The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work “open access”: digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent, and many authors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creators who depend on royalties are understandably unwilling to give their consent. But for 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journal articles for impact, not for money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue.

In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn’t, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. Distilling a decade of Suber’s influential writing and thinking about open access, this is the indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers.

This handout provides a brief overview of open access to scholarly literature. It looks at the problems with traditional journal publishing, the promise of open access as a solution, and the different paths to open access.

The Open Research Toolkit was created by Christopher Eaker during Faculty Development Leave, Fall 2021. While this toolkit was designed for librarians for learning open research concepts and skills and teaching them at their institutions, it would be useful for anyone interested in learning more about open research. Any questions related to this content can be directed to the author.

The ORT YouTube Channel is found here: http://doi.org/10.7290/ORT_Videos

The Open Research Toolkit is an Open Educational Resource, and is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may re-use and copy information from this toolkit with attribution. In addition, some of the materials referenced in this toolkit (e.g. some materials linked to and created by others) might be copyright protected; that will be indicated as best as possible, but no guarantees are made as to accuracy of that information. The user should check restrictions of any material prior to reusing it.

You can become a more visible, effective and impactful researcher by sharing your research data and publications openly. In this course, you will learn the objectives, main concepts, and benefits of Open Science principles along with practices for open data management and open data sharing.

Since research increasingly relies on software which is used to model and simulate, and to deal with the ever growing volume of research data, the course will also introduce FAIR software practices.

You'll learn to establish links between publications, data, software and methods, how to attach a persistent identifier and metadata to your results, and methods for clarifying usage rights. You will also discover ways to apply these principles to your daily research and adapt existing routines. Finally, you'll uncover potential barriers to sharing research and discuss possible solutions.

This course will help you grasp the key principles of Open Science, with answers to questions like:

How can researchers effectively store, manage, and share research data?
What kinds of open access publishing are most effective?
How can researchers increase the visibility and impact of their research?
How can the use of social media contribute to the visibility and impact of research?
How can researchers be acknowledged for the research software they write?
You will apply the topics of the course to a variety of case studies on Open Science adoption, which you will then discuss among fellow students. You will also be presented with a hands-on guide to publishing your research with open access. This will help you to apply Open Science principles in your daily work. It will enable you to implement and benefit from the Open Science policies that are currently being developed by governments and research institutions.

This course is aimed at professionals. Those who will see the most benefit include academic researchers at different levels: PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and professors; researchers working for governments; researchers working for commercial enterprises; MSc and BSc students interested to learn about the principles of Open Science.

The development of this course is supported by the VRE4EIC project with funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme.

You can become a more visible, effective and impactful researcher by sharing your research data and publications openly. In this course, you will learn the objectives, main concepts, and benefits of Open Source principles along with practices for open data management and open data sharing.

You’ll learn to establish links between publications data and methods, how to attach a persistent identifier and metadata to your results, and methods for clarifying usage rights. You will also discover ways to apply these principles to your daily research and adapt existing routines. Finally, you’ll uncover potential barriers to sharing research and discuss possible solutions.

This course will help you grasp the key principles of Open Science, with answers to questions like:

How can researchers effectively store, manage, and share research data?
What kinds of open access publishing are most effective?
How can researchers increase the visibility and impact of their research?
How can the use of social media contribute to the visibility and impact of research?
You will apply the topics of the course to a variety of case studies on Open Science adoption, which you will then discuss among fellow students. You will also be presented with a hands-on guide to publishing your research with open access. This will help you to apply Open Science principles in your daily work. It will enable you to implement and benefit from the Open Science policies that are currently being developed by governments and research institutions.

This course is aimed at professionals. Those who will see the most benefit include academic researchers at different levels: PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and professors; researchers working for governments; researchers working for commercial enterprises; MSc and BSc students interested to learn about the principles of Open Science.

This resource is intended as a module for graduate students in health sciences fields such as medicine, nursing, and public health, and librarians who work in these and related fields. The assignment will briefly review the literature on the three main themes (open access, social justice, and health equity) to provide background on the topic. Following this overview, students will break into groups, and each group will be given a topic with questions to spark discussion on the subject. Questions such as "Historically, how has access to health information created benefits or barriers to users?" or "When thinking about medical research, what stakeholders are concerned about open access and why?" Each group will select a notetaker to keep track of the responses, and time will be given in class to report out and have a wider discussion with each other. The materials provided include an optional pre-reading assignment, slide deck, lesson plan, and a sample comprehension check.

