Data Curation in the OpenAIRE Scholarly Communication Infrastructure

Since our first issue in 1977, with founding editor Michael Harloe, IJURR has been at the forefront of critical urban debates. The year 2015 marks an important moment for the journal since we stand at a crossroads between an increasingly corporate publishing environment, in which many journals are becoming online only, their academic content trapped behind expensive electronic pay walls, and an alternative pathway towards a defence of the modern journal as a printed publication, affordable and accessible to a wide range of readers. Many libraries, for example, especially from the global South, continue to rely on print-only subscriptions. At our most recent editorial board meeting held in Mexico City we had a wide-ranging discussion about the future of academic publishing and reaffirmed our commitment to IJURR as a high-quality academic journal available in both print and online formats. The cornerstone of our defence of IJURR in an increasingly challenging publishing environment is our comprehensive redesign. This has been developed over the last two years in collaboration with the Austrian designer Paulus M. Dreibholz, who has extensive experience with cutting-edge architectural and cultural publications, across a variety of different formats. As part of the IJURR redesign each article will work effectively either as an individual electronic document or as a printed version contained within a specific journal issue. The dual approach extends to precise details of the font, layout and pagination. Given the intense pressures on space we have had to find a solution that does not significantly affect our annual page range for the journal. A key element of the redesign has involved changing the existing typefaces. We have replaced the Times New Roman typeface, which is amongst the least distinctive available, with the clearer and more contemporary Mercury (1997), developed by the New York based typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler. For the headings, captions and block quotes, which had been set in Interstate (used for American road signage), we have switched to Avenir Next (2007), a typeface developed by Adrian Frutiger and Akira Kobayashi, which adds greater versatility between print and digital formats than Frutiger's original Avenir (1988) but retains key elements of geometric sans-serif typefaces such as Erbar (1922) and Futura (1927). With our new look we are aiming to make IJURR more distinctive, more readable, and also more closely engaged with cutting-edge developments in design and publishing, including the necessity to connect with wider audiences such as practitioners and urbanists outside the academy. Our redesign also marks a more serious engagement with the use of visual materials ranging from architectural sketches, film stills and photographs to various explanatory figures and tables. We are not only interested in the quality and legibility of these materials, both for print and online readers, but also their precise role in the context of key urban debates. Additionally, each issue of the journal will feature three images on the cover, connected to the articles, but also providing an opportunity to reflect on broader themes in urban culture. We also intend to use this ‘gallery space' to signal the distinctiveness of key debates or symposia. In parallel with changes to the journal we have also worked with the German web designer Corinna Reetz to revamp our website: gone is the clutter and garish maroon banner. In its place we hope that readers will find the site clearer and more navigable. We will be making greater use of our website in future to enable complementary commentaries and shorter interventions to accompany themes developed within the journal itself but also to allow faster interaction with contemporary debates of potential interest to our readers. As part of our commitment to improving IJURR we have also upgraded the paper quality for the printed journal––contrary to recent publishing trends––to ensure that the journal is attractive, readable, and earns its place on our bookshelves. We are keen that the journal should be available for sale in individual bookshops, alongside other critical journals, and we have negotiated a special single-issue price to facilitate this way of reaching wider readerships. We are also introducing a choice of referencing systems between the Chicago (footnote) and Harvard (in-text citation) models to reflect our commitment towards widening the range of disciplines we wish to feature in these pages: we hope that scholars from anthropology, history, science and technology studies (STS) and other disciplines will consider IJURR as a suitable outlet for innovative work that has hitherto been largely published elsewhere. This flexibility is important because it enables us to handle a wider range of data sources, methodological approaches and styles of writing: we are interested in countering the creeping uniformity of academic scholarship and the tendency towards highly formulaic modes of exposition. Another important area of change in academic publishing that affects IJURR directly is the introduction of ‘open access publishing'. This change is being driven mainly by demands that publications derived from publicly funded research activity should be freely available in digital format. At present, there are two ‘open access' options available: ‘green' and ‘gold'. Under ‘green open access', authors can make the peer-reviewed version of their article (i.e. the accepted version before copy editing and formatting) openly available in institutional and not-for-profit repositories after a set embargo period. Under ‘gold open access', authors who have institutional funds available to pay the so-called ‘Article Publication Charge' can make the published version of their article openly available immediately upon publication. IJURR fully embraces the move to green open access. However, our editorial board has raised significant concerns that the payment of exorbitant fees for gold open access is an integral part of the neoliberal drift in higher education and academic publishing. It is also discriminatory, since it will disproportionately benefit scholars from wealthier institutions in the global North with access to