Webinar – Open Access after the Transformation: The Funder Perspective

Time: 4pm – 5.15pm UK

Other time zones:  8.00 am Pacific Time | 10.00 am Central Time | 11.00 am Eastern Time |   1.00 pm Brasilia Time | 5.00 pm Central European Time | 5.00 pm West Africa Time | 6.00 pm South Africa Standard Time | 9.30 pm India Standard Time | 00.00 am Central Indonesia Time  (Time converter tool)

OASPA is pleased to announce our next webinar  — part two in our Funding Open Access after the Transformation series —which will focus on the perspective of funders. 

At its launch in 2018, cOAlition S announced that its members would, for a “transition period,” fund open access fees for journals covered by “transformative” agreements. That move helped to establish read-and-publish deals as the leading OA business model, despite criticism that the agreements prop up the author-pays APC system. The same author-pays business model has, despite this opposition, also gained traction to fund the publication of OA books (through BPCs).

As cOAlition S recently communicated, the transition period is ending; beginning in 2025, funders adhering to Plan S will no longer support the agreements. What is more, a growing chorus of stakeholders, including the Ivy Plus librarians in the US, a coalition of UK-based researchers, and the Council of the European Union, are calling for an alternative, collective funding model for OA. At the same time, collective funding experiments as well as conditional open models (such as Subscribe to Open)—in which neither authors nor readers pay—are reporting promising results around the globe.

This webinar features perspectives on the emerging landscape of collective and conditional open models from funders, as a follow up to May’s webinar focused on publishers.

The webinar will be chaired by Jeroen Sondervan (NWO, The Netherlands).  We welcome our panelists: Katharina Rieck (FWF, Austria), Ross Mounce (Arcadia Fund), Ashley Farley (Gates Foundation) and Faranah Osman (National Research Fund, South Africa)

Please join us live for this free webinar and contribute to the discussion.

Link to registration page: https://bit.ly/OASPA-webinar-registration-November

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

Webinar resources

Panelist Presentations: Ashley Farley, Ross Mounce, Faranah Osman

Responses to attendee questions

Biographies

Chair

Jeroen Sondervan – Programme Leader Open Scholarly Communication at Open Science NL, Dutch Research Council (NWO)

In 2015, Jeroen started working as an open access publishing consultant at the Utrecht University Library. In 2019, he joined Utrecht University as open access programme leader within the Open Science Programme. In this role, with the other themes of the Open Science Programme (recognition and rewards, public engagement, FAIR data/software and open education), he has driven and facilitated the culture change towards open science. 

In Open Science NL, Jeroen fulfils the role of programme leader in open scholarly communication. He will focus on open access, but will also broaden his scope to include open peer review, open research information and new ways of scholarly publishing.

Panelists

Ashley Farley – Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USA

Over the past decade Ashley has worked in both academic and public libraries, focusing on digital inclusion and facilitating access to scholarly content. She completed her Masters in Library and Information Sciences through the University of Washington’s Information School.

Ashley is the Program Officer of Knowledge and Research Services at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In this capacity she leads the foundation’s Open Access Policy’s implementation and associated initiatives. This includes leading the work of Gates Open Research, a transparent and revolutionary publishing platform. Other core activities involve supporting the strategic and operational aspects of the foundation’s library. This work has sparked a passion for open access, believing that freely accessible knowledge has the power to improve and save lives.

Katharina Rieck – Open Science manager at the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)

Katharina Rieck has been the Open Science manager at the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) for over nine years. She is responsible for the development of the FWF’s Open Access policy and manages the funding program Peer-Reviewed Publications (from 2024 Open-Access block grant). Katharina represents the FWF in several national and international networks and working groups such as cOAlition S, the Science Europe working group on Open Science, the Science Europe working group on Research Assessment, the COARA working group on “Improving practices in the assessment of research proposals” and the steering board of Open Science Austria (OSA).

Ross Mounce – Arcadia Fund

Ross manages Arcadia’s open access grants. 

He was previously a postdoc in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, a Software Sustainability Fellow, and a Panton Fellow for open data in science. Ross gained his doctorate at the University of Bath, where his thesis focused on the role of morphology in analyses of evolutionary relationships that include fossil species.

Faranah Osman – National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa

Faranah is the Executive Director responsible for Information Communication Technology (ICT) and Knowledge Resources at the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa. She is a mechanical engineer and holds a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from Stellenbosch University.

Faranah is currently responsible for the creation and oversight of enterprise architecture, and she has championed the digital transformation initiatives including the acquisition and implementation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system which has integrated all the core business functions of the NRF.

Ms. Osman actively supports the Open Science agenda in South Africa and serves on the South African, Open Science Advisory Board constituted by the National Department of Science and Innovation (DSI), to develop a national policy on Open Science. She is also the NRF representative on the National Site License for Open Access Project which aims to create a national forum that champions and coordinates the transition towards Open Access in the public sector.

Ms. Osman has had the privilege of working on two of South Africa’s “Big- Science” infrastructure projects namely the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) project hosted by the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) where she worked on the design, development, and manufacture of the opto-mechanical instrumentation; and the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Project where she was responsible for developing and implementing a business model that would support an infrastructure intensive ‘Big Science’ project. Today the South African Radio Telescope Observatory (SARAO) is home to the MeerKAT radio telescope array which will form part of the larger SKA telescope on the African continent.