In June 2026, we published the first version of the Belgian Diamond Open Access Landscape dataset, an openly available dataset documenting Belgian Diamond Open Access (OA) and delayed OA journals.[1] As the mapping exercise is conceived as an ongoing effort, we continue to identify, verify, and document additional journals. These efforts have already resulted in the publication of a second version of the dataset.[2] The most important changes concern two targeted review exercises. First, we systematically compared our dataset with the ALMASI Diamond OA dataset, a large-scale bibliometric dataset of Diamond OA journals in Africa, Europe, and Latin America.[3] This comparison allowed us to identify a number of Belgian journals that met our inclusion criteria but had been missed in the first version of our dataset. At the same time, the comparison provided valuable insights into the different outcomes that are produced by bibliometric and manually verified approaches. The results of this comparison, together with a detailed discussion of the observed differences between both datasets, are presented later in this article. Second, we conducted a systematic review of the Diamond OA publishing activities of Belgian university presses, as well as two Belgian-based scholarly publishers, Brepols and Peeters Publishers. Both exercises further strengthened the coverage of the Belgian scholarly publishing landscape.

While the comparison with the ALMASI dataset initially served a practical purpose, namely identifying additional journals for inclusion in version 2 of the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape dataset, it also generated a number of broader insights, which may be of interest to others working on Diamond OA monitoring and mapping. Before turning to the results, however, it is useful to give a brief overview of the methodologies used by both datasets. The ALMASI Diamond OA dataset was constructed by combining metadata from ROAD[4] and OpenAlex[5] to create a base list of OA journals. Journals that charge Article Processing Charges (APCs) were subsequently identified and excluded through cross-referencing with OpenAPC,[6] DOAJ,[7] and OpenAlex metadata. The resulting dataset was further validated and enriched through the integration of established Diamond OA datasets, national journal portals, and targeted manual verification in a small number of individual countries. Where information on publication fees was not explicitly available, journals were assumed to be Diamond OA and retained in the dataset. The final dataset contains 20.355 Diamond OA journals from Africa, Europe, and Latin America.[8]

In contrast, the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape dataset was built through a process of systematic manual verification and contextual interpretation at the level of individual journals. Journals were identified through a broad range of sources, including DOAJ, DDH,[9] OpenEdition Journals,[10] institutional publishing platforms, national funding programs, and existing Diamond OA inventories.[11] Each journal was subsequently reviewed individually, with the journal’s own website serving as the primary source for assessing journal characteristics and publication models. Candidate journals were then evaluated against a number of explicit inclusion criteria: (1) only active journals are included, meaning that the journal has published at least one issue within the previous five years,[12] (2) a journal is considered Belgian only when the publisher or publishing entity is legally based in Belgium, and (3) journals are classified as Diamond OA when no publication fees are charged to authors for unconditional open publishing.[13] In addition, the dataset separately documents Belgian delayed OA journals, allowing both publication models to be studied alongside one another while maintaining a clear distinction between them.[14]

The comparison between both datasets provides an opportunity to examine not only the completeness of both datasets but also the kinds of journals that tend to remain invisible under different methodological approaches. In particular, it allows us to assess the extent to which national, manually verified mapping exercises can complement international bibliometric initiatives, especially in a context where many Diamond OA journals remain only partially represented in major international indexes and databases. The relevance of such verification is also acknowledged by the authors of the ALMASI dataset, who note that bibliometric metadata are not always up to date and may contain inaccuracies regarding journals’ OA policies.[15] Similar concerns have been raised in studies of national Diamond OA landscapes outside Belgium, where it has been shown that the journals identified can vary depending on the criteria and data sources used.[16]

As said above, the first outcome of this comparison was the identification of additional journals for inclusion in the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape dataset. As a result, 63 journals are shared by both datasets, whereas 92 journals are unique to the ALMASI dataset and 99 are unique to the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape dataset. We also identified one duplicate record in the ALMASI dataset. The analysis therefore uses 155 unique journals rather than the 156 records reported in the original dataset.[17] These figures indicate that, despite a substantial overlap, both datasets also contain a considerable number of unique titles, which calls for a closer examination of the reasons for this divergence.

Figure 1. Comparison of journal coverage in the ALMASI dataset and the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape dataset.

Of the 92 journals that were not included in the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape dataset, the largest group consists of Hybrid OA journals (n = 49). Another substantial group comprises discontinued journals (n = 16), indicating that they are no longer active at the time of verification. Furthermore, 13 journals were excluded because they operate under a Gold OA model with Article Processing Charges (APCs), while for 9 journals no explicit evidence could be identified that all content would become openly accessible after an embargo period. A smaller number of journals were excluded due to the absence of a (current) Belgian connection (n = 5), because they provided paywalled access to their content (n = 3), or because they followed a Subscribe to Open model (n = 1).[18]

Figure 2. Number of journals excluded from the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape dataset by exclusion criterion.

Several explanations may account for the discrepancies between both datasets. One possibility is that journal information changed between the creation of both datasets. However, given that the ALMASI dataset was published on 11 December 2025 and the first version of the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape dataset was completed on 23 June 2026, this appears relatively unlikely, as the interval between both datasets is limited. A more plausible explanation is that some journals were incorrectly classified in the bibliometric sources on which the ALMASI methodology relies. Inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated metadata concerning publication models, APC policies, journal activity status, and publisher information most likely explains why a number of journals identified as Diamond OA by ALMASI did not meet the inclusion criteria applied in the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape study.

If we zoom in on the Hybrid OA journals, an interesting observation is that more than one-third of the journals identified in the ALMASI dataset (57 out of 155) are published by Brepols and Peeters Publishers, two publishers based in the Flemish region of Belgium and focused on the humanities. The strong presence of these two commercial academic publishers largely explains the high number of journals that were ultimately classified as Hybrid OA rather than Diamond OA. A likely explanation is that the publication models of these journals are difficult to identify through bibliographic metadata alone. These journals contain a mixture of open and restricted content, while bibliographic databases do not always capture the distinction between access conditions and publication models in a sufficiently granular manner.[19] What is also striking is that several journals published by Brepols and Peeters Publishers that were identified as Diamond OA in the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape study were absent from the ALMASI dataset. This suggests that bibliographic metadata not only leads to the inclusion of journals that do not meet the Diamond OA criteria, but also results in the omission of journals that do.