These resources are also available at https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/26714

Project:

This project involves the experimental use of open pedagogy to teach the Scholarly Communication course in a graduate-level library and information science (LIS) program. Open pedagogy is variously defined, but generally understood as a framework that requires students to be active creators of course content rather than passive consumers of it. Proponents view this as a form of experiential learning in which students demonstrate greater understanding of content by virtue of creating it.

Students in this course learn by doing; that is, they learn about scholarly communication by participating in the process. Each student is required to develop a chapter—on a scholarly communication topic of their choosing—to be included in an open access monograph. Following the semester, the text is published under a Creative Commons license on the University at Buffalo’s institutional repository as an open educational resource (OER), allowing for reuse or repurposing in future sections of the course or in similar courses in LIS programs at other institutions. To date, students have created the following open monographs: Perspectives on Scholarly Communication, Volume 1 (2019), Perspectives on Scholarly Communication, Volume 2 (2020); and Perspectives on Scholarly Communication, Volume 3 (2021). Support for the development and production of the third volume was provided by way of the following grant:

Scholarly Communication Notebook (https://lisoer.wordpress.ncsu.edu/notebook/); Institute of Museum and Library Services (https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/lg-36-19-0021-19. Investigators: Will Cross (wmcross@ncsu.edu); Josh Bolick (jbolick@ku.edu); and Maria Bonn (mbonn@illinois.edu).

Outcomes:

Immediate outcomes of the “learn by doing” aspect are clear. The experience of publishing engages students in the applied side of concepts they are introduced to by way of lectures, readings, and other class activities. This experience is invaluable for those entering the field academic librarianship, and particularly for those who will have scholarly communication responsibilities.

Immediate outcomes of the open pedagogy aspect are compelling. Research shows that students ascribe a positive learning experience to the implementation of this framework, and they hold for its continued use in future sections of the course. Students are enthusiastic in their embrace of creating renewable versus disposable coursework. They express great satisfaction with contributing to the professional literature, building the discipline’s nascent OER record, and having a publication to feature in their curricular and professional dossiers. The experience also resonates with students on a philosophical level; LIS students are particularly inclined to support activities that align with the field’s abiding ethic of “free to all”.

Long-term outcomes for the course are emerging. Select chapters from these volumes are used as required readings. In this way, students are contributing to professional discourse and to the ongoing development of LIS curricula. A roadmap for this ongoing experiment is given by way of the syllabus, assignments, lectures, rubrics, and other related materials in this Open Science Framework project.

This open course introduces students to the scholarly communications system — with particular emphasis on the scholarly journal publishing mechanism — wherein new information is created, evaluated, disseminated, and preserved.

The course content is organized into three parts. First, The Fundamentals aims to acquaint students with the basic framework of contemporary scholarly publishing: how it operates, who is involved, what roles they play, etc., as well as asking students to consider how they themselves might engage with the system as consumers and producers of scholarly knowledge. Chapters include sample exercises to reinforce content, as well as recommended resources for further study. Next, (Some) Problems raises questions and issues that complicate contemporary scholarly publishing. While scholarship and research have the noble goal of building and sharing new knowledge for the public good, they are also inextricably bound to real-world economic structures and inequalities. This section examines how the scholarly publishing system intersects with money, power, and privilege. It asks students to grapple with the system’s structural, systemic failings, as well as contemplate ways in which it might be improved. Finally, the course culminates in two final Assignments that instructors can use as part of the curriculum, or that independent learners can work through on their own. These are open-ended in that there are no discrete right or wrong answers, but rather opportunities for students to grapple with and reflect on the content of the course.

Material in this course can be used in classroom settings or as self-paced tutorial. Appropriate audiences include upper-level undergraduate or graduate students who are interested in publishing their work; library & information science (LIS) students or early-career librarians interested in scholarly communications; and anyone else who wants a better understanding of the scholarly publishing system and the academic culture in which it is rooted.

Joint webinar with ASAPbio, Sumeet Pal Singh and Europe PMC

Preprints enable researchers to rapidly share their work publicly before the formal peer review process. In this webinar you will learn more about preprints and their benefits for the research community from ASAPbio (Accelerating Science and Publication in biology); will hear an author’s perspective on posting preprints from Sumeet Pal Singh, a group leader at IRIBHM, ULB; and will find out how to incorporate preprints in your literature search routine by using the preprint discovery tools developed by Europe PMC.

ASAPbio is a scientist-driven nonprofit that promotes the productive use of preprints in the life sciences. ASAPbio coordinates a global community of researchers and stakeholders interested in preprints and develops resources to advance best practices and help researchers make informed decisions about communicating their work via preprints. Iratxe Puebla, Associate Director at ASAPbio, will provide an overview of preprints and their growth in the life sciences, and cover things researchers should consider before posting a preprint.

