The STL WLIC Libraries as Drivers for Open Access Wrap-Up!

On August 26th, the Science and Technology Libraries section hosted three speakers in their first session of the conference, Libraries as Drivers for Open Access. Reggie Raju, Acting Executive Director of the University of Cape Town Libraries, presented, “From Green to Gold to Diamond: Open access’ return to social justice.” He reminded attendees of publishing’s past, why researchers want to engage in scholarly communications with one another through publications and how external publishers came in and saw it as a viable profit making endeavor. Over the past ten years, open access has made large strides in challenging this prohibitive commercial model. The movement from green and gold to diamond open access, with the library as publisher, can be directly tied to social justice imperatives, including access to information. To read more about the access models, the importance of the free flow of information and providing open access for the marginalized, see Raju’s full conference paper here: http://library.ifla.org/2220/1/092-raju-en.pdf

 

Mahmoud Khalifa, currently a PhD candidate at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, presented, "Open access monitoring and business model in Latin America and Middle East: a comparative study based on DOAJ data and criteria,” a paper he co-authored with Ivonne Lujano. He spoke on their project which collected data from the DOAJ database to analyze the business models, peer-review policies, and plagiarism screening policies of open access journals published in Latin America and the Middle East. After giving background on the DOAJ and it’s ambassador program (of which both authors were members of), he delved into specifics of each region’s publishing models. To see a complete  analysis, country-by-country, please read Khalifa and Lujano’s full paper here: http://library.ifla.org/2126/1/092-lujano-en.pdf

 

Patrick Danowski, Library Manager of the Institute of Science & Technology in Austria, presented, "Austrian Transition to Open Access,” a paper he co-authored with Andreas Ferus, Brigitte Kromp, and Rita Pinhasi. Danowski spoke on the project, Austrian Transition to Open Access (AT2OA), which aims to increase Austria’s OA publication output through new researcher support and the restructuring license agreements by 2025. The project runs from 2017 to 2020 and will investigate questions such as: Is there enough money in the system to support a transition to OA? What would be the effects for individual institutions? What does a good transitional contract with a publisher moving to OA look like? And how will this group measure success? To learn more about this project, see Danowski, Ferus, Kromp, and Pinhasi’s full paper here: http://library.ifla.org/2286/1/92-danowski-en.pdf

 

Other papers submitted but not presented can be found below.