New Scholarly Communication Investments by CDL
The CDL Shared Collections Program is pleased to have been able to invest in several important open resources and tools in Fiscal Year 2020-2021, reflecting our commitment to ’invest in open’ by allocating a portion of our collections funding to the development of open content and infrastructure in support of UC scholarship and teaching. Key investments include:
Tools and infrastructure:
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and OAPEN: The Directory of Open Access Books is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available. DOAB currently indexes over 43,000 books from 651 publishers. OAPEN is a repository platform that provides aggregated access to OA book content, serving as a one-stop shop that complements access through individual publisher sites and provides quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation services. CDL was pleased to be able to provide 3 years of combined up-front support for both initiatives on behalf of all UC campuses in response to a funding solicitation from SCOSS, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services.
Open Access Switchboard (OASB): OASB is a new non-profit organization that provides shared back-end infrastructure to support the exchange of publication-level metadata for open access publishing arrangements among libraries, publishers, and funders. CDL has signed a three-year agreement with OASB as a launch customer to support metadata exchange for several of our recent transformative agreements.
OpenCitations: Another SCOSS-endorsed project, OpenCitations is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data through the use of Semantic Web (Linked Data) technologies. OpenCitations has recently published a formal definition of an Open Citation, and has launched a system for globally unique and persistent identifiers (PIDs) for bibliographic citations – Open Citation Identifiers (OCIs). OpenCitations is based at the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata at the University of Bologna.
Content:
PsyArXiv: CDL was pleased to be able to provide a second year of support on behalf of all UC campuses for PsyArXiv, the preprint reprint service for the psychological sciences maintained by The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science. A number of UC faculty closely involved with PsyArXiv requested support from CDL last year when the annual support model was initiated. PsyArXiv hosts over 17,000 preprints to date and currently runs on the OSF Preprints infrastructure.
SCOAP3 Books: As part of CDL’s support for open access initiatives, and in line with UC’s strong commitment to SCOAP3 as one of that initiative’s earliest supporters, CDL is pleased to have been able to contribute to SCOAP3’s newest project: funding the conversion to open access of important scholarly monographs in high energy physics (HEP). The books targeted for conversion include monographs and university-level textbooks in HEP and related disciplines such as instrumentation, detector engineering and accelerator physics. Titles will be made available on the OAPEN platform as well as at publisher websites. More information will be posted on the SCOAP3 Books website.
