemed international database. This article investigates the process of open access advancement in Russia, in particular, the implementation of international quality standards in the sphere of Russian scientific periodicals. Main DOAJ acceptance criteria are analyzed, as well as those problems that Russian titles experience adapting to them.

Read the full-text (in Russian).

New DOAJ Ambassadors in the Republic of Korea

Following our training sessions last month in Seoul we are very pleased to announce that we have appointed three new Ambassadors and an honorary Ambassador in Korea. We have also created a group of seven voluntary associate editors who will help DOAJ with applications coming from Southeast Asia. From 1st December 2017, the Ambassadors will start working on promoting DOAJ’s practices and standards, and Best Practices in Open Access publishing.

We are increasing our work and visibility as Open Access implementation spreads in many regions in Asia.

The three new Korean Ambassadors are:

Hea Lim Rhee

Hea is a senior researcher at Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), and also the managing editor of KISTI’s

Journal of Information Science Thea-lim-rhee.jpgheory and Practice (JISTaPJISTaP), the first English journal on computer science in Korea. 

Hea received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and her Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan, where she specialized in archives and records management. Conflict of Interest document

 

Hyun Jung Yi

Hyun Jung Yi holds a PhD in Library and Information Science from Chung-Ang University, Korea. She is a librarian at Hanyang University Guri Hospital, Korea. 20171114_134053

Currently, she also serves as a member of the Scholarly Committee at the Korean Medical Library Association and as a vice chair of the Committee of Information Management at the Korean Council of Science Editors. Her interests include observing trends in the scholarly publishing market, disseminating open access journals, and enhancing the publishing environment for researchers.

Conflict of Interest document

Youngim Jung

Youngim holds a PhD from Pusan National University in Computer Science and Engineering.

She is now a Senior Researcher at Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information developing and managing scholarly publishing systems for supporting domestic societies. Previously, she worked for KESLI, the national library consortium in South Korea and contributed herself to establish Korea DOI Center. Youngim Jung.jpg

She is a committee member of KCSE (Korean Council of Science Editors) and CASE (Council of Asian Science Editors). She has authored publications and communications in the field of Scientometrics, Library Systems and Natural Language Processing. Conflict of Interest document.

 

Sun Huh (honorary Ambassador)

sun_20151210.jpg

Sun is a medical doctor and holds a PhD from Seoul National University in parasitology. He has been a Professor of Parasitology, College of Medicine, Hallym University, Korea since 1988. He has worked voluntarily as a board member of Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors (1996-2011), Korean Council of Science Editors (2011-present), and Council of Asian Science Editors (2014-present).

He has been an editor of Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions since 2005. His goal with DOAJ is to pursue the registration of all open access journals from Korea to DOAJ. Conflict of Interest document.

 

The new Ambassadors will work alongside the existing DOAJ Ambassadors from other territories and the DOAJ Team in Europe.

It’s soon upon us: the Ninth Open Access Week

It’s soon upon us! The ninth Open Access Week. This year, the theme is Open in Action, about taking ‘concrete steps to make … work more openly available and encourag[ing] others to do the same’. The theme corresponds nicely with our IDRC-funded Ambassador project where we have Ambassadors working around the world to promote the values of open access and the DOAJ.

On Facebook, over the coming days, I’ll be listing the details all the DOAJ-associated activities that are being held across the globe. I’ve started with a list of links to some of the DOAJ Team’s profiles on the Open Access Week web site. Here’s the post:

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FDirectoryofOpenAccessJournals%2Fposts%2F1295485780463658&width=500

Need a flyer or a poster?

What are you doing for open access week? Let us know. If you need any DOAJ promotional material for your event, we have an A5 flyer for printing out, an A4 information sheet (more suitable for a North American audience), and we have a flyer and a poster in French, and the same in Chinese. Don’t forget that we have a collection of presentations on Slideshare, too, which are a great resource for “clipping” (saving a slide), downloading etc. If you need something else, get in touch!

The Open Access Week web site itself also has a great Resources section, where you can download logos, handouts and posters.

Policy updates: open access statement and user registration

Open Access Statement

Until recently, DOAJ has insisted that journals state very clearly on their web site a full and detailed open access statement, preferably one that follows closely the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition.

From 8th September, DOAJ will accept a short open access statement—even as short as ‘This journal is open access.’—but ONLY in combination with a Creative Commons licensing statement, or equivalent licensing statement, on the same page and, preferably, in the same paragraph. As always, this statement must be on the journal web site and not held on a different site. If the licensing statement is not on the same page as the open access statement then the extended open access statement complying with BOAI definition will be required.

User Registration

From August 2016, DOAJ no longer accepts journals that require users to register to view the full text. This change was put into effect immediately. As DOAJ reviews journals that are already in DOAJ, as part of their regular update work, they will remove those journals that require registration and notify the publishers.

If you have questions, send email to feedback@doaj.org

The DOAJ Ambassadors’ biographies

As promised in my post presenting the 15 Ambassadors , here are their biographies.