sources of research funding and institutions that can support (and indeed demand) the payment of gold open access fees. Nevertheless, we had to weigh our deep concern about gold open access against the need to find a solution that will not deter publicly funded research from being published in IJURR. Within this complicated publishing terrain we decided to offer green open access to all our authors, and gold open access to those authors who have to comply with gold open access requirements posed by their institutions or research funding bodies. At the same time, we actively explore ways in which gold open access fees can be redistributed to benefit authors from different institutional and geographical settings, in consultation with the charitable wing of our activities, the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies. In recognition that academic publishing, along with its wider institutional and public policy context, is in a state of flux at present we shall regularly review these developments to try and mitigate some of the more iniquitous effects. We are conscious that IJURR is embedded in an asymmetrical environment but do not wish to exacerbate these inequalities further. One additional question linked to the open access debate, is the way in which open access content can be handled in the print version of the journal. As noted earlier, we remain committed to retaining a high quality well-designed print journal, in an era in which commercial and technical advances push for the full ‘digitalization' of academic publications. But what does ‘being open access' mean to subscribers of the print only version of the journal, or to readers who do not have access to digital formats? Although it hinges upon addressing complex legal and institutional issues, we are committed to continue exploring ways for offering equal opportunities for open access to authors and readers alike independently of their geographic location or institutional setting. The significant increase in the quantity of submissions, combined with the increase in quality of papers we receive is a welcome development. Although in 2013 and 2014 we published almost twice our normal content in order to accommodate the increasing number of excellent papers we received, we are now also very close to accepting just 10% of articles submitted. This means we publish only articles that are judged to be truly exceptional in terms of empirical, methodological or conceptual originality and critical insight. What is also important to note, however, is that the journal's high quality is the result of the collective effort and labour put into it not only by authors, editors, and the editorial board and office, but also by our referees, who offer critical comments to improve papers. IJURR is one of the few journals that engage referees at every stage of the reviewing process by communicating all comments and editorial decisions to referees as well as authors. This is made possible thanks to the outstanding support offered by Mel Goodsell and Angela Yeap, under the guidance of Terry McBride, our managing editor. By sharing the anonymized version of the decision letter we send to authors with our international body of referees, we hope to foster the growth of an international community of critical scholars who are sometimes trained in different reviewing traditions. As they can see the comments written by their peers, our reviewers can engage in an international dialogue. Problems of urban and regional development are of growing visibility on a world scale, in rich and poor, socialist and capitalist countries alike. Often … they directly derive from processes which operate on an international level. This journal will compare and contrast such problems as they occur in widely differing situations and social systems. International dialogue has been our mission since the very beginning, a dialogue between scholars from various disciplines and origins, and a dialogue between scholars and activists (and they are oftentimes the same people). In 1998, the editors published a statement reflecting on how IJURR developed with regards to its original objectives. They wrote: ‘Despite the recurrent taste for simple universal models (which can be seen as an indirect form of intellectual domination), we have respected the diversity of urban experience and the usefulness of comparative analysis to enable understanding of the more familiar by contrast to the less familiar'. In 2009, the editors highlighted that international dialogue was more and more reflected in the composition of the editorial board, as well as in the range of articles published in the journal. Moreover, they note that technological changes now allow the journal to be accessible around the world. But, as they note, ‘internationalization is surely above all about acknowledging that theories derived from the experiences of North-West Europe and North America may not be universally applicable, and that those regions may be exceptional from a global perspective. Internationalization is thus a process of reconsidering and challenging theory on a range of levels'. Over the years, the very meaning of IJURR's international mission has changed because the world has profoundly changed. If the language we use to speak of the world has evolved, we remain stuck in dichotomies, despite many calls to break them down. Our efforts in the last decade have been placed on fostering scholarship that attempts to do away with these capitalist/socialist, first world/third world, developed/under-developed, core/periphery, north/south dichotomies in innovative ways. This has meant opening our pages to new epistemological traditions produced outside Europe and North America and in the new transdisciplinary frontiers of social knowledge production. The challenges are great because of language barriers and the continued dominance of English-speaking ways of writing papers and conducting research, which transpires in the reviews we receive. But the journal pursues its work towards internationalization by, for instance, relying on more and more reviewers from outside of Europe and North America. We have recently begun to organize IJURR lectures in other languages than English. The first of such, held in Mexico City in October 2014, will be available online shortly.

