The OABN is running a PALOMERA Series to enable OABN members to keep up to date with the project’s activities and to engage with the project. This post belongs to the PALOMERA series.
By Lucy Barnes (PALOMERA), Sona Arasteh (CRAFT-OA) and Oliver Blake (DIAMAS)
On 27 February 2024, members of the PALOMERA, CRAFT-OA and DIAMAS projects gathered online with an audience of interested people to discuss our latest project developments and how these help to create community-driven pathways to equitable open scholarly publishing: the goal that unites the three projects.
This was the second in a series of webinars intended to update the different communities we are engaged with about the progress of our work, and as well as talks from Clara Armengou and Margo Bargheer (CRAFT-OA), Jan-Erik Frantsvåg (DIAMAS), and Gabriela Manista (PALOMERA), this session also provided an opportunity for us to hear from Victoria Tsoukala (Policy Officer, European Commission, Open Science) about how the work of the three projects is helping to realise the open access (OA) policy goals of the European Commission.
Read on for a summary of our discussions, or watch the video recording of the session and view our slides.
CRAFT-OA
CRAFT-OA presented two main outputs of the project: 1) the Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH), a comprehensive registry of institutionally published and scholar-led OA journals in Europe and 2) an overview of the reports on standards for best publishing practices and technical requirements and the challenges faced by OA journals and platforms.
Presenting the DDH, Margo Bargheer (University of Goettingen) shed light on the project’s ambition to operationalise the concept of ‘Diamond’ OA in close collaboration with DIAMAS, and pointed out how the DDH aims to strengthen Diamond OA journals by enhancing their visibility and discoverability. In a second presentation, Clara Armengou from DOAJ shared the work done by the project on technical standards and best publishing practices, and on challenges faced by OA journals and platforms.
The project will build upon this work to address the identified gaps through a suite of training resources and events tailored specifically for Diamond OA journals. Together with our sibling projects DIAMAS and PALOMERA, CRAFT-OA’s work on enhancing the visibility, recognisability and discoverability of institutional publishing seeks to increase the capacity of the (Diamond) OA community.
DIAMAS
The DIAMAS project seized the event as an opportunity to share its most significant project result to date: findings from the Institutional Publishing Landscape Survey. Jan Erik Fransvåg presented the culmination of efforts to create, design, and analyse a survey for institutional publishers and publishing service providers across the European Research Area. His presentation focused on key findings from the 680+ respondents on finance, governance and management, open science practices, and scale of publishing operations. Overall, the results show an institutional publishing sector that is small in scale, and in need of support both financially and in terms of technical expertise. However, there is a richness and diversity to its publishing activities as well as a strong alignment with open science and good standards in publishing.
Before this work, little was known about the landscape of institutional publishing in Europe. Now the project has a firm base of evidence to develop tailored recommendations for Diamond publishing initiatives, and to assist those looking to adopt a Diamond OA model.
Sharing a stage with sibling projects CRAFT-OA and PALOMERA provides DIAMAS with an opportunity to showcase how its efforts align within the broader context of fostering a more equitable publishing ecosystem. Through collaboration, these three projects can strategically and cohesively pursue this shared goal. Furthermore, the webinar featured a presentation from the European Commission, serving as a poignant reminder of the potential impact of these projects and opening avenues for broader discussions, encompassing themes such as reforming research assessment practices. Moving forward, DIAMAS envisages continued collaboration with partner projects behind the scenes, ensuring that community-led publishing models are not just conceptualized but also realized.
PALOMERA
PALOMERA presented the rationale and process behind the creation of its Knowledge Base, which had recently been published online as a part of the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit, and collects material from 39 countries over 10 years and focuses on 5 different stakeholder groups. This includes both qualitative and quantitative data, and the presentation outlined how this was collected via desk research and interviews, as well as how it is now tagged and presented in the Knowledge Base, and how it was validated by the community.
The project is in the process of analysing the data, to prepare the OA book policy recommendations but also to describe the OA book policy landscape in ERA countries as part of a broader landscape of OA publishing activity – a landscape that is also being mapped by our sister projects. It was particularly useful to hear from the other projects about their explorations: together, our presentations communicated the rich complementarity of our work in its breadth and detail, giving a much greater understanding of community-led OA publishing across the ERA.
European Commission
Victoria Tsoukala gave a brief recap of some of the key contextual research that has shaped the Commission’s (EC) current approach, particularly highlighting the 2019 report on the Future of Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Communication, as well as the European Council’s framework recommendations that guide them. She pointed out the focus on building capacity for creating and disseminating open research via not-for-profit, subject-specific and national infrastructures, and on the importance of developing open research skills among researchers.
Areas where the three projects are making a particular contribution are in mapping and, ultimately, helping to coordinate the networks of institutional OA publishing activity, and in supporting policymakers in addressing the relatively slow progress of OA books.
Victoria concluded with a welcome emphasis on the need to connect and collaborate with research assessment reform, and particularly COARA. It was both helpful and energising for us all to hear the role of our three projects in the EC’s vision laid out so clearly.
Conclusions
This session was also a valuable opportunity for all of us to hear from our audience of 112 attendees about their questions and comments on our work. We received a number of helpful points via Mentimeter questions asked by each project, which facilitated direct feedback on our presentations. Both this community feedback and the perspective from the EC delivered by Victoria Tsoukala were really valuable for the three projects, and we hope they helped to make this session a dialogue, rather than simply a broadcast. We look forward to delivering our third webinar in the series in due course!