Not all differences between the two datasets can be attributed solely to inaccuracies or limitations in bibliographic metadata. The category “Embargo not explicitly stated” reflects a methodological difference in how delayed OA journals are identified and classified, rather than a disagreement about the OA status of these journals. No information could be identified regarding how delayed OA journals were handled when compiling the ALMASI dataset. In our study, delayed OA journals were explicitly included as a separate category, provided that the journal clearly stated that all content would become openly accessible after a defined embargo period. This requirement was adopted as a deliberate inclusion criterion in order to establish a clear and consistently applicable boundary between journals that could be verified as delayed OA and those for which insufficient evidence was available. Although delayed OA journals were also present in the ALMASI dataset, they were not identified as a distinct category. This suggests that delayed OA journals were captured by their methodology, but without the additional verification criteria that we applied.

Although this concerns only a single journal in the present comparison, it is worth briefly explaining why journals operating under a Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) model are not included in our dataset. While S2O enables content to become openly accessible without direct author-facing publication fees, the continuation of OA remains contingent upon the willingness of subscribers to renew their subscriptions. As a result, OA is not guaranteed as a permanent feature of the journal and may be reversed if sufficient subscription revenue is not maintained. In contrast, our definition of Diamond OA requires that OA is provided independently of subscription income. For this reason, S2O journals are not considered Diamond OA within the scope of the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape dataset.[20]

The reverse perspective is equally informative. Looking at the journals that are unique to the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape dataset reveals a number of patterns that might help explain the differences between both datasets. A first observation is that a substantial number of journals hosted on institutional and community-based publishing platforms such as OpenEdition Journals, Openjournals.nl, Open Journals UGent, OJS UCLouvain, and PoPuPS (ULiège) were absent from the ALMASI dataset. This suggests that, as expected, the bibliometric approach is less effective at identifying journals published through smaller institutional and community-based Diamond OA infrastructures, and is more suited for identifying journals and publishers that are well represented in international metadata sources.

Platform	Shared by both datasets	Only in Belgian Landscape dataset
Openjournals.nl	0	4
OJS UCLouvain	5	11
PoPuPS (ULiège)	5	18
OpenEdition Journals	10	10
Open Journals UGent	10	12

Tabel 1. Shared and unique journals by publishing platform.

A further explanation for the observed differences between the two datasets can be found in disciplinary orientation.[21] Only 36% of HSS journals are found in both datasets, compared with 46% of SET journals and 53% of BMS journals.[22] This pattern partly reflects the strong presence of HSS journals on institutional and community-based publishing platforms, which themselves are underrepresented in the ALMASI dataset as shown above. This observation is also consistent with broader scholarly communication patterns, as SET and BMS journals tend to be better represented in large international indexing and metadata databases, making them easier to identify through bibliometric approaches.

Disciplines	Shared by both datasets	Only in Belgian Landscape dataset	Total
HSS	46 (36%)	83 (64%)	129
SET	12 (46%)	14 (54%)	26
BMS	8 (53%)	7 (47%)	15

Tabel 2. Shared and unique journals by discipline.[23]

Publication language, on the other hand, does not appear to provide a convincing explanation for the differences between the two datasets. To classify the journals by publication language, we applied the same broad categories as used in the ALMASI scoping report:[24]

• English: journals publishing exclusively in English;
• Multilingual: journals publishing in English and at least one additional language;
• Other languages: journals publishing exclusively in non-English languages.

The proportion of journals identified by both datasets is remarkably similar across English-language, multilingual, and other-language journals, suggesting that the bibliometric approach does not systematically favor or overlook journals based on publication language.

Publication languages	Shared by both datasets	Only in Belgian Landscape dataset	Total
English	17 (37%)	29 (63%)	46
Multilingual	34 (39,5%)	52 (60,5%)	86
Other languages	12 (40%)	18 (60%)	30

Tabel 3. Shared and unique journals by publication language.

Comparing the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape dataset with the ALMASI dataset provided valuable insights into how methodological choices, including data sources, inclusion criteria, and validation procedures, shape the representation of national publishing landscapes. While large-scale datasets make cross-national analyses possible, national studies can provide contextual knowledge and journal-level verification that are difficult to achieve at scale. The comparison revealed discrepancies related to journal activity status, national affiliation, and, most importantly, the classification of OA models. It also showed that journals published through institutional and community-based publishing infrastructures, as well as Humanities and Social Sciences journals, were less consistently represented across both datasets. The Belgian case therefore highlights the need for further reflection on how Diamond OA journals are identified and classified, particularly when the aim is to capture diverse and locally embedded publishing initiatives.

---

[1] Laura Mesotten and Demmy Verbeke, The Belgian Diamond Open Access Landscape, June 23, 2026, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20760254.

[2] Version 2 of the dataset was published on October 9, 2026 and is available via https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20760253. 

[3] Zehra Taskin and Mikael Laakso, ALMASI Dataset of Diamond Open Access Journals, December 11, 2025, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17897299.

[4] ROAD (Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources) is an ISSN-based international database maintained by the ISSN International Centre that provides metadata on Open Access scholarly resources. See: https://www.issn.org/services/online-services/road-the-directory-of-open-access-scholarly-resources/.

[5] OpenAlex is an open bibliographic database containing metadata on scientific publications, authors, institutions, and funders.

[6] OpenAPC is an open initiative that aggregates data on Article Processing Charges (APCs), Book Processing Charges (BPCs) and data on articles published under transformative agreements.

[7] DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) is a community-curated index of peer-reviewed Open Access journals. Although DOAJ metadata were used during the construction and validation of the ALMASI dataset, DOAJ inclusion alone does not appear to determine whether a journal is captured by the ALMASI methodology. In the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape dataset, 18 of the 49 journals (37%) indexed in DOAJ are absent from the ALMASI dataset.

[8] Mikael Laakso and Zehra Taskin, D1.1 Scoping Report on Non-for-Profit Publishing Ecosystems, December 29, 2025, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18257718.

[9] DDH (Directory of Diamond Journals) is a community-maintained directory of Diamond Open Access journals.

[10] OpenEdition Journals is a publishing platform and infrastructure for Open Access journals in the humanities and social sciences, operated by OpenEdition.

[11] All consulted data sources are described in the dataset’s About section.

[12] Journals that explicitly state that publication has ceased, that have not published any content within the previous five years, or that have been launched but have not yet published any content are considered inactive and are excluded from the dataset.

[13] These inclusion criteria are described in more detail in the dataset’s About section.

[14] All tables and figures presented in this article are based on the combined set of Belgian Diamond OA and Belgian delayed OA journals.

[15] Laakso and Taskin, D1.1 Scoping Report on Non-for-Profit Publishing Ecosystems, 132.

[16] Simone Angioni et al., “Charting the Landscape of Italian Diamond Open Access Publishing,” Quantitative Science Studies 7 (June 2026): 564–84, https://doi.org/10.1162/QSS.a.466.

