While we strive to serve the Illinois State University community most directly, we are also part of a global community of researchers, scholars, and students. It can therefore be valuable for us to pull back and take a broader look at scholarly communication efforts around the world. The good news is that there are many exciting developments, from waived fees for scholars in low- and mid-income countries, to initiatives to build infrastructure for research, to national repositories for open access materials.
We can start with welcome and exciting news about a new pilot project to allow scholars from low- and mid-income countries to publish in open access journals without paying publishing charges or fees. The Cambridge Open Equity Initiative will allow scholars from 107 countries to publish in about 400 open access journals at no direct cost. The project will run from July 1, 2023, through the end of 2024, and Cambridge University Press is seeking support from university libraries and other institutional partners.
Scholarly communication has always required infrastructure to support it, and the Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) initiative recently held a conference in Ghana to explore ways to further build that infrastructure in Africa. The summarized findings of the conference were that finding innovative ways to finance the infrastructure, encouraging governments to invest in it, more collaboration and coordination at national and regional levels, and further stakeholder discussions and clarification of their roles would also support developing more research infrastructure.
The National Library of Armenia (with support from Electronic Information for Libraries or EIFL) has created a national repository to improve access to their digital materials. The repository will include “open access Armenian theses and dissertations, books and the Bulletin of Armenian Libraries.” In the approximately two months since the linked article was published, the number of items in the repository has doubled, from 2,000 to around 4,000 items, dramatically lowering barriers to access important works by the people of Armenia.
If you have questions about scholarly communication in general or would like to make your materials more readily available in our own institutional repository, ISU ReD, it is often possible to place pre-prints or even published articles and other materials there. If you wish to discuss this further, please contact the Milner Library’s Scholarly Communication Team.
