The OASPA Board is pleased to welcome Brill as a member for 2014. Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher spanning 20 subject disciplines. With offices in Leiden and Boston, Brill today publishes 200 journals and around 700 new books and reference works each year. Brill open access publications are made available through Brill Open on the Brill Online Books and Journals platform in all areas Brill publishes in: Humanities, Social Sciences, International and Human Rights Law and Biology.
In August 2013, Brill Open expanded to include books as well as book chapters. To date, Brill has published around 80 books in open access, several of which as part of ‘OAPEN-NL,’ a project exploring Open Access monograph publishing in the Netherlands. All titles published through Brill Open are available as part of the Brill Open E-Book Collection.
Authors can also publish their articles as open access in any of Brill’s 195 hybrid journals. Additionally, Brill’s six fully open access journals are searchable through the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and its open access books through the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) of which Brill is one of the main sponsors.
Also joining OASPA in January 2014 is ProQuest, a company renowned for innovative content and technology solutions that increase the productivity of students, scholars, professionals and the libraries that serve them. ProQuest enables researchers to more precisely find and access relevant content which includes thousands of open access titles through a range of aggregated databases and notable research tools such as the Summon® Discovery Service.
In addition to integrating and aggregating open access content in many of its information products, ProQuest publishes Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy, an open access journal advancing and supporting environmental research since 2005.
“Open access plays an important role in academic publication and I am delighted that SSPP has received the commendation of OASPA,” Maurie Cohen, Director, Program in Science, Technology, & Society, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Editor, Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy. “The journal aspires to consistently meet a rigorous standard of quality control while simultaneously bringing to light the pioneering work undertaken by scholars and policy practitioners seeking to address the sustainability challenges of the 21st century.”
The OASPA Board is delighted to also welcome BioOne as a member. BioOne launched its nonprofit open access journal, Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene in 2013. A new, peer-reviewed scientific journal, Elementa was founded by BioOne in partnership with Dartmouth, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington. As a multidisciplinary publication, Elementa features original research reporting on new knowledge of the Earth’s physical, chemical, and biological systems; interactions between human and natural systems; and steps that can be taken to mitigate and adapt to global change.
“Elementa fully supports BioOne’s mission to explore economic models and strategic partnerships that balance the needs of all stakeholders,” says President/CEO Susan Skomal. “Moreover, such a dynamic partnership with libraries ensures that we keep our focus on the publication of timely, high quality research to advance the intellectual agenda of science.”
OASPA is pleased to also now have Journal of Terrorism Research join as a Scholar Publisher member. This journal was launched in 2010 by the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, based at St. Andrew’s University. Founded in 1994, the Centre is Europe’s oldest for the study of terrorism. The aim of this Journal is to provide a space for academics and counter-terrorism professionals to publish work focused on the study of terrorism, drawing together the different fields of research.
The 3 new professional in particular reflect the steady growth in support that OASPA has received from the publishing industry since the organization was founded in 2008. In a blog post in December 2013 it was shown that a large number of organizations had joined the association in recent months. Figure 1 below shows that there is now a higher proportion of professional publisher members within OASPA.
Figure 1. Composition of OASPA Membership yearly since its foundation in 2008
Membership numbers appeared to plateau in 2013, despite many new organizations joining, and this was largely due to work carried out to review OASPA’s existing membership and to ensure that members meet the current membership criteria. The losses and gains per year are shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Gains and losses per year of publisher member organisations
For the OASPA Board,
Claire Redhead, Membership and Communications Manager
“Brill’s 195 hybrid journals” are praised, but Hybrid OA is not Open Access according to BOAI: “Open-access Journals … will … ensure permanent open access to ALL the articles they publish.” (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read).
“Brill’s six fully open access journals” are when looking at the DOAJ only 5 journals with all together as much as 113 articles. Two of these 5 journals have a CC BY-NC-ND license. With this license the publisher does not qualify for OASPA membership (https://oaspa.org/information-resources/frequently-asked-questions/#FAQ6). This did not pass unnoticed during OASPA’s evaluation (https://oaspa.org/member-record-brill). Looking at article level: Among the 113 articles 27 have CC BY and 7 have CC BY-NC, 79 articles have other licenses not fulfilling OASPA requirements.