[17] The duplicate record concerns Revue Quetelet / Quetelet Journal, which is listed in the ALMASI dataset under two separate records: Revue Quetelet + Quetelet Journal (ISSN 2593-9149, eISSN 2593-9157) and Revue Quetelet / Quetelet Journal (ISSN 2034-9378, eISSN 2034-9386). The latter record is also registered in the ISSN Portal, albeit under the title Chaire Quetelet. It presumably refers to an earlier registration of the same journal and was therefore treated as a duplicate.

[18] Some journals met more than one exclusion criterion and were therefore counted in more than one category. In particular, the category No Belgian affiliation overlaps with Gold Open Access with APC (n = 3) and Paywalled access (n = 1). As a result, the counts for the individual exclusion criteria should not be added together, as this would exceed the total number of excluded journals (n = 92).

[19] Recent recommendations of the OpenAlex Colors Working Group highlight important limitations of current Open Access classification systems. In particular, the report argues that widely used OA classifications often conflate access conditions with publishing and funding models, making it difficult to consistently represent more complex OA arrangements and to distinguish between different publication models on the basis of bibliographic metadata alone. See Juan Pablo Alperin et al., Recommendations for Revising the Open Access Classification System in OpenAlex, August 14, 2026, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21934115.

[20] Some studies and mapping exercises adopt a broader definition of Diamond OA and do include S2O journals, e.g. Niels Taubert et al., “Mapping the German Diamond Open Access Journal Landscape,” Minerva 62, no. 2 (2024): 193–227, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-023-09519-7.

[21] The disciplinary categories were assigned by the authors as part of the Belgian Diamond OA Landscape study, based on the primary focus of each journal. As a result, some classification decisions may be open to interpretation.

[22] The totals by discipline exceed the number of journals because some journals were assigned to more than one disciplinary category and are therefore counted more than once.

[23] For Tables 2 and 3, percentages are calculated relative to the total number of journals in the respective category.

[24] Laakso and Taskin, D1.1 Scoping Report on Non-for-Profit Publishing Ecosystems, 135.

3 days- 3 Webinars

This edition of Open Access Week is dedicated to researchers and their need for guidance through open access publication models and projects.

Join together, take action, and raise awareness about the importance of open knowledge sharing

Program

Monday October 20|12:30-13:30: 

• Theme: OPEN ACCESS TO PUBLICATIONS IN HORIZON EUROPE
• Speaker: Victoria Tsoukala (Policy Officer – European Commission – Unit A4- Open Science & Research Infrastructures)
• Registration

This session will explore the Horizon Europe Open Access rules and provide practical insights into their implementation. We will discuss how project officers are trained, which units are responsible, common questions from stakeholders, relevant statistics, lessons learned, and key takeaways for the next program cycle. We also anticipate questions and feedback from researchers who are applying these rules in practice. Their experiences will help enrich the discussion, and we hope the webinar will serve as a platform for sharing advice, best practices, and challenges.

Wednesday October 22|12:30-13:30: 

• Theme: HOW TO RETAIN CONTROL OVER YOUR PUBLICATIONS IN THE AGE OF AI ?
• Speaker: Mr. Joris Deene, Everest Advocaten, legal advisor SA&S
• Registration

As an academic author, navigating copyright in the era of Open Access can be challenging. In this session, you will learn how to strategically manage and retain your rights before, during, and after publication. We provide you with concrete tools and legal insights to maximize the impact of your work.

After this session, you will be able to:

• Choose and apply the right Creative Commons license for your specific goals.
• Understand and exercise your statutory right of secondary publication under Belgian law.
• Implement a rights retention strategy to secure your author’s rights before signing a publishing agreement.
• Navigate the challenges of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in academic publishing, focusing on copyright implications and publisher policies.

Friday October 24|12:30-14:00: 

• Theme: DIAMOND OPEN ACCESS
• Speakers : Clément Dessy (FNRS Research Associate- ULB, co-editor of the journal COnTEXTES ), Geoffrey Compère (FNRS Research Director- ULB, senior editor of Scipost Physics), Jonathan Dumont (PhD – Project Manager – ULiège Library)
• Registration

In response to growing concerns about equity and accessibility in scholarly publishing, an increasing number of researchers are advocating for the establishment of Diamond Open Access journals, which provide unrestricted access to research outputs for readers and enable authors to publish without incurring Article Processing Charges (APCs), thereby fostering inclusivity and the democratization of knowledge.

The webinar speakers will present complementary perspectives on Diamond Open Access publishing, including founding a new journal, converting an existing one, and serving as a senior editor on a Diamond Open Access platform.

Practicalities

• When: October 20-26, 2025 with webinars on 20, 22 and 24 October
• Where: Online
• For who: Anyone who needs guidance through open access publication models and projects.
• Price and registration: Free but mandatory.
• More info: Click here

Open Access Belgium would like to invite you to join the Open Access Network Event on the 12th of December to share best practices, foster community, and encourage knowledge-sharing on Open Access. By focusing on practical cases regarding predatory practices and copyright and rights retention, the participants get the chance to discover best practices, concrete advice and a deeper insight into those topics.

Anyone interested in Open Access is welcome, though the main focus will be on research support staff. Registration is free, though mandatory.

Programme

Morning – Predatory practices

• Introduction to predatory practices 
• Panel discussion: 3 cases tackled by the panel
• Case market: Interactively contribute to assigned cases to design solutions

Afternoon – Copyright and rights retention

• Introduction to copyright and rights retention
• Panel discussion: 3 cases tackled by the panel
• Case market: Interactively contribute to assigned cases to design solutions

Networking opportunities during the breaks and lunch to get to know your colleagues in research support

Practicalities

• When: 12th of December 2024
• Where: the event will take place at HOEK 38 (38 Leuvenseweg 1000 Brussels), in the Auditorium
• Who: for researchsupport staff, by researchsupporstaff
• Learn more: click here to learn more
• Registration: Registration is free but mandatory. Click here to register before the 21^st of November!

The term “preprint” is actually used for two related, but still slightly different, things. The term can refer to an author’s original manuscript (of an article, a book chapter, or a complete book) as it is submitted for publication (hence also known as “the submitted version” of the text). This submitted version typically remains private, whereas later versions of the text (revised after peer review and/or copy-edited by the publisher) are made available, either behind a paywall or in Open Access. However, the term preprint can also refer to the first public version of a text, which is being disseminated before formal peer review took place and which afterwards might or might not be developed into a more traditional publication. This second meaning of preprint is thus basically identical to what is known as “working papers” in disciplines like economics, law, and political sciences. To put it succinctly: the first meaning of the term preprint refers to a manuscript of an article, a chapter, or a book before publication; the second meaning – typically only used for articles – is considered to be the first public version of a text and therefore oftentimes treated as a publication in its own right. Both meanings of the term have in common that they refer to a text which was not submitted to formal peer review (yet).