A Review of: Scott, R. E., Murphy, J. A., Thayer-Styes, C., Buckley, C. E., & Shelley, A. (2023). Exploring faculty perspectives on open access at a medium-sized, American doctoral university. Insights the UKSG Journal, 36(1), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.620 Objective – To examine faculty members’ preferences, experiences, and current practices for publishing and using Open Access (OA) content. Design – Qualitative interviews and inductive coding of participants’ responses. Setting – Illinois State University (ISU), a public R2 university. Subjects – Twenty-five faculty members, representing all of ISU’s colleges. Methods – Authors recruited participants via a faculty electronic mailing list, selecting 25 faculty members representing all of ISU’s colleges, as well as differing academic ranks and length of time since earning their terminal degrees. Interviews were conducted, recorded, and transcribed over Zoom. Authors used inductive coding to identify themes, while also seeking input from participants and external professionals to guarantee accurate and detailed representation of participants’ responses to the interview questions. Main Results – All participants placed themselves somewhere on the spectrum between being completely opposed to, and enthusiastically participating in, OA publishing, with many noting tension between a principled belief in OA scholarship and difficulties with carrying out those beliefs due to journal quality or article processing fees. Some scholars were able to make use of grants, transformative agreements, or departmental funds to cover the costs associated with OA publishing. Disciplinary norms governed the sharing or use of unpublished, publicly accessible scholarship, with scholars in the sciences being more likely to place works in disciplinary repositories, such as arXiv. Participants expressed hesitation to post preprints to repositories due to lack of peer-review, legal considerations, and having one’s research ideas “scooped.” Lack of peer-review also contributed to hesitancy to cite preprints, although arXiv emerged as a highly regarded repository in terms of article quality for relevant scientific disciplines. Conclusion – The authors conclude that perceptions of OA publishing are heavily determined by disciplinary norms, leading to a broad range of practices even within an R2 university. This necessitates multiple approaches by libraries to make OA publishing more possible and palatable for scholars including facilitating access to funds that alleviate or cover article processing fees, hosting OA journals, and providing quality education and support for publishing in reputable OA journals in one’s field. The authors see sustained shifts toward publishing in OA models as also likely to lead to scholars' increasing their use of others’ OA materials.

Obama Signs Act to Make More Federally Funded Research Open Access: NIH Requirement Extended to Other Agencies

Anneliese Taylor Libraries Take on Policy: Support for Open Access and Open Data The growth of open access (OA) journal publishing has exploded in the last decade. The number of full, immediate OA articles went from 2% to 11% of all articles published between 2000 and 2011. When hybrid and embargoed open access articles are included in the count, the 2011 total jumps to 17% across all disciplines. And looking at biomedical journals specifically, 36% of articles published were OA 1 . Alongside this impressive growth in what’s commonly referred to as gold open access publishing has been a multi-pronged effort to expand access to published articles through “green” open access. Green OA is the process of depositing a version of a published article in an open access repository, whether that be an institutional repository (IR) or a disciplinary repository, or even placing articles on an openly accessible web site. “Self-archiving” is frequently used interchangeably with green OA. It does not require authors to pay an article processing charge as many gold OA models do. Many publishers have a history of allowing authors to self-archive a version of their article. The version is typically the accepted author’s manuscript, incorporating changes from the peer-review process, but before the publisher has copyedited, formatted, and branded the manuscript for final publication. A very few publishers allow the final, published version to be uploaded via self-archiving. There may or may not be a delay period after publication before the manuscript can be made accessible. Open access policies passed at the institutional level or by research funders are an attempt to broaden public access on a larger scale. The potential to open up access via a formalized policy is significant, but not without some effort. The next sections will highlight health sciences libraries and their roles with green OA policies in the United States. NIH Public Access Policy The single largest influencer on the growth of green OA articles in the health sciences to date is the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy, passed in 2008. This policy requires peer- reviewed scholarly articles published by NIH-funded researchers to be submitted to PubMed Central (PMC). The articles are made publicly available no later than twelve months after the official publication date. 2 PMC is NIH’s freely accessible, full text article repository, with close to 3 million articles currently deposited. NIH Policy manuscripts are about 10% of this amount. The rest of the content comes from publishers that voluntarily deposit their articles, usually after a publication delay. Many health sciences (HS) libraries got involved in 2008 or earlier with support for researchers at their academy needing to comply with the policy. Efforts range from offering workshops and individual consultations to notifying authors which of their articles are non-compliant and what steps to take to make them compliant. There are a number of excellent NIH Policy LibGuides (e.g. Duke University and University of Washington) and video tutorials (e.g. New York University and Harvard University) created by librarians to assist researchers. An informal survey in 2013 of Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) member involvement in supporting the Policy indicated a high level of activity amongst health sciences libraries. Of the 25 responses, all but four were actively involved with a support role. It’s remarkable that HS