Kamel Belhamel, Region: North Africa

kamelKamel holds a PhD from the University of Setif (Algeria) in Chemical Process Engineering. He is now Professor of Chemistry at University of Bejaia,  Director of the Laboratory of Organic Materials and Editor in chief of DOAJ-indexed Algerian Journal of Natural Products (ISSN: 2353-0391). He is the author of several publications and communications in the field of Chemical Process Engineering, Natural Products, Nanoparticles and Metal Alloys. Kamel has long, international experience in the management of Research Projects (Projects DAAD German, French Framework Programme CMEP…) and Coordinator of two Algerian Research projects CNEPRU, PNR …). Kamel is the DOAJ ambassador in region of North Africa.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

 

Xin Bi, Region: China

xinbiXin holds a PhD degree in Psychology from Soochow University in China and also a Master’s Degree in Information Systems from Liverpool University in UK. He is the University Librarian in Xi’an Jiaotong – Liverpool University in Suzhou and in this capacity he is working with a wide network including librarians, publishers, professionals in China and overseas to better facilitate the scholarly communication and knowledge dissemination. He is one of three DOAJ ambassadors in China. Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

 

Vrushali Dandawate, Region: India

vrushaliVrushali is Head Librarian at AISSMS College of Engineering College Pune, Maharashtra, India. She completed her Master’s from the University of Pune and has completed a Library Automation and Networking course from IGNOU Open University. She was selected for “International training program on Management of Electronics Information and Digital Library Lib@Web 2013” that ran from October 2013 – December 2013 at University of Antwerp, Belgium. In 2014, she received a grant from VLIR-OUS to attend “VLIR-UOS workshop ‘Training Information Literacy with Southern Partners’, coordinated by the University College Leuven-Limburg (UCLL). She is winner of ALCTS Online Course Grant for Library Professionals from Developing Countries for course Fundamentals Of Collection Development and Management (FCDM) March 2014. She is one of three DOAJ ambassadors in India.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Sridhar Gutam, Region: India

sridharSridhar holds a PhD in Plant Physiology from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and is part of the Agricultural Research Service of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). Currently, he is working as Senior Scientist at ICAR Research Complex for the Eastern Region. Apart from his studies related to plant physiology and phenology of horticultural crops, he is passionate for Open Access, Open Data and Open Education. He founded a community of practice, ‘Open Access India’ and is advocating the opening-up of agricultural research information and data. He is one of three DOAJ ambassadors in India.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Mahmoud Khalifa, Region: Middle East & Persian Gulf

mahmoudMahmoud is the founder & CEO of Cybrarians, the Arabic Portal for Librarianship and Information. He is an Associate at IFLA International Leaders Programme, 2016 and since 2013 is a board member of the Egyptian Library Association. Also in 2013 he was the winner of the Scientific Research Academy’s prize in informatics. He holds a PhD in Information Science from Cairo University. He is an accredited trainer for the IFLA BSLA Program (Building Strong Library Association), as well as a Fellow at Jay Jordan IFLA/OCLC Early Career Development Fellowship Program. He is the editorial manager of Cybrarians Journal, the first electronic Arabic journal on librarianship & Information science. He is the DOAJ ambassador for the region of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Ivonne Lujano, Region: Latin America

ivonneIvonne has a Master’s in Social Sciences with an emphasis in Education at FLACSO-Argentina and holds a B.A. in Education from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (UAEMex), where she currently works as lecturer. She is specialized in scientific Open Access publishing processes and has experience in the evaluation of scholarly publishing practices. She has worked with institutions and organizations at a national and regional level in the training of students, teachers and researchers on issues regarding scientific publishing in Open Access. Ivonne is the DOAJ ambassador for the region of Latin America.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Solomon Mekonnen, Region: East Africa

solomonSolomon is Academic Staff, with rank of Lecturer, at the Addis Ababa University (AAU).  Apart from his role at AAU, he is also a Co-Founder of Code4Ethiopia which advocates for open data. In addition, Solomon coordinates nationally an Open Access Programme for the international network Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL). He is a local organizer in Ethiopia for an international network called Open Knowledge International. Solomon was a project manager for Ethiopian Journals online. He is also a PHD candidate at the University of South Africa. Solomon is the DOAJ ambassador for the region of East Africa.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Leena Shah, Region: India

leenaLeena Shah holds a Master’s Degree in Information Studies from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore and a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering. After living and working for nearly two decades in Singapore she relocated to Bangalore, India, in May 2016 and is keen on promoting Open Access in this region. She was previously employed as an Earth Sciences Librarian at NTU where she gained experience in teaching and promoting open access, institutional repositories and scholarly communication in general to researchers and students. Leena is one of three DOAJ ambassadors for India.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Cenyu Shen, Region: China

cenyuCenyu has a Master degree in Computer Science from University of Helsinki and she is currently a PhD candidate in Information Systems Science at Hanken School of Economics in Finland. She has spent several years on Open Access research with a particular focus on studying questionable and non-English language OA publishers or journals. Her latest research interest expands to the identification and development of infrastructure services and support practices to promote open access movement in Chinese region. Cenyu is one of three DOAJ ambassadors for China.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

 

Ina Smith, Region: Southern Africa

inaIna holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Pretoria (South Africa) in Computer-Integrated Education, a Higher Education Teaching Diploma, and two degrees (BBibl and BBibl Honors) in Library and Information Science. She is Planning Manager at the Academy of Science of South Africa, and has vast experience of Open Access in general, scholarly research activities, repositories, and Open Access journal management and publishing. Ina is the DOAJ ambassador in the region of Southern Africa.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Pascal Soubeiga, Region: West Africa

pascalPascal is from Burkina Faso, West Africa. He has a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the library school of University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, Senegal, and is preparing a dissertation for a Master’s degree in communication. He has worked for the past 11 years as a librarian for the World Health Organization in Burkina Faso, as well as teaching in three library and information colleges there. He has solid experience in information retrieval, user training, and institutional repositories. Pascal is the DOAJ ambassador  for West Africa.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Yanhong Zhai, Region: China

yanhongYanhong holds a Master’s degree in Botany from Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. From August 2012 to April 2015, she worked for MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, an Open Access publisher), managing the journal Environments and supporting International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. In the past year, she worked at Elsevier, managing special issues for journals in the field of multimedia and computer science. She is one of three DOAJ ambassadors in China.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

The biographies of our fantastic team of volunteer Ambassadors for Russia will be posted here shortly.