scholarly journals Scholarly publishing initiatives at the International Rice Research Institute: Linking users to public goods via open access

First Monday ◽  
2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Borrero ◽  
Mila Ramos ◽  
Anna Arsenal ◽  
Katherine Lopez ◽  
Gene Hettel
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Agricultural Research ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
International Rice Research Institute ◽  
Scholarly Publishing ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
Hard Copy ◽  
Research Institute

Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Philippines, generate a large volume of research results emanating from donor-funded projects. The main objective is to disseminate, as widely as possible, the results of IRRI's research. There is also a strong push to provide free open access to these information resources through modes convenient to researchers in both developing and developed countries. Certain instruments for open access (OA) are already in place at IRRI, including links to full-text publications posted on the Institute's Web site (http://www.irri.org/), especially via the Library branch site (http://ricelib.irri.cgiar.org/), the Rice Knowledge Bank (http://www.knowledgebank.irri.org/), and Rice Publications Archive (http://rice-publications.irri.org/). The joint initiatives of the Library and the Institute's main science publishing units, particularly Communication and Publications Services and the Training Center, typify a convergence of practices to overcome hurdles to OA implementation. This paper explores how the links in IRRI's scholarly publishing chain, bridging information management and publishing, can effectively deliver public goods (knowledge about rice, in this case) to the intended primary users -- researchers and extensionists in the national agricultural research and extension systems (NARES) in developing countries. It also discusses publishing models for delivering public goods generated by an international research organization. To meet its mission, IRRI must employ various demand-supply models to disseminate information. Open access publishing is one model to adopt but first, the onus is on the Institute to overcome issues such as intellectual property rights, funding, and connectivity. IRRI's donors, NARES partners, governments, and rice farmers and consumers expect it to create and share information for the common good, and it strives to convert its resources into electronic format for delivery over the Internet. However, not all its stakeholders are connected. To create impact, IRRI must deliver information through whatever appropriate form, be it cutting-edge digital versions or traditional hard-copy books. This paper discusses this dilemma and hopes to encourage further research and thought on open access publishing.

scholarly journals COVID-19 and Sustainable Food Systems: What Should We Learn Before the Next Emergency

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Bisoffi ◽  
Lilia Ahrné ◽  
Jessica Aschemann-Witzel ◽  
András Báldi ◽  
Kerstin Cuhls ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Food System ◽  
Agricultural Research ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Use Of Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
Healthy Diets

Three key transitions leading to a “safe and just” operating space, with a focus on food systems, emerged during the development of a Foresight study promoted by SCAR (Standing Committee on Agricultural Research1): (a) sustainable and healthy diets for all; (b) full circularity in the use of resources; (c) diversity as a key component of stable systems. As consequence of COVID-19, food emerged again as a central element of life, along with health, after decades in which food security was taken for granted, at least in most developed countries. The COVID-19 outbreak offered the opportunity for a reflection on the importance of resilience in emergencies. Sustainable and healthy diets for all, was shown, during the pandemic, to depend much more on social and economic conditions than on technical aspects of food production and processing. Agriculture and the agro-industry have now a potential to absorb, at least temporarily, workers laid out in other sectors; the pandemic could be an opportunity to re-think and re-value labor relationships in the sector as well as local productions and supply chains. A full circularity in food systems also would benefit from stronger links established at the territorial level and increase the attention on the quality of the environment, leading to the adoption of benign practices, regenerating rather than impoverishing natural resources. Diversity is a key component of a resilient system, both in the biophysical sphere and in the social sphere: new business models, new knowledge-sharing networks, new markets. The three transitions would operate in synergy and contribute to the resilience of the whole food system and its preparation for a possible next emergency. Science can support policy making; however, science needs to be better embedded in society, to have a clear direction toward the grand challenges, to address the social, economic, behavioral spheres, to aim clearly at the common good. We need to re-think the conundrum between competition and cooperation in research, devising ways to boost the latter without sacrificing excellence. We need to improve the way knowledge is generated and shared and we need to ensure that information is accessible and unbiased by vested interests.

scholarly journals Cost of Open access publishing in the light of global developments in scholarly publishing: Springer’s Open access initiative

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Scholarly Publishing ◽  
Biomed Central ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
Impact Factors ◽  
Academic Publishing ◽  
Steady Increase ◽  
Open Access Journals ◽  
Wide Range