Lately, the second meaning of the term preprint has become more dominant, not in the least because the habit of disseminating articles before they have been peer-reviewed is becoming more widespread.

Preprints can be distributed through designated preprint servers, i.e. online repositories where researchers share articles before they have undergone formal peer review. Preprint servers are often connected with a specific discipline, such as medRxiv (health sciences) or bioRxiv (biology), or region, such as AfricArXiv, and typically guarantee some basic form of quality control such as a plagiarism check before the text is accepted for publication as a preprint. However, preprints can also be shared using general repositories which are discipline-agnostic (like Zenodo) and/or platforms which accept all kinds of research outputs (such as the CORE repository of Humanities Commons), and which do not perform such basic quality checks. Preprints typically get a permanent identifier (such as a DOI) and are indexed by services such as Google Scholar, Open Science Framework (OSF) Preprints, or Web of Science’s Preprint Citation Index.

As said, the practice of disseminating preprints is on the rise. In some disciplines, such as astronomy and mathematics, up to 35% of articles start out as preprints, which are seen as an important instrument for Open Scholarship (as preprints can always be shared openly), as a way of speeding up research (since dissemination of research results is no longer slowed down by pre-publication peer review) and as a way to establish priority of discoveries. Preprints also make other innovations in scholarly communication possible (such as open peer review or the publish-review-curate approach – topics which deserve a blog post of their own) and put into question the exorbitant prices of journal subscriptions or article processing charges. Recent research by Brierley et al. and Davidson et al. in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic even brought to light that differences between preprint and final versions of articles published in biomedical journals are limited, which gives cause to reconsider the time and money spent to develop a preprint into a journal article.

Recommended reading:

J. Bosman et al. (2022), New Developments in Preprinting and Preprint Review, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7040997

K. Hettne et al. (2021), A Practical Guide to Preprints: Accelerating Scholarly Communication, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5600535

L. Mesotten – J. Berckmans (2022), To preprint or not to preprint? KU Leuven researchers share their thoughts on the (dis)advantages of preprint publishing, https://www.kuleuven.be/open-science/what-is-open-science/scholarly-publishing-and-open-access/schol-pub/interview-preprints

Nicht nur von uns gibt es einiges zu berichten – auch von unseren zahlreichen Partnern und Partnerinnen wollen wir nach diesem Sommersemester einige Neuigkeiten teilen. Über den neuen Educational Resource Finder der Cultural Research...

The common way readers use library catalogs is to find out whether they have access to a particular resource through the library they are using. Catalogs of academic libraries thus provide information about what publications a student or staff member of a particular university has access to, and how they can access it – either by providing details about the location of a physical copy or by providing a link to the electronic version.

But what is the role of the catalog of academic libraries in an Open Access world, especially now that more than half of new journal articles appear in Open Access and more and more scholalry monographs are published openly as well? If the catalog only lists what the library is paying for, then it is no longer doing its job since students and staff members actually have access to a whole lot more than what is in the catalog (namely all Open Access publications as well). If, on the other hand, the catalog lists everything that students and staff members have access too, then it becomes massive, because it should incorporate all Open Access materials as well. It also becomes rather useless since the catalog of let’s say Leuven would not be that different from the catalog of let’s say Leiden – so why would we spend any time and energy keeping separate catalogs?

Of course, if you rethink the catalog of an academic library as a curatorial instrument listing publications which subject specialists have selected as particularly relevant for a specific research community – regardless whether these are publications behind a paywall or not – then they still might make sense. Or maybe we need to think further and conclude that managing a catalog is no longer the way to fulfil the traditional, curatorial role of the library, thus acknowledging that academic libraries’ role in both discovery and fulfillment have diminished and it is high time to focus on other tasks?

Sometimes, researchers ask us to close off access to a dissertation that had initially been made available in Open Access through our institutional repository Lirias. The main motivation for this is the fear that publishers won’t be willing to publish the material if it can already be freely consulted online. This fear stems from a general anxiety that characterizes the dissertation process: the idea that developing your dissertation is still something you mainly do alone, without publicly sharing too many details, driven by, on the one hand, a feeling of insecurity to already share your work before it’s “ready” and, on the other hand, the worry that your ideas might be “stolen”.[1] However, more collaboration can only help to improve the project. In this blogpost I will address some common concerns and show that sharing your dissertation in OA offers various advantages and does not contradict the ambition of publishing your work.

Am I obligated to make my dissertation available in Open Access?

At KU Leuven, OA for your dissertation is a choice, not an obligation. While you are always required to archive the electronic version of your PhD thesis in Lirias (practical guidelines about how to upload your dissertation can be found here), opening it up publicly is not mandatory. We offer the following accessibility options:

1. Public access: if you select this option your dissertation will be placed under a temporary embargo of 12 months starting from the date of your defense. This means that during those first 12 months, only internal KU Leuven users (staff and students) will be able to access your work. After the expiration of the embargo, the dissertation will become openly available so that everyone can find and read it. Of course, you can also choose to make your dissertation immediately available in Open Access. Just contact the Open Access Support Desk and they will gladly remove the embargo. The other way around is also possible: if you prefer a longer embargo period (e.g. 2 or 3 years) just ask them to make the change.
2. Permanent embargo: this means that your dissertation is indefinitely only available for internal KU Leuven users.
3. No access: while this option is available it is actually only recommended for material that has to remain strictly confidential (e.g. for economic or political reasons) as it means that nobody, except for a few repository administrators, can consult the file. Even you and your (co)supervisor(s) cannot access the dissertation anymore.

Most KU Leuven researchers go for the public access license so that they have 12 more months to either decide to close their dissertation off longer, or let it become publicly available.

I want to stress here that the choice you make when uploading your dissertation is not permanent. It might not be the best time to decide about the accessibility of your work when you are about to defend. I know from experience that this is a very stressful time and that you are not up to dealing with practicalities. Maybe you aren’t really familiar yet with how repositories and Green OA work and don’t have time to figure out the details. And you probably haven’t decided yet if, let alone where, you wish to publish your research, meaning that you can’t take publishers’ policies regarding the matter into account. Therefore, a solution might be to initially share your dissertation in OA, so that others can engage with your work while you are still exploring your options. Once you have signed a contract with a publisher and they prefer you to (temporarily) restrict access to your dissertation, you can always ask the Open Access Support Desk to change the availability.