Sumeet Pal Singh is a group leader at IRIBHM, ULB and an ASAPbio fellow. Sumeet will describe the journey of publishing his first senior author paper from a preprint to a peer-reviewed article, as well as the details related to the timing of posting a preprint and its relationship to the peer-review process. He will outline a new path provided by Review Commons that allows the authors to receive peer reviews for their manuscript prior to a journal submission, as well as post the reviewer’s comments and the authors’ response on preprint server (bioRxiv).

Europe PMC indexes over 300,000 preprints abstracts and full text COVID-19 preprints from 20 life sciences preprint servers alongside published journal articles. Preprints in Europe PMC are linked to citations, data, community peer reviews and more. In this part of the talk we will demonstrate how to find relevant preprints, cite and track preprint citations, claim preprints to ORCID, or discover relevant resources.

Who is this course for?
This webinar is suitable to any biological researchers who wish to learn more about incorporating preprints into their research. No prior knowledge is required.

Outcomes
By the end of the webinar you will be able to:

Define what a preprint is
Choose a suitable preprint server for your work
Maximise the options for publication of the preprint at a journal
Decide when to post your manuscript as a preprint
Deal with community reviews and comments
Identify how to search for relevant preprints
Find data behind the preprint
Find comments or reviews associated with a preprint
Add a preprint publication to your publication list
Cite a preprint

Preprints enable researchers to rapidly share their work publicly before the formal peer review process. This webinar will demonstrate how to incorporate preprints in your literature search routine by using the discovery tools developed by Europe PMC.

Europe PMC indexes preprints abstracts and full text COVID-19 preprints from many life sciences preprint servers alongside published articles. Preprints in Europe PMC are linked to data and platforms that comment on or peer review preprints. We will demonstrate how to find the data behind preprints as well as comments and reviews associated with a given preprint. We will also share useful tips for posting your pre-prints, claiming a pre-print to your ORCID and tracking your pre-prints’ citations, revisions or recommendations by readers.

To learn more about using Europe PMC in your research try our Europe PMC: Quick tour or our webinar Using Europe PMC for effective literature research.

Who is this course for?
This webinar is suitable to any biological researchers who wish to learn more about incorporating pre-prints into their research. No prior knowledge is required.

Outcomes
By the end of the webinar you will be able to:

Define what a preprint is
Identify how to search for relevant preprints
Find data behind the preprint
Find comments or reviews associated with a preprint
Demonstrate how to add a preprint publication to your publication list
Describe how to cite a preprint

Psychological sciences preprints from PsyArXiv are now searchable in Europe PMC, an open database of life sciences literature. Join us for this live demo to learn how to find PsyArXiv preprints in Europe PMC, how to explore links to data, citations, comments or open peer reviews, how to claim preprints to your ORCID record, and more.

Who is this course for?
This webinar is aimed at psychology researchers.

Outcomes
By the end of the webinar you will be able to:

find PsyArXiv preprints in Europe PMC
explore links to data, citations, comments or open peer reviews
claim preprints to your ORCID record

The Publishing Trap is an open educational board game designed to teach researchers, academics, doctoral students, librarians and other professionals in higher education about the impact of publishing and scholarly communication choices they make throughout their career. Following the COVID-19 pandemic the game has been shifted to be played online using virtual classroom / webinar software (e.g Zoom, Microsoft Teams). The team nature of the game requires break-out room functionality to allow each team to confer during each round of the game.

A critical inquiry into the politics, practices, and infrastructures of open access and the reconfiguration of scholarly communication in digital societies.

The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work—to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological or policy vacuum; there are complex social, political, cultural, philosophical, and economic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access from the perspectives of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities. The contributors consider such topics as the perpetuation of colonial-era inequalities in research production and promulgation; the historical evolution of peer review; the problematic histories and discriminatory politics that shape our choices of what materials to preserve; the idea of scholarship as data; and resistance to the commercialization of platforms. Case studies report on such initiatives as the Making and Knowing Project, which created an openly accessible critical digital edition of a sixteenth-century French manuscript, the role of formats in Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), a network of more than 1,200 journals from sixteen countries. Taken together, the contributions represent a substantive critical engagement with the politics, practices, infrastructures, and imaginaries of open access, suggesting alternative trajectories, values, and possible futures.

