Webinar – Introducing OASPA’s Wayfinders: Increasing Equity in Open Access Publishing

As well as the recording above, please find responses to unanswered attendee questions and the panelists’ slides – Danny Burke, Ros Pyne and Susan Veldsman.

Date: Tuesday January 23 2024

Time:3 – 4.15 pm  UK / UTC

Other time zones:  7am Pacific Time | 9am Central Time | 10am Eastern Time | 12pm Brasilia Time | 4pm Central European Time | 4pm West Africa Time | 5pm South Africa Standard Time | 8:30pm India Standard Time | 11pm Central Indonesia Time (Time converter tool)

OASPA’s first webinar of 2024 introduces some of OASPA’s ‘wayfinders’ – examples of those increasing equity in OA in different ways.

Per-publication charges (APC/BPCs), Read & Publish transformative agreements, ‘publish-only’ agreements and most other pay-to-publish models in open access (OA) currently exclude many researchers without the ability to pay, and leave out those who aren’t affiliated with the ‘right’ institutions. Better engagement routes are also needed in all OA models so any scholar, regardless of funding, geography or affiliation, can have a voice in scholarly publishing and be a stakeholder with influence.

Positive change is possible through the willingness of OA publishing organisations to increase equity in OA. Where there is a will there’s a way, and throughout 2024 OASPA is amplifying ‘wayfinders’ – examples of those increasing equity in OA in different ways.

In our launch webinar of the wayfinders series, discussion of four distinct models will spark thinking around correcting current trajectories of (predominantly) inequitable OA. This wayfinders webinar features science journals from two different continents, books in the humanities, and a medical journal turning the APC/waiver model on its head in favour of total inclusion.

OASPA’s wayfinders series brings to life practical case-studies helping all organisations find their own way to more equity in OA.

Malavika Legge, creator of this new wayfinders series and author of OASPA’s posts on Equity in OA will introduce and chair this webinar which includes the following speakers:

• Making APCs more inclusive: eCancer’s Danny Burke  – Pay what you can afford – a way to flip the APC model on its head
• Avoiding exclusion by going green: Meagan Phelan os AAAS – APC based OA is exclusionary, but a green policy can include all
• Thinking out of the box with BOCs: Ros Pyne – Bloomsbury Open Collections paving their own way to equitable OA
• No charges to read or publish: Susan Veldsman of ASSAF – running fee-free science journals 

The panellists will each speak for 10 minutes, and then we will open it up to questions from the audience and discussion.

Please note that views expressed in OASPA webinars are those of the individual speakers and do not represent the view of OASPA.

Biographies

Chair

Malavika Legge (OASPA)

Malavika is OASPA’s Program Manager, leading projects that support OASPA’s mission. She previously led an open-science agenda as Publishing Director at the Biochemical Society, and was elected to the first Council of the Society Publishers’ Coalition (SocPC) in 2019, going on to serve as its Chair from 2020 to 2023. Starting her publishing career at Informa Healthcare, she has a breadth of editorial, publishing technology, sales and licensing experience. Malavika dreams of a world where scholarly publishing is open access publishing – by default, for everyone. She is author of the OASPA series on Equity in OA.

Panelists

Danny Burke (eCancer)

Danny Burke is the CEO of ecancer which is a global charity with the mission to raise the standards of care for cancer patients across the world through education. Danny has been CEO since January 2019 and has worked at ecancer since 2011. Before that, Danny worked for a number of different charities focused on cancer and education based in the UK predominantly in fundraising and business development. ecancer’s Journal focuses on supporting authors and researchers from Low- and Middle-Income Countries as well as other communities with limited resources. We are completely open-access from the point of publication and operate a ‘pay what you can afford’ model for authors.

Meagan Phelan (AAAS)

Meagan is the Communications Director for the Science family of journals, where she oversees efforts to boost the visibility of all forthcoming Science family of journal content for reporters worldwide. Prior to joining AAAS in 2013, she served as a senior writer at AIR Worldwide, where she interacted with more than 65 Ph.D.-level scientists and engineers to communicate advances in wind engineering, seismology, climate science, and other fields. Previously, she was a senior writer and editor at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Meagan holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biology and Spanish from Gettysburg College, and a Master’s degree in Science Writing from The Johns Hopkins University. In 2008, Meagan received a Fulbright Scholarship to work with Dr. Juan Antonio Raga at the University of Valencia to help determine the cause of morbillivirus resurgence among small cetaceans in the Mediterranean. Meagan also completed science-reporting internships with Science as well as National Public Radio and has freelanced for various outlets including Anesthesiology News.

Ros Pyne, (Global Director, Research and Open Access, Bloomsbury Academic)

Ros Pyne leads the open access team at Bloomsbury Academic. She has worked in open access policy and strategy roles for over a decade and has a particular interest in bringing OA to long-form scholarship and to the humanities. Ros sits on the advisory boards for the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit and the Mellon-funded Book Analytics Dashboard Project and is co-author of several papers on open access books.

Susan Veldsman (Academy of Science of South Africa, ASSAf) 

Susan Veldsman has been Director of the Scholarly Publication Unit at the Academy of Sciences in South Africa since 2009. Early in her career, she started off as an Information Librarian, at various Higher Education Libraries in South Africa where she eventually was promoted to Assistant Director of Client Services, Library Services at the University of Johannesburg. In 2002 she moved to a national project, South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC) where she was responsible for negotiating access to commercial databases and was actively involved in promoting Open Access and setting up Institutional Repositories. In 2006, she continued this work in an international consortium, eIFL.net, in other transitional and developing, member countries worldwide.

She is responsible to drive the Open Science agenda by advocating for the opening up of the entire research process from agenda-setting to the dissemination of findings. She is also responsible for raising the visibility, discoverability and accessibility of South African scholarly journals through Open Access and online journal content management; improving the quality of South African scholarly journals, books & conference proceedings through expert peer review panels; and finding solutions to further support the development of policy frameworks in order to facilitate optimal use and access to publicly funded research.