Why would I publish my dissertation in Open Access?

Making your dissertation available in OA has various advantages. First and foremost, it cannot be denied that OA will increase readership and boost citations as your work will be easily findable and accessible to interested readers both inside and outside academia. This in turn promotes active debate about your research, and the feedback can be a great help when revising your manuscript. Moreover, your work can be picked up much faster on a global scale, which increases your chances of collaboration and puts you on the radar in the international job market.

While it might seem contradictory, the fact that your work is out in the open can also help to bring it to the attention of publishers. For example, back in 2013, Harvard University Press stated that thanks to OA the odds increase of them picking up the dissertation under the slogan “If you can’t find it, you can’t sign it”.[2] Open Access is also interesting for publishers from a marketing perspective. Thanks to the open availability the work can already attract readers and instigate discussions, the same audience will most likely also be interested in reading the reworked publication.[3]

What you might need to verify before publicly sharing your dissertation is if you are using material that is protected by copyright licenses (e.g. images, archival sources, etc.), or if you are working with personal data of living individuals. It’s best to already solve these kind of issues at the start of your project, but if you still have some uncertainties about this, just reach out to us or our colleagues from the Copyright Support Desk.

Will a publisher accept my manuscript if the dissertation is available in Open Access?

Unfortunately, a resource or up to date index that collects publisher policies concerning this issue does not exist. In any case, such a resource would be hard to maintain since policies are not set in stone and can change over time. Presses also do not provide much data about OA dissertations that they publish and it has been a while since surveys last asked publishers about the possible impact of OA on their willingness to publish dissertation-based books. Nevertheless, we can gain some valuable insights from older surveys about this topic.  

Most notably is the study conducted in 2011 on the policies of arts, humanities, and social sciences journals and university presses.[4] They found that fewer than 5% of total respondents would never consider to publish a dissertation that is already available in OA. In other words, the great majority of the journal and university press editors surveyed were open to publish such a dissertation, on the condition that the original content was substantially adapted. Needless to say, their decisions to publish were made on a case-to-case basis (just as with any type of publication). The survey also revealed that publishers are much more concerned with the quality of the work than prior access to, what they qualify as, an unpublished dissertation. A similar, smaller-scale UK survey conducted in 2015-2016 surveyed 23 university and commercial presses, again in the field of arts, humanities, and social sciences.[5] Their findings revealed that none of the respondents would outright refuse to publish a monograph derived from a dissertation available in OA.

From these studies, and from our own experiences and anecdotal evidence we have gathered along the way, we can conclude that most publishers consider, without prejudice, submissions derived from openly available dissertations. Publishers most often expect you to significantly revise, rewrite, and reframe your dissertation when turning it into a monograph or article. As they consider major edits to be inevitable, they don’t particularly mind that the dissertation is openly available and won’t reject your manuscript on the grounds of prior publication.[6] However, publishers’ policies naturally differ; there are still publishers that may object to the open availability of your dissertation. More broadly speaking, there are also publishers that do not publish monographs that are too close to a PhD thesis in general, regardless of the dissertation’s OA status.[7] Don’t be afraid to just contact the publisher you are considering and, if need be, alter the availability of your dissertation with just one email to the Open Access Support Desk.

Does OA facilitate plagiarism?

Besides the fear that OA will prevent future publication, another common concern is that OA increases the chances of your work being plagiarized. This fear is unwarranted: OA can actually help to protect your work, as plagiarism is much easier to detect when the original work is freely available. Furthermore, if you are aiming for a book publication, it will take some time to rework your PhD into a monograph. If your work can be consulted online in the meantime, you create a transparent public record of your research. This can serve as proof that you formulated certain ideas first, protecting you from scooping rather than enabling it. This way, OA can deter plagiarism and idea theft.[8]

Takeaways

While I wanted to demonstrate in this post that OA is not something to fear, but to embrace, I do want to underline that you always have the final say in how you wish to share your work based on your own experiences, prospects, and what you feel comfortable with. The key takeaways I want to leave you with are:

1. KU Leuven has an opt-in policy for OA when it comes to dissertations, and you are free to select your preferred availability.
2. OA can help bring your work to the attention of interested scholars, possible future employers, and potentially even publishers.
3. The chance that a publisher will reject a manuscript based on an openly available dissertation is minimal, but you can always just contact them to clarify the matter. If they do make objections, remember that the availability of your dissertation can always be altered.
4. OA deters instead of enables plagiarism. 

If you still have concerns or questions about the availability of your dissertation or any other digital scholarship-related matters, do not hesitate to contact the Artes Research team!

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[1] Kathleen Fitzpatrick has described this unease with publicly sharing the dissertation process and puts forward digital scholarship as a way to eliminate such anxieties: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Dissertating in Public,” in Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities, ed. Virginia Kuhn and Anke Finger, 2021, 19–23, http://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0239.

[2] “Can’t Find It, Can’t Sign It: On Dissertation Embargoes,” Harvard University Press Blog (blog), accessed August 19, 2022, https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2013/07/cant-find-it-cant-sign-it-on-dissertation-embargoes.html; also cited in: Jill Cirasella and Polly Thistlethwaite, “Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual,” in Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Implementation, ed. Kevin L. Smith and Katherine A. Dickson (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016), 206.

[3] Cirasella and Thistlethwaite, “Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual”, 210.

[4] Marisa L. Ramirez et al., “Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities? Findings from a 2011 Survey of Academic Publishers,” College & Research Libraries 74, no. 4 (2013): 368–80, https://doi.org/10.5860/crl-356.

[5] Christian Gilliam and Christine Daoutis, “Can Openly Accessible E- Theses Be Published as Monographs? A Short Survey of Academic Publishers,” The Serials Librarian 75, no. 1–4 (2019): 5–12, https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2019.1589633.

[6] Cirasella and Thistlethwaite, “Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual”, 206; Fitzpatrick, “Dissertating in Public”, 22-23. A study conducted in 2018 alsoconcluded that onlya small percentage of dissertations are published as books with relatively few changes: Karen Rupp-Serrano and Jen Waller, “Dissertation-to-Book Publication Patterns Among a Sample of R1 Institutions,” Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 6, no. 1 (2018): 1–23, https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2187. If a publisher is right to see the dissertation and the monograph as two completely distinct species, or whether we should approach the dissertation more as an already finished product that could be published as such, is another discussion that I won’t address here.

[7] E.g. “Publishing Your Book with MUP,” Manchester University Press, accessed August 19, 2022, https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/resources/publishing-your-book-with-mup/.

[8] Peter Suber, Open Access, MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 23–24; Cirasella and Thistlethwaite, “Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual”, 212.

