The Open Scholarship Initiative
Working together in partnership with UNESCO to create the global future of open
Support OSI

Issue & Policy Briefs

Coming this month! Stay tuned!

Most Recent

About

OSI Briefs are short working papers that distill key findings from the reports published by OSI Conference groups, as well as from information exchanged on the OSI listserv. These reports provide timely recommendations to improve the future of open, and offer a mechanism through which feedback from outside OSI can be aggregated.

Each brief has a similar structure that includes a concise statement of the topic, related published works, work that still needs to be done, key stakeholders, known organizations working on the topic, policy makers who might be able to influence the topic, and dissenting views.

OSI briefs are published on a regular basis of every few months. Stay tuned to this space!

Coming This Month

Defining Open

What is it really (and says who)? Improving the future of open requires that we first get a better handle on exactly what it is we’re trying to improve.

Predatory Publishing

The rapid growth of predatory publishing poses a threat to the integrity of the research record. What can be done?

In the Pipeline

The open spectrum
What should we (or can we) do about deceptive publishing?
The future of Beall’s list & blacklists
Author attitudes toward CC-BY
What do we really know about embargos?
How fast is open growing?
Can we measure the economic impact of open?
How much profit do commercial publishers really make (and why do we care)?
Disaggregating publisher services
Workable models of peer review
The moral case for open
The OA2020 global flip pros/cons
Cash incentives in scholarly publishing
The open access citation advantage—fact or fiction?
The impact factor scourge
Information underload in the developing world
SciHub
Open IP
The central role of scholarly societies
P&T reform and why this is necessary for the future of publishing (TOP for hiring and promotion)
Working together on common infrastructure solutions
Including HSS in the reform conversation
What is publishing anyway?
Can OA publishing hurt your career?
Can society afford open access (the pros and cons of open policies unfolding in the EU)?
Who decides what is open?
Evolving open solutions
Readability in journals— is this an issue (does it really help anyone to make a lot more unreadable articles open)?
Why researchers use ResearchGate (and should they?)
How much research spending is allocated to publishing anyway?
Can scientists help combat the spread of fake science news?
Why academics might find “new wave” journals appealing
The US Federal Trade Commission’s ruling against OMICS
Does junk publishing pose a threat to science?
The structure of publishing (for-profit, nonprofit, etc.)
global journal editing standards
global peer review standards
Has the time come for journal accreditation standards?
Are open protocols doable?
Is an iTunes model workable?
Issues at the intersection of open access and open data
The open matrix—taking the spectrum into more dimensions
A scholcomm definitions/glossary
A scholcomm how-to resource list: How to start an IR, how to publish in OA, etc.
Comparing regional issues and perspectives in OA (what’s most important in Africa, Latin America, Europe, China, etc.)
The culture of communication in academia: Overview
How to recognize predatory publishers & publishing
Misc stats/facts (how many journals, what percent open, etc.)