Issues and Challenges in the Development of Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Communications in Nigeria

The paper notes that advances in technology have resulted in the emergence of open access publishing and scholarly communication. Open access publishing typically provides an internet based digital platform for the publication of research output with unrestricted access to the public while scholarly publication networks encompass inter linked information access to database by educational institutions. The growth of open access publishing and scholarly communication has been very remarkable in many developed countries. However, academic and research institutions in many developing countries like Nigeria are still battling to overcome many challenges in an attempt to make their research outputs openly accessible. At the same time, cross access to digital libraries is in its embryonic stages amongst research institutions. This paper identifies the challenges and their effects

The Potential of Library Publishing Services to Transform Scholarly Communication in Ireland

Libraries need to move beyond traditional roles of purchasing and distributing scholarly literature, librarians need to strategically position themselves and take ownership of improving access. As a direct result of Covid-19, there is a new level of urgency to transform the scholarly communication process and there are enormous opportunities for an expanded and inclusive library publishing service which addresses access to knowledge and literature.  This rich discussion will stimulate the drive to make library publishing a mainstream service within Irish libraries.   The purpose of this study is to provide a vision for how academic libraries can assume a more central role in a future where open access (OA) publishing has become the predominant model for disseminating scholarly research. This work will analyse existing trends related to Open Access policies and publishing with an emphasis on the development of repositories managed by libraries to publish and disseminate articles. These trends, coupled with emerging economic realities, will create an environment where libraries’ will assume a major role in the Open Access publishing environment. This paper will provide an insight for academic libraries and their institutions to consider a dramatic shift in the deployment of subscription financial resources from a largely closed scholarly communication system to one that provides open, unrestricted access to research. Given the importance of scholarly publishing, a number of Irish Third level libraries have launched library publishing services including the establishment and management of high quality library published peer-reviewed open access journals and Open Educational Resources to support formal and informal scholarly communication. Librarians are also upskilling in the area of library publishing. A number of Irish Librarians have completed the Library Publishing Coalition's Library Publishing Curriculum. There is also the Library Publishing Group as part of the Library Association of Ireland. This work aims to identify and examine the factors of library publishing services that facilitate scholarly communication. The clear message from this discussion is that libraries need to include publishing in their services, advocate for open access and serve their communities and societies

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

The intersection of scholarly communication librarianship and open education offers a unique opportunity to expand knowledge of scholarly communication topics in both education and practice. Open resources can address the gap in teaching timely and critical scholarly communication topics—copyright in teaching and research environments, academic publishing, emerging modes of scholarship, impact measurement—while increasing access to resources and equitable participation in education and scholarly communication. Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is an open textbook and practitioner’s guide that collects theory, practice, and case studies from nearly 80 experts in scholarly communication and open education. Divided into three parts: *What is Scholarly Communication? *Scholarly Communication and Open Culture *Voices from the Field: Perspectives, Intersections, and Case Studies The book delves into the economic, social, policy, and legal aspects of scholarly communication as well as open access, open data, open education, and open science and infrastructure. Practitioners provide insight into the relationship between university presses and academic libraries, defining collection development as operational scholarly communication, and promotion and tenure and the challenge for open access. Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is a thorough guide meant to increase instruction on scholarly communication and open education issues and practices so library workers can continue to meet the changing needs of students and faculty. It is also a political statement about the future to which we aspire and a challenge to the industrial, commercial, capitalistic tendencies encroaching on higher education. Students, readers, educators, and adaptors of this resource can find and embrace these themes throughout the text and embody them in their work

Scholarly communication 1971 to 2013. A Brindley snapshot.

This chapter attempts a snapshot of the dramatic changes impacting on scholarly information access and delivery in the last forty years through the prism of Lynne Brindley’s career. This was a period in which historical practices of information and access delivery have been dramatically overturned. In some respects, however, the models of scholarly publishing practice and economics have not changed significantly, arguably because of the dominance of multinational publishers in scholarly publishing, exemplified in the ‘Big Deals’ with libraries and consortia, and the scholarly conservatism imposed to date by research evaluation exercises and tenure and promotion practices. The recent global debates on open access to publicly funded knowledge, have, however, brought scholarly communication to the forefront of attention of governments and university administrations .The potential exists for scholarly research to be more widely available within new digital economic models, but only if the academic community regains ownership of the knowledge its creates. Librarians can and should play a leading role in shaping ‘knowledge creation, knowledge ordering and dissemination, and knowledge interaction’

Open Access Publishing in Business Research: The Authors’ Perspective

Open access (OA) publishing is now accepted as an integral part of the emerging trends within scholarly communication. Business librarians, like their subject specialist colleagues in other disciplines, are increasingly called upon to interpret scholarly communication trends to their faculty. This study surveys 1,293 business faculty from American schools of business accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Issues explored include business faculty publishing practices within the discipline and how these affect academic advancement, obtaining articles for their own research, electronic publishing, self-archiving, and their perceptions about OA publishing generally.With support from the Emerald Publishing Research Award 2009

