Plan S for Shock

Plan S for shock: the open access initiative that changed the face of global research. This is the story of open access publishing – why it matters now, and for the future. In a world where information has never been so accessible, and answers are available at the touch of a fingertip, we are hungrier for the facts than ever before – something the Covid-19 crisis has brought to light. And yet, paywalls put in place by multi-billion dollar publishing houses are still preventing millions from accessing quality, scientific knowledge – and public trust in science is under threat. On 4 September 2018, a bold new initiative known as ‘Plan S’ was unveiled, kickstarting a world-wide shift in attitudes towards open access research. For the first time, funding agencies across continents joined forces to impose new rules on the publication of research, with the aim of one day making all research free and available to all. What followed was a debate of global proportions, as stakeholders asked: Who has the right to access publicly-funded research? Will it ever be possible to enforce change on a multi-billion dollar market dominated by five major players? Here, the scheme’s founder, Robert-Jan Smits, makes a compelling case for Open Access, and reveals for the first time how he set about turning his controversial plan into reality – as well as some of the challenges faced along the way. In telling his story, Smits argues that the Covid-19 crisis has exposed the traditional academic publishing system as unsustainable

Plan S for Shock

Plan S for shock: the open access initiative that changed the face of global research. This is the story of open access publishing – why it matters now, and for the future. In a world where information has never been so accessible, and answers are available at the touch of a fingertip, we are hungrier for the facts than ever before – something the Covid-19 crisis has brought to light. And yet, paywalls put in place by multi-billion dollar publishing houses are still preventing millions from accessing quality, scientific knowledge – and public trust in science is under threat. On 4 September 2018, a bold new initiative known as ‘Plan S’ was unveiled, kickstarting a world-wide shift in attitudes towards open access research. For the first time, funding agencies across continents joined forces to impose new rules on the publication of research, with the aim of one day making all research free and available to all. What followed was a debate of global proportions, as stakeholders asked: Who has the right to access publicly-funded research? Will it ever be possible to enforce change on a multi-billion dollar market dominated by five major players? Here, the scheme’s founder, Robert-Jan Smits, makes a compelling case for Open Access, and reveals for the first time how he set about turning his controversial plan into reality – as well as some of the challenges faced along the way. In telling his story, Smits argues that the Covid-19 crisis has exposed the traditional academic publishing system as unsustainable

Towards the establishment and implementation of an institutional repository at the University of Cape Town (UCT): a case study

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.The concepts of open access and scholarly publishing are still gaining momentum in Africa, especially South Africa. Increasingly, institutional repositories are being planned and developed by universities throughout the world especially in the first world countries, which have taken the lead. Institutional repositories have developed because of changes in scholarly communication where journal prices are high and libraries are finding it difficult to subscribe to them. Communication technology in the form of the internet brought a solution to the problem. Researchers, authors and libraries now advocate for the open access model of scholarly communication. This study explores the developments associated with the establishment and implementation of an Institutional Repository at UCT

Open Access: “Information Wants to Be Free”?

The main points made in this document: - Internet mantras like information wants to be free misled OA advocates about what is possible in an online world. Amongst other things, these mantras led to the mistaken belief that publishing would be very much cheaper on the internet. - BOAI was intended to achieve three things: to resolve the longstanding problems of affordability, accessibility, and equity that have long dogged scholarly communication. - It now seems unlikely that the affordability and equity problems will be resolved, which will impact disproportionately negatively on those in the Global South. And if the geopolitical situation worsens,solving the accessibility problem may also prove difficult. - OA advocates overestimated the wider research community’s likely interest in open access. This led them to lobby governments and funders to insist that they force open access on their peers. This was a mistake as it opened the door to OA being captured by neoliberalism. - The goals of the OA movement are out of sync with the current economic and political environment.This is not good news for scholarly communication, for library budgets or for OA. - Populism and nationalism pose a significant threat to open access. - The pandemic looks set to wreak havoc on budgets. This is likely to be bad news for OA. - Rather than being a democratic force for good, the internet created power laws and network effects that saw neoliberalism morph into neofeudalism and paved the way for the surveillance capitalism and data extractivism that the web giants have pioneered. These negative phenomena look likely to become a feature of scholarly communication too. - Today we see a mix of incompatible strategies being pursued by libraries, funders, and OA advocates – including unbundling, transformative agreements and the adoption of publishing platforms, as well as experiments with scholar-led and “collective action” initiatives. There appears to be no coherent overarching strategy. This could have perverse effects, which has in fact been an abiding feature of OA initiatives. - OA advocates have unrealistic expectations about diamond open access and the possibility of the research community “taking back ownership” of scholarly communication. - While publicly funded OA infrastructures would be highly desirable there currently seems to be little likelihood that governments will be willing to fund them, certainly at the necessary scale and with sufficient commitment. - OA advocates have probably overplayed their claim that publishers are engaged in price gouging. Nevertheless, the industry consolidation we have seen has led to a publishing oligopoly that now dominates scientific publishing in a troubling way. And as these companies develop ever larger and more sophisticated platforms and portals, we can expect to see more worrying implications than high costs emerge. Unfortunately, governments and competition authorities currently seem either not to understand the dangers or are unwilling to act

Information Outlook, June 2007

Volume 11, Issue 6https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2007/1005/thumbnail.jp

An Anthropological Analysis of Book fairs

This working paper examines the role of international book fairs in the global publishing industry, and in particular their relation to the publishing cycle, chain and field. It outlines some relevant historical features, as well as main functions, of fairs, before describing in detail the daily activities of an independent academic publisher at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Analysis of the book fair takes place at two levels. The first focuses on the importance of visibility in a fair’s timing and location, as well as in the location and size of participants’ stands, inclusion in the fair catalogue, business deals, and social gatherings. The second examines the book fair as a tournament of values, or ritual tournament, in terms of its framing, membership and currency. The argument presented is that the currency of copyright is not dissimilar to a form of gift exchange and that, as a result, a book is both commodity and gift. It is in the shadow of the gift that the commodity of the book is produced, distributed, sold and read

Uma década de acesso aberto na UMinho e no mundo

O lançamento do RepositóriUM em 2003 constituiu-se como um projeto pioneiro no domínio dos repositórios institucionais e do movimento do Acesso Aberto ao conhecimento científico. No momento da sua apresentação pública havia decorrido cerca de um ano e meio sobre a disseminação da Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI – que definiu pela primeira vez o Acesso Aberto), precisamente um ano sobre a disponibilização do software em que foi desenvolvido (o DSpace) e apenas um mês sobre a difusão da Declaração de Berlim sobre o Acesso Aberto nas Ciências e Humanidades, que viria a recolher grande adesão nos anos seguintes. Nos dez anos que se seguiram à sua criação, o RepositóriUM consolidou-se como um serviço relevante no contexto da Universidade do Minho, catalisador de desenvolvimentos significativos no panorama nacional e de grande visibilidade e reconhecimento internacional, e simultaneamente o Acesso Aberto conheceu notáveis evoluções em Portugal e no mundo. Este livro, que assinala e celebra o décimo aniversário do RepositóriUM, ilustra estes progressos do Acesso Aberto, em especial através dos repositórios. Reunindo contributos de alguns dos mais ativos protagonistas e impulsionadores dos avanços neste período, Uma Década de Acesso Aberto na UMinho e no Mundo oferece uma ampla panorâmica da evolução e da situação atual do Acesso Aberto, a partir de múltiplas perspetivas e realidades

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history