On 17/18th January the PALOMERA (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) project kicked off with a meeting in Brussels, Belgium. Representatives from the 16 partners gathered to launch the new two-year project, funded by HORIZON Europe.
The project is focused on ensuring that academic books and monographs are not neglected in Open Science and Open Access (OA) policies. While books are a vital way to share research in many disciplines, they are rarely mandated to be published OA by research funders and institutions. PALOMERA will investigate the reasons for this situation and provide actionable recommendations to speed up the transition to OA books, further promoting Open Science.
Over the two days in Brussels, each of the project’s five work packages presented themselves and participants took part in a workshop to collect ideas for landscape and mapping of OA book publishing in Europe. The kick-off made clear how all project activities would fit together and contribute to one another. Once complete, PALOMERA will table policy recommendations aimed at research funders and policymakers, to maximise impact and change.
LIBER will assist the project with its landscape analysis. We will also look for opportunities to collect our members’ input on this topic, to help shape recommendations that are relevant for key stakeholder groups. If you are interested in OA policies for books and monographs, please follow the work of this project or contact oliver.blake@libereurope.org for opportunities to be involved.
For more information, please visit the website of the project coordinator, OPERAS.