Collaborative organizational infrastructures to support open access journals

With the advancement of open access (OA) journal publishing opportunities in partnership with presses and faculty, libraries in alignment with intersecting academic values are fulfilling a need by supporting sustainable models of scholarly communication that incorporate disseminating faculty scholarship in collaboration with library and/or press staff and editors to “start up” an OA journal or transform an existing print journal to OA. Library staff that embrace faculty or student publishing partnerships are structuring and utilizing their scholarly communication skill sets by positioning the availability of open access publications to disseminate quality research results. University presses are also forging alliances with libraries to strategically align their business models as an economically viable solution and compelling competitor in publishing journals. The peer-reviewed OA journal model actuates library publishing activities with the goals of making research globally visible, the ability to build upon others’ work, and uphold the scholarly communication practices of researchers and publishers that might include stakeholder ways in: supporting the faculty research cycle; hosting software and tools’ training; metadata creation; database indexing; Creative Commons licensing; reducing libraries’ purchasing costs; engaging altmetrics; and economic viability. My infographic poster will visually depict various stakeholder alignments in publishing OA journals

Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, Version 2

Introduction The Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography includes over 175 selected English-language articles, books, and technical reports that are useful in understanding the digital scholarly publishing activities of academic libraries since the late 1980\u27s, especially their open access book and journal publishing activities. The bibliography covers the following subtopics: pioneering academic library publishing projects in the 1980\u27s and 1990\u27s, early digital journals and serials published by librarians (as distinct from libraries), library-based scholarly publishing since the Budapest Open Access Initiative, technical publishing infrastructure, and library and university press mergers/partnerships and other relevant works. Here is the Library Publishing Coalition\u27s definition of library publishing: The LPC defines library publishing as the set of activities led by college and university libraries to support the creation, dissemination, and curation of scholarly, creative, and/or educational works. Generally, library publishing requires a production process, presents original work not previously made available, and applies a level of certification to the content published, whether through peer review or extension of the institutional brand. Based on core library values, and building on the traditional skills of librarians, it is distinguished from other publishing fields by a preference for Open Access dissemination as well as a willingness to embrace informal and experimental forms of scholarly communication and to challenge the status quo. Starting in the late 1980\u27s, university libraries were among the first publishers of digital scholarly journals on the Internet. With the approval and support of Robin N. Downes, the Director of the University of Houston Libraries, The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, an open access journal, was launched in August 1989, with the first issue being published in January 1990. In November 1990, the Virginia Tech University Libraries published the first issue of the Journal of the International Academy of Hospitality Research. The Stanford University Libraries established the HighWire Press in 1995, publishing The Journal of Biological Chemistry as its first journal. As of March 2015, HighWire Press had published over 2.4 million open access articles out of a total of 7.6 million articles. Again with Downes\u27 approval, the University of Houston Libraries began publishing the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, an open access book, in October 1996. This digital book was updated 64 times between 1996 and 2006 (Digital Scholarship continued its publication though version 80 in 2011). In the 1990\u27s, digital journal and serial publishing projects that involved university libraries working in partnership arrangements included the BioOne Project (the University of Kansas, the Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium, and other partners), Project Euclid (Cornell University Library and Duke University Press), Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library), and RLG DigiNews (the Research Libraries Group and the Cornell University Library Department of Preservation and Conservation). Early digital journals and serials published by librarians included the Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture, Ariadne, Current Cites, Information Research, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, The Katharine Sharp Review, LIBRES (early volumes), MC Journal: The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship, and Public-Access Computer Systems News. (See the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists, 6th edition and section 3.1 Electronic Serials: Case Studies and History of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography for further information on this topic. In the 1990\u27s, University libraries also acted as important digital journal publishing testing grounds for major academic publishers in ventures such as the CORE Project, the Red Sage Project, the SuperJournal Project, and the TULIP Project. (See section 3.3 Electronic Serials: Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography for further information on this topic.) In the 1990\u27s, a few library organizations and companies published electronic journals and serials. The Library Information Technology Association published Telecommunications Electronic Reviews and OCLC published The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials. In the last 20 years, there has been a growing movement by academic and other libraries to directly publish books, journals, and other works. This resurgent activity has been fueled by the open access movement, which is typically viewed as starting with the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative. Academic libraries built organizational and technical infrastructure to support this movement, often using open source software that was created in order to advance it. An increasing commitment to the OA movement sparked important cultural changes in libraries, which resulted in the proliferation of institutional repositories, scholarly communication units, and research data support units supported by them. Open source software from the Public Knowledge Project, such as Open Journal Systems, is frequently used in library-based publishing programs; however, a variety of software tools, are also employed. Promising new open source publishing programs, such as Fulcrum, Hypothesis, Janeway, Manifold, and PubPub, are emerging; but are not well represented in the types of works covered by this bibliography. University presses are in a period of change and restructuring. Increasingly, they are being put under the administrative control of university libraries. Furthermore, entirely new all-digital open access university presses are being established, often under the direction of or in partnership with university libraries

