LIBER 2020 - Session #5: Open Access Insights

These are the slides from the LIBER 2020 Session Open Access Insights.

Session Description:

A goal of LIBER’s 2018-2022 Strategy is working towards Open Access (OA) as the predominant form of publishing. Many successful initiatives and projects have brought us closer to achieving this goal.

If you are interested in how members of the research library community around the world have been implementing OA policies, join us for the session Open Access – Best Practices and New Ways Forward to hear from several speakers presenting new initiatives in the field of Open Access.

Deni Bourguet, Benoit Facon, Dr. Thomas Guillemaud and Marjolaine Hamelin will introduce an alternative to the current system of publication, namely the Peer Community In (PCI) project. PCI is a non-profit organization that aims to create specific communities of researchers reviewing and recommending, for free, unpublished preprints in their field. Recommended pre-prints can be used by scientists and cited in scientific literature. The first Peer Community in Evolutionary Biology was founded in January 2017 and has currently 415 publishers among the most prominent researchers in the field. In the years that followed, 11 other PCI’s were successfully established.

Next, Malin Sofia Fredriksson will present a case study of OA publishing activities of researchers at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. She will present to what extent Åbo researchers publish OA, which forms of OA publishing are chosen as well as their motivations for publishing or not publishing OA. Furthermore, she will share an assessment of the implications for the development towards a culture of open scholarship.

Finally, Leo Waaijers will discuss the shortcomings of Plan S around Transformative Agreements, and propose an alternative: the Quality Open Access Market (QOAM). QOAM enables authors to make an informed choice regarding the journal in which they publish their research article on a quality versus price comparison of academic journals. In other words, QOAM is doing what Plan S aims to do: creating a fair and transparent Open Access publishing environment. He will conclude by focussing on QOAM as a possible connection with libraries to bring back competition to the OA forum.