OASPA has been going through a very busy time on the membership front and we are delighted to welcome a record number of new members who have joined OASPA during the last twelve months. We are encouraged to see such keen interest in open scholarship and to have such a diverse array of organisations contributing to our current growth phase.
OASPA promotes best practice and ethical standards in open access and applies rigorous criteria and in-depth review to all membership applications. We recently took some time to review and update our membership criteria and code of conduct to hopefully make information easier to find and follow.
In the Small Professional Publisher category, we welcome seven new members. The American Physiological Society (APS) publishes journals and books in many disciplines within physiology. The Society’s 16 distinguished scientific journals are dedicated to the advancement of physiological research, which has formed the basis for many biomedical advances. European Publishing is housed within the Science and Technology Park of Crete, Greece and publishes journals in close collaboration with scientific bodies and associations. The purpose of these partnerships is to allow open access publishing to serve the academic and stakeholder community of grass-roots researchers and regional policymakers. Exon Publications of Brisbane, Australia, publishes high-quality peer reviewed books in the fields of health and biomedical sciences. The focus is to provide an excellent publishing service to authors, and content to the scientific community.
Now Publishers Inc. is an international academic press that has built a reputation among readers, authors, editors and librarians as a source of excellent peer-reviewed publications in Business, Economics, Computer Science and Engineering. Open Exploration Publishing is an academic publisher of online journals producing trusted content and spreading significant works and facilitating open exchange of insight and information in scientific fields. SciPost is a complete scientific publication portal managed by the SciPost Foundation. It is online-based, and offers freely, openly, globally and perpetually accessible science and its journals aim at the highest achievable standards of refereeing. SciPost Commentaries allow Contributors to seamlessly comment on all existing literature.
Finally in this category, University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing supports its affiliates’ creation of scholarly publications. Providing consultations about general publishing questions, and publishing journals, books, dynamic scholarly serials, and textbooks through its University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing imprint.
We welcome one organisation to the Medium Professional Publisher category – IWA Publishing – an international publisher that spreads knowledge about our most valuable resource, water, helping to improve global health and well-being. IWA Publishing publish a portfolio of 15 peer reviewed journals and 800 books, along with other information resources on all aspects of water, wastewater and environment.
New to the Large Professional Publisher category are two publishers. Bloomsbury Academic began as an open access book publisher in 2008. Since then the division has grown to become a leading global independent publisher focussing on the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences with offices in London, New York, Sydney and New Delhi with one of the largest open access book portfolios, with several hundred titles available through a rapidly expanding programme. The MIT Press is committed to its mission of disseminating scholarly ideas for the broadest possible audience and has been a leader in open access book publishing for two decades supporting a variety of open access funding models. In 2021, the MIT Press announced the launch of Direct to Open (D2O) – an innovative, sustainable framework for open access monographs. All MIT Press subscription journals support author-paid open access (the “hybrid” model) and the Press publishes several completely open access journals.
We are delighted to welcome nine new Scholar Publisher members to OASPA covering a wide area of subject matter from across the world. Al-Academy is an international quarterly journal issued by the College of Fine Arts, University of Baghdad which deals with academic research related to the aesthetic subject, which includes the fields of plastic arts, music, theater, cinema, design arts, calligraphy and decoration, as well as theoretical and applied research in the field of art education. Al-Khwarizmi Engineering Journal (ALKEJ) is published quarterly by the Al-Khwarizmi College of Engineering, University of Baghdad under the sponsorship of Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. The journal publishes four issues of original contributions in the engineering disciplines of Biomedical, Information, Mechatronics, Manufacturing Operations and Biochemical Engineering, Chemical, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. Al-Kindy College Medical Journal (KCMJ) is an open access publication of Al Kindy College of Medicine, University of Baghdad. The mission of the KCMJ is to provide a platform for high-quality medical knowledge exchange for Iraqi researchers and scientists from abroad. New findings and observations on issues related to preventive and clinical medicine are our targets. The aim of this journal is to contribute to scientific exchange, stimulate new research questions, find practical solutions, and adapt evidence-based professional action in the field of medical practice.
