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Tag: Open Access

Open Access
Dec 15 2022

UI Libraries Announces New Institute of Physics Open Access Agreement

Posted on December 15, 2022 by Sara Scheib

The University of Iowa Libraries is pleased to announce a new transformative read and publish agreement with the Institute of Physics (IOP). The agreement, negotiated through the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), ensures continued access to IOPscience and supports unlimited Open Access publishing in eligible IOP journals for University of Iowa authors without paying article processing charges (APCs).

The agreement takes effect on Jan. 1, 2023, and runs through Dec. 31, 2025. To qualify for the agreement, the article must be accepted in an eligible IOP journal within that timeframe and have a corresponding author from the University of Iowa or another participating institution.

Corresponding authors must identify themselves as affiliated with the University of Iowa and use their institutional email address as part of the IOP publishing workflow. They will automatically be identified as eligible to publish open access without paying APCs. Authors will retain copyright and the article will be published under a CC-BY Creative Commons license.

The IOP agreement is one of a growing number of transformative agreements the UI Libraries participates in as part of its commitment to support Open Access. If you have any questions, please contact the Sciences Library or the Scholarly Impact Department.

Posted in Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Impact, Sciences, What's newTagged Open Access
Jun 21 2022

Libraries support OA book publisher Punctum Books

Posted on June 21, 2022 by Sara Scheib

The University Libraries is pleased to announce it has joined Punctum Books Supporting Library Membership Program for three years. Punctum Books is a scholar-led, queer-led, and peer-reviewed academic book publisher devoted to academic and para-academic authors working in any field in the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and architecture & design who want to publish books that are genre-bending and which take experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing. As a diamond open access (OA) publisher, all Punctum Books titles are openly available and they do not charge any author-facing fees.

The University Libraries support for Punctum Books will help to subsidize:

  • the publication of high-quality OA books in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Fine Arts, and Architecture & Design, with no publication fees ever imposed upon authors;
  • commitment and adherence to the “best practices” (as guided by librarians and the standards of academic communities) for editorial evaluation and oversight, interoperable metadata, cataloguing, indexing, discovery, dissemination, aggregation, and preservation of its OA books; and
  • the development and sustainable maintenance, in collaboration with other presses and research organizations, of open-source and community-owned infrastructure for OA books in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

This support is aligned with the Libraries Statement of OA Support and is one of many memberships and agreements undertaken to make more University of Iowa scholarship open access. If you have questions about the Libraries support for open access, please contact us at lib-impact@uiowa.edu.

Posted in Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Impact, What's newTagged Open Access1 Comment
Feb 03 2022

Wiley Open Access Agreement

Posted on February 3, 2022December 16, 2022 by Sara Scheib

Important Update: All Wiley open access credits for 2022 have been used. UI authors will instead be offered a 10% discount on APCs. Information about an expanded Wiley open access agreement for 2023 and beyond will be announced as soon as possible. (12/16/2022)

University Libraries is excited to announce an open access (OA) agreement with Wiley. This agreement, negotiated through the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), begins on February 1, 2022, and runs through December 31, 2022. Through this agreement, the University of Iowa receives 124 credits. Each credit allows one eligible article to be published open access in a Wiley hybrid journal at no cost to the author. Corresponding authors can choose to use a credit to make their article OA.  

  • Eligible publications have a corresponding author from the University of Iowa, are primary research and review articles (which may include original articles, case studies, reviews, and short communications), and are accepted for publication in a Wiley hybrid journal between February 1, 2022, and December 31, 2022.  
  • Choosing to make an article open access is part of the Wiley publishing workflow. Once your article has been accepted in a Wiley hybrid journal, you will see the option to make it OA in the Wiley Author Dashboard. If you choose to make your article OA, you will then be asked to indicate your affiliation with the University of Iowa, and your request will be submitted to the library for approval.  
  • Requests to use credits are approved on a first-come, first-served basis. If or when we run out of credits, UI authors will be automatically eligible for a 10% discount on Article Processing Charges (APCs) until December 31, 2022. 

See the BTAA Wiley Open Access Agreement for more details. Please contact Sara Scheib if you have questions or need assistance. 

Posted in Hardin, Scholarly Communication, Scholarly ImpactTagged Open Access
Feb 01 2022

Company of Biologists: Free Open Access Publishing for UI Authors

Posted on February 1, 2022 by Sara Scheib

Open AccessThe University of Iowa Libraries has entered into a transformative agreement with the Company of Biologists that allows University of Iowa authors to publish open access articles for free in their 5 journals.