This module dwells on a number of methods (including old and new) available for research evaluation. The module comprises the following four units:
Unit 1. Introduction to Research Evaluation Metrics and Related Indicators.
Unit 2. Innovations in Measuring Science and Scholarship: Analytical Tools and Indicators in Evaluation Scholarship Communications.
Unit 3. Article and Author Level Measurements, and
Unit 4. Online Citation and Reference Management Tools.
Brief overviews of the units are presented below.
Unit 1 encompassed and discussed citation analysis, use of citation-based indicators for research evaluation, common bibliometric indicators, classical bibliometric laws, author level indicators using authors' public profiles, article level metrics using altmetric tools. It is to be noted that author level indicators and article level metrics are new tools for research evaluation. Author level indicators encompasses h index, citations count, i10 index, g index, articles with citation, average citations per article, Eigenfactor score, impact points, and RG score. Article level metrics or altmetrics are based on Twitter, Facebook, Mendeley, CiteULike, and Delicious which have been discussed. All technical terms used in the Unit have been defined.
Unit 2 deals with analytical tools and indicators used in evaluating scholarly communications. The tools covered are The Web of Science, Scopus, Indian Citation Index (ICI), CiteSeerX, Google Scholar and Google Scholar Citations. Among these all the tools except Indian Citation Index (ICI) are international in scope. ICI is not very much known outside India. It is a powerful tool as far Indian scholarly literature is concerned. As Indian journals publish a sizable amount of foreign literature, the tool will be useful for foreign countries as well. The analytical products with journal performance metrics Journal Citation Reports (JCR®) has also been described. In the chapter titled New Platforms for Evaluating Scholarly Communications three websites i.e. SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) [ScimagoJR.com], eigenFACTOR.org, JournalMetrics.com and one software called Publish or Perish (POP) Software have been discussed.
Article and author level measurements have been discussed in Unit 3. Author and researcher identifiers are absolutely essential for searching databases in the WWW because a name like D Singh can harbour a number of names such as Dan Singh, Dhan Singh, Dhyan Singh, Darbara Singh, Daulat Singh, Durlabh Singh and more. The ResearcherID.com, launched by Thomson Reuters, is a web-based global registry of authors and researchers that individualises each and every name. Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is also a registry that uniquely identifies an author or researcher. Both have been discussed in this Unit. Article Level Metrics (Altmetrics) has been treated in this Unit with the discussion as to how altmetrics can be measured with Altmetric.com and ImpactStory.org. Altmetrics for Online Journals has also been touched. There are a number of academic social networks of which ResearchGate.net, Academia.edu, GetCited.org, etc. have been discussed. Regional journal networks with bibliometric indicators are also in existence. Two networks of this type such as SciELO – Scientific Electronic Library Online, and Redalyc have been dealt with.
The last unit (Unit 4) is on online citation and reference management tools. The tools discussed are Mendeley, CiteULike, Zotero, Google Scholar Library, and EndNote Basic. The features of all the management tools have been discussed with figures, tables, and text boxes.
This is Module Four of the UNESCO's Open Access Curriculum for Researchers.
Full-Text is available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002322/232210E.pdf

This course is no longer taught at the U-M School of Information. These materials are from an older iteration of the course.

This course introduces students to the ideas and practices surrounding teaching, learning and research at a world class research university like the University of Michigan, and the emerging role in these practices of Open Educational Resources, including open content such as opencourseware, open access initiatives, open publishing of research and learning materials as found in open journals, databases and e-prints, open textbooks, related open software efforts such as open learning systems, and emerging open teaching experiments. The course will ground the students in how teaching, learning and research is done at the university level, and then survey relevant OER efforts, looking at their history, development, potential futures, and the underlying motivations for their progressive adoption by various members of the community of scholars. more...

This course uses an open textbook Open Educational Resources at the University of Michigan. The articles in the open textbook (wikibook) were written by the School of Information Graduate students in the class.

In ScholCom 202X, you'll take on the role of a new scholarly communication librarian at a small public university somewhere in the US in the "distant future" of the year 202X.

You'll be given a number of scenarios derived from activities and questions a real scholarly communication librarian might expect to receive. These scenarios fall into four general areas: copyright; publishing; institutional repositories; and open access.

The game has two versions, an interactive fiction format written in Ink (located in the "Ink source" and "playable" folders) and a static PDF version (in "printables").

In the interactive fiction version, after reading each scenario you'll be given a chance to consult your "augment," a smartphone-like device which contains a very brief annotated list of some relevant sources and a calendar that tracks how busy you are. In the PDF/print version, these sources are listed below the scenario text, and are open access whenever possible.

After you've read the scenario text and consulted these sources (or not), put yourself in the place of the librarian in the game and think about how you would respond. Would you try to help just the person you're currently talking to, or would you rather build resources and develop strategies that could make the question easier to answer the next time it comes up, and potentially even reach and educate people who don't know the questions to ask in the first place?

