An online interview with Ashley Farley, program officer of Knowledge and Research Services at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As of 2023, the Gates Foundation earmarks some 8,000,000,000 US Dollars annually to its various philanthropic goals. Focusing on global health and global development, the Gates Foundation supports a wide range of research and development activities in fields such as child nutrition, family planning, eradication of poverty and diseases, etc. In this podcast, Farley explains why open research lies at the heart of the Gates Foundation’s strategies.

An introduction to the project DIAMAS, aimed at investigating and supporting “diamond” open access publishing models, i.e. free for the reader as well as the author (no publishing charges/APCs). An ultimate goal of the three-year project is to foster high-quality diamond publishing by setting up a Europe-wide capacity center. The recording was made in conjunction with the Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing in December 2022.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was founded by Lars Bjørnshauge in 2003; the current managing director is Joanna Ball. A cornerstone in the global Open Science landscape, DOAJ currently lists more than 18,000 peer-reviewed, strictly open access journals (Gold or Diamond). Dominic Mitchell, who has worked for DOAJ for the last ten years, explains how the indexing process is managed by a combination of volunteers and salaried staff like himself, how they work to exclude predatory journals from the list, and how DOAJ is financed. Furthermore, DOAJ is involved in several collaborative projects promoting high-quality scholarly publishing, including The Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (4th ed., 2022).

OPERAS, the European research infrastructure dedicated to open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities, has more than 50 member institutions from 16 different countries. The aim is to share knowledge between stakeholders across Europe through a variety of multinational Special Interest Groups developing collaborative services and projects. As a distributed infrastructure, OPERAS works to promote open dissemination of research-based knowledge about society and culture.

Jadranka Stojanovski discusses the evolution of library support for open science from a Croatian perspective. Since the 1990s, she has been heavily involved in several national research infrastructures, such as: the combined scientific bibliography and green open access repository CROSBI; HRČAK, a platform now hosting more than 500 open access journals and other scholarly series; DABAR, a collaboration between various institutional repository services.

A discussion about the origins and growth of various French infrastructures for open research, especially in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). Among the services discussed are OpenEdition, a national publishing infrastructure for Open Access journals and books in the SSH disciplines; the HAL archive, a national repository for Green Open Access documents; and various research data services, such as Huma-Num, a repository designated for Digital Humanities materials.

As the first UK institution, Edinburgh University adopted a Rights Retention Policy on 1st January 2022. As a result, all research articles written by Edinburgh’s researchers can now be made legally available in open access immediately upon publication in a journal or a volume of conference proceedings. In this episode, head of Library Research Support at Edinburgh University Library, Dominic Tate explains how the policy came into being and how it has been received by academic publishers.

The service for open research datasets Dataverse.no was established in 2017. Five years later, it holds some 1,300 datasets created by researchers at fourteen partner institutions. All submitted datasets are curated (checked) before they are published by curators at the various institutions. In addition, curators have established courses and webinars helping researchers make their datasets as FAIR as possible (FAIR = Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). In this episode, Leif Longva and Philipp Conzett tell about how it has expanded, from a subject-specific archive called TROLLing (Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics) to the generic, CoreTrustSeal-certified service that we see today.

On 1 September 2022, professor of linguistics and director of cOAlition S Johan Rooryck was created a doctor honoris causa at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. In this in-depth interview, Rooryck reflects on his career so far and shares his vision of a future where scholar-led, fair and equitable open access prevails over commercial publishing structures. Johan Rooryck starts out by explaining how he became the editor-in-chief of the high-ranking journal Lingua in 1999, how his relations with the publisher Elsevier became increasingly strained, and how he succeeded in bringing all his co-editors along in a sensational break with Elsevier. Instead, they launched the fully open access journal Glossa (now a high-ranking journal of general linguistics) at the platform Open Library of Humanities, in 2015. Rooryck in particular dwells on the non-commercial model known as Diamond Open Access, with no charges facing either readers or authors. Speaking on behalf of Plan S and the cOAlition S, whose executive director he became in 2019, Rooryck also broadens the view to all forms of open access, including open access to books and research data. At the end, he looks ahead to the future, when faced with the final, fundamental question: are you an optimist?

In this episode, Camilla Brekke, prorector for research and development at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, informs about the institution's new Open Access Policy, in which Rights Retention is a key element. Host: Per Pippin Aspaas