The publisher with a turnover of 26 000 000 EUR per year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brill_Publishers) got OASPA membership based on 34 Open Access articles which are up to OASPA’s standards.
Thanks very much for your comments. I can see how the conflicting information might raise questions, and I’m also glad for the opportunity to clarify a bit on this.
The 2 journals in question were acquired by Brill from KITLV Press in The Netherlands. At KITLV Press, these journals were published in Open Access under a CC-BY-NC-ND license. After the acquisition, Brill decided to open the license to CC-BY-NC – our preferred license for journals. As a result, the content on DOAJ is thus mixed legacy. We have asked our contact person to have this changed in the DOAJ listing to reflect Brill practice so that both journals will be correctly listed as CC-BY-NC journals, which they now are. As you can see on our own platform both journals are CC-BY-NC:
• Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia: http://ow.ly/tsKrh
• New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids : http://ow.ly/tsJam
The 6th journal title, Indo-European Linguistics, is a new journal. Only one advance article has been published so far, which explains why it is not yet an activated link on DOAJ. The article is available for download at BrillOnline: http://ow.ly/tsRmx
I hope this response has addressed your concerns. Should you have additional questions for us, please don’t hesitate to contact us at brillopen@brill.com.
One CC-BY or CC-BY-NC journal is required for OASPA membership, although the OASPA Board always encourages to use the CC-BY license. See https://oaspa.org/membership/membership-criteria/.
Dear Claire,
it is great that OASPA has this blog and it is even greater to get a real discussion started.
Only OASPA knows what OASPA’s intentions are. I can only go by what I read on OASPA’s web page in combination with my limited logical thinking.
OASPA’s membership criteria are: “The publisher has at least one journal … which is all open access.“ (I would prefer to see a minimum percentage of OA journals required for membership.) „The policy should be … CC BY, however … CC BY-NC license is currently also permitted.“ FAQ: „Why doesn’t OASPA allow CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC-ND licenses? …“
From these three bits of text I determined: “The minimum number of OA journals for OASPA membership is one, but ALL OA journals must be CC BY or CC BY-NC, because OASPA does not allow other licenses.” OASPA once answered to another membership application: „… the policy you use (CC BY-NC-SA) does not meet current OASPA membership criteria.“ „Please let me know if you would be willing to change your licensing policy for future journal issues.“ OASPA did NOT write: „Please let me know if you would be willing to change your licensing policy for future journal issues OF AT LEAST ONE OF YOUR JOURNALS.“
I think OASPA has more “issues” with unclear or even contradicting rules:
https://oaspa.org/principles-of-transparency-and-best-practice-in-scholarly-publishing/#comment-5233 (DOAJ answered, OASPA did not.)
https://oaspa.org/new-guide-on-openness-is-released/#comment-5235
https://oaspa.org/new-guide-on-openness-is-released/#comment-5236
No answer from OASPA to clarify things for more than a month, but maybe answers are in preparation. I do not stress this just for the sake of getting an answer, but because I simply do not know how to best set up OA publishing according to all these rules!
OASPA evaluates based on OASPA rules. We all try hard, but we are all humans, and all of us make mistakes. Publishers can make mistakes and OASPA can make mistakes. The more care OASPA puts into its rules, the more moral ground OASPA has to demand to take care when setting up OA publishing.
OASPA certainly has a problem with the general approach of publisher membership compared to an evaluation on journal level (see DOAJ). It is certainly ok to accept and support traditional who want to convert to OA, but be cautious! There are traditional who start OA journals. Otherwise they make authors of their subscription based journals believe that offered (very expensive) Hybrid OA is Open Access (which it is not) – showing also the OASPA membership logo – and do NOT advertise that the real OA, authors could get for free with their subscription based journals, is Green OA (see BOAI).