Celebrating Open Access Week 2023

by Helen Sharp, Scholarly Publications Specialist, Open Access Support Team, University Library Service

International Open Access Week 2023  launches today – our special edition infographic below provides a snapshot of Open Access publishing activity and downloads from our repository over the past year.

This annual event provides an opportunity to promote Open Access for scholarly research publications, and the benefits this brings both to academia and to society as a whole. This year’s theme is “Community over commercialisation” and seeks to raise awareness around the importance of community controlled knowledge sharing systems such as institutional and subject repositories and open publishing platforms and initiatives.

Cardiff University supports Open Access through the institutional repository ORCA which provides a showcase for staff and student publications and PhD theses. Full text is made available in ORCA wherever possible via the Gold or Green open access routes.

The University has signed up to 28 nationally negotiated “Read and Publish” agreements as part of the Jisc HE consortium. The agreements combine reading and publishing fees into one annual subscription, avoiding “double dipping” where institutions pay a subscription for read access and a further fee for authors to publish Open Access. Negotiations aim for a cost neutral outcome and enable Gold Open Access publishing for a wider range of authors across all disciplines. The agreements include University Presses and small learned society publishers as well as large commercial publishing houses. Cardiff University staff and students can find full details of all the agreements on the staff and student intranet pages.

The University also supports Open Access publishing through Cardiff University Press which operates on a Diamond open access model with no fees for author or reader. Established in 2014, the Press has a current portfolio of twelve journals, and an open access monograph publishing initiative which was launched in 2020. Open Access monograph publishing is enabled via a monograph award initiative for Cardiff University authors.

Our latest monograph, Material Culture of English Rural Households c. 1250-1600 by Ben Jervis et al, was published earlier this month. Drawing on the results of the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘Living Standards and Material Culture in English Rural Households, 1300-1600’, it represents the first national-scale interdisciplinary analysis of non-elite consumption in the later Middle Ages.

As well as facilitating Open Access publishing for our own authors through our Press, we also aim to support Open Access monograph publishing and infrastructure initiatives where we can. This is achieved through not-for-profit, community and academic driven collaborative funding initiatives. These models use supporters’ membership subscriptions to facilitate Open Access publishing with no author-facing fees.

These include OA discovery platforms including DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books), and publishing initiatives such as Open Library of the Humanities, Open Book Publishers, OAPEN,  Liverpool University Press Opening the Future , MIT Press D2O (Direct to Open), and a number of initiatives supported by the Jisc Open Access Community Framework.

Due for publication in Spring 2024, Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power coauthored by Emiliano Treré (Reader in Data Agency and Media Ecologies at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media, and Culture) will be made Open Access via the D20 model.

To find out more about our open research support initiatives, check our daily blog posts throughout the week, and follow us on Twitter @CUOpenResearch.