Open Access publishing is well established in our research landscape, and the advantages of OA are clear but unfortunately the mechanism and metrics are still tangled with for profit publishers meaning at some point someone must pay.
Diamond Open Access refers to Open Access journals and platforms that are free to both authors and readers. Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS, and the French National Research Agency (ANR) recently presented an action plan on Diamond OA and the landmark Open Access Diamond Journals Study found that Diamond OA contributes 45% of OA publishing globally. This coincides with the finalising of the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment which aims to move us away from publish or perish metric to an ecosystem that recognises the diverse outputs, practices and activities that maximise the quality and impact of research.
In this webinar we will hear from Dr Samuel Moore about the potential that could be unlocked with a move towards Diamond OA and from Prof. Toma Susi on how the reform of research metrics and assessment could enable this move. UCC Library Scholarly Comms Librarian Donna Ó Doibhlin will outline the options for OA publishing in UCC and we will hear more about CORA UCC institutional repository. We will also hear from the editors of some of our homegrown Diamond OA journals Boolean and Scenario on their journey and the support that UCC Library has provided along the way.
To register for this event please click on this link
Keep reading for speaker information and abstracts.............
Samuel Moore
Dr. Samuel A. Moore is a scholarly communication specialist at Cambridge University Library and a research associate at Homerton College. His research in library and information studies explores the ethics and politics of scholarly communication. He has a Ph.D in Digital Humanities from King’s College London and over a decade’s experience as a publisher, educator and researcher specialising in open access and academic publishing. He is also one of the organisers of the Radical Open Access Collective.
'Scaling small', or why there are no BIG solutions to the problem of ethical open access
As Plan S gains steam in Europe and the US mandates public access to all research published from 2026, subscription publishing seems likely to be an increasingly unviable business model in the near future. We are rapidly moving to a time in which all academic research articles – and increasing amounts of books – will be available to access and share without payment. Yet although open access has won the day, it is worth considering why this victory also feels like something of a defeat. Publishing is still largely controlled by a handful of profiteering companies who are rapidly expanding into areas beyond research articles, such as research data, user data and other elements in the knowledge production workflow. At the same time, many researchers remain unengaged and motivated by regressive research cultures that promote competition over collaboration, seeing open access as an imposition or something to be ignored entirely. But what is to be done here, and why are there no easy or big solutions? This talk will argue that the all-encompassing solutions promised by open access mandates, funder platforms and transformative agreements are part of the problem. Instead, open access practitioners need to consider the necessity of ‘smallness’ and local solutions in nurturing a diverse and ethical diamond open access publishing ecosystem.
Toma Susi
Toma Susi is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Vienna in Austria. In his research career, he has worked on materials synthesis, spectroscopy, electron microscopy and modeling, authoring over 80 peer-reviewed articles and reviews, and contributed open data and code as well as an open grant application. He coordinated science policy as the Vice-Chair of the Young Academy of Europe, recently chaired an open science task force at the Initiative for Science in Europe, and was a member of the core drafting group of the European agreement on reforming research assessment. He currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Open Research Europe and on the Editorial Board of Scientific Data.
Twitter @mostlyphysics
Reform research assessment to unlock the potential of diamond OA
Processes of research evaluation and rewards are coming under increasing scrutiny, with critics convincingly arguing that they have adverse effects on research quality and support a research culture of competition to the detriment of collaboration. Accordingly, many have called for a wide-ranging reform of research assessment. The overarching aim would be to enable a positive change in research culture that not only helps improve the transparency, reproducibility and reliability of research, but by rewarding excellent science on its own merits, also de-emphasize those forms of evaluation that contribute to toxic competition. These long-overdue efforts to reform research assessment are finally underway.
A prerequisite for a successful reform is to increase the involvement of researchers themselves in designing reward and evaluation systems. However, it has become clear that although there is increasing recognition of the need and desire to move away from flawed prestige-based metrics, there is little consensus on what should replace them. Considering the increasingly strong drive from policy-makers, it is now vital that different research communities both urgently and concretely consider how they wish evaluation systems to be adapted in each of their individual circumstances.
At the same time, the efforts to achieve immediate availability of publicly funded research outputs accelerated by cOAlition S and now the US Federal Government seems set to flip the entire academic to open access publishing. There is a valid concern that this may further entrench existing commercial players and lead to ever-inflating article processing fees, shifting access barriers from reading to publishing. However, this may also make researchers finally aware of the exorbitant price we pay for publishing – and should we succeed in the assessment reforms, this may be a perfect opportunity to unlock the potential of scholarly-led diamond OA.
Donna Ó Doibhlin
Donna Ó Doibhlin is the Scholarly Communications Librarian in UCC Library and CORA manager. Her role involves promotion and support for OA publishing across the university and she provides regular outreach, training and skills development sessions in OA.
https://libguides.ucc.ie/OAatucc
Twitter @CORA_UCC
The Library Research Services enabling OA publishing in UCC
Research Services and the CORA Team in UCC promotes Open Access publishing throughout the University by encouraging staff and researchers to publish their research findings openly through our OA repository CORA.
Recent funder OA mandates have strengthened the requirement to publish research openly and this has highlighted the value of institutional repositories to share this research. The team also manage the current IReL-funded transformative agreements with publishers. While this offers a level of support to our researchers it brings its own challenges. This talk will highlight some of these challenges and identify potential solutions.
The Boolean: Showcasing UCC’s doctoral students
The Boolean is a student led publication that gives doctoral students in the University a platform to communicate their research in a non-academic, accessible way. Students submit articles about their work written to be intelligible to a general audience. These articles are peer reviewed by staff and students from a different discipline to ensure intelligibility. The goal is to train students in both, non-academic writing, as well as get them familiar with the submission and peer review process. Thanks to the library the Boolean runs on the Open Journal System, OJS, this year. This means it has a fully integrated submission platform which helped in gathering over 30 articles publication this year.
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