>> See video of presentation (25 min.)BioMed Central is the open access publisher who pioneered this publishing model and has been part of Springer since 2008. We launched our first journal in the year 2000, and have since seen several positive global developments which have helped establish open access as an important trend in the evolvement of scholarly communication.  We have consequently observed a steady increase in awareness of open access and specifically, of our wide range of specialist as well as broad interest titles which is reflected in our growing submission numbers.BioMed Central as one of the main open access publishers has helped to establish open access as a new way of making academic research available to researchers and the public, and to introduce a change of the subscription business model in academic publishing and libraries. While BioMed Central also offers a solution for the Green Route of open access (“Open Repository”) the main part of our publishing activity is centred around our fully or “gold” open access journals. BioMed Central and SpringerOpen practise the “author pays” model, whereby the author is asked to pay a fee to cover the publisher’s cost of publishing and distributing the article. While the awareness of open access is growing among the academics, there is still uncertainty among many of how open access works and why they are asked to pay a fee. To cover that fee can still be a major obstacle for a researcher attempting to publish an article in an open access journal, as the SOAP report stated in 2011.I will present an analysis of the most recent open access developments and studies globally; as well as the effect that this has had on a number of factors that play a role in scholarly publishing, such as Impact Factors, citations and awareness of open access among academics. I will give an update on BioMed Central and Springer’s own development in the arena of open access and visibility of research, including  experimenting with alternative methods of evaluating research such as Altmetric and the SCImago Journal & Country Rank.  I will conclude with an overview of how we are working with research organisations and universities to offer financial support to their researchers in order to cover the fee for publishing in BioMed Central and SpringerOpen journals in the context of our institutional membership program.

scholarly journals Elsevier’s commitment to Universal Access

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federica Rosetta
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
High Energy Physics ◽  
Universal Access ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
High Energy ◽  
Open Access Journal ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
Active Engagement ◽  
Scholarly Communication System ◽  
Access Mechanisms

At Elsevier we recognise that access to quality research is vital to the scientific community and beyond. For us this means providing support and the latest tools to maintain the quality and integrity of published scientific literature, achieving the widest dissemination of content, and embracing the opportunities of open access.Elsevier is committed to universal access, quality, and sustainability. We encourage active engagement and discussions about access.  We are investing our resources in developing new initiatives, expanding our open access and other access initiatives, and in developing our policies.Global Access initiatives are enabled with organisations throughout the world. Elsevier has established agreements and developed policies to allow authors who publish in Elsevier journals to comply with manuscript archiving requirements of several funding bodies, as specified as conditions of researcher grant awards. Our intention is to further explore collaborations with funding bodies to ensure maximum compliance for their authors, hence also the possibility offered by 1214 of STM subscription-based journals for authors, funding bodies, or other parties to sponsor open access to articles. With 74 journals offering Open Archive and 23 Open Access journal titles available on ScienceDirect and a number already in the pipeline, Elsevier offers several ways for authors to make their work available beyond the subscription model in several scientific areas spanning from Immunology, to Pharma, Physics, Genomics and including well-known brands such as Cell Reports.Elsevier Open Access Solutions are thought in line with our commitment to delivering the highest level of sustainable access to quality content. An example of which is our support towards major academic achievements as exemplified by our commitment to annually making the work of Nobel Prize winners freely available on ScienceDirect. Similarly, Elsevier is making all articles in the high-energy physics area reporting results from CERN’s LHC Project freely available on ScienceDirect.We believe subscription and open-access publishing can co-exist and we will continue to invest to close remaining access gaps globally – thus, also via philanthropic programmes that address the needs of less developed countries -  and support a balanced mix of universal access mechanisms as the key drivers for a high-quality and sustainable scholarly communication system.

scholarly journals The Economics of Open Access Law Publishing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Litman
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Business Model ◽  
Journal Article ◽  
Scholarly Publishing ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
Research Writing ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Considerable Uncertainty ◽  
Open Access Journals ◽  
The Law

The conventional model of scholarly publishing uses the copyright system as a lever to induce commercial publishers and printers to disseminate the results of scholarly research. The role of copyright in the dissemination of scholarly research is in many ways curious, since neither authors nor the entities who compensate them for their authorship are motivated by the incentives supplied by the copyright system. Rather, copyright is a bribe to entice professional publishers and printers to reproduce and distribute scholarly works. As technology has spawned new methods of restricting access to works, and copyright law has enhanced copyright owners' rights to do so, the publishers of scholarly journals have begun to experiment with subscription models that charge for access by the article, the viewer, or the year. Copyright may have been a cheap bribe when paper was expensive, but it has arguably distorted the scholarly publishing system in ways that undermine the enterprise of scholarship. Recently, we've seen a number of high-profile experiments seeking to use one of a variety of forms of open access scholarly publishing to develop an alternative model. Critics have not quarreled with the goals of open access publishing; instead, they've attacked the viability of the open-access business model. If we are examining the economics of open access publishing, we shouldn't limit ourselves to the question whether open access journals have fielded a business model that would allow them to ape conventional journals in the information marketplace. We should be taking a broader look at who is paying what money (and comparable incentives) to whom, for what activity, and to what end. Are either conventional or open-access journals likely to deliver what they're being paid for? Law journal publishing is one of the easiest cases for open access publishing. Law scholarship relies on few commercial publishers. The majority of law journals depend on unpaid students to undertake the selection and copy editing of articles. Nobody who participates in any way in the law journal article research, writing, selecting, editing and publication process does so because of copyright incentives. Indeed, copyright is sufficiently irrelevant that legal scholars, the institutions that employ them and the journals that publish their research tolerate considerable uncertainty about who owns the copyright to the works in question, without engaging in serious efforts to resolve it. At the same time, the first copy cost of law reviews is heavily subsidized by the academy to an extent that dwarfs both the mailing and printing costs that make up law journals' chief budgeted expenditures and the subscription and royalty payments that account for their chief budgeted revenues. That subsidy, I argue, is an investment in the production and dissemination of legal scholarship, whose value is unambiguously enhanced by open access publishing. In part I of the paper I give a brief sketch of the slow growth of open access publishing in legal research. In part II, I look at the conventional budget of a student-edited law journal, which excludes all of the costs involved in generating the first copy of any issue, and suggest that we cannot make an intelligent assessment of the economics of open access law publishing unless we account for input costs, like the first copy cost, that conventional analysis ignores. In part III, I develop a constructive first copy cost based on assumptions about the material included in a typical issue of the law journal, and draw inferences based on comparing the expenses involved in the first copy, and the entities who pay them, with the official law journal budget. In part IV, I examine the implications of my argument for open access law publishing. In part V, I argue that the conclusions that flow from my analysis apply to non-legal publishing as well.This paper was published in 2006 in volume 10 of the Lewis & Clark Law Review.