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report results of a study which investigated the growth of open access (OA) journals across the world with reference to the Asian region. Details of 117 OA journals were collected from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to determine the geographic distribution, language of publication and growth of periodical year-wise. The study makes detail analysis of four OA periodical published from India, Iran, Pakistan and Taiwan. Pattern of authorship and contribution according to nature of professional work were analyzed. The study reveals that most contributions were made by teaching professionals in comparison to working library and information officers. Single-authored contributions dominated (44 per cent) in all periodicals of the Asian region, indicating low amount of teamwork/collaborative contributions to library and information science (LIS) research by the authors of this region. To know the subject distribution of articles, the study was limited to 27 ...

Reviewed by: The Future of Scholarly Communication, edited by Deborah Shorley and Michael Jubb Jeffrey Beall The Future of Scholarly Communication, ed. Deborah Shorley and Michael Jubb. London: Facet Publishing, 2013. 188 pages. $80.00 (ISBN 978-1-85604-817-0) The thirteen essays in The Future of Scholarly Communication are divided into two parts called Changing Researcher Behavior and Other Players: Roles and Responsibilities. They cover most of the hot topics in scholarly communication, including open access, institutional repositories, data mining, and the future roles of libraries in the scholarly communication ecosystem. A better title might have been The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Scholarly Communication, as few of the authors really make any definite predictions; they seem to have the same uncertainty that most of us share regarding scholarly communication’s future and instead primarily identify and describe past and present trends. While the work purports to be about the future, many of the authors spend a large number of words expressing their disdain with the present. An example is David C. Prosser’s chapter titled “Researchers and Scholarly Communications: An Evolving Interdependency.” Much of this chapter actually focuses on the past, and the author bemoans the fact that the Internet has had little impact on the essentials of journal publishing. He seems more interested in forcing change than in analyzing it or letting it occur organically. Similarly, Mark L. Brown’s chapter, “The Role of the Research Library,” is probably the most relevant one for the readers of this journal, but the chapter again focuses disproportionately on the past and present instead of the future. Brown concludes that research libraries are leaders of innovation in scholarly communication, that they serve as centers of experimentation and advocacy, that they work to provide access to all the different types of scholarly communication, and that they generally work in collaboration and as consortia to achieve economies of scale. On the other hand, the book’s final chapter, “The Library User’s View,” presents a perspective that essentially devalues libraries as simple acquisitions departments. Author Roger Schonfeld describes how he believes science faculty experience the library: “The scientist, for whom the experience is indeed frequently seamless, has little recognition that he is using the campus library, other than in its role as a purchasing agent.” (p. 172) Fortunately, the book’s other authors do not share Schonfeld’s [End Page 121] cynical view of academic libraries, instead affirming research libraries’ role as centers of innovation in science communication. Of course, this work’s elephant in the room is the fact that it purports to describe the future of scholarly communication using a technology developed in the fifteenth century—the printed book. Is the future not yet here? Some of the contributors are advocates of open access, yet they allowed their work to be published as a hardcopy monograph. Moreover, most of the discussion revolves around the scholarly article; monographs are largely ignored, so it is ironic that the authors choose to disseminate their work not only in an old technology but also in a form they neglect to even describe as being a part of scholarly communication’s future. Finally, the book is excessively centered on the United Kingdom and insufficiently treats how research libraries are organized and how research is funded in North America. Published in April 2013, this work is already becoming dated. Much of it deals with scholarly open-access publishing, a topic best covered in open-access works themselves—works published in the many new and open scholarly communication venues the book itself describes. Jeffrey Beall University of Colorado Denver jeffrey.beall@ucdenver.edu Copyright © 2013 Johns Hopkins University Press