Key benefits of the agreement include:

  • unlimited fee-free publishing of Open Access research articles for corresponding authors in their hybrid journals (Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology) and their fully Open Access journals (Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open)
  • unlimited access to their hybrid journals including their archives dating back to 1853
  • compliant with Plan S and funder mandates

Publishing open access allows articles to reach a wider audience because they are free to read online and not limited to subscribers. This transformative agreement for open access publishing means that UI authors will not have to pay out of pocket for the article processing fees that are traditionally charged for open access publishing.

To take advantage of free open access publishing in Company of Biologists journals, UI authors can follow the instructions on their web site. 

Looking for more? Check out the UI Libraries full list of transformative agreements (also known as read and publish agreements).

Questions? Ask Leo Clougherty or Sara Scheib.

Posted in Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Impact, SciencesTagged Open Access
Open Access
Aug 23 2021

ECS Plus: Free Open Access Publishing for UI authors

Posted on August 23, 2021August 29, 2021 by Sara Scheib

The University of Iowa Libraries has entered into a transformative agreement with the Electrochemical Society (ECS) that allows University of Iowa authors to publish open access for free in ECS journals. The number of open access articles that can be published for free is unlimited and takes effect immediately. Publishing open access allows articles to reach a wider audience because they are free to read online and not limited to subscribers. This transformative agreement for open access publishing means that UI authors will not have to pay out of pocket for the article processing fees that are traditionally charged for open access publishing.  

To take advantage of free open access publishing in ECS, UI authors must select ECS Plus under Step 6 – Open Access Waivers, Charges and Credits at the time of manuscript submission to take advantage of an article credit.

  • When you submit your article to an ECS journal, you’ll be asked if you wish to publish open access. Select ‘Yes’
  • Select ‘ECS Plus’ and name your institution in the supporting information box

In additional to free open access publishing, University of Iowa students, faculty, and staff have full access to the contents of the ECS Digital Library.

Looking for more? Check out the UI Libraries full list of transformative agreements (also known as read and publish agreements).

Questions? Ask Leo Clougherty or Sara Scheib.

Posted in Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Impact, SciencesTagged Open Access
Open Access logo
May 21 2021

Publish Open Access with the American Chemical Society

Posted on May 21, 2021 by Sara Scheib

ACS Publications - Most Trusted. Most Cited. Most Read.The University of Iowa Libraries has entered into an agreement with the American Chemical Society (ACS) to bundle the cost of journal subscriptions and Open Access (OA) publishing. Under this three-year contract, UI corresponding authors can publish their journal articles Open Access and free of cost to them in any ACS journal. These articles can then be immediately read by anyone, anywhere, without the paywalls that traditionally accompany academic journals. Under this agreement, UI authors can publish a significant number of articles OA, but not an unlimited number.

This arrangement is part of a larger effort by UI Libraries to reduce the cost of OA for individual researchers. Unfortunately, publishers often charge authors directly to pay for the cost of publishing OA journal articles. (For instance, ACS normally charges authors $4,500 per article for OA.) For faculty who don’t have grant or departmental funding, this can be prohibitively expensive. These costs have soared in recent years and are a significant barrier to making research open and freely accessible.  

For more information, contact Conrad Bendixen, or Leo Clougherty from the Sciences Library.

Posted in Scholarly Communication, Scholarly ImpactTagged Open Access
Cambridge logo
Feb 18 2021

UI authors can now make Cambridge articles Open Access for free

Posted on February 18, 2021May 21, 2021 by Mahrya Burnett

On the heels of its recent arrangement with PLOS, the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) has entered into a second contract to bundle the cost of journal subscriptions and Open Access (OA) publishing, this time with publisher, Cambridge University Press. Under this three-year contract, UI corresponding authors can publish their journal articles OA and free of cost to them, in any of Cambridge’s journals. These articles can then be read by anyone, anywhere, without the paywalls that traditionally accompany academic journals.  

This arrangement is part of a larger effort by UI Libraries and the BTAA to reduce the cost of OA for individual researchers. Unfortunately, publishers often charge authors directly to pay for the cost of publishing OA journal articles. (For instance, Cambridge normally charges $2,520 per article for OA.) For faculty who don’t have grant or departmental funding, this can be prohibitively expensive. These costs have soared in recent years and are a significant barrier to making research open and freely accessible.  