scholarly journals The Diamond Model of Open Access Publishing: Why Policy Makers, Scholars, Universities, Libraries, Labour Unions and the Publishing World Need to Take Non-Commercial, Non-Profit Open Access Serious

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 428-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Fuchs ◽  
Marisol Sandoval
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
Academic Publishing ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Labour Unions ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
The Future

This reflection introduces a new term to the debate on open access publishing: diamond open access (DOA) publishing. The debate on open access is a debate about the future of academia. We discuss the problems of for-profit academic publishing, such as monopoly prices and access inequalities and point at the limits of contemporary perspectives on open access as they are frequently advanced by the publishing industry, policy makers and labour unions. The article introduces a public service and commons perspective that stresses the importance of fostering and publicly supporting what we term the model of diamond open access. It is a non-profit academic publishing model that makes academic knowledge a common good, reclaims the common character of the academic system and entails the possibility for fostering job security by creating public service publishing jobs. Existing concepts such as “gold open access” have serious conceptual limits that can be overcome by introducing the new term of diamond open access. The debate on open access lacks visions and requires social innovations. This article is a policy intervention and reflection on current issues related to open access (OA) publishing. It reflects on the following questions: * What should the role of open access be in the future of academic publishing and academia? * How should the future of academic publishing and academia look like? * Which reforms of academic policy making are needed in relation to open access publishing? We want to trigger a new level of the open access debate. We invite further reflections on these questions by academics, policy makers, publishers, publishing workers, labour unions, open access publishing associations, editors and librarians.Twitter: #DiamondOA

scholarly journals Building a university Open Access scholarly publishing environment

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tereza Karlová ◽  
Lenka Hrdličková
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Value Added ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Scholarly Publishing ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
Research Assessment ◽  
Editorial Office

As Open Access publishing has been playing a more important role in scholarly communication, well-developed Open Access publishing infrastructure should be adopted by universities in order to make their outputs more competitive and provide its authors the immediate impact of their work. More than that, such “in-house” publications are very good starting points for early career researchers while they are joining the world of scholarly publishing. Not because of lower quality or reduced requirements, but because of extra help and guidance that might be provided to students by editorial office. The Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU) - Central Library has developed, based on the community needs, an Open Access journal publishing environment including the complete set of publishing standards, and being linked to the global Open Access infrastructure. One university scholarly journal and proceedings series is published there by the library, the platform also hosts a number of subject-specialized journals published by smaller departments. Such hosting is essential for many editorial teams, since it provides current publishing standards that they would hardly be able to keep by their own. Furthermore, being part of a university library, the editorial office has skills to provide value-added services in full range of information and publishing skills to researchers, authors, and students. To capture a full scale of Open Access publishing services, an Open Access monograph platform ought to be adopted in such a manner that is able to deal with various multimedia document types and contents, live monographs etc. The hosting of publishing platforms and guidance in Open Access publishing, research assessment and information and publishing literacy enhances good cooperation between the library and the academic community, and also provides the community with a lot of practical added value and help in meeting the current publishing criteria to succeed in the competitive research environment.

scholarly journals South Africa’s journey towards open access publishing

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 30-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed C. Bawa
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Open Access ◽  
Scholarly Publishing ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
Science System

South Africa’s journey into open access publishing is not new, but it has received renewed energy and vigour. The current dominant commercial model of scholarly publishing undermines the production and dissemination of knowledge in science systems such as South Africa’s, first through a hopelessly inequitable higher education and science system with large disparities amongst institutions and because of the increasing unaffordability of the current subscription-based model. This is a description of the approach being adopted to address one part of the quest towards open access scholarly publishing.

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