The article tries to highlight the evolution and conceptual framework of institutional repositories and their impact on the academic and scholarly circles in terms of better visibility, wider audience and earlier communication of research. The characteristics associated with the institutional repositories are also highlighted, which makes them stand out from the crowd in the family of open access scholarly platforms. The study is based on the examination and evaluation of the articles published across various peer-reviewed journals showcasing numerous dimensions of institutional repositories, ranging from their evolution to open scholarly acceptance. A preliminary search on institutional repositories was carried through two well-renowned indexing/abstracting databases of peer-reviewed literature, Clarivate Analytic’s, Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus. Search terms like institutional repositories, institutional research output, open access repositories, green open access, open access, open access publishing, open access initiatives, digital libraries, directory of open access repositories, open DOAR and scholarly communication were run across the databases for article retrieval, and the relevant studies were extracted accordingly. To make the study more comprehensive and current, the studies citing the retrieved articles were also consulted. The study reveals that the benefits associated with institutional repositories are manifold. They recounter users with the information which was otherwise unavailable due to the reasons ranging from the non-availability of supplementary information (like unpublished reports and working papers, multimedia and audiovisual items, learning objects, other special item types, bibliographic references, datasets, lecture notes and so forth) to the paywall/subscription models adopted by commercial channels of scholarly communication. Furthermore, the social, research and technological factors tend to be the main motivating factors for their wider acceptance by the scholarly community at global, national, organizational, and individual levels. They enhance the preservation of institutional research output with increased viewership and prestige apart from achieving a potential research impact. They, in a real sense, have abrogated the unilateral assault orchestrated by the commercial publishers on the author community by democratizing their scholarly voices via open and barrierless scholarly platforms. They are the future of the academic output of an institution/author as they perform successfully within the constitutional boundaries of scholarly and academic publishing, thus safeguarding the rights and claims of every academic actor. Given the importance of institutional repositories for a more democratic, barrierless and impactful information communication, they are for sure going beyond various scholarly circles by breaking the traditional and rigid walls of scholarly endeavours. The study presents a useful overview of the progression of the institutional repositories, their intended purpose and how they serve to fill the gaps in scholarly publishing and meet the needs of the wider academic community. The article summarizes in one place a concise overview of the use and impact of institutional repositories. The study is also an eye-opener for scholars interested in the research in the field of institutional repositories.

Let's Make Those Book Chapters Open Too!

A Review of:
 Dawson, D. (2018). Effective practices and strategies for open access outreach: A qualitative study. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 6(1), eP2216. https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2216
 Abstract
 Objective – To discover effective outreach methods used by academic libraries to promote open access (OA) publishing to researchers.
 Design – Semi-structured interviews
 Setting – 7 large research universities in the United Kingdom (UK)
 Subjects – 14 individuals responsible for OA outreach at their institution, including librarians and other OA practitioners
 Methods – Purposive sampling was used to select universities based on their membership in the UK’s Russell Group, designation in the top 20 of the Research Council UK’s OA grant-size ranking, and suggestions from other professionals. The author contacted individuals responsible for OA at these institutions by email to inform them of the study and solicit their participation. The subsequent semi-structured interviews occurred in person. Areas of focus in the interview included: job responsibilities and overview of offered scholarly communications services; sources of OA services at the institution; evolution and effectiveness of OA outreach activities; support and scholarly communication knowledge needed by researchers; and advice for fellow practitioners conducting OA outreach. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded using the qualitative software NVivo. Inductive analysis was conducted to identify key themes.
 Main Results – The author identifies four primary themes in the coded interviews: “The Message”; “Key Contacts and Relationships”; “Qualities of the OA Practitioner”; and “Advocacy versus Compliance” (p. 1). Participants advocated for straightforward, frequent messaging tailored to the audience. The author identifies relationships as important to outreach – especially support from influential administrators and buy-in from key researchers – highlighting that face-to-face interaction is helpful when cultivating these types of relationships. Participants emphasized important qualities for OA practitioners to possess, including expertise, diplomacy, and perseverance. Establishing credibility as an expert was identified as important to generating buy-in from researchers. Finally, the author discusses the library’s role in OA advocacy vs. compliance. Some participants suggested an overemphasis on compliance to meet funder requirements may overshadow promotion of the inherent value of OA in academic publishing.
 Conclusions – The author suggests that because UK open access efforts are robust and have been in progress for many years, OA practitioners from the UK may possess useful insights for North American librarians with growing initiatives. The study highlights implications for practice including the identification of effective outreach strategies, evidence of the need for balanced messaging, and observations on why faculty may be resistant to outreach from librarians. The author recommends further research to determine what type of messaging is most valuable and when, suggesting less complex policies in North America may allow for more focus on the public good of OA. Successful outreach is predicated upon having enough time to gain the necessary depth of knowledge, and the study acknowledges that librarians with diverse job responsibilities may have less time to invest in this way. The author also suggests more research is needed to evaluate the impact of the dynamics between librarians and classroom faculty. The article posits that librarians who participate in research and tenure processes may find communication easier and have opportunities to promote OA through participation in university governance. Finally, the author observes that librarians are poised to have a positive impact on the scholarly publishing system through outreach to researchers who can drive systemic change.

