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New Scholarly Communication Investments by CDL 2022

July 11, 2022 Author: Ellen FinnieCategories:

CDL’s Shared Collections team, in consultation and collaboration with the UC-wide Shared Collections Leadership Group (SCLG), is pleased to have been able to invest in several important open resources and tools in Fiscal Year 2021-22, 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:

  • A 3-year UC systemwide investment in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal (AICRJ), currently published by UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center via Allen Press,  to fund  the journal’s transition from a 50-year subscription model to open access  via CDL’s eScholarship Publishing program.  

CDL has also made new investments in two innovative and significant open access platforms and services:

  • SciPost – a not-for-profit open repository publishing infrastructure, which includes innovations such as “peer-witnessed refereeing,” a form of open peer review.  SciPost is managed by scientists.  There are no author fees, and authors retain copyright when submitting for publication in SciPost. 

  • OEN (Open Education Network) – a not-for-profit started at the University of Minnesota to support open textbooks, and specifically the Open Textbook Library, OEN has expanded to become a community that “advances the use of open educational resources and practices” in “both vision and practice.”

In addition, CDL has made new or expanded investments this year In response to funding requests through SCOSS, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services, whose purpose is to “help identify non-commercial services essential to Open Science, and to make qualified recommendations on which of these services should be considered for funding support.”

CDL’s SCOSS-supported investments the year include:

  • DSpace – a widely adopted open-source repository software for managing research and scholarly materials, which, according to the SCOSS funding call, has a “focus on open access, preservation, and storage;” an “active developer community;” and is currently used by “more than 3,000 academic libraries, research centers, governments, national libraries, and commercial organizations.”

  • ArXiv – the original preprint server, and a curated open platform for sharing research which is, according to the SCOSS funding call, a “pioneer in digital open access with a 30-year history” hosting “more than 1.9 million scholarly articles in eight subject areas.”   

CDL has also continued its investments in these important foundations for sustainable open access:

  • Open Access Switchboard (OASB) – CDL provided support for a second year.  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. 
  • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – CDL continued its sponsorship with the commitment of continued support for the 2022-2024 period.  DOAJ is a list of peer-reviewed open access journals covering all disciplines and more than 50 languages; journals are listed after a detailed evaluation, enabling DOAJ to become a key reference point for quality open access journals.  
  • Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) – CDL has continued ongoing funding from a prior 3-year investment in The Directory of Open Access Books, 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.  
  • PsyArXiv – CDL is pleased to have been able to provide a third 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.