Created in Santiago in Chile in 2004, Ariadna ediciones, is an open access academic publisher whose purpose is the publication and dissemination of books, articles and journals in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. folklor/edebiyat published from Cyprus International University, publishes quarterly in the fields of Folklore, Literature, Anthropology, Language and Linguistics. Iberoamerican Journal of Medicine is an international journal without submission and publication fees that publishes interesting original research conducted in all fields of medicine, interesting case reports and clinical images, reviews, editorials, letters, comments and letters to the Editor including reports on publication and research ethics. LIBER Quarterly is the peer reviewed, open access journal of LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries. The journal seeks to cover all aspects of modern research librarianship and scientific information delivery. It strives to form a bridge between the scholars of the Library and Information Sciences (LIS) and the practitioners in our university and research libraries by publishing not only theoretical contributions, but also examples of good practices.
mediastudies.press is a new, open-access publisher for the media and communication studies fields. Launched in 2019, the press is nonprofit and scholar-led. Publishing living works, with iterative updates stitched into their process, the journal encourages multi-modal submissions that reflect the mediated environments authors study. Publishing is free with an aim to demonstrate, on a small scale, an open-access publishing model supported by libraries rather than author fees. The University of Louisville Journal of Respiratory Infections focuses on the wide range of medical disciplines related to respiratory infections. The journal is owned and operated by the University of Louisville and subsidized by the University of Louisville and the Robley Rex VA Medical Center Clinical Research Foundation. This journal does not charge article processing/publishing charges (APCs) or submission charges strongly believing that investigators submitting significant research should not be required to pay for article processing fees.
To our Supporting Services and Infrastructure (Non-Commercial) category, we welcome eight members. The CERN Scientific Information Service (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) aims at efficiently managing, preserving and disseminating scientific information to make it openly accessible and reusable to CERN and the worldwide High-Energy Physics community. Coko is a non-profit that builds technology and facilitates community around better, faster, more open forms of publishing. CrossRef makes research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. It is a not-for-profit membership organization that exists to make scholarly communications better by rallying the community; tagging and sharing metadata; running an open infrastructure; playing with technology; and making tools and services—all to help put research in context.
DOAB foundation is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available. The Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes research data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of data types with a vision to promote a world where research data is openly available, integrated with the scholarly literature, and routinely re-used to create knowledge. Dryad’s mission is to provide the infrastructure for, and promote the re-use of, data underlying the scholarly literature.
Edinburgh University Library – Edinburgh Diamond, a service provided by Edinburgh University Library, uses Open Monograph Press (OMP) and Open Journal Systems (OJS) to provide a hosting service for Diamond Open Access books and journals published by University of Edinburgh academic staff and student groups. Book and journal hosting is also provided as a shared service governed by the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL). The service includes training, guidance and technical support and it is provided free of charge to staff and students of the University of Edinburgh. Jisc provides digital solutions for UK education and research with a vision for the UK to be the most digitally-advanced higher education, further education and research nation in the world. It provides UK universities and colleges with shared digital infrastructure and services, negotiates sector-wide deals with IT vendors and commercial publishers, and offers expert advice on digital technology for education and research.
Finally in this category, EIFL (Stichting eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries)) is a not-for-profit organization that works with libraries to enable access to knowledge in developing and transition economy countries in Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America. In a highly networked digital world their activities help people to access and use information for education, learning, research and sustainable community development.
We welcome HighWire to our Supporting Services and Infrastructure (Commercial) category. HighWire is a technology provider to the Research Communications sector with a focus of innovation in service of the Scholarly Community.
A very warm welcome is extended to all of our new members and we look forward to learning from them as we work together. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with any membership questions. Email Lulu Stader, OASPA’s Membership Coordinator at memberships@oaspa.org
Look out for our occasional spotlight blog posts focused on some of our recently joined member organisations.
