PALOMERA (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) is nearing its final leg: twenty months down, and four months left to go! This post summarises the achievements of the project in recent months, as it investigates why so few open access (OA) policies include books, and what can be done to change this. It also looks ahead to the final stages of the project, and highlights opportunities to get involved in forthcoming project events in the autumn.
Throughout the project, the Open Access Books Network’s (OABN) PALOMERA Series has enabled the OABN community to stay informed and engaged with what PALOMERA has been doing via events and blog posts, including project roundups, a deep dive into our conversations with different stakeholders and updates on project webinars and surveys. Read on for your guide to the project’s concluding stages!
Turning information into knowledge
The first half of PALOMERA was dedicated to scoping and information-gathering; in recent months our focus has turned to transforming that information into knowledge and recommendations that can be shared and used by others, and in the final stages we will share that knowledge with the wider world.
PALOMERA has collected over 650 policy-related documents into an openly available Knowledge Base for consultation. These documents were gathered through a mix of desk research and surveys, and they have been tagged according to the PESTLE framework; many of them also have key snippets that have been translated into English. The Knowledge Base also includes transcribed interviews that were conducted with OA books and policy experts from across the ERA. A report on the work done to compile the Knowledge Base is available on PALOMERA’s Zenodo community.
Since the turn of the year, intensive work has been undertaken to validate and analyse the material in the Knowledge Base. The validation process gave valuable insight into how to package and share this material, and provided feedback on the analysis results. At the conclusion of the project, PALOMERA will have completed arguably the most comprehensive study on OA policies (books or not) to date.
In spring, PALOMERA began the process of drafting recommendations for eight stakeholder groups (RPOs, RFOs, national policymakers, publishers, libraries, researchers, societies, and infrastructure providers) based on this study. These recommendations will be subject to a validation exercise in September, before being made public – stay tuned via the project mailing list for the latest updates.
Also in May, PALOMERA held the third Funder Forum meeting, offering a space for peer-to-peer knowledge exchange between funders and policymakers, and the presentation of early findings from the Knowledge Base analysis. The final Funder Forum of the project will be an in-person workshop focussing on how to sustain the Funder Forum after PALOMERA concludes, and how to maintain and update the Knowledge Base.
Community engagement and sharing PALOMERA’s outputs
The PALOMERA team has been working hard to share what the project is doing far and wide. At the end of February, we held a cross-project webinar with DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA with 100+ participants and a presentation from the European Commission to outline how the three projects help to support the EC’s vision for the future of scholarly communication.
Members of the team have delivered in-person presentations and workshops at the OPERAS, RESSH and LIBER conferences, at the DARIAH annual event, and elsewhere – you might have seen them!
PALOMERA also conducted an impact survey to find out how the project’s output might be used by different groups. There were more than fifty responses and these will be written up into use cases for different stakeholder groups.
The ‘Take 5 with PALOMERA’ blog post series has also continued to roll out, with a new post each month giving an insight into the different project partners and why they are involved.
Upcoming events
And there’s more! A number of events will be delivered in the autumn, many of them open for all to attend and some of them coming up (very!) soon. You can sign up to these already:
- WEBINAR: Developing institutional policies for Open Access books (Tuesday 24 September, 14:00-15:30 BST / 15:00-16:30 CEST). Co-organised between PALOMERA and the European University Association, a webinar to raise awareness among university actors about open access books and long-form publications (including monographs, book chapters and edited collections). Free to register.
- WEBINAR: Open access book policies: The author’s experience (Wednesday 2 October, 14:00-15:00 BST / 15:00-16:00 CEST). Part of the Open Access Books Network’s PALOMERA Series, this event will bring together four authors to reflect on their experiences of publishing an open access (OA) book, and how they navigated policy mandates to publish open access. Free to register.
- PALOMERA Conference (Monday 28 October, 12:00-16:45 GMT / 13:00-17.45 CET). Join us either in person in Ljubljana or online via streaming to explore the work undertaken since January 2023, and a deep dive into the recommendations the project is making as we reach the end of our work. There is no fee to register for the conference. Lunch, coffee and dinner will be provided for those attending in person.
- In-person: There are still a few places left to participate in person (location: ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 2, Ljubljana, Slovenia) and you can register via this link. The deadline for the in-person registration is the 11th of October. The remaining in-person places are available on a first-come-first-served basis.
- Online: There is also the option to register for online streaming via the same link. The deadline for the online registration is the 23rd of October. Many places are available online. The full programme is available here.
And the following events are on the horizon, with final details and signup links coming soon (join the PALOMERA mailing list for the latest updates):
- WEBINAR: Creating Community-Driven Pathways to Equitable Open Scholarly Publishing – Leading the Way (Wednesday, 6 November 2024, 14:00-15:30 GMT / 15:00-16:30 CET). The next webinar instalment organised between 3 sister projects CRAFT-OA, DIAMAS and PALOMERA. The registration link and programme will be shared in the coming months.
- WEBINAR: The final PALOMERA event (Wednesday 4 December, 14:00-15:00 GMT / 15:00-16:00 CET). The last event in the OABN PALOMERA Series, as the PALOMERA project presents its final outputs and conclusions, including the complete analysis of the Knowledge Base, actionable and evidence-based recommendations for different stakeholder groups, and the final policy brief. The registration link will be shared in the coming months.
Stay in touch
It’s safe to say that it will be a busy and exciting autumn – and you can keep up to date with all the latest news via the PALOMERA mailing list and the OABN!