This week, we get the lowdown on the 2021 European Meeting of the ISMPP and on who is writing open access articles. We also look at an announcement from the US Big Ten Academic Alliance, a phishing scam targeting academic library accounts and cOAlition S’s support for mixed models of open access. Finally, we learn about the state of open access in the Global South.
Success all round at the 2021 European Meeting of the ISMPP via ISMPP | 1-minute read
The 2021 European Meeting of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) took place this week, attracting more than 300 attendees. We at Open Pharma are celebrating the success of two posters we presented at the meeting. Our first poster looked at the effect on the level of Open Research and Contributor ID (ORCID) capture of prompting authors for these details at various stages in the article publishing process. Our second poster explored patterns in open access publishing across pharma and found that almost two-thirds of the pharma-funded studies included in the analysis were published open access. Elsewhere in the virtual poster hall, an open access benchmarking poster from Boehringer Ingelheim showed that 71% of their sponsored articles were made available with immediate open access upon publication. However, the study also found that this could have been increased to 90% if the immediate open access option had always been chosen. Another poster from Ipsen presented the costs and savings associated with publishing open access and showed that the initial cost of publishing open access was consistently offset by the savings in costs associated with publication and content reuse. A big congratulations to all authors and presenters!
Who’s writing open access articles? via Quantitative Science Studies | 30-minute read
The likelihood of an academic publishing an article open access increases if they are male, they work at a prestigious institution, and they are at an advanced stage in their career, according to a study published in Quantitative Science Studies. The authors of the study looked at over 1.6 million articles published by 182 320 diverse researchers at 390 PhD-granting institutions in the USA and classified the articles as closed or gold, green, bronze or hybrid open access. They also found that researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences had the highest rate of participation in open access publishing.
US Big Ten Academic Alliance agree PLOS publishing deal via PLOS Blogs | 2-minute read
The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) – a group of large state universities in the USA – has agreed to participate in PLOS’s Community Action Publishing (CAP) programme. Under this agreement, BTAA institutions will pay PLOS a fixed annual fee that will allow BTAA researchers to publish in the open access PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine journals without the authors themselves incurring any costs. The BTAA is the largest group so far to participate in the CAP programme, and joins the University of California system, Jisc members and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network.
Beware the Silent Librarian via The Scholarly Kitchen | 5-minute read
In this interview, Senior Director of Threat Research at Agari and ex-US Federal Bureau of Investigation analyst Crane Hassold describes how a group called Silent Librarian has used phishing emails to compromise more than 300 universities in 22 countries. The group has followed the same tactics for several years to poach the library account credentials of academics across the world. The Silent Librarian group then access and download journal articles available to those accounts in order to sell them on. Crane warns that these types of activities can compromise library–publisher relationships.
Plan S and green open access via sOApbox | 13-minute read
In this series of blog posts, cOAlition S restates its commitment to open access in all its forms, including green. The first post describes the policies regarding the deposition of articles in managed repositories of various cOAlition S members. The second post covers the benefits of depositing articles in repositories, such as increasing the visibility and dissemination of research, and providing a location for other research outputs like posters and student theses. The final post discusses how the cOAlition S repositories relate to their Rights Retention Strategy, which aims to help authors to retain copyright of their work.
Open access in the Global South via The Scholarly Kitchen | 4-minute read
In this article, biologist-turned-consultant Haseeb Irfanullah shares his insights about the state of open access publishing in Bangladesh. He also highlights the differences in priorities between the Global South and the Global North when it comes to academic publishing.
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