KU Leuven Libraries Artes has signed up for Sidestone Press’s library program. Sidestone Press is an academic publishing house founded by scholars, for scholars. They have one clear ambition: to make scientific information available to all. Through their digital e-book library they provide free online reading worldwide (in HTML format). Researchers and students affiliated with KU Leuven can now also freely download the PDF format of all publications and buy a print copy with 25% discount. By joining the library program we also further support their mission to continue to provide free access to their books worldwide.

Sidestone Press mainly publishes in the field of archaeology but they have a growing portfolio in other Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines. All books can be accessed via our library catalogue Limo or directly via the publisher’s website, where KU Leuven users will also see the option to buy a print copy with discount.

The following is the redacted text of a statement given by Demmy Verbeke at the “The Diamond Open Access Model: what impact on research?” webinar organized by Academia Europaea Cardiff, KU Leuven Libraries and the Young Academy of Europe on March 28, 2022. 

Academic libraries have a responsibility in the context of Diamond Open Access on at least two levels.

For more than a decade now, librarians worldwide have played a role in promoting OA, explaining the various options to make academic work freely available to all, highlighting the pros and cons of the various routes towards OA, etc. This advocacy work is lately more and more interwoven with talking about funder compliance or talking about things like block grants, OA funds and read-and-publish deals. However, we need to be very careful that the latter does not turn librarians into salesmen for the publishers with whom their universities have this kind of agreement. The thing that we always need to remember is that academic librarians do not work for publishers; they work for their institutions and serve the scholarly community, so they need to talk about the diversity of OA possibilities. They owe it to their profession to provide an analysis which is as objective as possible of the pros and cons of various OA approaches so that authors can make up their own mind about whom they want to entrust with the dissemination of their research results.In that context, it is important that librarians also talk about Diamond OA and give the full picture. For instance by not only talking about the main thing that scholars associate with Diamond OA, namely that this is an approach to scholarly publishing which does not charge fees to either authors or readers, but also to stress the second element of the characterization used in the recent Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, namely that these are community-driven, academic-led and academic-owned publishing initiatives. This is important, because this makes an essential difference in the financial model behind initiatives of this sort and is the reason why scholars, funders and institutions alike should not only foster Diamond OA but should even prioritize it over other approaches.

The second responsibility is to not only talk and inform about Diamond OA but also to financially support it. Personally, I have very little patience for the argument “we do not have the budget to support Diamond OA programs”. Most university libraries in the Western world have multi-million budgets, whether they receive additional block grants for OA or not. I find it hard to believe that it would be impossible to find a few grand in that budget for Diamond OA. I do, however, understand and sympathize completely with the realization that we need to rethink our budgets in order to make room for Diamond OA. Both acquisition and cataloguing processes of libraries are still completely geared towards either the traditional model of publishing behind a paywall or towards publishers who have found a way to shape their OA offer in such a way that it almost appears as business as usual, for instance through read-and-publish deals. As a result, there is a big risk that library budgets are completely hoovered up by a combination of buying paywalled content and spending money on the privately-owned, for-profit approach to OA. This means that, if libraries want to financially support Diamond OA, they need to either prioritize it in the sense that they first spend available budget on Diamond OA, then on paywalled content, then on for-profit OA; or that they need to make much clearer distinctions in their budgets and need to separate a percentage for Diamond OA, a percentage for paywalled content and a percentage for for-profit OA. The added task is that they also need to stick to that division. If the price tag of either of those three categories increases – and, by the way, I guarantee that the price tag for for-profit OA will increase – then they cannot move around money from one category to the other without first having a thorough discussion that this implies a policy change.

I consider both responsibilities for academic librarians in the context of Diamond OA as an obvious continuation of the role they have been playing in the field of scholarly communication for generations. Librarians are not in the business of telling researchers what to do and how to distribute the results of their work. But that does not cancel out the fact that researchers turn to librarians for guidance in this, either by making explicit appeals to the expertise within libraries to provide support and advice, or implicitly by observing which choices libraries make in their collection building and adapting their own publishing practices to this. Similarly, research libraries have a long tradition of funding the market for academic publishing. Library budgets pay for the acquisition of monographs, for standing orders for series and for subscriptions to journals and databases. So it is natural that these same libraries are now called upon to act as funders for publishing in OA. And just like librarians were entrusted to make wise budget choices in a traditional system of acquisition of content behind a paywall, they should now be entrusted to make wise budget choices in how to support OA publishing. I, for one, am convinced that librarians will ensure much better value for money, and thus do a much better job for their institutions and the scholarly community which they serve, if they favor academic-led approaches towards OA without author fees over for-profit approaches towards OA based on publication-level payments.

If you are a regular visitor to our blog, you might have noticed that The Scholarly Tales is a blog hosted by Humanities Commons (HC). We, at Artes research, actively promote the use of innovative, non-profit and community-led platforms such as HC and work to bring them to the attention of our readers and researchers. In this blogpost we will take you through the different aspects of the Humanities Commons platform and explain what it can offer you.

Humanities Commons labels itself as a “network for people working in the humanities,” but apart from enabling academic networking, HC also encompasses an Open Access repository, a webhosting structure, and a platform for collaborative work. Humanities Commons is dedicated to openness, which is evident in the fact that the platform is open to anyone, regardless of field, language, institutional affiliation, or form of employment. It is completely Open Access, Open Source and non-profit, in contrast to other academic networking platforms such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, which do have commercial objectives and often have an aggressive advertisement strategy. At Humanities Commons you can rest assured that any content or information you contribute to the platform will never be used for commercial ends.

Humanities Commons as a scholarly network

The first step to begin using Humanities Commons is to create an account. Registration is easy: you can either link your profile with existing accounts from other applications such as Google or Twitter or you can make a completely new HC account. When you have officially joined the Commons, you can start building your profile. All your activity on HC will be linked here: your groups, your shared work, your websites, etc. The next step is to find colleagues and discover new like-minded researchers by browsing through and joining different groups or by creating your own group. Joining groups allows you to easily interact and collaborate with scholars who share common interests. If you create your own group, it is useful to know that you have the option to make the group either public, private, or hidden. All groups allow each member access to group discussion boards with e-mail notifications, shared calendar, file sharing, and collaborative documents.

HC stimulates communication between its members by making connections. Some ways you can do this include following other users to keep up-to-date with their work or by starting a private chat or using the @tag . Interacting in this more personal way is great for asking questions, getting feedback from colleagues on your work, and promoting events and publications.

Humanities Commons as an Open Access repository

The repository of HC is called the Commons Open Repository Exchange, or CORE. CORE offers users the possibility of archiving a copy of their work and sharing it with the world in Open Access. The content can be accessed and downloaded by anyone, even if they have not registered for an account.