As the Libraries continue to sign these types of transformative agreements, our hope is that more and more of our faculty will be able to publish their research OA without fees.  

For more information, please contact Sara Scheib, Head of Scholarly Impact, or Mahrya Burnett, Scholarly Communications Librarian.

Posted in Scholarly Communication, Scholarly ImpactTagged Open Access, scholarly publishing, transformative agreements
Jan 22 2021

Big Ten Academic Alliance Signs new PLOS Deal

Posted on January 22, 2021May 21, 2021 by Mahrya Burnett

If you’ve ever considered publishing Open Access (OA) in PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine, it just got a lot more affordable. The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), of which University of Iowa is a member, just signed a three-year deal with the OA mega-journal publisher, PLOS, allowing corresponding authors at any Big 10 university to publish in these two journals without any cost to the author. This agreement is part of PLOS’ Community Action Publishing (CAP) program, which its website describes as, “a type of ‘collective action’ business model that can equitably distribute the cost of selective, Open Access publishing among institutions rather than charging high APCs to individual authors.” The program comes as part of an existing resource sharing consortium among the institutions of the Big 10 and is the first of its kind, both for PLOS and the BTAA.  

While not all of PLOS’ journal titles are covered by this agreement—most notably the publisher’s flagship journal, PLOS One is not covered—PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine are already major publication venues for authors at Big 10 universities, representing 5% of the total articles published in both journals from 2016 to 2019. This deal makes the highly selective titles even more attractive to BTAA authors. 

Article Processing Charges (APCs) are a burden that OA authors have to bear themselves if they have no grant or department funding to cover them. These costs have risen precipitously in recent years and are a significant barrier to making research open and freely accessible. Without the CAP program, authors submitting to PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine could expect to pay up to $3,000 to make a single article open. This agreement represents an alternative to both the traditional subscription model of academic publishing and the author-funded APC model. Under the CAP program, the BTAA pays for the publishing costs (+ 10% margin) and any revenues above the target are redistributed back to community members.  

If you’re interested in taking advantage of no-cost OA publishing in PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine, the process should be seamless. You just follow PLOS’ existing workflows and your institutional affiliation will trigger PLOS to publish the article without the APC. As UI Libraries move toward supporting more sustainable and equitable models of OA, we see this community-based agreement as a step in the right direction.  

For more information, please contact Sara Scheib, Head of Scholarly Impact, or Mahrya Burnett, Scholarly Communications Librarian.

Posted in Faculty News, Main Library, News, Scholarly Communication, Scholarly ImpactTagged Open Access, transformative agreements
Open Access logo
Oct 29 2018

Open Access to Research Data

Posted on October 29, 2018October 31, 2018 by Willow Fuchs

Written by Brian Westra, Data Services Manager

This year’s International Open Access Week is emphasizing equitable foundations for open knowledge. Across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities there is a growing recognition of the importance of open access to research data. The FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles encompass a set of technical/ computational characteristics that enable data discovery and reuse. Data sharing can advance the rate of research discovery, provide the basis for new forms of computational and multi-disciplinary research, and on a personal level, may lead to increased citations of the related articles.

If you’re interested in the details, these principles are outlined in the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science, but are just as applicable to NSF’s funding of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, the digital humanities, and other domains. Others who are working on pathways for implementation include publishing coalitions and the US Federal Government’s Project Open Data.

To bring this to a more personal level of application, here are just a few ways in which you can start supporting open access to your own research data.

1. Use open, non-proprietary file formats whenever they are available and appropriate for your research. By using these formats you enable others to view and use your data without the need for specialty software, and provide some assurance that when software changes, or disappears, your data will still be usable by others (and yourself).

Data repositories, research funding organizations, and some publishers provide guidelines and suggested formats for data. The UK Data Services recommended formats cover more common file types. Your research domain may have specific standards, such as those for earth sciences, medical imaging, and chemistry.

 Sometimes data will need to be converted to an open format, and it’s important to be aware of the considerations about what might happen to the data, or embedded information, during this process. The UK Data Services website and other sources outline these issues, and you can also contact us for assistance.

2. Deposit in repositories that will provide long-term, open access to and preservation of the data. Do not rely on supplemental files with articles that may be locked behind a paywall. Instead, seek out repositories that are sustainably funded, and provide open access to at least the metadata via a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) or other persistent identifier. Some funding organizations list their preferred data repositories with their data management planning guidelines, and you can also contact us for assistance.