Pubfair: A Framework for Sustainable, Distributed, Open Science Publishing Services

Over the last thirty years, digitally-networked technologies have disrupted traditional media, turning business models on their head and changing the conditions for the creation, packaging and distribution of content. Yet, scholarly communication still looks remarkably as it did in the pre-digital age. The primary unit of dissemination remains the research article (or book in some disciplines), and today’s articles still bear a remarkable resemblance to those that populated the pages of Oldenburg’s Philosophical Transactions 350 years ago. In an age of such disruptive innovation, it is striking how little digital technologies have impacted scholarly publishing; and this is also somewhat ironic, since the Web was developed by scientists for research purposes. Pubfair is a conceptual model for a modular open source publishing framework which builds upon a distributed network of repositories to enable the dissemination and quality-control of a range of research outputs including publications, data, and more. Pubfair aims to introduce significant innovation into scholarly publishing. It enables different stakeholders (funders, institutions, scholarly societies, individuals scientists) to access a suite of functionalities to create their own dissemination channels, with built in open review and transparent processes. The model minimizes publishing costs while maintaining academic standards by connecting communities with iterative publishing services linked to their preferred repository. Such a publishing environment has the capacity to transform the scholarly communication system, making it more research-centric, dissemination-oriented and open to and supportive of innovation, while also collectively managed by the scholarly community

Facciamo il punto sull'Open Access : editori, ricercatori e specialisti dell’informazione si confrontano alla "First European Conference on Scientific Publishing in Biomedicine and Medicine" Lund, (Svezia) 21-22 aprile 2006

(Let's make the point on Open Access: publishers, researchers and information scientists meet at the "First European Conference on Scientific Publishing in Biomedicine and Medicine" Lund, (Sweden) 21-22 April 2006) Different aspects of the open access publishing model were discussed at conference in Lund by prestigious speakers, such as Eugene Garfield, Jean Paul Guedon, Stevan Harnad. In synthesis, the open access paradigm is deeply reshaping the scholarly communication system. Researchers are becoming gradually aware of OA impact so that the number of articles published on open access journals is increasing worldwide. Further efforts have to be done to promote authors' self-archiving of scientific works in the digital repositories set up on a large scale by research and academic institutions. The traditional publishing sector keeps to claim its role as producer of "official communication" by issuing prestigious journals, but in many cases offer the authors the choice of adopting both the author pay model or the subscription model to distribute their research outputs. Scientific publishing has been widely recognised as a "cost of research" and this fact should lead to guarantee free, permanent access to public funded research

Are we walking the talk? Tensions between librarians' values, academic freedom and open scholarship

Open access - the practice of freely sharing scholarly outputs online -- is steadily garnering support across the research community. At academic institutions, libraries are usually the standard-bearers for this trend, advancing open scholarship by providing services, infrastructure and funding - for example, employing scholarly communication experts, operating institutional repositories, and funding open access publication costs. This investment in personnel and resources reflects a shared priority of advancing more equitable systems for creating and sharing knowledge. Our professional organizations publicly espouse these values and engage in advocacy to advance open access projects and uptake. At an institutional level, library workers often lead the development of campus open access policies which encourage or commit researchers to publicly share their work. In Canada, nine academic institutions and ten libraries/librarian councils have adopted open access policies. Despite this wealth of activity and public professions of support for open scholarship, it is unclear whether academic librarians in Canada actually practice what we preach. Most of the open access statements/policies adopted by libraries merely encourage workers to make their scholarship freely available. Anecdotal evidence indicates a minority of us are actually archiving our work in institutional repositories or publishing in open access journals. This paper will provide preliminary results from a survey exploring how Canadian academic librarians’ professional, personal and collective values impact our publishing practices. In particular, results from this study will indicate how academic freedom provisions -- articulated in collective agreements, institutional policies and by professional organizations including CAPAL and CAUT -- may affect whether we choose to support open access with our words and actions. Academic freedom is usually appreciated as a protective measure, guarding librarians and faculty against repercussions for work or speech which may be viewed as controversial. Independently choosing how to disseminate research is often a key tenet of academic freedom policies. Accordingly, librarians may experience tension between our personal/professional support for the principle of open access and our will to exert academic freedom and publish where we please – including closed-access venues. This discordance not only affects our own scholarly practices but should also be acknowledged within librarians’ continuing efforts to encourage faculty to embrace open access