Choosing the Target Journal: Do Authors Need a Comprehensive Approach?

Academic libraries are becoming increasingly involved in scholarly communication through work with institutional repositories and other open access models. While academic librarians are being encouraged to promote these new models, their opinions about open access have not been documented. This article reports on the results of a national survey conducted in the summer of 2006 of academic librarians’ attitudes toward open access principles and related behaviors. While attitude responses were largely positive, there were differences in levels of support related to respondents’ job descriptions and funding of open access activities. Surveyed librarians appear to be more comfortable with tasks that translate traditionally held responsibilities, such as educating others, to the open access environment. Most significant is the discrepancy between stated support of library involvement in open access initiatives and significantly lacking action toward this end. The results offer insight into how open access proponents may better focus their advocacy efforts.

In this column, Mike Furlough writes about repositories from a user services perspective. His engaging and accessible article provides a fascinating history of hype, a primer on technical tools, and thoughtful reflections on the future of institutional repositories. Mike Furlough joined The Pennsylvania State University Libraries in 2006 as the assistant dean for Scholarly Communications and co-director of the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing. Furlough's graduate training is in American Literature, but he ran away to join the University of Virginia Library, where he developed and led a number of services to support digital scholarship. He currently serves as a member of the Association of College and Research Libraries' Scholarly Communications Committee and begins editing a column on that topic for CR a vault or sepulchre. (1) Institutional repository (IR) often refers to a service that supports and encourages the deposit of student- and faculty-created materials, primarily open-access versions of research articles that have been formally published elsewhere or not at all. The early energy surrounding IRs centered on a hope that promoting open access could serve as a countermeasure to commercial publishing power and its ability to distort the market for knowledge. Taking control of our institutions' research by providing the ability to distribute this information to the world in an open-access mode seemed to be an inevitable outcome of the Internet. What follows is a brief history of IR hype. In July 2002, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported 'Superarchives' Could Hold All Scholarly Output: Online Collections by Institutions May Challenge the Role of Journal Publishers. (2) Also in 2002, a Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) position paper declared that institutional repositories--digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community.... provide a critical component in reforming the system of scholarly communication--a component that expands access to research, reasserts control over scholarship by the academy, increases competition and reduces the monopoly power of journals, and brings economic relief and heightened relevance to the institutions and libraries that support them. (3) But in 2004 The Chronicle provided an update: Papers Wanted: Online Archives Run by Universities Struggle to Attract Material. (4) IRs soon became the butt of jokes, even inside the community of practitioners. In March 2006, Dorothea Salo, an institutional manager, rechristened herself in her blog. …