You can upload a variety of materials to CORE – whether it’s a published paper, a syllabus, a blog post, an interview, a work in progress, a data set, or even audio or video files (there are some guidelines on file types and file size). Every type of research output can have an impact, so all different types of materials are accepted.

Works deposited to CORE are covered by the Humanities Commons Terms of Service, which offers protection against misuse. You can, however, publish your work under a Creative Commons (CC) license of your choosing. This will allow reuse of your work in accordance with the stipulations of the chosen CC license.

Every item you upload is given a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) that serves as a permanent identifier. DOIs provide persistent, citable metadata for scholarly and creative works, including gray literature such as blog posts, syllabi, data sets, presentations, and video and audio files.

The repository offers numerous methods of discoverability. All materials uploaded to CORE are indexed by Google, Google Scholar, SHARE, Altmetric, and BASE-OA. Since you can notify the members of any of your Humanities Commons groups when you have uploaded new material to CORE, you can easily bring your work to the attention of a relevant potential readership.

Lastly, CORE also provides long-term storage of your work since the files deposited in CORE are stored in the Columbia University Libraries’ long-term digital preservation storage system.

Humanities commons as a webhost

When you have registered with Humanities Commons, you can also start a blog or a site through their platform to boost your online presence, get feedback, or simply share information. Because of their emphasis on openness, sites on the Commons are by default open to anyone but, if necessary, you can restrict access.

Humanities Commons allows two types of sites: group sites and personal sites. Group sites are created by the administrator of a group who then determines the role of each of the other members.

Sites are built with WordPress, a popular Content Management System (CMS) that many are already familiar with. HC offers templates and plugins to personalize your site. The guides and extensive FAQ section navigate you through the different steps of creating your own online presence with ease. However, if you would encounter any difficulties or have any questions about starting your own WordPress website or blog, do get in touch with us! We would be happy to share some tips and tricks!

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Humanities Commons is a user-friendly platform with a high emphasis on openness. Contrary to other scholarly networking sites, it is not focused on making profit through the exploitation of user data. The primary goal of Humanities Commons is to offer a space for researchers to connect and to share and archive scholarly work. It is a great alternative to other scholarly networking sites and is also a perfect way to support Open Access ideals while disseminating your research and building your online scholarly presence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On March 28^th (2pm, CEST) the Academia Europaea Cardiff, KU Leuven Libraries and the Young Academy of Europe jointly organize a webinar about “The Diamond Open Access Model: what impact on research?”. The webinar is free and open to all, the registration form can be found here. During this one-hour webinar, an expert panel will explain and discuss the latest developments in Open Access publishing and what it means for researchers, research-intensive institutions, learned societies, libraries and other publishers. There will be plenty of time for the audience to interact and pose questions to the panel.

Panel

• Professor Johan Rooryck, Executive Director, Coalition S
• Professor Sarah de Rijcke, Professor in Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies & Scientific Director at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University
• Dr Bregt Saenen, Senior Policy Officer for Open Science, Science Europe
• Professor Toma Susi, University of Vienna, Member of the Scientific Advisory Board, Open Research Europe
• Professor Demmy Verbeke, Professor of Open Scholarship and Head of KU Leuven Libraries Artes

The webinar will be chaired by Professor Ole Petersen, Honorary Vice-President, Academia Europaea.

Webinar description

With escalating Article Processing Charges (APCs) under the Gold Open Access Model, attention has been turning to the Diamond Model, where scientific articles are not subject to APCs. Diamond journals represent a large percentage of open access publishing output and are mostly owned and managed by universities, learned societies and other not-for-profit organisations.

Two organisations leading the development of an international strategy on Open Access, Science Europe and Coalition S, have recently launched an initiative that will offer worldwide support to building and sustaining the Diamond Model. The action plan was published on 2nd March.

On Monday 9 May 2022 KU Leuven will organize the 2022 edition of the Open Science day as a hybrid event, online and at the Irish College in Leuven.

The Open Science day is an event where researchers share experiences about Open Science. It offers researchers the opportunity to enter into conversation with university leadership including rector Luc Sels. Next to these debates, there will be two interactive panel sessions and a poster session. The panel sessions will be dedicated to the reproducibility and replication of research on the one hand, and preprints and (open) peer review on the other hand.

For the poster session, every topic related to Open Science is welcome, both theoretical studies and more practical contributions. Researchers can also address their own research subject, and explain how it is affected by Open Science, how they put openness into practice, or why they oppose the tendency to open up all elements of the research cycle. Contributions can showcase new opportunities that Open Science brings to academia, or can discuss, on the contrary, the challenges related to Open Science.

As a KU Leuven researcher (PhD students, postdocs and professors), you are welcome to submit your own poster or panel contribution. The submissions are open until 28 February.

Key dates

• Deadline for submissions: 28 February 2022
• Notice of acceptance: 23 March 2022
• Open Science Day: 9 May 2022 (hybrid)

For more information see the Open Science Day 2022 website

Welcome to another overview of new digital scholarschip resources added to the Artes Digital Scholarship Community on Zotero (learn more about this group and join with your Zotero account to get the group’s resources right in Zotero on your desktop). It’s a brief one; we’re currently reading a lot of excellent data management plans from new PhD researchers, which will be their own blog post sometime in February.

In this edition: a fantastic new open access resource on data management in linguistics, unfortunate mishaps in publication and data management, more Zotero tips, and a long read for the weekend about the practicalities of supporting open access publishing at KU Leuven.

The Programming Historian is an OA journal that publishes novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching. Every lesson is published in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.

What does it offer you?

The Programming Historian offers the ability to teach yourself new skills within the world of the digital humanities.  Every tutorial is rigorously peer reviewed to make sure it is accessible to newcomers and is judged by external reviewers.  The process also gives scholars the option to learn from each other as the peer review is conceived as a collaborative and productive process.  The Programming Historian publishes all contributions according to the concept of Gold Open Access which means a lesson is freely available without having to pay a subscription fee or experiencing any other restriction on access. Furthermore, authors do not need to pay a publishing fee (Article Processing Charge or APC).  Every submission is published under a Creative commons ‘CC-BY’ license so that anyone can republish the work, as long as they cite the author correctly. As The Programming Historian is a strong believer of giving everyone the ability to benefit from the tutorials, lessons make use of open source programming languages and software as much as possible.  This way, everyone has access to the necessary software, even without an extensive research budget.

How can you contribute?

