The project:
To round off a great Open Access week, we’d like to announce a new interesting project we’ve started. Continuing our efforts in the field of Open Science, Open Knowledge Finland was commissioned by CSC – IT Center for Science and the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture to implement a Study on the Openness of Scientific Publishers.
The challenge:
The key goal of the project is to look at the practices of open access publishing by major publishers, and “rank” these publishers according to metrics / scorecard developed in the project.
The project will particularly look at some of the major scientific publishers, namesly Elsevier, Springer, Nature, Wiley-Blackwell, American Chemical Society (ACS), Taylor & Francis, Sage, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), IEEE, and ACM.
Our assumption is that the ranking will be based on
- Number of open access journals / full journal list
- Costs of open access publishing
- Creative Commons licenses
- Self-archiving
- Data-mining possibilities
What do you think? Perhaps you’d like to contribute to Leo Lahti’s tweet:
#OAWeek question: suggest criteria to assess the openness of academic publishers? @troppone @jlehtoma @mikaellaakso @rmounce @chgutknecht
— Leo Lahti (@antagomir) October 28, 2017
Expected results:
This report looks at the practices of open access publishing as it is presented in easily accessible online sources. The need of information is linked to a wider framework of investigating the current status of open access practices across the academic field in Finland. Previous reports have scrutinised Universities and research institutions (2015, 2016) and the sources for research funding (2016). This report concentrates on a further piece of research infrastructure: channels of publication.
Who’s doing it?
The leading expert and manager for this project is Leo Lahti, a long-time researcher, expert and activist on open science.
OKFI is doing this in collaboration with Oxford Research – with Juho-Matti Paavola and Anna Björk doing much of the data crunching and writing. Assoc. Prof. Mikael Laakso gives guidance and Teemu Ropponen supports with admin and communications.
The project kicked off a few weeks ago, early October. Key results will be delivered in November, and the project will finalize in December. So, in short, this is indeed a “rapid action” project!
How can you participate:
- The report draft will be commentable – not available yet.
- There will also be a dialogue with the publishers.
- Follow Open Science Finland on Facebook
- The project on Slack: okfi.slack.com – channel #51-tiedekustantajat
- Participate in the Open Science Forum (ATT-foorumi)
See also:
- Tiedon hinta (The cost of publishing) campaign – http://tiedonhinta.fi/en/english/
- No deal, No review campaign – http://www.nodealnoreview.org/
Want to know more?
Contact:
Leo Lahti, leo.lahti@okf.fi
Teemu Ropponen, teemu.ropponen@okf.fi
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