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

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?

In the blog series “Researcher questions” the Artes Research team shares some common and/or pertinent questions that we get from researchers at the Faculty of Arts. The goal of the series is to share the advice that we give more broadly, as it might be helpful to others as well or make you consider something you had not thought about before.

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]

The Belgian War press website biedt gratis tal van Belgische kranten aan die gedurende de twee Wereldoorlogen verschenen, al dan niet klandestien of gecensureerd door de bezetter.

Op initiatief van CegeSoma (Studiecentrum Oorlog en Maatschappij) met financiële steun van Belspo (Federaal Wetenschapsbeleid) werden deze kranten – waarvan de consultatie in diverse archieven en bibliotheken vaak problematisch is – verzameld en gedigitaliseerd. De website, die geraadpleegd kan worden in het Nederlands, Frans en Engels, biedt ook achtergrondinformatie aan met betrekking tot oorlogspers.

Het overzicht van gedigitaliseerde kranten vind je hier:

Al deze kranten digitaliseren was niet haalbaar, daarom opteerde de Koninklijke Bibliotheek ervoor meer dan veertig titels te digitaliseren die een evenwichtige staalkaart bieden van de Belgische dagbladpers tussen 1830 en 1950. Op die manier werden zowel Franstalige, Nederlandstalige als Duitstalige kranten van verschillende politieke strekkingen gedigitaliseerd. Het gaat bijvoorbeeld om de neutrale Le Soir, het socialistische Vooruit en Le Peuple, of de liberale en nationale L’Indépendance belge.

Via “online consulteren” + “browse” vind je gemakkelijk per krant de verschillende edities (per jaar, maand, dag) terug. Daarnaast kan je ook de inhoud van de kranten zelf doorzoeken via de “search” functie.

Vragen over het gebruik van deze databank mogen worden gericht aan de collectie-expert Geschiedenis en Overheidspublicaties.

A previous post shed some much needed light on the complex world of OA terminology. It certainly helps to be familiar with these names, although we cannot claim that all possible questions can be answered with one post. What about Black OA, Rogue OA, Radical OA and Platinum OA? Can Bronze OA actually be called OA? And is Elsevier really talking about the same approach to Diamond OA as the early advocates for community-driven, APC-free OA do when they plan a Diamond OA Journals conference?

It is necessary to get familiar with this OA terminology. However, we should also be mindful of the risk that we spend so much time and energy on definitions that we lose sight of the essence – not unlike what happens with trying to define what a predatory journal is, which deflects attention from the real problems of scholarly publishing (version of this article openly archived here). Another approach would be to start the discussion from two simple distinctions.

The first is the difference between open archiving and open publishing.

• The actor with open archiving is the author. He or she publishes something, and then takes the additional actions of archiving an electronic version of that publication in a repository and making the archived version freely available to all. Quite regularly, the version which the author has archived and made available is not identical to the published version (e.g. an accepted version instead of the published version), and the archived version is not available at the same time as the published version (e.g. it is made openly available with a delay of 12 months). Open archiving thus offers the advantages of OA, at no cost to the author (who can always find a free repository to archive his or her text in), but requires an additional action by the author and exists as a system parallel to actual publishing.
• The actor with open publishing is the publisher. At the time of publication, the publisher immediately makes the final version of the text openly available. A publisher typically does not do this for free, and somebody needs to cover the publication costs. This can be done by charging the author, by charging an academic institution or a research funder, or by having the publication costs covered by a group of supporters, typically a consortium of university libraries.

The second is the difference between a for-profit and a non-profit approach to scholarly publishing.

• In a for-profit approach, the goal is to realize incoming funds which are higher than the actual publication costs. The profit which is thus realized is not reinvested fully in the scholarly community but used to reward shareholders in the publishing business. Scholarly publishing has great potential for being a profit-bearing enterprise, because most of the skilled workers in the production chain (i.e. the researchers) offer the fruits of their labor (producing manuscripts, performing peer review, editorial work) for free, because there is a stable market of customers (i.e. university libraries), and because prestige is such a big factor in academic publishing (so that publishers who have attained a good reputation can realize very high mark-ups).
• The non-profit approach rejects the premise that profit should be made on the dissemination of research results. At its core is the conviction that scholarly knowledge is a common good and thus should be shared by all. It resents the fact that a small group (i.e. shareholders of a publishing company) would profit from investments with public money (both in employing researchers and by subsidizing university libraries) and therefore maintains that if incoming funds are higher than publication costs, they should be reinvested in the scholarly community.

More and more institutions and consortia of libraries conclude so-called read-and-publish deals or transformative agreements with legacy publishers. But this new incarnation of the big deal is not without its critics. The hard line opposition argues that transformative agreements hamper  progression and should therefore be avoided at all cost. A less radical approach is to make sure that the available budget is not spent exclusively on transformative agreements but is also used to support alternatives, fostering diversity of business models in the market of academic publishing.

The hard line

Transformative agreements diminish rather than stimulate diversity and equality in scholarly communication, are unnecessary in certain disciplines, might worsen the state of the market, and stimulate vendor lock-in.

Let’s look at the last argument in a bit more detail. If the negotiations leading towards a transformative agreement are successful (which is only possible if they are very well prepared – which comes at great expense), they might lead to a deal with a legacy publisher including OA at about the same cost as an earlier subscription arrangement. Hoorah! However, by concluding such transformative agreements, academic institutions demonstrate that they are able and willing to pay above production cost for publication services. What is more: by doing so, they finance legacy publishers to further develop services concerning research data management, bibliometrics, and other aspects of scholarly communication.

So what will happen next negotiation round? If (and this is again a very expensive if) negotiations go well, academic institutions might even be able to drive down the price for publication services offered. But they will have to pay additionally, and handsomely, for the other services. They will feel obliged to do so (1) because these legacy publishers will dominate the market place even more than before, (2) because the services these publishers offer will be more attractive and user-friendly than anything else on the market (since academic institutions, unwittingly but generously, provided the budget to develop them), and (3) because legacy publishers will be able to lure academic institutions into new forms of big deals packaging services concerning scholarly communication which will seem easier and cheaper than obtaining these services separately.

For this, and many more reasons, transformative agreements should actually be considered librarian malpractice.   

What if academic institutions would invest the budget as well as the time, energy, and talent they currently waste on transformative agreements in community-owned alternatives? Alternatives that foster diversity rather than monopoly and support bibliodiversity and multilingualism, thus providing a more global and democratic approach. Alternatives which involve working with partners who do not insist on vendor lock-in and who operate in service of the academic community (rather than in the service of their shareholders). Would that not mean that we would finally see, in the words of Eloy Rodrigues, the return of universities and scholars “to the driver’s seat of scholarly communications”?

Back to reality

Even if it seems a naïve dream to expect a general commitment to this approach, is it not smart to safeguard part of the budget to invest in alternatives, thus keeping the market healthy and our choices open? Even when we do it in a very small way, let’s say – as argued by David W. Lewis – by putting aside 2,5% of the total library budget to support open and community-owned infrastructure (and if you don’t know where to start, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services can most certainly help). An investment of 2,5% seems little, and perhaps not something to be proud of (since the implication is that you spend 97,5% of your budget on scholarly communication infrastructure which is closed and/or privately-owned). But it is a start.