Congratulations to The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for further strengthening their support of Open Access.  As of the 1^st December, all publications emerging from a 'call for proposals’ published by NWO after this date must be immediately accessible to everybody from the moment of publication.

Read the full press release.

Interested in publishing an article in an Open Access journal? QOAM allows you to assess the quality of a journal and the cost of publication. QOAM is an initiative of the Dutch Radboud University in Nijmegen. Information about a journal is compiled through a Journal Score Card, consisting of 2 parts:

• Base Score: a questionnaire on four aspects: editorial information, peer evaluation, governance and the publishing process, and
• Valuation Score: assessment by users of the journal, either authors, editors or reviewers peers.

With QOAM you can not only express your experience with a journal as a researcher but also find out more about an OA journal, its quality and cost.

Full-Day Workshop - Wednesday 18 Nov 2015 - Ghent

Horizon 2020 has been at the forefront as a major funder implementing Open Access policies. Following the Open Access pilot in FP7, Horizon 2020 brings a strong mandate for Open Access to publications as well as an Open Data Pilot in certain areas.

Many questions arise from this policy: how to practically follow the requirements, which media to use, and what about confidentiality issues? Which issues should be taken care of at the proposal stage, during the project and after the project finishes?

The aim of this workshop is to provide answers, to exchange experiences, and to define problems and barriers. The target audience is NCP's, research administrators and project coordinators.

The morning will be devoted to Open Science in Horizon2020. After an introduction by the EC, the benefits of Open Science will be presented by Lennart Martens. The Open Access mandate and the Open Data Pilot will be clarified with examples of how OpenAIRE services can be of help.

The afternoon will propose interactive workshops, taking a closer look at the practical implications of the Open Access mandate and the Open Data Pilot. One track will discuss the mandate, how it affects projects and researchers and how OpenAIRE can help you to comply. In a parallel group, the Open Data Pilot will be discussed, with a presentation of research data management tools. There will be time for discussion and questions as your input is important for the success of the project.

Expected outcomes of the workshop:

• Checklist of Actions for NCPs and research administrators on how to support H2020 projects
• Information for project coordinators at the proposal writing stage
• How to meet obligations during the project for OA publication mandate and the Open Research Data Pilot
• Ideas for future support materials

You can register for the workshop here: registration OpenAIRE workshop.  There is no registration fee.

The venue, het Pand, is situated in the center of Ghent: https://goo.gl/maps/9cWcz

Interested in publishing your book in Open Access?  The Open Access Directory, a wiki-based website managed by the Open Access community, provides a list of Open Access Book Publishers.

For example, some general publishers in the Humanities:

• Open Book Publishers: Founded in 2008 at the University of Cambridge, Open Book is a nonprofit publisher of peer-reviewed, academic books. The books can be viewed online for free (via Google Books), while digital PDF editions and POD paperback and hardback editions are available for purchase. They are licensed under the CC-by-NC-ND license for England and Wales.
• Open Humanities Press: Open Humanities Press was established in 2009 in partnership with University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office to publish open access monographs and make them available online. The site currently hosts a small number of journals as well as books.

This is just a small sample of the over 100 publishers listed (last updated on 3 Sep 2015).

Interested in learning about different aspects of Open Science but don't have the time to attend a course or information session?  The Foster project has just released their first set of e-learning courses as part of Open Access Week 2015.

The self-learning courses focus on the topics “Open Access in Horizon2020”, “Open Science to Research”, and “Repository compatibility with Horizon2020”. The courses have been created by FOSTER partners and offer a variety of options to get to grips with each topic: short video presentations, background reading and self-assessment tests.

For further developments, stay tuned to the Foster project via their twitter channel @fosterscience or their website.

A new website has been launched by SPARC, The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, that quantitatively documents a journal's degree of openness.