As you think through each scenario, ask yourself how you would balance the desire to do a good job against the threat of overwork. You're welcome to write out what you would do, or just think about it. The PDF versions of the scenarios can also be used to role play in a classroom setting, with one student taking on the role of the librarian and another the role of the person who needs their help.

Playable version at https://people.wou.edu/~bakersc/ScholCom202X/index.html. Additional background available at https://lisoer.wordpress.ncsu.edu/2021/05/18/new-to-the-scn-scholcom-202x-an-interactive-fiction-game/.

Researchers, scholars and scientists main business is scholarly communication. We communicate about our work to others, as we push the boundaries of what we know and the society knows. We question established notions and truths about science. We share our findings with others, and in a way that is popularly known as scholarly communication which emerged with the publication of first journal in 1665. However, the term gained popularity only in the 1970s, as access to peer reviewed and scholarly communication became difficult. This module has four units covering introduction to scholarly communication, peer reviewed journals, electronica journals and databases and the Serials Crisis. At the end of this module, the learner is expected to be able to:
- Explain philosophy, mission, and objectives of scholarly communication
- Describe the process of scholarly communication
- Identify different channels of scholarly communication
- Discuss the dysfunctioning of the scholarly communication
In Unit 1, Introduction to scholarly communication, we have discussed different aspects of scholarly communication – particularly its genesis, importance and ethics of academic publishing, and different communication channels available in academic publishing. Some of these channels are commonly described as primary sources as they provide first-hand testimony or direct evidence concerning a topic under investigation. Historically, scientific journals were initiated by learned societies and other scholarly communities for reporting results of concluded research works or scientific discoveries. Now many forprofit publishers have started publishing research journals.
Unit 2, Communicating with Peer Review Journals, covers two important academic publishing channels, namely peer reviewed journals, conferences and their proceedings. This Unit also highlights different methods and procedures of peer reviewing for publishing primary literature emanated from research studies. The peer reviewing is essential for validating quality of research findings conveyed by researchers, which are subject to fulfilment of ethical standards and appropriate research design, sampling and other methodological issues.
In Unit 3, Electronic journals and databases, we have discussed the emergence of electronic journals in academic and research environment due to wide proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICT) in research communications and academic publishing. Scientific communities and scientific communications from the global South are getting substantive attentions through adaptation of electronic journals and electronic academic databases in the process of research communications.
In Unit 4, the Serials Crisis, we discuss the cost of peer reviewed publications and the problems faced by researchers in developing countries. The focus of this unit is on highlighting the problems and discusses possible solutions including the emergence of open access as one of the solutions. Open access journal publishing helps in mitigating some of the problems associated with serials crisis.
This is Module One of the UNESCO's Open Access Curriculum for Researchers.
Full-Text is available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002319/231938e.pdf

This is the last Module of the course on Open Access for researchers. So far you have studied about Open Access, its history, advantages, initiatives, copyrights and licensing, evaluation matrix for research – all in the context of scholarly communication. In this Module with just two units, we would like to help you share your work in Open Access though repositories and journals. At the end of this module, you are expected to be able to:
- Understand the publication process involved in dissemination of scholarly works;
- Choose appropriate Open Access journals and repositories for sharing research results;
- Use social media to promote personal research work and build reputation.
In Unit 1, we discuss the research publication process at five stages – planning stage, preparing stage, pre-publication stage, publication stage and postpublication stage. We emphasize the importance of social media in sharing and making your work visible to the target groups.
In Unit 2, we focus on sharing your research through OA repositories and Journals. First we discussed the different types of repositories to select and highlighted the steps that you may consider including deposit in your own institutional repositories or in global open repositories. We then discuss the sources of finding and deciding on OA journals. This unit also provides guidance on choosing the right OA journals, as the quality of OA journals is often questioned.
This is Module Five of the UNESCO's Open Access Curriculum for Researchers.
Full-Text is available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002322/232211E.pdf

This template is part of the K-12 Voices for Open OER-DEIA Action Plan for K-12 District Implementation.  The template, and the entire guide, is intendend as a strategic planning tool for district leaders wishing to promote the already pedagogically and financially compelling practice of creating or adapting open educational resources (OER) to help achieve district goals in serving all students through diversity, equity, inclusion, or accessibility (DEIA) lens.  The guide provides step-by-step planning tools, including examples, templates, and resources to help district leaders articulate and establish action plans for what we refer to as "OER-DEIA."  The entire guide is an open educational resource itself, free and openly licensed for reuse, remixing, and resharing.

Think. Check. Submit. helps researchers identify trusted journals and publishers for their research. Through a range of tools and practical resources, this international, cross-sector initiative aims to educate researchers, promote integrity, and build trust in credible research and publications.