In addition to external data repositories, the UI provides a data repository in which you can deposit your research data, and we can assist you with this as well.

3. When you deposit your data, insure that it is well-documented so that others can find it, understand it and know about any restrictions on its use. Most repositories provide standardized fields for you to submit this information. Document the collection/generation process, analysis, and any other computational workflow that would be necessary to understand or reproduce the data. You may also want to deposit a readme file for additional information, if the repository allows.

These are a few basic steps that you can take when you are ready to share your research data. With some time and effort, your data will be accessible and enable you to have a broader impact through sharing these products of your research.

Posted in Scholarly CommunicationTagged data management, Open Access, Open Access Week
Open Access logo
Oct 25 2018

Scholarly Communications and OA

Posted on October 25, 2018October 23, 2018 by Willow Fuchs

Written by Mahrya Burnett, Scholarly Communications Librarian      

In the libraries, we spend the whole month of October celebrating Open Access (OA), and with good reason. As scholarly publishing continues to evolve and spawn new models for disseminating knowledge, it’s more important than ever to make sure that anyone can access critical research and that scholars from anywhere in the world can publish their discoveries. It’s also important for scholars at the University of Iowa to understand how to manage the impact of their research, disseminate it as widely as possible, and to choose publication venues that will help reach their goals.

Guiding researchers as they navigate these issues is a big part of my job as a scholarly communications librarian. I meet with all kinds of students and faculty to talk about the ins and outs of publishing their research. If you’re interested in getting your publications out from behind paywalls and into the hands of readers, here’s how I can help:

Find open access journals in your discipline

One way to make your research open is to publish in an open access journal. But what does that mean? Open access journals are publications that make it free for readers to access ALL of their content through the publisher’s website. Quality OA journals will be transparent in their business and editorial practices and should be well-regarded in your field. They should also be up-front about any Article Processing Charges (APCs) used to offset the cost of publishing. The Directory of Open Access Journals can help you determine whether a journal is, in fact, open and can help you find open journals in your discipline. I can help you navigate this directory or provide you with additional information about journals.

Get your work into Iowa Research Online

Iowa Research Online (IRO) is Iowa’s institutional repository for publications and other research artifacts. This means that UI faculty, staff, and students can upload their published work and make it discoverable to anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world. Including your article in IRO is another great way to make your research open, and I would be glad to help walk you through the process. Not every publisher will allow you to include the final version of your article in a repository. But luckily, there are tools that we can use to determine exactly what your publisher will allow. Sherpa/RoMEO is one such tool. This directory lists current publisher policies on self-archiving and will tell you what you can and cannot include in IRO.

Find funding for Article Processing Charges (APCs)

APCs are one of the most misunderstood aspects of scholarly publishing. In some disciplines, it has long been standard practice to charge authors “page fees” for charts, graphics, color printing, or other publication costs. In other disciplines, giving money to a publisher is considered “pay to publish,” and is not seen as a legitimate practice. In the world of open access publishing, we have seen APCs crop up, proliferate, and grow to sometimes thousands of dollars per publication. Not all OA journals charge APCs, in fact the vast majority do not. However, the ones who do are often big name journal titles, with high impact factors, produced by major academic publishers. These are often the same journals in which scholars need to publish, for promotion and tenure, or simply to be widely read. In many ways, these publishers still control the landscape, even the OA landscape, and it looks like their APCs aren’t going away anytime soon. If you find yourself needing to pay an APC or are considering an OA publication, but don’t know how to fund it, I can help. Often, you can designate grant funding to be earmarked for APCS or your department may have funds available for this purpose.

Get up-to-date on funder mandates for open

Funding organizations are slowly recognizing that the research they fund as a public good should, in fact, be available to the public. While other parts of the world are further along that the United States in this regard (See Plan S, for example), certain federal agencies require that funded research be made publicly available. When this is the case, researchers must comply with the mandate. Some agencies, such as the National Institute of Health, make complying with this policy relatively easy. Others are a bit more tricky. This is another area where I can be of assistance.

If you’d like to discuss how to make your research open, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to send me an email at mahrya-burnett@uiowa.edu to set up an appointment. I’m also a part of the library’s new Scholarly Impact Department, which rolls our scholarly communications and data services into one unit. If you’d like to learn more about the new department, please contact us at lib-impact@uiowa.edu. Let’s work together to make Iowa’s scholarship as open as it can be!

Posted in Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Impact, UncategorizedTagged Iowa Research Online, Open Access, Open Access Week

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