The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of
open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include matters pertaining to
open access book An open-access monograph is a scholarly monograph which is made openly available online with open license.
Concept
Open access is when academic research is made freely available online for anyone to read and re-use. As with open access journals ...
s and open scholarly infrastructure.
[''This article incorporates material from th]
OASPA website
which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...
.''
History
The OASPA was launched on October 14, 2008 at an "Open Access Day" celebration in London hosted by the
Wellcome Trust
The Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation focused on health research based in London, in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome (founder of one of the predecessors of Glaxo ...
.
The following organizations are founding members:
*
BioMed Central
BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open ...
*
Co-Action Publishing
*
Copernicus Publications
Copernicus Publications (also: Copernicus GmbH) is a publisher of scientific literature based in Göttingen, Germany. Founded in 1994, Copernicus Publications currently publishes 28 peer-reviewed open access scientific journals and other publi ...
*
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
Hindawi is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. It was founded in 1997 in Cairo, Egypt, but purchased in 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, a publishing ...
*
JMIR Publications
The ''Journal of Medical Internet Research'' is a peer-reviewed open-access medical journal established in 1999 covering eHealth and "healthcare in the Internet age". The editors-in-chief are Gunther Eysenbach and Rita Kukafka. The publisher is ...
* Medical Education Online (David Solomon)
*
Public Library of Science
PLOS (for Public Library of Science; PLoS until 2012 ) is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and laun ...
*
Sage Publications
*
SPARC Europe
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is an international alliance of academic and research libraries developed by the Association of Research Libraries in 1998 which promotes open access to scholarship. The coalition c ...
*
Utrecht University Library
Utrecht University (UU; nl, Universiteit Utrecht, formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2018, it had an enrollme ...
The OASPA faced some criticism for a perceived conflict between its self-declared role as the "stamp of quality for open access publishing" and the application of its own criteria for membership. One member organization,
Frontiers Media, was included on
Jeffrey Beall
Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, best known for drawing attention to " predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and for creating what is now widely known as Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory ...
's list of
predatory open access publishing
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and withou ...
companies. Two members,
Hindawi Hindawi or Hindavi can refer to:
*Hindawi affair
*Hindustani language (Hindi-Urdu), Central Indo-Aryan languages, or any language of the Hindi Belt
*Something of, from, or related to Hind or Hindustan (another name of India)
* Hindawi Programming S ...
and
MDPI
MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) is a publisher of open access scientific journals. Founded by Shu-Kun Lin as a chemical sample archive, it now publishes over 390 peer-reviewed, open access journals. MDPI is the largest op ...
- initially called predatory by Beall - were later removed from his list after pressure was applied to his employer.
There was also concern around the fact that OASPA had been founded by
BioMed Central
BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open ...
and other open access publishers, which would cause a conflict of interest in their "seal of approval". OASPA has also been criticized for promoting
gold open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or Gratis v ...
in a way that may be at the expense of
green open access
Self-archiving is the act of (the author's) depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as ...
.
Activities
OASPA organizes an annual conference on open access scholarly publishing.
OASPA encourages publishers to use
Creative Commons licenses, particularly the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), which is in line with most definitions of "open", e.g. the
Open Definition by the
Open Knowledge Foundation
Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. It was founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 in Cambridge, UK. It is incorporated in England a ...
.
Members
OASPA members fall into the following groups:
Professional publishing organisations – Organisations that include at least one full-time professional who manages the publication of OA scholarly journals or books. These organisations may be for-profit or nonprofit, and they may own journals or books or manage the publication on a contract basis for societies or other groups of scientists or scholars. Members of this class may also include organisations such as academic/research libraries, university presses, or other organisations in which the primary focus is other than publishing but still employ full-time professionals who manage the publication of OA scholarly journals and/or books.
Scholar publishers – Individuals or small groups of scientists/scholars that publish usually a single scholarly journal in their field of study. The publication process is often largely subsidised by volunteer effort.
Other organisations – Other organisations who provide significant services and/or support for OA publishing.
In order to join OASPA as a member organization, a publisher must undergo an assessment process and meet set criteria. These criteria were set in 2013 and revised again in August 2018. There are seven categories of OASPA membership:
* Professional Publishing Organisation (Small)
* Professional Publishing Organisation (Medium)
* Professional Publishing Organisation (Large)
* Professional Publishing Organisation (Very Large)
* Other Organisation (non-commercial)
* Other Organisation (commercial)
* Scholar Publisher
As of March 2021, OASPA has 159 members.
Response to the ''Science'' sting
As a response to the ''
Who's Afraid of Peer Review?
"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by ''Science'' correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake sc ...
'' investigation, OASPA formed a committee to investigate the circumstances that led to the acceptance of the fake paper by 3 of its members.
On 11 November 2013, OASPA terminated the membership of two publishers (
Dove Medical Press
Dove Medical Press is an academic publisher of open access peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals, with offices in Macclesfield, London (United Kingdom), Princeton, New Jersey (United States), and Auckland (New Zealand). In September 2 ...
and Hikari Ltd.) who accepted the fake paper. Sage Press, which also accepted a fake paper, was put "under review" for 6 months.
Sage announced in a statement that it was reviewing the journal that accepted the fake paper, but that it would not shut it down.
Sage's membership was reinstated at the end of the review period following changes to the journal's editorial processes. Dove Medical Press were also reinstated in September 2015 after making a number of improvements to their editorial processes.
See also
*
Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) is an international trade association of non-profit publishers created in 1972. It is the largest association of scholarly and professional publishers in the world, with nearl ...
*
Association of Publishing Agencies The Association of Publishing Agencies (APA) is a not-for-profit trade body that promotes the interests of companies involved in the production customer publishing.
Structure
The APA is based in London, UK and is run by Patrick Fuller, CEO, and J ...
*
Directory of Open Access Journals
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. The proje ...
*
*
International Publishers Association
The International Publishers Association (IPA) is an international publishing industry federation of national publisher associations representing book and journal publishing. It is a non-profit and non-governmental organization, founded in 1896 t ...
*
:Open access publishers
*
Periodical Publishers Association
The Professional Publishers Association (PPA), formerly known as the Periodical Publishers Association until 2011, is the main publishing industry body which promotes companies involved in the production of media, supporting the creative economy at ...
*
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is an international alliance of academic and research libraries developed by the Association of Research Libraries in 1998 which promotes open access to scholarship. The coalition c ...
*
Society for Scholarly Publishing
The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is a professional society, founded in 1978, dedicated to promoting and advancing communication and networking among all sectors of the scholarly communications community. It has approximately 1,100 member ...
References
External links
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Open access (publishing)
Publishing organizations
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Organizations established in 2008
International organisations based in the Netherlands