The Open Access Spectrum (OAS) Evaluation Tool generates an “Openness” score that is straightforward, easy to understand, and free. You can use it to help you determine if a particular journal responds to your needs in terms of openness.

The OAS Evaluation Tool uses the HowOpenIsIt? Guide as the basis for a 100-point scale. In addition to providing independent, expert evaluation of journal OA policies, it:

• includes distinct evaluations for a journal’s policies regarding reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights, author posting rights, automatic posting, and machine readability.
• pulls together— in one single, accurate web resource— information that is otherwise buried across scores of publisher websites. 

An initial batch of 500 journals has been included at launch, with another 500 to follow by the end of the year. These journals encompass a range of disciplines, countries of origin, and business models. The set of 1,000 journals was created from the freely available Scimago dataset, which was divided into open access and non-open access journals on the basis of a lookup of their ISSN in the DOAJ. The top 600 journals from the non-OA set and the top 200 from the OA set, based on ranking by Scimago Journal Rank, were selected. Additionally, 200 journals were selected from across the Scielo, Redalyc, Bioline, AJOL, and DOAJ databases to ensure geographic and subject diversity.

LERU (The League of European Research Universities) Statement for the 2016 Dutch EU Presidency

Nowadays, European universities pay publishers significant parts of their university budget. Hundreds of millions of euro's. Money which is not directly spent on research and education, even though it is largely taxpayers´ money. As Harvard University already denounced in 2012, many large journal publishers have rendered the situation “fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive”, with some journals costing as much as $40,000 per year (and publishers drawing profits of 35% or more). If one of the wealthiest universities in the world can no longer afford it, who can? It is easy to picture the struggle of European universities with tighter budgets. In addition to subscription costs, academic research funding is also largely affected by “Article Processing Charges” (APC), which come at an additional cost of €2000/article, on average, when making individual articles Gold Open Access. Some publishers are in this way even being paid twice for the same content ("double dipping")

Is this how the EU envisions access to the results of academic research?

"Christmas is over", says Prof Kurt Deketelaere, Secretary-General LERU: "I call upon the European Commission and the forthcoming Dutch EU Presidency to work with all stakeholders and bodies involved, to bring sensible solutions to the fore."

To read the full LERU statement, see http://www.leru.org/index.php/public/extra/signtheLERUstatement/.

Join our OpenAIRE webinar on Monday 19 Oct 2015 from 12:00-13:00 to learn all about the Open Access to Publications mandate in Horizon 2020 and the benefits OpenAIRE can bring you.

All projects receiving Horizon 2020 funding have the obligation to make sure any peer-reviewed journal article which they publish is openly accessible, free of charge.

Ensuring Open Access to publications may come with many question: what to deposit and where, how to ensure access, what are the implications of Open Access and how can it help my research?

The webinar, led by Inge Van Nieuwerburgh, from the University of Ghent, will address the following topics:

• Open revisited & Open Access
• OA policy development in H2020
• Open Access in Horizon 2020
• What does OpenAIRE offer?
• How can OpenAIRE help?

For full details and to register, see the OpenAIRE Events page.

Helping researchers to make informed publication choices.

Need help in determining where to publish your research? A new campaign, !Think. ✓Check. >Submit. can help you determine the best place to publish the results of your research.

You can benefit from more information on what to consider when choosing where to publish, but the campaign is, in particular, directed towards early-career academics, and is aimed to be accessible to those whose first language is not English, or who may not be aware of, or have access to, the full breadth of scholarly literature.

Think. Check. Submit. is a new campaign coordinated by representatives of organisations from across the industry: ALPSP, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), INASP, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), ISSN, LIBER, OASPA, SPARC, UKSG and others.

La Science Ouverte en marche

Les chercheurs, acteurs des mutations de l'édition scientifique à l'ère de l'Open Access

Les 12, 13 et 14 octobre 2015

Paris - 155, Bd de l'Hôpital - métro Place d'Italie

For full details, see http://jao2015.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/5.