Editorial - Open in action

This second Open Access Newsletter of 2016 is released some two weeks before the annual International Open Access Week, to be held 24-30 October.

This year’s theme is ‘Open in Action’. As open access becomes a more and more familiar concept, focus is now on the small steps everyone can take to make openness in research a reality. One such small but significant step is depositing the full text of your article in the University’s research database Pure, thereby making it freely available on your institutional researcher profile page. This is called green open access or the green road to open access. A ‘mandate to deposit’ for our University and the UMCG is currently being drawn up.

Our local contribution during the Open Access Week will concentrate on green open access, with a poster and online campaign highlighting its uses and advantages. Green open access is no substitute for publication of an article in a peer-reviewed journal (be it toll access or – gold – open access), but a supplement to it, enhancing the findability, availability and impact of the article. On the primary road, gold open access directly via peer-reviewed journals, progress is still being made.

Our researchers can now publish in gold open access in thousands of journals from Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, SAGE, Taylor & Francis, De Gruyter, Karger, and – from 2017 onwards – the American Chemical Society. The publication charges (APCs) normally raised by the publisher, are paid upfront by the universities and waived for the authors. See this list of the journals involved or when in doubt ask us. The Dutch EU presidency in the first half of 2016 made open access one of its strategic spearheads, widening its scope to include open research and open data under the umbrella of open science. This resulted in the Amsterdam Call for Action Open Science.

All of these ‘actions’, and more, come up in this newsletter, which we hope you will enjoy.