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Clearing the final hurdle – automating embargo setting
One of the biggest issues facing the Open Access Team has been keeping up with the constant stream of accepted manuscripts that need to be processed. In many cases we receive notification of an accepted manuscript well before formal publication. This has presented a significant challenge over the last five years because although we know there is a publication forthcoming (or at least we trust that there this), we have no idea as to when an article may actually be published. This means that we have many thousands of publication records in Apollo which have ‘placeholder’ embargoes because we simply did not know the publication date at the point of…
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Embarking on a career in open access
Lorraine and Olivia started working as Scholarly Communication Support in the Open Access team at the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) in the University Library this summer. In this interview, they share their experience of starting a new role in the field of open access, from the perspective of their respective backgrounds in academia and publishing. What does working in Scholarly Communication Support entail and what are your responsibilities in this role? For the first few months joining the Open Access team we both started looking at “Fast Track deposits”, the simplest route of depositing author’s manuscripts into Apollo, the University of Cambridge institutional repository. This system allows the team…
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Image Copyright and Open Access in the Arts and Humanities
Copyright is a crucial topic in the Humanities because researchers in several disciplines (especially history of art, my field of study) rely on images for their work and because publishers usually require authors to pay copyright holders for permission to reproduce those images – failure to do so would make the author and the publisher liable for copyright infringement. At the OSC Symposium last 2nd October 2019 (Open Access Monographs: From Policy to Reality), Dr Nicola Kozicharow’s presentation on ‘Open Research Publishing in the Humanities’ made quite an impact on the discussions of the day. This early career historian of art, specialised in 19th– and 20th-century European and Russian art, talked about the challenge of publishing when third-party image copyright is involved. She detailed the difficult and sometimes grotesque situations that she…
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Chasing cash cows in a swamp? Perspectives on Plan S from Australia and the USA
Plan S was born in Europe, yet from the very start it aspired to accelerate conversations around open access on a global scale. After all, if free access to research outputs is good in one place, it will be good everywhere, right? Well, it turns out that things may not be that simple. In this Open Access Week, we look East and West to find out how Plan S is being received across the globe. Dr Danny Kingsley explores how reliance on foreign students has trapped Australian universities in a ‘Faustian bargain’ with publishers and reduced the scope for change. Micah Vandegrift reports on the type of conversations that Plan…
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Open Access monographs: Reflections from our recent symposium
Open access book formats have been under discussion for several years and have attracted interest – and concern – from researchers in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences as well as amongst institutions, publishers, and funders. Earlier this month the Office of Scholarly Communication organised a one-day symposium on ‘Open Access monographs: from policy to reality’ which took place at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. It aimed to enable discussion about the open access monographs agenda and its future challenges with the Cambridge community and beyond, to bring together researchers with publishers, funders, experts and innovators in the field of open monograph publishing, and to share experiences about the opportunities and realities…
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Searching Open Access: steps towards improving discovery of OA in a less than 100% OA world
At the heart of the University of Cambridge’s Open Access Policy is the commitment “to disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible to contribute to society”. Behind this aim is the benefit to researchers worldwide, as the OA2020 vision has it, to “gain immediate, free and unrestricted access to all of the latest, peer-reviewed research”. It’s some irony indeed that the growth of the availability of research as open access does not automatically result, without further community investment, in a corresponding improvement in discoverability. Key stakeholders met at the British Library to discuss the issue at the end of 2018 and produced an Open Access Discovery Roadmap ,…
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A Fast-Track Route to Open Access
In the last two years, since the REF 2021 open access policy came into force, the Open Access Team has received an ever increasing number of manuscript submissions for archiving in Apollo, Cambridge’s institutional open access repository. We have been thinking long and hard about ways to cope with the workload, by scrutinising existing practices and streamlining workflows, because we want to provide the best possible service to our researchers, commensurate with the University’s world leading research. This blog introduces what is perhaps the greatest overhaul of our workflows since the service began: a new ‘Fast Track’ deposit system. Work it harder Before the start of the REF OA policy (2014-2016),…
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Multiplicity, the unofficial theme of Researcher to Reader 2019
For the past four years at the end of February, publishers, librarians, agents, researchers, technologists and consultants have gathered in London for two days of discussions around the concept of ‘Researcher to Reader’. This blog is my take on what I found the most inspiring, challenging and interesting at the 2019 event. There wasn’t a theme this year per se, but something that did repeatedly arise from where I was standing was the diversity of our perspectives. This is a word that has taken a specific meaning recently, so I am using ‘multiplicity’ instead : The principles of Plan S are calling for multiple business models for open access publishing, according…
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Book Review: Scholarly Communication – what everyone needs to know®
As we wind down towards the last days of 2018, thoughts go to gifts for family and friends. Here, as our last minute gift idea to you, is a book that should be under the tree of every scholarly communication aficionado. The following book review appeared in Research Fortnight on 15th September 2018 with the title ‘New readers start here‘. It was edited by John Whitfield and is reproduced here with permission. Book Review It is odd to be reviewing a book that stresses the importance of “positive reviews in…prestigious publications” to potential sales and publishers’ reputations. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that Scholarly Communication: What everyone needs to know,…
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Blood: in short supply?
Two years ago (almost to the day) we called out Blood for their misleading open access options that they offered to Research Council and Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) authors. Unfortunately, little has changed since then: Blood continues to demand a $1000 ‘service fee’ to deposit manuscripts in PubMed Central (PMC). Nature, for sake of comparison, will do this for free. Their ASH Author Choice option, which costs $2500, offers no form of Creative Commons licence in return. Neither of these routes is sufficient to comply with either Research Councils’ or COAF’s open access policies which require that the accepted text be made available in PMC within 6 months of…