Though writing a new lesson is the best way to actively engage with the digital humanities community through The Programming Historian, it’s not the only way you can contribute.  Their policy tries to offer the greatest possible level of participation.  You can join the editorial board to edit lessons or, if you’re fluent in one of the languages they offer, you are invited to get in touch about translating.  Even simple feedback is very welcome.

The Programming Historian is an international project driven by volunteers and supported by individual and institutional supporters.  KU Leuven Libraries Artes funds the project through the institutional partnership program.

DARIAH-EU is launching an annual Open Access Monograph* Bursary for the publication of a first monograph in the field of Digital Humanities. This bursary reflects DARIAH’s commitment to the growing open research culture for Arts and Humanities scholars. Through this funding, the organization hopes to make Open Access publishing a more viable option for early career researchers, who often encounter financial or professional hurdles when considering this publishing route. For more information from DARIAH-EU on the context of Open Access publishing and the specific considerations that went into the creation of this annual bursary, read here.  

Key details of the bursary: 

• Publication costs will be covered up to the maximum of 7,000 EUR. 
• The funding approval is valid for a period of 12 months after the grant agreement is signed.  

Key eligibility criteria and application requirements: 

• Applications are open to early career researchers who received (or will receive) their PhDs in DARIAH member countries or who have a professional affiliation (including both academic and alt-academic) in a DARIAH member country.  
• The proposed monograph must be in the field of Digital Humanities, which can be interpreted in the broad sense of the theory and practice of developing, applying, and reflecting upon digital tools, methods, and assets in humanities research. 
• Proposed monographs must not have been previously published. PhD dissertations which have been deposited in institutional repositories and/or published on microfilm are also eligible.
• An enclosed letter asserting expression of interest from the publisher is mandatory. 
• The publisher should be listed as an open-access publisher, for example, in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). 

Key dates:  

• Application deadline: 6 December 2021 
• Announcement of winner: January 2022 

The above list of requirements is not exhaustive. For more details on the requirements, expectations, and timeline regarding the submission process and project, see the DARIAH-EU page.  

 

*DARIAH-EU specifies that the terms “book” and “monograph” are used in a sense that includes all long forms of scholarship. 

Opening the Future is a collective subscription model for OA books. Libraries can sign up for its membership scheme, which implies that they grow their collections and support Open Access at the same time. The objective is to raise small contributions from a large number of academic libraries, so that no single institution bears a disproportionate burden.

How does it work?

A library subscribes to a backlist package of non-OA books offered by a publisher. The publisher makes this backlist package of non-OA books available to subscribers only (in other words: books in this package remain non-OA), but uses the subscription money to publish new books in OA. These new books are thus made available to everyone in OA, benefitting scholars and institutions around the world.

How it started and how it’s going

Opening the Future was launched by the COPIM project: an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers supported by the Research England Development Fund (REDFund) as a major development project in the Higher Education sector with significant public benefits, and by Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. The Central European Press (CEP) piloted this model and was recently joined by the Liverpool University Press. Both programs are funded by  KU Leuven: membership for the  CEP program is financed by KU Leuven Libraries Artes, whereas membership for The Liverpool University Press program is funded via the KU Leuven Fund for Fair OA.

In June 2021 it was announced that Opening the Future has been shortlisted as a finalist for an ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) is the international trade association which represents non-profit scholarly publishing. The winner of the award will be announced during their annual conference on 15-17 September.

The project

Arabic Collections Online (ACO) is an online library specialized in providing Open Access to Arabic books and manuscripts in several scientific domains. ACO started its digitization project with the aim of providing free and global access to Arabic language content, which is currently not widely available. The project already offers access to over 16.000 volumes, however the goal of the project is to digitize 23.000 Arabic volumes. The topics range from philosophy and religion to political sciences and technology, and include both volumes from the classical Islamic period as well as more recent volumes.

Functionalities and use

The web pages are designed symmetrically, where the left side of the page is written in Latin script (i.e. English or transliteration) and the right side offers the same functionalities in Arabic. The search functions are likewise designed to facilitate queries on multiple levels (such as title, author, subject, place of publication, etc.) in English, Arabic transliteration and Arabic scripture. Under the header ‘search’, the website includes some search tips for the use of transliteration. The ACO project applies the Library of Congress transliteration system.

The ACO website is definitely a useful tool for researchers who are looking for specific Arabic source materials, as well as for students who want to gain a quick overview of the variety of digitized Arabic sources.

Questions about this database can be directed to the subject specialist Eastern Studies.

Looking to publish in Open Access but not sure how to find a suitable Open Access journal in your specific discipline? The easiest way to start your search is browsing through the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which was created to increase the accessibility, usage, and impact of quality OA resources.

The DOAJ indexes academic journals across all disciplines that are peer-reviewed and only have the Full OA-option, not the Hybrid OA-option. If you already have a specific journal in mind to publish your publication in, you can enter its title or ISSN in the simple search box on the homepage and check whether it is included in the DOAJ or not. If it is, you can rest assured that the journal is qualified. If it’s not, there is still the possibility that is has not been brought to the attention of the DOAJ yet, since publishers have to apply to have their journal indexed. You can take a look at the application form and the criteria the DOAJ uses to measure quality here.

In case you don’t yet know where you want to publish, you can look up journals via the search box on the home page or via the more advanced search by clicking on ‘search’ in the upper toolbar.

You can either search for journals or articles, for our goal we will select the journals option. Aside from using keywords and subjects, you can also search by (country of) publisher or journal language. If you want to use controlled vocabulary for your search, you can select a subject filter in the left toolbar. Let us for example have a look at the subject “Language and Literature”, which gives us 1433 indexed journals.[1] You can then refine further by subtopic (e.g. Romanic languages), language, license, publishers, publishers’ countries, and peer review type. An interesting filter is to only look for journals without Article Processing Charges (APCs), meaning that you can publish your article in OA without having to pay for it.

We see that 91% of the 1433 journals do not require the payment of an APC, of which nine are published in Belgium (amongst others Interférences litteraires/literaire interferenties, published at KU Leuven, and Authorship, published at Ghent University). This is a clear indication of that fact that it’s a misconception that publishing in Gold OA will always cost you money.[2]

Once you click on a specific journal title you will find more information about how to publish with this journal, such as author fee, instructions for authors, expected time from submission to publication, etc. Moreover, the DOAJ tells you under which license articles are published and if the author retains unrestricted copyrights and publishing rights or not. Finally, the journal’s metadata are listed here: publisher, publications language(s), and subject(s) (according to the Library of Congress Classification system).

With this method, the DOAJ is a surefire way to find the journal best suited for your article. If you are looking to publish a book rather than an article, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the OAPEN Library are a good starting point to locate Open Access book publishers. [3]