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.

On the 4th June, the Flemish Interuniversity Council (VLIR) is organising a free 1-day seminar in Brussels aimed at young researchers and their supervisors focussing on research data management. Several practical topics will be addressed such as copyright issues, data management planning, dealing with repositories, EC Horizon2020 requirements, supporting tools, etc.

Full details and to register here.

107 739 : the number of full-text downloads made via ORBi^lu of publications by UL authors since its inception in April 2013. An increase of over 250% in April 2015 versus January 2015! See the results for yourself.

An elightening viewpoint from a young researcher, Erin McKiernan, on what she can do to ensure her publications are open.