by Laurent Romary (Inria)

There is currently a tug-of-war going on within the arena of scientific communication: scientists are exploring new, more efficient and affordable ways to disseminate research results, but at the same time, a web of private publishing companies (and even learned societies) are endeavouring to preserve their financial turnover on the basis of models from a previous era. This tension is echoed in the recent news relating to scholarly communication within Europe as a whole, and within individual countries:

by Jos Baeten (CWI) and Claude Kirchner (Inria)

At its October 2014 meeting, the EEIG ERCIM board installed a task group Boost Open Access Mastering (BOM), chaired by us, with the goal of facilitating the sharing of information and the strategies of ERCIM participants in regard to open access. The ensuing report [L1], a plea for author control, which was adopted by the board in October 2015, recommends an open-access strategy and identified tools shared or to be shared by several ERCIM members.

by Peter Murray-Rust (University of Cambridge)

Scholarly publications, especially science and medicine, have huge amounts of untapped knowledge, but it’s a technical challenge to extract it and there’s a political fight in Europe as to whether we can legally do it.

by Karim Ramdani (Inria)

Promoting Open Access without specifying the road chosen to reach it makes no sense. The author-pays road (APC Gold Open Access) is without a doubt the worst option.

by Leonardo Candela, Paolo Manghi, and Donatella Castelli (ISTI-CNR)

The open-access movement is promoting free-of-restriction access to, and use of, research outcomes. It is a key aspect of the open-science movement, which is pushing for the research community to go ‘beyond papers’. This new paradigm calls for a new generation of repositories that are: (i) capable of smartly interfacing with the wealth of research infrastructure and services that scientists rely on, thus being able to intercept and publish research products, (ii) able to provide researchers with social networking tools for discovery, notification, sharing, discussion, and assessment of research products.

by Marc Herbstritt (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik) and Wolfgang Thomas (RWTH Aachen University)

The commercialisation of scientific publishing has resulted in a situation where more and more relevant literature is separated from the scientists by high pay walls; this has created an unacceptable impediment to scientific exchange. To illustrate how scientists can regain the essence of ‘publishing’ – namely to make research results public – we report on LIPIcs (Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics), an open-access series for the proceedings of international conferences.

by Vera Sarkol (CWI)

In order to keep open data accessible into the future, academics and librarians need to consider long-term preservation.