CSIRO announces it “has begun the journey” towards open access
CSIRO says it has signed agreements with discipline publishers, plus journal giant Elsevier, “to publish CSIRO science for readers to access for free.” Which is good, but is the organisation picking up publication fees, (Elsevier is big on gold OA)? CMM asked. “Agreements that CSIRO has entered into for publishing its own research allow Gold Open Access publishing,” an organisation representative replied.
CSIRO Publishing (“editorially independent”) is also offering OA, signing agreements with institutions covered by the Council of Australian University Librarians. These appear to be of the pay to publish kind, except when they aren’t.
CSIRO charges open access fees, to recover peer review and publication costs. However, these don’t apply for some of its journals, if authors are “from an eligible institution.” But all authors can deposit the accepted version of a manuscript in an institutional repository or on a personal website without an embargo period.
MIT makes the monograph open access
Humanities academics wedded to books as in paper between covers books have been able to avoid the OA argument by pointing out it applies to articles generally in STEM fields.
MIT has done something about that, announcing Direct to Open, a “first-of-its-kind sustainable framework for open access monographs,”
The deal is that from next year all new MIT monographs will be available on its e-book platform. A library that wants a copy will be able to buy access, not just for itself but the world.
It’s an alternative to “the traditional market-based business model” for monographs, which is now unsustainable without subsidies. MIT suggests monograph sales are now 300-500 units, down from 1500-1700 in the ‘90s.
MIT will report progress in a year, for other institutions to follow, “with the aim of making it possible for many more scholarly monographs published each year by university and other mission-driven presses to be discovered, accessed, and shared broadly.”
Getting what research institutions have already paid for
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has kicked US$2m into The Lens, which “ingests, cleans, aggregates, normalises” and serves over 225m plus scholarly works, 127m plus global patent records and more than 370m patent sequences. “Research institutions and their funders currently pay private corporations almost a billion dollars a year for tools to discover, analyse and measure data around research publications – even those they have published or funded,” The Lens states.
Personal accounts stay free but there are now, “low cost licences” for an open data based toolkit, “that bridges science and business.”