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tag: Open access

Past Event
March 22, 2024

Breaking Boundaries: Is Open Access Truly Open to All?

Karger in Conversation

Ithaka S+R’s Roger Schonfeld will participate in a thought-provoking panel discussion that aims to critically examine whether open access, despite its advancements, is only halfway towards achieving its goals. By exploring how knowledge can be both accessible an understandable beyond academic spheres, the panel hopes to initiate a dialogue that will shape the next steps in the open access and open science movement. The webinar will also address topics including: Assessing the extent to which open access reaches diverse global…
Past Event
October 24, 2023

Unpacking the Open Access Impact on Print Book Sales

Association of University Presses Webinar

In September, Ithaka S+R and the Association of University Presses published the report “Print Revenue and Open Access Monographs: A University Press Study,” as well as its affiliated data set. On October 24 at 10am ET, join authors of the study in a webinar during OA Week 2023 to discuss the findings in this report, and share ideas about how university presses can use the information to develop sustainable OA monograph publishing solutions. This research was funded by a…
Blog Post
September 19, 2023

Open Access Book Publishing

Print Sales, Publisher Revenues, and New Business Models

Developing open access models for monograph publishing is a priority for many university presses today, but it has been a challenge to provide the level of subvention necessary to sustain open models. As a consequence, open access programs have increasingly looked to include library support as well, for example through various flavors of subscribe to open models. In addition, some publishing leaders have come to question the assumption that when monographs are published on an open access basis,…
Research Report
September 19, 2023

Print Revenue and Open Access Monographs

A University Press Study

What happens to print sales when an OA edition of a scholarly monograph is also available on publication? This is the central focus of this report, which is authored by members and representatives from the Association of University Presses and Ithaka S+R. Beyond exploring the question of the role of print sales in OA monograph publishing, we will also touch briefly on how print sales fit into the overall financial equation of a sustainable OA book model.
Blog Post
June 22, 2021

Cancelling the Big Deal Project Spotlight

An Interview with Freie Universität Berlin with contributions from Dominik Hagel, Franziska Harnisch, Mario Kowalak, and Cosima Wagner

As university budgets face considerable strain and new models for providing open access to scholarly communication proliferate, academic libraries are increasingly pursuing alternatives to the “Big Deal” journal subscription model, including cancellation. But how are these strategies affecting researchers and what do they make of them? Over the past year Ithaka S+R has been studying the impact of Big Deal cancellations on its users in partnership with 11 academic libraries. Previous research has focused primarily on…
Research Report
June 22, 2021

What’s the Big Deal?

How Researchers Are Navigating Changes to Journal Access

The dominant mode by which research libraries have provided maximum journal access as cheaply as possible—subscription bundles or “Big Deals”—is giving way to new approaches. This transition is taking place through a combination of negotiations, activism, business modeling, user needs research, and decision support, among other factors. To support these processes, Ithaka S+R partnered with 11 academic libraries to understand researcher perceptions to help inform their ongoing strategic decision making about Big Deal journal subscriptions.
Blog Post
January 4, 2021

Not Much Has (Yet) Changed

Open Access Priorities and the Impact of COVID-19

As it became clear at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that research on the virus was greatly needed by both scholars and the general public, many publishers quickly opened up access to previously paywalled content. Open access sharing of COVID-19 data became relatively more common with organizations such as the National Institutes of Health compiling and sharing databases of articles, enabling researchers…
Past Event
March 19, 2020

National Academy of Sciences Journal Summit

Roger Schonfeld Moderates Panel of Deans of Research

This event has been postponed. We will update the event when we have additional information. On Thursday, March 19, at 2:15 pm, Roger Schonfeld is moderating a panel of deans of research at the National Academy of Sciences Journal Summit in Washington DC. The panel includes John Bixby (University of Miami), Susan Martinis (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Padma Raghavan (Vanderbilt University), and Keith Yamamoto (University of California San Francisco). The working agenda for the summit is available here.
Blog Post
December 10, 2019

Perspectives on the 2018 US Faculty Survey in Against the Grain

Every three years when we release findings from our national faculty surveys, we receive a plethora of reactions and responses to the results. There was no exception when we released the 2018 results in conjunction with the ACRL conference in April 2019. While these high-level quantitative results offer strong evidence toward understanding faculty practices and perspectives, particularly for tracking change over time, many who work in academic libraries, learned societies, and…
Blog Post
November 12, 2019

Taking the Temperature on Open Access Among UC Berkeley Faculty

In fall 2018, UC Berkeley fielded the Ithaka S+R local faculty survey, concurrent with our national initiative. In this post, Chan Li, Assessment Program Librarian, shares how data from this survey can be used for decision-making in supporting scholarly communication efforts of faculty members. — Christine Wolff-Eisenberg To promote a publishing ecosystem where the impact of research can be maximized by removing readership barriers, the UC Berkeley Library is making many efforts to push for open access publishing,…
Past Event
November 14, 2019

