The announcement of Plan S in September 2018 brought the issue of implementation to the forefront of discussions of open access (OA). One issue addressed in the Plan and in a number of responses to it is that of compliance: many funding bodies in North America and Europe have OA mandates, but to what extent are researchers complying with them?
October 22 to 28, 2018, marked the 10th annual International Open Access (OA) Week. Founded in 2008 by SPARC and its partners, Open Access Week is now recognized around the world as an opportunity to start conversations about OA, plan collective action, and build a presence of OA in the scholarly community and beyond. This year’s theme—Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge—emphasizes the community-driven nature of the OA movement and the importance of local action.
cOAlition S is a group of national research funding agencies that are working together to realize the principles of Plan S, which calls for full and immediate open access to publicly funded research across Europe. The coalition is supported by the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC) and was announced in September 2018.
Created in the spring of 2017, Coalition Publi.ca aims to establish an infrastructure dedicated to the digital production and dissemination of research results in the Canadian humanities and social sciences (HSS). The project is now guided by an advisory committee with representatives from various stakeholders within academia.
Open annotation is the ability to freely contribute to online, usually web-based, content, such as documents, images and video. Open annotation as a concept has been embraced predominantly by scholars in the Digital Humanities, a group that has a long history of online collaboration.
The 2018 federal budget, released on February 27, 2018, significantly benefits research in Canada. The budget includes $925 million over five years in funding that is committed to the Tri-council agencies: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).