The evolving landscape of scholarly communication in India reflects a growing commitment to democratizing access to academic knowledge. This chapter critically explores the intersection of open access (OA), copyright, and scholarly communication, with a particular focus on recent developments in management and academic library sciences across India. As digital transformation redefines how knowledge is produced, shared, and preserved, Indian academic institutions are actively reconfiguring traditional publishing paradigms through institutional repositories, OA mandates, and government-led initiatives. The chapter begins by tracing the evolution of scholarly communication in India, highlighting the transition from print-centric models to digital dissemination through platforms like Shodhganga, NDLI, and university repositories. It then examines the role of India’s Copyright Act and Creative Commons licensing in facilitating or hindering open access practices. Emphasis is placed on recent advancements such as the proliferation of OA repositories, increasing use of preprints, and national strategies like One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) and One DAE One Subscription (ODOS), which aim to consolidate and broaden access to scholarly content. Academic libraries emerge as key enablers in this transformation—supporting repository development, raising copyright awareness, managing Article Processing Charges (APCs), and engaging with faculty to promote open scholarship. The chapter incorporates case studies from institutions like IISc Bangalore, University of Delhi, and CSIR to illustrate both achievements and persistent challenges, including funding limitations, low OA awareness, and legal ambiguities. By integrating quantitative insights with policy review and best practices, the chapter offers a roadmap for enhancing scholarly communication in India. It concludes by recommending strategic interventions such as national OA mandates, capacity building for librarians, and the integration of AI and blockchain technologies for copyright and metadata management, all of which are essential for a sustainable, inclusive knowledge ecosystem.

In the evolving landscape of scholarly communication in India, institutional repositories (IRs) have emerged as a promising strategy to enhance open access to research outputs. An institutional repository is a digital archive to collect, preserve, and disseminate the intellectual output of an institution. This paper explores how IRs serve as a cost-effective and sustainable platform for scholarly communication, particularly in Indian higher education and research institutions. By analysing the current status of IR adoption across Indian universities, including policy frameworks, technological infrastructure, and user engagement, the study highlights both the opportunities and challenges associated with implementing IRs. Key benefits include increased visibility of research, preservation of institutional knowledge, and democratisation of access. However, barriers such as limited awareness among researchers, lack of standardisation, copyright issues, and resource constraints impede wider adoption. Drawing on successful national examples (such as INFLIBNET’s Shodhganga) and international best practices, the paper offers strategic recommendations for policymakers, administrators, and librarians to strengthen IR infrastructure and embed IRs in India’s open access ecosystem. Through sustained institutional commitment, capacity building, and policy alignment, IRs can significantly contribute to the democratisation of knowledge and the transformation of scholarly communication in India.

This chapter presents a new paradigm for sustainable data-driven language learning systems design in higher education that draws on qualitative reflections spanning a decade (2012–2022) with stakeholders from an ongoing global research study with the FLAX (Flexible Language Acquisition) and F-Lingo projects at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand (Fitzgerald (2019) A new paradigm for open data-driven language learning systems design in higher education; König et al. (2022) Smart CALL). Design considerations are presented for remixing domain-specific open access content into Open Educational Resources (OER) for academic English language provision across formal and non-formal higher education contexts. Primary stakeholders in the research collaboration include the following three groups: (1) Knowledge organisations that provide open access to academic content—libraries and archives, including the British Library and the Oxford Text Archive, universities in collaboration with MOOC providers and the CORE (COnnecting REpositories) open access aggregation service at the UK Open University; (2) Researchers who mine and remix academic content into corpora and open data-driven language learning systems—converging from the fields of open education, computer science and applied corpus linguistics; (3) Knowledge users who re-use and remix academic content into OER—English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioners from university language centres. Automated content analysis was carried out on a corpus of interview and focus discussion data with the three stakeholder groups in this research. We discuss themes arising from the research data that reflect the different stakeholders’ experiences of remixing open access research content that has been produced within the academy for re-use as open educational content for teaching and learning features of academic language within open data-driven language learning systems. These open learning systems have been specifically designed to scale with OER expansion and traction in mind for their sustainable uptake both within and beyond the brick and mortar of the traditional university. The new paradigm presented in this chapter challenges, as the OER movement must, established business models and deeply embedded cultural or institutional norms that present obstacles to OER expansion and traction and the sustainability of the movement. One persistent challenge concerns the lack of open education policy across the higher education sector for full open access (for use, modification, adaptation) via Creative Commons licensing to content produced within the academy. Thus, while this research has theoretical and practical implications in applied linguistics, computer science, language teaching and learning and open education, more generally, it also has significant cultural, business model and policy implications for higher education.KeywordsData-driven learningDesign-based researchEnglish for academic purposes (EAP)Higher educationMassive open online courses (MOOCs)Open accessOpen educational practicesOpen educational resources (OER)Systems design