Open Access (OA) Week – Support SCOSS in Providing Funding for Three Essential Services for the Open Research Community
What is Open Access (OA) Week about and why is it important?
Open Access week is a week-long event (25 – 31 October 2021) whereby different organisations and entities promote the principles and agenda of open access, namely that research which has been conducted and paid for by public funds should be accessible to all – for the common good of people and for science.
This year’s theme intentionally aligns with the recently released UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, of which Open Access is a crucial component. Circulated in draft form following discussion by representatives of UNESCO’s 193 member countries, the Recommendation powerfully articulates and centres the importance of equity in pursuing a future for scholarship that is open by default.
What is the SCOSS network and what are its aims?
The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), a part of SPARC Europe, has successfully supported two pledging rounds for Open Science Infrastructures (OSIs) helping them secure a sustainable future. To date, SCOSS has facilitated reaching over €3.3m in pledges for DOAJ, Jisc’s Sherpa Romeo, DOAB and OAPEN, PKP and OpenCitations.
The mission of SPARC Europe is to provide leadership to Europe’s Higher Education and research communities and those that support it to enable the conditions and opportunities to maximise the access and re-use of Europe’s research and educational resources for all whilst respecting diversity and equity. This closely aligns with LIBER’s own mission to provide an information infrastructure to help research in LIBER’s institutions to be world-class and ensuring intellectual freedom and access to scholarship.
SCOSS now launches its third pledging round: we are asking the research community to please support arXiv, Redalyc/AmeliCA,and DSpace. These three services are all deemed “essential infrastructures” by SCOSS:
arXiv, founded in 1991, is one of the pioneers in digital open access, making it possible for researchers to share and discover emerging science via preprints. Currently hosting more than 1.9 million scholarly articles, arXiv offers a broad range of services: article submission, compilation, production, retrieval, search and discovery, web distribution for human readers, and API distribution for machines, together with content curation and preservation.
Redalyc /AmeliCA has been gaining momentum as a vital open publishing infrastructure in many parts of the world. Redalyc was established in 2003 to stimulate Open Access publishing in Latin-American, Portuguese, and Spanish-speaking countries, expanding its offering to more countries in 2018. Redalyc includes journal quality assessment processes, full-text article hosting, automatic editorial workflow technology, metrics, and author-level services.
Redalyc, together with CLACSO leads AmeliCA, a multi-institutional community-driven initiative supported by UNESCO. AmeliCA fosters collaboration among different stakeholders, such as universities, journal editors, libraries, and the research community.
What does the research community need to do?
We encourage everyone within the LIBER community to support the initiative, either by spreading the word or encouraging your organisations to pledge funding, where possible, for any of the three SCOSS pledges.
To learn more details about the initiative and the potential beneficiaries, as well as view 2-minute pitches from each of the services, go to Let’s work together to build a healthy Open Science ecosystem! and read more about how to pledge here.