The Unfunded Mandate of Compliance

Oya Y. Rieger at NFAIS Foresight Event

On Thursday, November 14, Oya Y. Rieger is speaking on “The Unfunded Mandate of Compliance” at the NFAIS Foresight Event, “Open Access: The Role and Impact of Preprint Servers,” in Washington DC. Her talk will take place at 2:00 pm. For more information and to register, please see the event website. Abstract During the last decade, we’ve witnessed the emergence of public access policies by a range of governmental and private funding agencies to open up scholarly outputs that…
Blog Post
October 21, 2019

Beyond Innovation: Emerging Meta-Frameworks for Maintaining an Open Scholarly Infrastructure

There are numerous free and community-based academic and cultural resources that are designed and built on open source or open access principles. Undertaken by not-for-profit mission-driven organizations, such services and technologies aim to introduce innovation to various stages of scholarly communication from designing research projects to publishing results.  Today, amid growing concerns about their long-term durability and agility, there is renewed interest in sustainability, business models, revenue, and maintenance. In our previous post, we looked back at some…
Past Event
October 13, 2019

The Labor of Open

Danielle Cooper at the Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute

From Sunday, October 13 through Wednesday, October 17, Danielle Cooper is participating in the 2019 Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The theme of this year’s institute is “Equity in Scholarly Communications.” Danielle will be working on a team with Leslie Chan (University of Toronto Scarborough), Emily Drabinski (CUNY Grad Center), Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Jojo Karlin (CUNY Grad Center), and Ela Przybylo (Illinois State University) on “The Labor of Open.” The Triangle…
Blog Post
October 1, 2019

Sustaining the Open Sector: A Brief Look Back

During the last two decades, we’ve seen the emergence of several open source (OS) and open access (OA) initiatives designed to support the academic and cultural community’s needs for more effective, versatile, and cost-efficient tools. Since 2006, Ithaka S+R has explored the sustainability requirements of these resources, investigating both the factors that lead to success and the reasons behind setbacks and failures. Today, amid the failure of several cross-institutional “open” initiatives and the broader search for funding to…
Past Event
November 6, 2019

Library Collections: Creatively Adjusting Budgets to Invest in Open Content

Roger Schonfeld at the Charleston Conference

On Wednesday, November 6, from 2:00 – 3:10 pm , Roger Schonfeld will join Barbara Dewey (Penn State University),  Julia Gelfand (University of California, Irvine), and Dan Cohen (Northeastern University) for a panel discussion, “Library Collections: Creatively Adjusting Budgets to Invest in Open Content,” at the Charleston Conference. For more information and to register, please see the conference website. About the panel Building on the 2019 ACRL/SPARC Forum on Collective Reinvestment in Open Infrastructure, this program will explore how…
Past Event
March 22, 2019

Roger Schonfeld Leads Workshop at RLUK

Beyond Open: Transformations in Scholarly Publishing

On Friday, March 22, from 11:30 am -1:00 pm, Roger Schonfeld is facilitating a workshop on “Beyond Open: Transformations in Scholarly Publishing.” Roger will be joined by Toby Greene (OECD) and Daniel Hook (Digital Science). The workshop is part of the RLUK19 Conference in London, England. For more information and to register, please see the conference website. About the workshop Open access is transforming the scholarly publishing landscape. In just the past year, the academic sector has asserted itself through…
Past Event
February 14, 2019

Roger Schonfeld Delivers Plenary Address at NFAIS

On Thursday, February 14, Roger Schonfeld is delivering a plenary address on “The Role of Library Consortia in the Transition to Cloud-based Infrastructure and Open Access Publishing” at the NFAIS Annual Conference in Alexandria, Virginia. His session will run from 10:45 am to noon, and registration is now open on the NFAIS website. Abstract Library consortia and systems have played a major role in the development of collaborations to expand the availability of collections and licensed content and reduce…
Blog Post
June 20, 2016

The Impact of Open Access Mandates

Looking at Trends in the UK Survey of Academics

What makes the 2015 Ithaka S+R Jisc RLUK survey of UK academics so interesting is its timing. The last survey was 2012, the year of the Finch report on open access. The latest survey took place in 2015, the year the Higher Education Funding Council of England (Hefce) published its policy linking open access to the next Research Excellence Framework (REF). To some extent the results tell us what we already know: three years is a long…
Blog Post
February 5, 2016

Looking at the Cost of Publishing Monographs

When Peter Berkerey was named executive director of the American Association of University Presses (AAUP), he undertook a listening tour of the membership. From this experience, he commented that he was struck most by the diversity of the membership and how that made it difficult to establish common programs for the organization. That diversity among university presses is clearly illustrated in The Cost of Publishing Monographs: Toward a Transparent Methodology, a report just concluded by Nancy Maron, Christine Mulhern,…
Research Report
February 5, 2016

The Costs of Publishing Monographs

Toward a Transparent Methodology

The University Press business model faces numerous challenges today, with revenues under pressure due to a host of factors, from the decline of bricks-and-mortar stores and shifting library purchase patterns to the still emerging distribution and revenue models made possible by digital books. Over the last few years, certain forces have emerged and intensified—federal mandates for Open Access, declining sales reach, and the desire of university presses to build a greater audience for scholarly works—encouraging university presses to seriously consider…