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Report on a workshop on open access publishing in Vienna in October 2013.

To associate research data to the published results favors their reuse by the scientific community, but this does not afford sufficient guarantees of preservation. To store them in databases solves this contingency and provides visibility, but in Spain there are not many services of this kind. For this reason, we describe, evaluate and discuss the pros and cons of foreign multidisciplinary data repositories that can be useful for researchers and information managers: Dryad, Figshare, Zenodo and Dataverse. It is still early to choose optimally and definitively one or the other application, so we conclude with recommendations to guide the user community and intermediaries.

The Academic Spring refers to the recent movements among scholars and scientists in favor of open access and against the policies of the academic publishing industry. This article presents an overview of the costs involved in the publishing of commercial journals as well as the justifications by publishers and academics who support or reject the for-profit publishing process of academic literature. Advocates the formulation of alternative scholarly communication and the consolidation of the open access movement, oblivious to the interference of business interests.

The emergence in the scientific community of an initiative known as data sharing, consisting of sharing research data among researchers and aiming to maximize efforts and resources, is analysed. First, the concept of research data and the related technical difficulties depending on the discipline are reviewed. We also examine the motivations, origins and growth of this movement, which has had an important impact on the scientific community’s behaviour through the creation of reposi- tories and data banks, raising both technical and social challenges. Then we discuss leading funding agencies’ initiatives and scientific journals’ editorial policies promoting these practices. Finally, we examine the impact these major changes in researchers’ habits have for librarians, including the emergence of new professional profiles.

The new model of publication of Open Access (OA) is changing the paradigm of the scientific and academic edition. The article presents a brief review on the emergence, the history and the definition of this new form of edition. To verify the way at which the commercial publishing are working with the model OA, five of the most relevant are analyzed. Their policies and costs are studied, as well as the advantages that present. The OA journals and their subject areas covered are mentioned

Based on an analysis of the specialised bibliography, the article presents the institutional, economic and technical aspects that must be taken into account to ensure the sustainability of repositories for digital preservation. The importance of inter-institutional cooperation is made manifest in the institutional aspects analysed. In dealing with the technical aspects, a cost analysis demonstrates that storage costs are not as high as they are thought to be, and the relationship between financing challenges and the technical decisions that affect repository design is also discussed. Finally, the usefulness of applying auditing systems (ISO 27000, National Security Scheme, DRAMBORA, TRAC) to test the reliability of preservation systems is explained.

The author, one of the advocates of open access, stresses the importance of this initiative for scientific development in general. He also explains its utility to correct inequalities and injustices that implies the existence of a barrier to knowledge between poor countries and the developed ones. He introduces the debate on the issue of scientific authority and its modalities. Open access to scientific literature, he argues, will be able to optimize the working capacity of the scientists everywhere and help to the development of the science.

This contribution is aimed at presenting the principles upon which rely the mandatory Open Access policies of over 40 funding organizations worldwide. Most of them are in the biomedical field. Policies require that outputs of research publicly funded must be publicly available by self-archiving in an Open Archive. One of the latest funders to adopt such a policy is Telethon Foundation. The European Union also mandates Open Access for researches granted within the 7 Framework Program.

Claims for open access are mostly underpinned with 1. science–related arguments (open access accelerates scientific communication); 2. financial arguments (open access relieves the serials crisis); 3. social arguments (open access reduces the digital divide); 4. democracy–related arguments (open access facilitates participation); and, 5. socio–political arguments (open access levels disparities). Using sociological concepts and notions, this article focuses strongly on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of (scientific) capital and its implications for the acceptance of open access, Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis and the implications of open access for the concept of the digital divide. Bourdieu’s theory of capital implies that the acceptance of open access depends on the logic of power and the accumulation of scientific capital. It does not depend on slogans derived from hagiographic self–perceptions of science (e.g., the acceleration of scientific communication) and scientists (e.g., their will to share their information freely). According to Bourdieu’s theory, it is crucial for open access (and associated concepts like alternative impact metrics) to understand how scientists perceive its potential influence on existing processes of capital accumulation and how open access will affect their demand for status. Foucault’s discourse analysis suggests that open access may intensify disparities, scientocentrism and ethnocentrism. Additionally, several concepts from the philosophy of sciences (Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend) and their implicit connection to the concept of open access are described in this paper.

The international meeting, Berlin 7: Open Access reaching diverse communities [1] took place from December 2nd to 4th, 2009 in Paris. This seventh follow up of the 2003 Berlin conference highlighted the different pathways to Open Access that research communities are taking. The conference was conducted primarily in a round-table style and addressed all of the most debated issues in the Open Access area. The aim of this report is to offer a synthesis of the different topics and perspectives.